The Dungeon Warning Part 3

I tested the door first—not because I expected it to open, but because I needed to confirm the extent of my confinement. The handle turned easily enough, but the lock held firm. Heavy iron that would require more than determination and a hairpin to overcome.

The walls were next. Solid stone, fitted so precisely that mortar was barely visible between the blocks. No convenient loose stones, no hidden passages, no melodramatic escapes waiting to be discovered. Just rock that had been standing for centuries and would likely stand for centuries more.

The barred window offered the most unsettling discovery. Beyond the iron lay not another room or corridor, but genuine darkness—the kind that spoke of vast spaces and considerable depth. I could feel air moving through the bars, carrying scents that made something primitive in my brain recoil with instinctive wariness.

This isn't a dungeon, I realized with growing unease. It's something else entirely.

The cell wasn't designed to keep prisoners from escaping. The bars, the lock, the solid construction—all of it was meant to keep something out rather than keep someone in.

But what?

I wrapped my hands around the iron bars, testing their strength. They were warm to the touch despite the cold air flowing through the gaps, and carved with symbols that hurt to look at directly. Not decorative flourishes, but purposeful marks that seemed to pulse with their own dim light.

Protection, my instincts whispered. Those symbols are meant to protect.

"Protect me from what?" I said aloud, my voice echoing off stone walls.

The darkness beyond the bars seemed to shift in response to my words, though that was surely imagination born of stress and fear. Nothing could live in spaces that deep, that cold, that completely removed from sunlight.

Nothing human, corrected a voice in my head that I tried to ignore.

I was still standing at the window, still trying to make sense of the symbols carved into iron, when the sound began.

Low and mournful, it seemed to rise from the very foundations of the castle. Not quite a howl, not quite a song, but something that combined elements of both into music that spoke directly to parts of the human soul that civilization had tried to forget.

Wolf, my mind supplied automatically. That's a wolf howling.

But even as the thought formed, I knew it was wrong. I'd heard wolves before—distant calls drifting across the moors near our country estate, lonely and wild but recognizably animal. This was something else entirely. Something that carried intelligence and intention and a sorrow so profound it seemed to have physical weight.

The sound rose and fell with musical precision, and I found myself straining to catch nuances that felt almost like language. Almost like...

A name.

My name.

That's impossible, rational thought insisted. You're overwrought, imagining patterns where none exist.

But my ears insisted otherwise. In the spaces between notes, in the way the howl shaped itself around certain syllables, I could hear something that sounded disturbingly like "Catherine" being called from the depths.

Stop, I commanded myself. This is hysteria brought on by stress and confinement. Wild animals don't call people by name.

The howl came again, closer this time—or perhaps not closer in physical space, but somehow more immediate. More personal. And despite every rational instinct screaming warnings, I found myself pressing closer to the bars.

Don't respond, common sense begged. Whatever's down there, you don't want to attract its attention.

But something deeper than conscious thought was already responding. Some part of me that recognized that call, that had been waiting to hear it without understanding why.

The sound that escaped my throat wasn't intentional—part gasp, part sigh, part acknowledgment of something I couldn't name. But it carried clearly through the bars, down into the darkness beyond.

The silence that followed was absolute, profound, terrifying in its completeness.

Then, from somewhere far below, came the whisper of movement. Something large shifting through shadows, disturbing air that had been still for who knew how long.

It heard me, I realized with mounting alarm. And it's coming closer.

I should have stepped back from the window. Should have moved to the far corner of the cell and waited for whatever morning might bring. Should have done anything except what I actually did, which was remain exactly where I was, hands gripping iron bars, straining to catch any hint of what moved in the darkness below.

What are you? I thought, the question directed toward shadows I couldn't penetrate. What are you, and why do I feel like I should know?

The howl rose a third time, and this time there was no mistaking the intelligence behind it. Whatever made that sound was trying to communicate, trying to bridge the gap between human understanding and something altogether more primitive.

Calling me, whispered that dangerous voice in my head. It's calling me home.

The thought should have terrified me. Should have sent me scrambling away from the window and toward whatever meager safety the cell's interior might provide.

Instead, it sent warmth flooding through my chest that felt dangerously close to relief.

Home, I found myself thinking. Finally, someone calling me home.

Which was madness. Complete, irrational madness.

But madness that felt more real than anything else in my life had for a very long time.