Soon after, the rest of the other servants woke up with their freakish orchestra of rambling and mumbling, soft moaning and begging, sent a wave of goose bumps to all who witnessing their eerie cult gathering-like performants. One man couldn’t stop apologising for what he’d done to some kid, and again like the maid, on and on he rambled about the whisperings demanded he to… “do it”, that he couldn’t refuse the whisperings’s demanded, that he must complied, complied just because the whispering told him to, while wore a traumatized deranged look on his face like a soldier having a PTSD flashback, a face Samuel known too well.

“What’re you talking about, apology to who, what kid? Where’s my father?” –lord Harduin concerned.

“Down there” –That man switched his rambling to a few repeating words- “They’re all down there, down there, they’re all down there, down there…” –on and on he repeated.

“Down there?” –Princess Hi intrigued- “Where is this ‘down there’ he spoke of?”

“Eh…” –Lord Harduin guessed- “Maybe the basement? There’s an unused basement under this building.”

“Well, lead on lord Harduin” –the Aulacia Princess entreated- “There’s only one way to find out.”

After had some other servants fetched them lantern, the crowd pressed on toward the basement cautiously to make sure there would be no other surprise on the way. And after a few minutes through the dark hallway the basement door was clear in front of their eyes.

The hinges moaned like a dying animal and as the door cracked open, everyone quickly had their hand on their nose and their face contorted into a disgusted expression as a foul smell washed through them from the base of the stone staircase.

“Bloody hell, is something died down there?” –Samuel commented as they pressed on.

Down, down the stony steps they went, the door at the end of the steps they pushed, and more horrible smell assaulted their sense, smells of rot, of decay, of filth and damp basemen. Like an invisible cloud, it ravaged their nose and gripped tight at their lungs, and even tainted their tongue with a vague foul taste, made every breath they took were a great struggler.

From the dark room beyond the basement door, stood a lonely lantern pole illuminating a few tables and some persons, one stood tall and still, another lied still on the table. A clanking sound of shifted metal took the attention of those who just stepped through the basement door. On their right, the feeble light of the lone lantern revealed a scene of nightmare. Women, chained to the floor and wall were three young women sitting in their own filth and crawling with cockroaches, the sleeves on their dress were all torn off, revealed puncture mark of needle. The women were complete out of their sense, one of them lift her face and look at the newcomer crowd, eyelids haft open with a dazed expression, like a junkie high out of their mind, some of them had blister or bloated lump on their skin.

The nightmarish scene did not end there, just a few step away from the chained women, in a corner of the basement was a pile of corpse, one on top of another, all were young women or teenage girl. Some had already in the state of decomposing some still fresh. And all have the same condition, grotesquely malformed with either lumps of flesh big and small misplaced all over their corpse or strange appendix things protruded out of the corpse’s skin, that Samuel could not believe or made sense of what his eyes were seeing, the only way he could describe to himself was those… things, whatever they are, looked somewhat similar to crustacean or insect’s limb.

Quickly followed after the brief realization of what just unfold before their eye, people in the crowd started to puke and added more to the disgustingness of that basement, some other lacked that kind of steel nerve and fainted on the spot. Disgusted and shocked, Samuel stood and stared at the gruesome scene in front of his eyes and most importantly the person or rather, the corpse, laying on the table in the middle of the room, the little girl he saw yesterday. Haft of her body mutated and malformed, with an expression of utter terror permanently fixed on her face, saw the girl’s hollow dead-eyes, Samuel felt like he being judge, being accursed for his inaction, he could felt the blood inside his vein was boiling with rage, anger at whoever had done all of this.

Finally, somewhat recovered from the shock of the discover, they turned their attention to the man stood at the table in the middle of the basement, who now had turned his face toward them, and that face shocked them furthermore.

“D… D… Dartern?” –the Bricatish word, Lord Harduin just uttered, mean “father”.

Stood there stared at everyone else was Lord Urdin himself, with a wide opened eyes and an emotionless gauntly face, half lit by the lantern his face radiant an unimaginable eeriness that could freeze the spine of anyone who got stared at.

“You” –Lord Urdin spoke in the common speech, slowly turned at where he stood and pointed at precisely Princess Hi- “Yes, yes, you’re suitable, you’re suitable” –freakish grin cracked his lips contrasted to the uncanny monotone in his voice.

“Yes, yes, you’ll make a good servant for them” –step by step, with an uncanny grin on his face, Lord Urdin approached the Aulacian princess. 

He lunged, but quickly knocked aside by Samuel’s fist before he could lay a finger on the princess. Before Lord Urdin was able to drop to the ground Samuel already jumped on his chest and let his anger flowed through his fists. Up and down, up and down, like the movement of the pistol Samuel’s fists pommelled the middle-age man, punch after punch, like a great wave of tsunami, Samuel’s ire crashed on the perpetrator of the hellish scene he just saw. But quickly a small hand pulled at his robe’s collard and followed with a plea of mercy had halted Samuel’s anger, saw his father was being assaulted, Lord Harduin quickly jumped between Samuel and his father, begged Samuel to stop. After a few seconds, Lord Urdin had recovered, and it seems Samuel’s punching had knocked some sense back to the lord.

“H…Harduin?” –Lord Urdin looked around him with a bewilderment wide eyes- “D… Did I do this?”

“Dartern, what’d happened here?” –Lord Harduin spoke in tear- “What’s all of this? why did you do this?”

“I… I… I don’t know” –Lord Urdin trembled, finally comprehended that hellish scene, and who created it- “I… I… don’t know, it was… it because…” –his fingers suddenly wrapped around his head, fingernail dug into his skin. Lord Urdin gently swayed his body, his eye rolled up into his skull and face melted and wrap with incomprehensible expression like some weird impressionist painting while let out a string of unintelligible mumblings.

“Father? Father are you alright?” –Lord Harduin shook his father- “Speak to me father? Why did you do this? Because of what?”

“The Whisperings” –Lord Urdin uttered the word with great effort- “I must obey, the whispering told me to follow his requests, can you hear it?” –Eyes rolled wildly in shockets, Lord Urdin grasped hold to his son- “The whisperings, the whisperings told me to… can you hear it? Please, someone… make it stop… those whisperings won’t stop”

Finally, Lord Urdin fell back to the dirty floor and curled up into foetal position, trembling and sobbing about some whispering that only him could hear, while everyone else looked on with pity and puzzled by what kind of madness had got into the lord.

“Everyone look here” –Elesil’s voice diverged all attention toward the floor near the end of the basement. A trail of multi bloody footprints all headed to a door at the end of the basement.

“Lord Harduin, where’s that door lead to?” –Princess Hi asked the shaken boy.

“Ugh… well… the escape turner for emergency case, I think, it’ll lead to the nearby river” –the boy wiped his tear tried to kept himself together.

So while the others stayed behind to tending to the victims and clear up the mess, Samuel, Elesil, Emma and Princess Hi pressed on through the escape turner followed the bloody footprints on the floor. Eventually, the footprints ran out, but pushed forward they still, the echo of their footstep guide their lantern light forward through the darkness of the turner until another reinforced-door stood in their way. After a “clack” of the big slide-lock, the door opened to a small cave half submerged in water with a built-in wooden quay, sunlight reach inside through the top of the thick curtain of reeds outside where the cave connected to the river. Drag-marks led to the water could be seen easily on the sandy bank in the cave.

The waster plashed as Samuel launched himself to the water, after a minute, wedged his way through the thick reeds, Samuel found himself bobbing amidst an empty river, no boats of any kind could be seen. It was clear, all of that atrocities weren’t accomplished by Lord Urdin alone, someone must be also involved in those crimes and that someone had long gone together with all the boats in the cave.