The stairs below the marker were much the same as the ones leading below the Citadel; cold steel, leaving a hollow metallic feeling of perfectionism and isolation. I hated this place, and I hated that my theory of the Order's involvement in my spiral was shaping to be correct. How much had been a lie? How much had been manufactured for my sake?

  The Chosen had taken the lead, following down the stairs close behind Vance. Kas and I took up the middle, with Victor strolling casually behind. Looking over my shoulder, I watched as he ran his finger down the dusty steel railing on the stairs. His eyes, bright in the iris, but yellowed with what I assumed with jaundice, seemed to take in everything. He was an observant man, constantly taking in the world around him with precision and almost child-like wonder.

  The next door, like a grey slate of unadorned metal, also opened with Vance's keycard, and slid open mechanically. I watched as the hallway on the other side became visible. I knew what to expect, but the others did not, except for maybe Kas, who I had told in detail, my experience here.

  The bitter, hospital white hall lit up with flickering motion lights, revealing glass cases, prison cells really, lining the entire thirty foot corridor. This had been the display, where the monstrous creations had sat, dead, dying or suffering. Understanding now that these had been denizens of the Old World, monsters who had been experimented on, presumably by the Order of Vigilance, made my stomach sink.

  "Holy shit!" Sky exclaimed, covering her mouth and nose. The smell of death and rot was nauseating. The group gagged in unison, except for Victor, who moved to the front of the pack, kneeling to inspect the bodies on the floor, and then to peer at the ones behind the glass.

  "This was torture. Someone was trying to create chimeras, and not the mythological kind. They mutated and murdered all these souls." He said, his voice low and his tone almost reverant. It was hard to tell if he was sad for the loss of all these captured and killed souls, or if he was admiring the craftsmanship of the patchwork horrors before us.

  I recognized these creatures now. Before, they all had looked like abominations; fear inducing nightmares. But I could see now the hopelessness in these dead creatures, likely kidnapped from their families, jobs and lives. They were prisoners of war, like any I had seen in my time. A war that no one knew was happening.

  I could point out a centaur, with pegasus-like wings on its sides, its tail replaced by some venomous spike.

  Gremlin creatures lay in heap in one of the windowed cells, huddled together, their nails pulled off, hair missing, arms of other animals grafted to their small torsos, making them look like spider monsters. It was hard not to think of Gene, the Gremlin doorman at Union Station's entrance to the Old World train station.

  The once pristine white hallway was streaked with blood, and the long-since rotted corpses of my fellow military men. The Guilt had ripped them apart mercilessly, pulling limbs off, opening bodies to spill viscera. Most of the bodies faced up as we entered, indicating that we had been running away. We had fled the carnage when our weapons proved useless against The Guilt and it had picked us off one by one. Except for me.

  I could feel all the eyes slowly turning to face me. This had been my mission. I was the sole survivor of this atrocity.

  "This is awful. John, how did you even manage to..." Kas had started, but she heaved, desperately trying to keep down vomit. For someone who was a monster hunter, I assumed even this was too much. This wasn't dispatching evil creatures. This had been torture and slaughter.

  "I was lucky. I don't remember most of it, the memory is all a blur. The closer we get to that door at the end of the hall, the less I can actually think about it." I told her quietly. She didn't look at me, but she nodded. Vance and his team had moved up to the door at the end, the keycard scanner blinking red, denying him authorization beyond the bloody entrance hall.

  "No good, I can't get any further." He said, turning back to call down at me. I was shocked, cause Vance's card had gotten us this far. Which meant however had clearance to get into the lab, was higher up than him. The implications ran wild in my head.

  "Uh, guys." Kas said, her voice starting low, and then rising. We all turned to look at her. She was knelt next to one of the corpses of my fellow military men. He was missing the lower half of his body somewhere further down the hall, but his top half was still mostly intact. He wore the same special forces black tactical gear as we all had. His vest was torn up and his skull sat turned around in his helmet. That was when I noticed what Kas was looking at.

  There on his shoulder was a small ensignia. The same one all the black clad Order members had been wearing. The one on all the shirts in the training gym. I stared, stunned. It was impossible. These men had to have come after my squad had left. Something else must have gotten to them. But this corpse wasn't fresh. It was years old, the skin having long since fled his face, and decomposition had taken hold. The gore had been sealed in behind me when I fled.

  "John, this means..." Kas looked up at me, her eyes wavering and unsure. I looked down at my hands, turning them over and over. How could I not remember that? How did I not know that I had always been part of the Order. Had been a soldier for the Order?

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Perhaps, deep down, that was why I had sought them out so hard over the years. My knowledge of all these things unseen wasn't a detective's hunch. They had been fragments of a memory scrambled; a memory lost. All of these things had started to fade: my jobs, my family, my past. The narrative of who I was had unravelled like someone had pulled a loose thread.

  "It doesn't make any sense." I muttered to myself.

  "When was the last time you took your pills, John?" I heard Victor ask. He rested a hand on my shoulder, grounding me back in reality.

  "I stopped taking them. They were making things worse." My words were staggered, like I was partially absent from the conversation. I looked up from my hands to see Victor staring at Kas, who only shrugged.

  "There are going to be things inside that lab that will be triggering for you John. Things you might not fully remember could come rushing back to you. Are you prepared for that?" Victor asked, his voice matter-of-fact.

  I didn't look at him as I nodded. I simply stared down at the bisected Order soldier on the ground, his skin long since lost to time, the dark stain behind him where organs used to be. This could have been me. It very well was me. Who was I actually?

  Victor approached the door then, looking back and motioning to Kas, who levelled her crossbow at the door. I watched as the Chosen materialized Artifacts out of nowhere, the magic of their powerful Bonding Ceremony. I hated that I had only proven to make my situation worse with my own Ceremony. I resented those young, spirited teenagers, full of adventure and fueled my magic.

  Victor pulled out his keycard and scanned it, the light blinking green, and suddenly the steel double doors in front of us clicked, unlocking. Clinton grabbed the door and pulled it open, motioning for the others to filter in. I watched, one by one as the Chosen disappeared behind the door, then Victor.

  "Are you sure you're up for this John? We can go outside and have them tell us what they found. You don't need to be in here." Kas said, moving one hand from her crossbow to awkwardly put a hand on my back.

  I wanted to thank her in that moment, for sticking by my side since we had met. I wanted to thank her for caring for me, watching over me, and believing me, when no one else did. I wanted to hold her like I had when she told me about her past.

  "I have to know." The only words I could muster, croaked out of my hoarse, dry mouth as I walked forward. Kas stayed close behind me as we entered the lab below Partridge Island.

  The lab looked much like Victor's back at the Citadel. The white, surgical suite was covered in more blood and rot than the hallway. The Order soldiers, scientists and several other chimeric creatures littered the floor, completely eviscerated and decomposed. Six tube-shaped pods lined the far wall across from the door, with one shattered, the glass pushed outward and across the floor. That had been where The Guilt had come from, I knew. Or at least that was what I told myself. There were bodies floating in the green liquid in the other five pods, but it was not as opaque as Victor's pods. I could see these men, trapped inside, the diagnostic screens attached to the pods long since flat-lined.

  The others had expected combat, some video game boss style fight with a large creature or mad scientist. There was nothing but gore and disappointment here. It was clear to me now that this facility had been used by the Order of Vigilance. It was also clear that the squad that I had wrongly assumed to have been the Canadian Armed Forces, was actually another cell of the Order. It had been a betrayal then, I assumed. The people who were creating chimeras had been of the Order, but must have been some kind of renegade arrangement. Or someone who had access to the Order, but was no longer active. My team must have come in to clean up.

  I watched as Artifacts fizzled away with disappointed sighs. I heard Kas sling her crossbow back over her shoulder. Victor moved quickly to one of the computers, removing a severed hand from the keyboard, and trying to get the sticky keys to work despite ancient dried blood. We all looked to him when the computer pinged to life, blue screens flickering to life, displaying the Windows logo. That was when I felt my phone vibrate furiously in my pocket, startling me. I pulled it from my pocket and was met with a black screen instead of my background. A green cursor blinked at the top left of the screen, before words started typing.

  [Thank you John] Blinked in green at the top of my phone, before all the other screens in the room flickered to black, displaying the same green writing. This was how Ch0z3n1 had reached out to me, and I felt foolish once again. For someone to have so much inside information, they would have had to have been part of the Order at some point themselves. The private protective networks that the Order used for all of its information was very well protected, but not well enough if I had been carrying what was essentially a sleeper agent in my pocket the whole way here. At the Citadel, he would have easily been weeded out and dealt with, but here, alone, on an isolated island, in a forgotten lab...I had given this outsider the entrance that he needed.

  [Downloading System Databases...Please Wait...]

  [Accessing Secure Functions...]

  [User Login: D.Griffin Ch0z3n1]

  [System Override...]

  [Accessing Secure Files...]

  [Project Echidna Accessed...Downloading Files]

  We all looked up at the screens in horror, as someone hacked the systems to recover whatever sick science project had been done here. Project Echidna. I immediately thought of the spiny, quilled ant-eater like creature, but I knew I was wrong. I wasn't as fluent in Greek Myth as the others in the room, but I knew who Echidna was.

  The Mother of Monsters.