The staircase didn't get much cleaner the further he went down; in fact, it seemed to get more decrepit the further down the knight went. The squishy lumps of hardened blood made his stomach lurch in discomfort. With every step, the churning, writhing mass at his feet made him shiver. The slightly tangy smell of agony in the air tasted bitter on his tongue. The entrance wasn't even visible from the depth he was in anymore; there was just the small, safe space within the overused candles, soft light imbued with the ever so slight tinge of blue. The hesitance in his step had disappeared after the fourth step down, in its place was a foreboding sensation riding through every nerve in his body. The knight was almost certain it was the humming that still sounded distant to his ears despite descending many more than several floors under the bloody surface. Thinking about the surface only made him shiver more; it was much more difficult to wrap his head around a forest of people existing in that state from something that wasn't from that malicious book of madness. He had considered that it was in fact from the book, but it was a spell that didn't hold any of the characteristics of the spells' effects on the bodies of said spells victims. But in the countless spells in the seemingly infinitely paged book, not a single one didn't hold at least one of these characteristics. This entire biome was the work of a tyrant who worked his entire lifetime to create a spell of this level. It could've been a disease developed, there was no telling what was the cause of the genocide, but it deep in his bones he knew that whatever awaited him behind the curtain of mystic was the reason for these peoples ill fate.
He was pulled out of his musing from a squelching sound from his heavy foot followed in suit by the foul odor of a rotting corpse. He had grown accustomed to the lingering smell of death some time ago while in the belly of the unnamed necromancer, yet that did not stop the initial gag of disgust from the escaping the knight. He decided to hurry past the rancid smell to make sure it didn't stick to him–not like anyone was going to smell him–the knight scuffled down the stairs with a renewed vigor while ignoring the bubbles that began to enter the vicinity of the warmly lit candle. They were a pale, sickly green surrounded by a sore white that connected like a parasite to the bloody walls. They pulsed a little in agitation from the light, but remained unresponsive to the knight's lumbering form.
With his eyes trained on the darkness in front of him, he did not see the various skincrawling 'creatures' across the tight corridor, which–if he wasn't hallucinating from the deep darkness in front of him and behind him–was currently shrinking, in both height and width. When the knight had just entered the corridor, his armor was able to fit through the space with his arms stretched out to his side and to the ceiling, making it rather maneuverable. However, now, he could barely raise his elbows out without hitting the cysts, while he had to slightly hunch himself over to make sure that the top of his helmet didn't scrape the roof of the tunnel. The humming had morphed into a simple whistle in the short moment the knight had accounted for his now restricted movement. The terror that had built up in his furrowing brow was almost tangible, the clear disgust on his tongue, and the brittle anger in his tightened jaw were all reasons for him to turn back around and never return to what could likely be his tomb, yet unlike a tomb, this place would keep him from reaching the afterlife. But he kept moving down those steps, into the echoey hallway.
The passage tightened even more, it wasn't just awkward to move now, his arms were now pressed against the slimy walls, creating a sound he couldn't quite describe as the strange substance clung to his armor, until the passage opened up. It didn't stop going down, but it was like the stairwell he had been descending wasn't slowly getting smaller at all. Turning around, he gazed into the darkness above him, he could not see it, but he could nearly call it factual that walls had shifted in such a way so that the knight could fit his way through the passage, without touching the walls or ceiling, but just so. That came with its own questions, however.
'Is this place alive?' It was a fair assumption to make, as the darkness was still watching him–something he had not forgotten about–and with the newly added shifting chambers, it felt more and more like a likely option, if not a superstitious one. He chuckled a bit at the thought of moving walls being a bit superstitious as he turned back to the darkness beneath him and continued his leisure walk.
He wasn't sure how long it had been since he had started his walk down the corridor. Might as well have been several days to a week, yet he was still descending. The further he went, the more foggy his mind was supposed to become, yet his mind only sharpened under the assaulting mental force, leaving him wide awake for many days on end; he wanted to sleep, he wanted to turn back, but the knight had already traveled so far that it would've been a waste to travel all the way back up, so that eerie forest, made from the lives of what was once humans. The tunnel itself had changed from time to time. After walking down that tunnel for what he believed was roughly two days, the tunnel shifted from that gory muddy mess to something which confused him lightly: it was pure white, with various holes strewn about, making it vastly harder to walk down since the staircase itself caved into several of these holes from time to time. He knew his anatomy pretty well and was greatly surprised to see similarities between a bone and the place he had been walking through, which could only mean that he was walking through a giant bone, which, for some reason, didn't affect him as much as he thought it would. The darkness quieted during this section of the walk, but after a day of walking through the bone, he entered a far more foul place, which is where he is at this moment.
The corridor had transitioned instantly, from the pristine bone to a rather grotesque, flesh-like, pulsing meat. It twitched and spasmed occasionally, sending jolts of disgust through the knight's nervous system. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end while looking at the meat around him. There was no immediate danger, yet his keenly developed senses raved at him that he was in the most danger the knight had likely ever been in. Several beads of sweat trailed down the knights face behind the slightly rough armor, there was something off about the corpse–or at least what he believed to be a corpse–It was of course obscenely enormous for no real reason, and it gave off this feeling of slumber that made his senses dull, leaving him even more alert than he was previously. The constant spasms of the body's muscles did little in relaxing him, or setting him off either; they were just another detail to be wary of. The squelch of each foot stepped on the flesh beneath his feet, yet no blood oozed out of the long open wound. It was almost frightening how calm this walk was, but at least it gave him fleeting moments of clarity.
He had many opportunities to think about his current situation down here in the single speck of light in the infinite darkness to his front and back. One thing he knew for a fact, was that this corpse was the creature that created the forest of faces on ground level, it was the only thing that had even a glimpse of the power needed to imprison that many people to the mortal realm. When he figured this out, he felt a slow, freezing shiver of realization creep up from the souls of his feet to the very tip of each hair follicle on the top of his head. This being he was traveling over was a Giant. The great honey combed bleached section of his walk down was in fact a bone, and he was traveling deeper and deeper into the body of a mortal god, something that was from the same tribe as Death itself. At the thought of Death, a great shudder of displeasure racked the body. The knight, who was strong in his own right, was tossed around in the tight corridor, and quickly was plastered on each wall for a great period of time, while being forced to the other with each great tremor that racked the beings titanous body. It was not dead. The shaking didn't stop, only further growing in strength, making it far harder for the knight to keep his balance on the short steps he found himself stuck on. He tried digging his feet into the flesh he was walking on, but that had the opposite effect of what he hoped.
The knight watched the darkness in front of him carefully as his body lurched forward without his accord, while his feet unlodged themselves from the pinkish flesh, and swung high in the air. He looked on tiredly as his body slid down the stairs, growing in speed, while the candle remained stationary, unable to understand that the knight was still moving despite not walking down the stairs. He knew from the moment he slipped would be unable to stop. The speed he was already moving at would tear his arms off he tried to join them with the walls around him, so he silently accepted his fate, while bitterly lamenting that he was still finding ways to fall down great distances, while the darkness writhed around him in amusement, grinning and guffawing at his plight. Torrents of liquid from the flesh of the giant helped slide the knight down the slope, removing what little friction still remained in his unwilling descent.
The knight accepted his fate after a few moments on the ground, his face was smushed into the front of his helmet, which was face first into the stairs. When the knight felt the taste of the giant's blood against his gritted teeth, he knew he had to stop this. He couldn't afford to sacrifice his arms just in case he ran into something at the base of the staircase, yet there was nothing else he could do if he didn't want to use his arms. The slightly squishy floor left a light trench as he continued to zoom deeper and deeper into the chest of the creature. He tried digging his fingers into the tissue, but failed miserably, as they slid right out in seconds as he flew. He wanted to curse his situation, but his mouth was still stuck to the front of his helmet; still getting painted with bodily fluids. His patience had grown exponentially since he had been thrown to the bottom of the ocean, yet still he found his fuse already shortened far more than it had been since the night he gave up on his people.
The knight swept those memories under the rug, there was a new purpose in his life to fulfill, and drudging up those moments at his lowest wouldn't help. Luckily for the knight, he had just arrived.
Sliding down the final step, he stood still for a small while. He left the grungy staircase, at long last. He was torn between feeling on guard, and worried, or thankful. In the end he picked to feel both as he tossed his body to the side. The shuddering of his armor against the ground echoed in the vast chamber he now found himself in. Looking up, he could only see the grand darkness of the lair deep in the torso of a slumbering god. He wasn't able to give it much thought as the room trembled lightly. He couldn't see it, but he heard small amounts of dust and debris land on his armor from the distant ceiling. The trembling ended after a moment, then continued, then stopped. It was akin to that of a beating drum, at a set pattern the trembling would come, with a low murmur following suit not long after. The knight sighed, and from his position, clawed his way to a sitting position, then back up to his full height in a few moments. Ignoring the groans from the red steel covering him, the knight gazes at the empty darkness curiously. His hand rested on the hilt of his weapon, but he did not sense immediate danger in the vacinity–it was strange. Pivoting, his eyes glossed over his line of sight with half heartedness. There was no way he'd be able to see anything in this place, even if he strained himself, but it felt wrong to not put in at least some effort into looking around.
He was about to turn around to the direction he believed the stairs were when he heard it–whispers, and the following moment, plumes of incandescent red flames burst into reality, evenly spaced from each other, placed directly in the middle of vast, extravagantly carved marble pillars. The flames gave way to small pillars of smoke, and from that smoke faces of the eternally slumbering forest above murmured their sadness, and their dreams; how they would improve their lives if they could, and with each of their distinctly high pitched voices, the knight was put more on edge. From the light, an abyssal black floor revealed itself. If he wasn't standing on the platform of darkness, he would've assumed it was a pit of tar waiting for some unlucky creature to consume slowly. The walls that surrounded the knight were an equal shade of black, that likely spread not too far out from the only distinguishable light. Just as the knight was able to make out his surroundings, he was also able to make out his own condition, which is better than he thought it would be: across his chest were great scars from the staircase rubbing against him, but nothing that could get in his way if a fight ensued, which is all that the knight really cared about. His eyes lingered on himself for a couple of moments, but after another tremble came and went, the knight turned his attention back to the room.
Taking a hesitant step forward, he heard a low thud and the sound of metal rubbing on glass which confused and alarmed him. He took another step and received the same sound again, followed by a great throbbing in the room. Looking around, the knight looked at the pillars to his left and right, across them told a tale through great tapestries and finger painted dialect of a people from a distant past from now and a distant future from his time. Though a single constant through the left pillars was a single armored man holding a sword forged by a darkness nearly as impenetrable as the armor he wore. Glancing to the right, the knight observed the tale of what he assumed to the owner of this body, a giant, yet there was not a single thing he could decipher from it. The glyphs of texts of old were far more worn, and the images far more faded to time.
Both sets of pillars went forward, illuminating a path into a space that seemed infinitely larger than the thing in its center, while being much too small for it. It was a circular space created after the marble pillars branched outward in a circular way till they met at the other side of where they started, though that's not what grabbed the knight's attention. In the center of the knight's vision was a vast, unending mound of flesh, with large blue tubes connecting to it, branching outward, it was an alive mass. With every pulse it released, the grand room shuddered, while blood pumped outward to the rest of the giant's body, this was a giant's heart, and it was the size of a mountain.
Though the pillars seemed to stretch far into the darkness above without a chance of ending, the knight could see the whole mass of the heart from his place, and in the very core of the heart, an infinitely smaller speck of ilk was spotted. A black virus that branched outward, with equally distinct cracks of brilliant light emerging from the dark core in the center of the heart. With every pump of the heart, the cracks grew wider, the light grew brighter, and the darkness grew eviler. The knight could feel his consciousness trying to slip away from him and enter a deep coma, but he fought against it, keeping it at bay for a few moments until finally, the final cracks appeared in the heart of the giant at the center of the circle, it was as though the heart a feeding the leech, and it was finally leaving its cocoon. The knight had walked in on the birth of a new ruler of the mortal world. The snapping sounds as the veins connected to the heart disconnected from the heart, and as the plugs disconnected they spewed torrents of blood so vast the knight almost assumed it was a waterfall as the veins fell lifelessly from their places and crashed into the black ground. The veins shattered the glassy surface, leaving the lakes of red with grand shards of darkness in the pools. Just as the blood stained the darkness, it also stained the pillars, and the knight only watched as the heart fell from its strung up position, like a puppet cut from its strings and prepared himself for the creature he knew would emerge from the heart of the now dying giant.
The knight drew his sword, fell into a stance his mind had forgotten, and stared onward without fear–at least on the surface. 'There's no turning back now' The once lustrous red had quickly drained of color and life as it pathetically spewed splotches of red blood from its wounds, trying and failing to rekindle its life. He stood stalwart as the organ floundered, and the body he was in began to fail slowly. Shudders racked the giant, each much more devastating than the last, yet the room cast from darkness did not waver, and instead stood strong as the heart gave its last weak beats of life and after an excruciating few seconds, it gave out. A cold silence suffocated the room, as the heart's febrile attempts at living finally extinguished, leaving a husk ridden with disease left. The ilk of light and dark in the center of the heart had grown fainter, and after a few moments of nothing happening, the knight was about to release his stance, when he heard it: an itching from the depths of the dead hearts depths; something was trying to claw out of the mountain of flesh.