The darkness that fell over the year 802,701 was not a natural twilight; it was a heavy, suffocating blanket. As the last sliver of the sun vanished, the low thrumming from beneath the Sphinx suddenly shifted. It became a piercing, mechanical wail—a siren that sounded like a scream slowed down to a funeral pace.
Waaaa-ooooo. Waaaa-ooooo.
Sarah clutched her ears, the sound vibrating through her skull. Beside her, the Eloi reacted instantly. They didn't run. They didn't hide.
Their bodies went rigid. As one, their heads tilted back, and Sarah gasped in horror. Their beautiful, vacant eyes didn't just go blank—the pupils drifted upward until only the stark, milky whites were visible. Their eyes rolled into the backs of their heads, leaving them looking like a garden of standing corpses.
"Weena! Look at me!" Sarah grabbed the girl’s shoulders, shaking her violently.
Weena’s head lolled back, her white eyes staring at nothing. She was gone.
Then, the lights began.
From the tops of the crumbling white towers, ancient projectors whirred to life. They cast spinning, concentric circles of hypnotic violet and sickening green light across the valley. The patterns pulsed in time with the siren.
The Eloi began to move. In a horrifying, synchronized trance, they started to march toward the Great Sphinx. Their feet shuffled in the grass, hundreds of white-eyed ghosts walking toward their own slaughter.
"No! Wake up! All of you, wake up!" Sarah screamed, trying to pull a young man back, but he was like a statue in motion, his strength fueled by the trance.
A scuttling sound erupted from the shadows nearby. Sarah spun around, her flashlight—a relic from 2002—clicking on.
The beam hit a nightmare.
It was one of them. A Morlock. Up close, it was even more grotesque than she had imagined. It had the torso of a distorted man, but its limbs were long, multi-jointed, and covered in a fine, bristly hair like a spider’s. It crouched on all sixes, its head snapping toward the light.
Its eyes were the worst part. Two massive, bulging domes took up half its face—compound eyes, like a fly, shimmering with thousands of tiny, black facets that twitched independently.
It chattered, a wet, clicking sound, and sprang.
Sarah dived to the left, the creature’s clawed hand whistling past her ear. She saw another one—and another. They were emerging from the vents in the ground, scuttling up the walls of the ruins with impossible speed. They weren't just hunters; they were shepherds, nipping at the heels of the hypnotized Eloi to keep them moving toward the bronze doors.
"Weena!"
Sarah saw the golden-haired girl reaching the threshold of the Sphinx. The bronze doors were open, revealing a yawning gullet of absolute blackness.
Sarah didn't think about the machine. She didn't think about the fixed points of time. She only thought about the daughter she couldn't save on that beach road. She wouldn't let another child walk into the dark.
She lunged forward, grabbing Weena’s waist and tackling her to the ground just as the girl was about to cross the line.
The Morlock guarding the door let out a piercing hiss. It didn't use the hypnotic light; it used brute force. It lunged, its spider-like arms wrapping around Sarah’s throat. The smell of the creature was overwhelming—the scent of old blood and stagnant earth.
Sarah fought, kicking at the creature’s pale underbelly, but a second Morlock swarmed over her, pinning her arms.
As she struggled, she looked up and saw a figure standing in the shadows of the doorway. He wasn't scuttling. He was standing tall, dressed in tattered, dark robes that looked like they had been stitched together from a thousand years of scavenged silk. He wore thick, soot-black glasses that hid his eyes.
He raised a hand, and the clicking of the spider-creatures stopped instantly.
"The Architect has arrived," the figure said. His voice was smooth, cultured, and chillingly human. "Bring her down. She has been running for a long time. It is time she learned that some things... are better forgotten."
A heavy blow landed on the back of Sarah’s head. The spinning hypnotic lights of the valley were the last thing she saw before the world turned as black as the Morlock tunnels.
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