Lost in Translation

The air in the Undercroft was a stale, mineral tang, thick with dust and the ghosts of ancient, broken systems. Cyril moved through it like a shadow, his worn coat blending with the perpetual gloom. He’d heard the whispers, seen the subtle, almost imperceptible changes – the way a shadow held its shape too long, the brief flicker of impossible color on a concrete wall. But the effects of the hum, the Chorister’s song, were no longer subtle for many who lived down here.

He found the first one hunched in an alcove off a narrow service tunnel. A woman, normally known for her sharp tongue and quicker fists, was rocking back and forth, her eyes wide and unfocused. A faint, persistent hum vibrated in the air around her, too low for human hearing but somehow palpable.

"Sister," Cyril said softly, approaching with slow, deliberate steps. "Are you unwell?"

Her head snapped up, her eyes fixing on him, but there was no recognition in them, only a depthless, liquid sheen. Her mouth opened, and a series of clicks and whistles came out, sounds that had no place in a human throat. It wasn't speech, not even close. It was like listening to a broken machine trying to sing.

Cyril knelt, wincing internally at the sound, which resonated in his own bones. "Sister, what is it? What do you see?"

She didn't answer with words, couldn't. Instead, her hands, calloused and grimy, began to move. Not gestures, not signing. They traced intricate, impossible shapes in the air – geometries that shifted and reformed even as he watched, leaving faint afterimages like shimmering dust motes. The clicks and whistles intensified, a frantic, alien chorus accompanying the dance of her fingers.

A knot tightened in Cyril's stomach. This wasn't sickness. This was... tuning. Her mind, her body, were resonating with the hum, interpreting its alien structure in a way that bypassed language and even coherent thought. He reached out hesitantly, but before he could touch her, her head tilted back, and a low, resonant note, identical to the hum in the air, escaped her lips. It held for a full ten seconds, steady and unwavering, before she slumped forward, trembling.

"May the Architects have mercy," Cyril murmured, though the words felt hollow. He stood slowly, leaving her to her silent, incomprehensible ordeal.

Further on, near a collapsed access shaft where the air was cold and smelled of damp earth, he found a man he knew as Old Man Silas. Silas had always been cantankerous, muttering to himself about the old days. Now, he wasn't just muttering. He was peeling strips of skin from his arm, meticulously laying them out on a flattened piece of corrugated metal. The skin wasn't bleeding. Instead, it was flaking off in strange, crystalline patterns, catching the meager light like shattered glass.

"Silas," Cyril said, his voice hoarse. "What in God's name are you doing?"

Silas didn't look up. His movements were precise, almost artistic, as he arranged the iridescent flakes. "Building," he rasped, his voice dry and brittle, like stone grinding on stone. "Building the new wall. They sing the instructions. See?" He gestured with a hand that shimmered faintly, the skin already beginning to show the same unnatural crystalline texture. "It's all in the song. Layers upon layers."

Cyril felt a wave of nausea. This wasn't a delusion. Silas’s skin was genuinely transforming. The hum here was stronger, a deep vibration that felt like it was rearranging the very fabric of the tunnel walls. He saw the geometric patterns the woman had traced in the air reflected faintly in the structure of the crystalline flakes on the metal sheet. The hum wasn't just a sound; it was information. And these people were receiving it, applying it to themselves.

He knelt again, trying to keep the tremor from his voice. "Silas, let me help you. Let's get you somewhere safe."

Silas finally looked at him, his eyes clear but utterly distant. "Safe?" He laughed, a sound like breaking glass. "The only safe place is in the pattern. The Old Ways are dust. They are being unmade, layer by layer." He gestured with his shimmering hand towards the tunnel walls, which seemed to subtly pulse with the hum. "We become... resonant. We become... part of the build."

Part of the build. The phrase echoed in Cyril's head, chilling him to the bone. This wasn't about faith, or sin, or cosmic warfare in any sense he understood. This was something else entirely. Something that saw human beings as raw material, as variables in a grand, indifferent equation. He stayed with Silas for a while, watching him meticulously construct his wall of shedding skin, offering quiet words of comfort that felt utterly inadequate in the face of such alien transformation. Silas never responded, lost in the silent symphony of his own unmaking. Cyril left him there, the low hum clinging to his clothes, a physical reminder of the disturbing symphony playing out in the Undercroft. He had seen suffering before, poverty, madness, violence. But this? This was something new, something that defied his pity and left him profoundly, sickeningly confused.

The air in the cramped passage felt thick and close, carrying the persistent, low hum like a physical weight. Cyril pulled his damp tunic away from his skin, the rough fabric scratching where the residual vibration still seemed to cling. He paused beside a slumped figure near a corroded bulkhead. The man’s head was cocked at an impossible angle, not broken, but *formed* that way, the bone and muscle seemingly poured into the unnatural twist like cooling slag. A low, repetitive clicking came from the man's throat, a sound that held no cadence of speech, only the sterile rhythm of a poorly calibrated machine.

Cyril knelt, the joint in his knee protesting. He withdrew the tattered notebook from his satchel, its pages dog-eared and stained. His pencil, stubby and blunt, hovered over the worn paper. He stared at the figure, then at the empty lines. His previous entries were filled with observations of despair, signs of disease, the ravages of hunger and violence – things he could categorize, could offer words of solace against, could, however futilely, frame within the suffering of the world as he understood it.

He chewed on the end of his pencil. How did one describe a body that had forgotten how to be human? How did one write down *clicking* as a symptom? He scribbled a few lines, his handwriting tight and uneven: "Subject 7: Male. Appx 40 standard cycles. Observed posture… unnatural flexion, cervical spine. Audible symptom: rhythmic, non-vocal click… suggests osseous restructuring?" Restructuring. Not disease. Not injury. *Restructuring*. His mind rebelled against the word, a word for rebuilding a wall, not a man's neck.

He stood, moving deeper into the section of the Undercroft where the hum felt particularly concentrated. Further on, near a makeshift shelter cobbled together from scavenged metal sheets, a woman sat tracing patterns in the thin layer of dust on the floor. Not pictures, but intricate, interlocking geometric shapes that pulsed with a faint, internal light visible only from certain angles. Her fingers moved with frantic, obsessive precision, faster than any human hand should be able to manage. They seemed thinner, too, the skin stretched taut and translucent over elongated bones.

"Sister," Cyril said softly, approaching slowly. "Are you well?"

She didn't look up. Her eyes, visible beneath a curtain of lank, greasy hair, were wide and unfocused, staring at the shimmering patterns on the ground. "Almost," she breathed, her voice barely a whisper, devoid of inflection. "The sequence. It’s so... beautiful. I can see the joins now. The old threads are fraying. They need... reinforcement."

"Reinforcement?" Cyril repeated, his brow furrowed. This echoed Silas's words, 'the build'. His hand went to his notebook again, but his mind was a churning mess. What reinforcement? Against what? The crumbling Undercroft? No, they spoke of *threads*, of *sequences*. Like woven fabric, like code. The images of the glittering flakes on Silas's skin, the impossible angle of the man’s neck, the shimmering patterns under the woman’s hand – they weren't random. They were deliberate, horrifyingly precise.

He tried another angle. "Sister, what do you see in these patterns? Are they... visions?" He tried to connect it back to the familiar language of revelation, of divine insight.

She finally paused, her elongated fingers hovering over a particularly complex node in the dust pattern. A tremor ran through her hand, making the shimmering effect intensify for a brief second. "Visions?" She tilted her head, a movement that seemed slightly too fluid, too boneless. "No. Not visions. Instructions. They are singing the world, Prophet. And some of us... we hear the truest notes."

Prophet. The title felt like ash in his mouth. He was a prophet of what? Of decay? Of madness? He was supposed to offer understanding, offer hope. But there was no hope here, no understanding his faith could provide. This wasn't spiritual affliction. This was physical, tangible, and utterly alien. His theological framework, built on narratives of good and evil, sin and redemption, felt flimsy and irrelevant. He had sought to interpret the chaos through familiar scripture, but the scripture offered no verses for bones that reshaped themselves to an unheard rhythm, or skin that shed like glittering scales.

He stayed with the woman for a time, watching the impossible speed of her fingers, the terrible beauty of the glowing dust patterns. He asked questions, probing, trying to find a crack, a hint of the person she had been before the ‘song’ consumed her. He found nothing but the serene, vacant expression and the tireless, unnatural movement of her hands.

Leaving her, the hum felt louder, more insistent. He passed others. A figure whose voice was a low, distorted echo of his own, repeating snippets of his earlier sermon in a chilling, non-human timbre. Another whose shadow seemed to detach and flicker independently on the wall behind them. Each encounter was a fresh chisel blow against the foundation of his beliefs.

His notebook remained largely empty. Words failed him. How could he explain the quiet horror of witnessing bodies become canvases for an indifferent, cosmic artistry? His initial thought – that these were symptoms of some divine punishment, a curse – felt hollow. This wasn't punishment; it was creation. Monstrous, uncaring creation. And the idea of it being a miracle felt even worse. A miracle was supposed to be benevolent, a sign of divine favor. What favor was this, that reshaped a man into a clicking automaton, or turned skin to living crystal?

He sat down against a cold, damp wall, the hum vibrating through the stone and into his spine. His head swam. If this was the work of the 'architects' he'd spoken of, then they were builders utterly indifferent to the materials they used. They weren't angels or demons. They were... processes. Algorithms made manifest. And the people in the Undercroft, those most exposed to the intensifying signal, were being rewritten, integrated into the build, their bodies and minds raw data points in a cosmic computation.

A bitter, despairing clarity settled over him. This wasn't a war between divine forces. It was a transformation, a fundamental change in reality, driven by something vast, complex, and utterly beyond human morality or understanding. His faith, his attempts to find meaning in suffering through theological lens, felt like a child's sandcastle against a tidal wave. It was dissolving, leaving him exposed to the raw, indifferent mechanics of the universe. These wasn't miracles, not curses. They were *mutations*, products of a cosmic 'code' that saw humanity as just another variable in its grand, terrifying equation. His unique, despairing view of the architects wasn't a prophetic vision; it was a terrified, dawning understanding. And the Undercroft was just the crucible where the new world was being forged, without so much as a by-your-leave to the things that lived within it.