The guards escorted Youri all the way down to the Pit, exactly as Benjamin had ordered. The Pit was the lowest level of Khalil Fortress, and the only section of it built to hold no more than ten prisoners at once — a scarcity that had earned the level its name in the first place, since anyone sent that far down was never expected to need company. At the main platform leading to the entrance, the bottom of the shaft was nearly impossible to make out, swallowed by distance and shadow. It was a massive, squared-off hole lined on every side with panels of dark glass, and the guards pushed Youri onto the descending platform before it began its slow drop into the dark.
As the platform sank lower, the light from the entrance above thinned and finally vanished altogether, leaving nothing behind but a dim red glow that barely reached the lower walls. Down and down it went, past level after level Youri couldn't begin to count, until at last it slowed and came to rest. Ahead of him stood a massive chamber carved directly into the rock — not built, but carved, as though the mountain itself had been hollowed out to make room for it. The guards shoved him again, off the platform and onto a narrow walkway that ran along the front of the chamber, rock walls closing in on three sides and a single towering sheet of glass forming the fourth. Youri studied it for a long moment, drawing a slow breath. "So this is the Pit, huh."
The guard behind him gave a short laugh. "Enjoy it."
Youri walked forward without another word. A doorway opened in the glass ahead of him, and the moment he stepped through it, thin lines of white neon flickered to life along the walls, casting a faint, sterile light across the chamber. The door sealed shut behind him the instant he cleared it. He turned back toward the glass just in time to watch the guards board the platform and begin their ascent, leaving him well and truly alone. Once they were gone, Youri lowered himself onto the cold stone floor and lay flat on his back, staring up at the dim, uneven ceiling.
He couldn't help but wonder if this was the very place Flavio had once described to him — Khalil, the inescapable prison. The thought of that name brought an unexpected sting to his right eye. It had been decades since Flavio had died, and yet the mind had its own cruel way of dragging the past back up regardless of how much time had passed, or how little it seemed to care whether Youri was ready for it.
Then, without warning, the lights in his chamber cut out entirely, and he was left in total darkness. It was not the first time in his life he had found himself locked away in the dark. But this time, despite everything else he had already survived, it felt different — as if the veil of numbness he had carried with him for so long had simply slipped away and left him exposed. The old sadness crept back in to fill the space it left behind, because in the dark, no matter what a person is or claims to be, the mind eventually turns inward and begins to feed on itself, swallowing everything whole and handing back nothing but old memories and old mistakes a person had spent years trying to forget.
Khalil's surface offered no mercy to anything that touched it. A starless world circling a blue gas giant, it lay perpetually shrouded in ice, its horizon lost beneath winds violent enough that most known ships couldn't approach it without risking structural failure long before landing. But the cold and the wind, brutal as they were, were not what made Khalil infamous. What made it infamous was something else entirely — something far more dangerous than either: the absolute darkness that blanketed the planet, and the anomaly that lived inside it.
When the first Terrian expedition reached Khalil's surface, the crew — safely sealed inside their ship — began reporting strange sounds almost immediately: a low, distant cry rising up from somewhere below, impossible to place and, according to every scan they ran, impossible to explain. Every indication available to them said there was no life on Khalil whatsoever. Baffled, the crew sent a shuttle down for a closer look, and what it found broke every rule the expedition thought it understood about the universe. There was, somehow, life on that surface — and not merely life, but creatures shaped unmistakably like wolves, prowling through the dark. They had no true bodies to speak of. What passed for flesh on them was closer to a living, coiling gas, dark as the void around it, glowing faintly here and there with a dim, pulsing red.
Fascinated despite every warning instinct, the crew brought the shuttle in for a closer look — and that single decision became the costliest mistake of the entire expedition. The moment they made contact, the creature surged forward and engulfed the shuttle whole, dissolving it from the inside out before anyone aboard the mother ship could react. It didn't stop there. It turned next toward the expedition ship itself, and only sheer luck saved the crew — the ship had already begun to come about, engines flaring to full power, and the wash of heat pouring off them was enough to disintegrate the creatures closing in around the hull, buying just enough time for the ship to break away and escape.
From that day forward, Khalil was formally classified as inhospitable, and it was eventually decided that its very hostility made it ideal for a different purpose entirely: a prison fortress that no one would ever be foolish enough to try walking away from. The planet remains home to the same creatures that nearly destroyed that first expedition, and the Empire eventually gave them a name to match — drawn from their gaseous nature and their wolfish shape, they were officially designated Khaloses, though most who spent any length of time at the fortress simply called them what they truly were: the Necro Wolves.