The corridors ahead were very high, making their width feel smaller than it actually was.
The floor beneath Ashe's feet reflected the light above and the surrounding structure, creating faint and distorted images that moved with her.
She noticed that the walls were layered as well. They were composed of multiple levels of material, each embedded with elements she couldn't identify. Thin lines of light ran through those layers and for a place that appeared as abandoned as this one, the presence of light was difficult to ignore.
She slowed her pace slightly and let her eyes move across the walls as she passed them. The mechanisms embedded within them varied in size and form. Some were small and highly detailed, others were larger and mostly broken. Some even had materials she wasn't able to classify at all.
She tried to compare what she was seeing to something familiar, anything that might exist in her memory, but each attempt had the same result. A faint buzzing in her head, causing each useful thought to slip away before she could actually understand it.
She moved forward slowly through that space. The cold she had felt earlier had spread further, and her hands began to tremble slightly as she moved. Each step required more effort now, and even maintaining her balance felt like a difficult task to perform.
The damage to the place grew more visible the deeper she went. Entire sections of infrastructure had been forced through the walls, as if pressure from within had broken through the structure itself. Large pieces of machinery lay collapsed across the floor or suspended in the upper areas of the corridors.
Ashe tried to make sense of what she was seeing.
She did not have the knowledge to understand the mechanisms themselves, but she could observe the pattern of damage. It looked like something had happened suddenly, with enough force to disrupt multiple layers of the structure at once. This couldn't have been slow gradual decay.
Given the scale of the facility, whatever had caused that damage had to be significant.
The thought remained with her as she walked.
There were no signs of life anywhere. No movement. No evidence that anyone else had been there recently, or even at all.
After a while, she entered another section of the facility that stood out to her.
At the far end of the room, she noticed a series of objects arranged in a perfect lineup pattern. They resembled consoles of sorts.
She approached one of them carefully, scanning the area around for anything that might have been dangerous. When nothing happened, she stepped closer.
From that distance, the structure of the closest console was even more difficult to interpret. Its surface was smooth, despite the torn sections, yet there was no call to action, nothing about it made it obvious as to how it was meant to be used.
She extended her hand.
As she touched it, a thin layer appeared across the surface, spreading from the point where her fingers touched it. It resembled water at first, forming a fluid plane over the console. When she withdrew her hand slightly, faint ripples spread across it.
This was certainly not technology she understood.
Before she could process what had happened, a sharp discomfort settled in Ashe's chest, reminding her of Seven's warning earlier in the pod chamber. For a moment, it disrupted her breathing entirely so she instinctively brought a hand to her chest as if to improve the pain. When it diminished, she turned and left the area.
The trembling in her limbs had become harder to ignore by then, and her breathing was uneven again.
As she walked, her thoughts returned to the writings in the pod chamber. She remembered the words Seven had mentioned: Threnos and Harmonic Seeds. She whispered them several times, in an attempt to store them in memory even if she did not understand them. They were the only concrete things she had, even if they explained practically nothing at that moment.
And maybe they were also a way to prove who Seven was and whether she was losing her mind or not.
After a while of struggling to keep her thoughts steady, she noticed something ahead. A faint light was slightly moving somewhere in the distance in random ways. From her vantage point, she couldn't tell what it was, but in a place where everything else was static, its movement certainly drew her attention.
She approached carefully and stepped through the arch.
The chamber ahead was smaller than the others she had encountered, but at its center, suspended in the air, stood something she had no words for. Its form was fractured and crystalline, with sharp edges coming out from all sides and directions. A blue light pulsed from within, and thin strands of energy circled around it.
It resembled a mass of blue and black energy, yet its shape was mostly rigid, constantly reforming its crystal edges.
It was silent, even though it moved constantly within its own space.
As strange and unsettling as it was, there was an unusual beauty to it that Ashe couldn't ignore. She felt drawn to it in a way she did not understand.
After a moment, she stepped closer.