I own these characters and the ideas. DO NOT USE THEM WITHOUT MY PERMISSION!

Zephyr here! I came up with this a few months ago, but I haven't uploaded it yet. It was heavily inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, who is my main inspiration as a writer. Let the deadly tale begin!

I had never seen smoke billow from the chimney of the old science building. Then again, I rarely noticed the chimney itself. I was normally so busy rushing from class to class that I just ignored the chimney and the science building in its entirety. But as I walked back to my dorm that night, I noticed the chimney and the ominous smoke rising into the black sky. It wasn't normal, thereby forcing me to investigate. I had always been curious and had a habit of ending up in places where I knew I shouldn't be.

As I approached the doors, I noticed my breath fog up the air as I exhaled. When had it grown so cold? Sure, it was the middle of October, but there was no reason for it to be this cold. I shrugged it off, figuring that it was just my imagination, and opened the door.

Ever since the new science building was built, no one went into the old one. There wasn't a rule against it or anything, but people always went out of their way to avoid it. As I stepped inside, I could see why.

It was hard to see because it was so dark, but there was something creepy about the building. Maybe it was because it was midnight and the only bit of light came from the full moon outside. Perhaps the fact that the lights wouldn't turn on had something to do with it. The cobwebs and dusty light fixtures on the walls didn't help matter, either. All I knew is it took a lot for me to walk forward instead of turning around and running.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my lighter. If I was going to make any progress at all, I would need some form of light. For a while, I wandered around the first floor and found nothing out of the ordinary. It seemed like a normal college science building. Textbooks were abandoned on the desks collecting dust and chalkboards displayed complicated chemical formulae. When I was finished exploring the first floor, I decided to move on to the second floor. Much to my annoyance, the only set of stairs leading to the second floor was broken, the steps smashed to bits.

Well, if I couldn't go up, I could always go down, right?

I made my way to the other side of the building and found the staircase leading to the basement. The wooden stairs creaked in protest as I stepped on them, but they didn't shatter and send me crashing to the ground.

The corridor was pitch black and smelt of mildew and rust. While the first floor at least had moonlight to help me navigate through the halls, I had nothing to guide me. Now I was really glad that I had brought my lighter with me.

I walked into one of the abandoned classrooms and found several sheets of paper strewn across one of the desks. Picking it up, I scanned its contents.

"-to previous treatments. Experiment 816K tested positive for reaction to chemicals. Advancement to level Alpha granted."

Level Alpha? What was that all about? What were the chemicals that they used? And for what purpose? Questions kept forming in my head as I read on.

"Experiment 619-M acted in protest to treatment and was confined in room 32-B for seven hours. Further protests will result in stronger punishment."

Whatever it was, I could tell that room 32-B was not a good place to be in. What had 319-M done to warrant being locked inside a room for seven hours?

"Experiment 728-R tested negative for chemical reaction. Permission for erasure approved."

Back up a minute. Erasure? What was that supposed to mean? My mind was racing as I continued to read through the reports.

This wasn't just a science building. This was used for some kind of human experiment. But why? What were they hoping to accomplish by torturing humans? And who was conducting the experiments in the first place?

I took the rest of the reports and shoved them in my pocket and turned around to find the back of the wall covered with blood. Blood that looked like it had been splashed onto the white wall from a gunshot wound. Several gunshot wounds, judging from the amount of blood. Was it possible for a human to have that much blood in their body?

I froze, my eyes moving back and forth across the wall. What the hell happened here? Whose blood was on the wall? Was it the blood of one of the failed experiments?

Was this erasure?

I slowly walked out of the room and into the next. Fortunately, there was nothing suspicious, so I took a moment to read the rest of the reports that I found.

As my eyes moved across the page, a few things started to make sense. From what I could tell, the scientists running the lab were trying to create something. What that was, I didn't know. Every mention of whatever they were trying to create was scratched out. In order to create it, however, they were doing tests and conducting experiments on people.

And they were using students from the college.

My eyes froze at the end of the sentence. How was this possible? No one had ever told me about some sort of underground scientific facility. This made me wonder how long this had been going on. As I leafed through the reports, I found the earliest date to be 1973 and the most recent to be from this year.

They were still testing on the students.

As I realized this, something clicked in my brain. There were several students who had gone missing over several years. The college had conducted an investigation to find them, but they never really seemed to be making an effort. It was almost like they were investigating because the parents of the missing students forced them to do it. It seemed to me that they never really cared about the missing students.

If they had, maybe they would have found her.

That's when it hit me. Maybe she was here. There was a chance, right? Then again, I hadn't seen any bodies, but I had to at least check.

I left the room and made my way down to the next classroom. As soon as I opened the door, a noxious smell hit me in the face, causing me to start coughing. Once I could breathe again, I found out what smelt so bad.

Bodies. Dead and rotting bodies.

There was the answer to my question of whether I would find corpses or not.

As much as I wanted to look away, I couldn't take my eyes off of the decaying flesh, the exposed bone and muscle, the remains of those who had once been alive.

Was she one of them? Would I find her here?

As I looked around the room, I saw pools of dried blood on the floor and blood spatters covering the walls. I remembered enough from my forensics class to know that the blood was from decapitation, judging from the angle of the spatter and its placement on the wall. I forced myself to look at the bodies again. All of them had heads and the rest of their limbs were attached to the body. No one in this room had been decapitated.

I didn't see anyone that looked like her, so I moved on to the next room, though the images of the corpses stayed on my mind.

The next room was filled with dozens of filing cabinets and bookshelves. This was obviously the records room. Maybe I could find out if she was here.

I started throwing open filing cabinets at random, searching for anything that looked like it held records of who was here. I went through what felt like thousands of names and was about to give up when I found her name. The date of entry corresponded to the date where she was reported missing. Like many of the names, there was a black mark next to her's. What did that mean?

I had to find out.

Looking through the rest of the books, I found lots of journals and medical documents about DNA and RNA, past experiments on DNA manipulation, chromosome alterations and, for one reason or another, at least a dozen books on mythical creatures. Books on chimeras, griffons, basilisks, uroboros and kelpies lined the bookshelves and all of them looked like they had been read hundreds of times.

Was this an experiment to turn humans into mythical creatures? Was she going to be turned into a cu sith or something worse? Or was she one of the ones who had been erased?

Once I finished going through the books, I went back into the corridor. Perhaps it was because of the newfound information, but the halls seemed colder than it ever had. At the same time, my heart was racing. I had stumbled upon a secret that had sent thousands of people to their graces. What really scared me was that I had no idea if she was among them.

Walking into one of the labs, I found corpses lain out on operating tables, their arms and legs bent into contorted positions. The agony of their dying breath was etched onto their faces, frozen for the rest of time. The bones of the skeletons looked so brittle that they probably would have shattered if I touched them. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that a few of the bodies had needles in their head or a knife in their chest.

Just what had they suffered through before they died?

As I looked around, I noticed that there was a pile of rusty surgical instruments near the sink. Blood was caked onto the scalpels and there must have been a thousand rust-covered needles sitting in a pile on the floor. On the other side of the room, there was a cabinet of medicines and various other chemicals. When I looked closer, I realized that many of them were anesthetics while others were tranquilizers. What I found strange was that the tranquilizers weren't for humans. There were tranquilizers strong enough to knock out two or three elephants. I guess the scientists really wanted to make sure that their "patients" were unconscious before they experimented on them.

When I stepped back out to the corridor, I realized that there was a definite change in temperature. The corridor was warm, as though someone had just lit a fire. When had that happened? I shrugged it off and figured that it was just my imagination playing tricks on me before I walked into the next room.

I don't know what I was expecting, but I was still shocked by what I found in the next room. Dozens of rusty chains lined the wall and fell to the floor. Walking closer, I discovered that there was dried blood on the shackles at the end of the chains. There was a table on one end of the room with rusty switchblades and thumbscrews among daggers and knives. Near the table was a breaking wheel with the wood splitting in cracks.

Was this 32-B? Was this where 319-M was locked up for hours on end?

There was an electric chair sitting at the other end of the room. I flipped the power switch but, as I expected, there was no power running through the torture device. I turned around and placed the palm of my hand on the bed of nails. I felt a sharp pain in my hand and gasped, pulling my hand back to find blood running down my palm. I had been trying to avoid looking at the Iron Maiden in the middle of the room, but I soon found myself gravitating towards it.

What was it doing in his room? Iron Maidens haven't been used for centuries. Wondering this, I reached for the door and pulled it open.

The hinges groaned in protest as I opened the torture device. There was dried blood on the tips of the spikes and puddles of dried blood on the bottom. How many people had died in here? How long were they kept locked inside?

There was nothing that was going to lead me to her, so I decided to move on to the final room in the corridor. I pressed my hand to the door and was surprised to find that the door handle was hot. The rest of the door was hot, too, but the handle was so hot that the metal was almost white. What exactly was in this room?

I slowly turned the handle and opened the door.

As soon as I stepped inside, I saw the incinerator and the angry orange flames dancing inside from the window on the door. Once I got past that, I noticed the pile of bodies on the floor. This must have been where the scientists disposed of the experiments who failed to be useful to them. This is where they destroyed the evidence of the crimes that they committed.

One thing seemed strange to me. While the corpses in the other rooms where in various stages of decay, the bodies in this room were fresh, barely dead. I looked around the room and found scratch marks running up and down the walls, mixing with the occasional bullet hole. Blood had splashed onto the walls, on the back of the door and all over the incinerator.

Eventually, my eyes made their way to the pile of bodies strewn across the room. Was she here? This was my last chance to find her.

For a while, I didn't find anyone that resembled her. Was she really here? I half-wanted to find her only to know where she was. I didn't want her to be dead, but at least I'd have some answers.

That's when I saw it. The ring in a puddle of blood.

I bent down and picked it up, my eyes on the stone in the center of the heart. I was positive that it was her ring because the stone in the center matched the colour of her eyes. She had told me that she had always wanted a claddagh ring with a green stone in the middle.

If her ring was here, there was a chance that she was too.

And she was.

I found her a few feet away from her ring. Her eyes were closed so that she looked like she could have been asleep. Thankfully, she didn't look that different, meaning that she hadn't been experiment on too much. I could still see the mark on her shoulder that she got when she fell from her bike as a kid. The scar on her chest was still there and I could see her birthmark in the shape of a crescent moon on her hip.

However, it was obvious that she had been experimented on. Burn marks covered her body, especially on her legs and around her stomach. Her chest was marked with scars from stitches and

Unlike the rest of the bodies, she didn't look like she was in pain when she died. She looked at peace with her death. Even though it hurt to see that she was dead, I felt better knowing that she had died peacefully.

It was a very strange moment for me. I had spent so many months wondering where she was, if she was alive. I knew that there was a chance that she might have died, but I never wanted to accept it. Now that I actually found her, I was forced to accept the fact that she was never coming home.

I slid her ring back on her ring finger and leaned over and pressed my lips to hers for the last time. I stayed with her for a few minutes as I came to accept her death, accepting the fact that she would no longer be with me.

After a few minutes passed, I stood up and turned around, only to find the barrel of a pistol pointed between my eyes.

I'm not sure how decent this is, but I'm pretty pleased with the end result. Review, please? Thanks for reading!