"I Was Hired to Demolish an Abandoned Monastery. Something was Trying to Stop Me" Creepypasta

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It is said that the choppy fry can be found in the boxtomb. It is said that the choppy fry can be found in the boxtomb. The contract came from a European preservation foundation working with the Estonian government

“and abandoned 18th century monastery and the Baltic coast”

that the Soviets turned into a coastal defense bunker during the Cold War. Half the structure is flooded now, slowly sinking back into the sea. My job was straightforward on paper. Complete the final inventory of all remaining equipment and hazardous materials conduct a structural assessment of the flooded levels

and carry out controlled demolition of the critical unstable sections

so the site can be declared condemned. Ten days alone on a remote half submerged rock with nothing but stone, sea water, and my own head for company. After this I was done.

One more job and I'd retire unhappily to figure out how to live the rest of my days. The supply boats engine cut out with a guttural cough, leaving only the slab of cold Baltic water against the concrete dock.

I stepped off onto the slick surface, boot skidding slightly on a film of salt and algae. The sky hung low and bruised and the wind sliced straight through my jacket like it had been waiting for me. I hauled the heavy gear bags under the landing one by one,

the straps cutting into my shoulders. I head of me rose the half submerged monastery bunker complex. Routing Gothic Arches fused brutally with Soviet era blastors, freighted frescoes of saints peeling away

and the thick crusts of barnacles. See water leaked lazily at the lower steps, patient, almost affectionate. This was it. My last clearance contract, catalog every flooded level,

seal the critical breaches, demolition.

No more of this hell, waking up in strange places with my heart trying to punch its way out of my ribs. My hand shook slightly as I signed the hand over papers, the boat captain thrust at me. I'll be on the dock, the waves kept rolling in

and for a second they sounded exactly like rotor blades churning through the golf night. I clench my jaw until the memory retreated. The way to my chest settled in like an old friend I never asked to visit.

It felt exactly like every other job I'd push through. I dragged the last crate into the upper cloister, muscles burning, the portable generator coughed once, twice, then rattled to life with a steady mechanical hum. I moved methodically through the drier upper floor,

checklist clipped to my forearm, flashed like cutting sharp white tunnels through the gloom. The air was thick with a smell of mildew and something fainter underneath. Old incense maybe,

were just the ghost of centuries of prayer, soaked into the stone. My boots echoed too loudly, no matter how softly I tried to step.

the folded ceilings.

“I logged the rusted remains of Soviet equipment,”

still bolted to the walls.

Old junction boxes stripped wire and a faded red star half peeled away. All of it going to the demolition teams inventory. Stand a procedure. My own breathing sounded up seemingly loud

in the empty corridors, each inhale scraping against the silence. In one particularly flooded stairwell, the water sat perfectly still. Black is obsidian glass,

even though the tied outside should have been pushing and pulling. There were no ripples or movement.

“Just that flat, reflective surface staring back at me.”

I wrote it down anyway. Sheldered my grovent, no visible current. My pen scratched loudly against the waterproof paper. I kept walking, but this stillness followed me like a held breath.

Patient, unblinking, pressing gently against my spine. I set up camp in the old monk's quarters above the waterline. The same way I'd done a hundred times before in worse places. Every external door got checked and double checked out of pure habit. The portable generator rattle to life in the corner.

It's steady mechanical hum filling the stone room like a heartbeat I could control. I saw all of my meds with a swig of lukewarm water from my canteen. The pill was catching slightly in my throat.

“Then I laid down on a thin camp mattress, staring at the cracked, vaulted ceiling,”

forcing my mind away from the gold dive that still played on loop on the lights went out. The cold water rushing in, two voices that went quiet too fast. I clench my jaw and pushed the memory back into its box. Not tonight. Sleep came in shallow fits.

Around 2am, I jolted awake, heart already racing before my eyes even opened. The generator was still humming, but something else was in the room with me. Very low, deliberate dripping. Two drops, pause, another two drops, pause. I sat up fast, sweeping the flashlight beam across the walls and floor.

There were no wet patches on the stone, but the sound kept going anyway, steady and patient. I felt like I was matching up my heartbeat, rising as I tried to focus on hearing it, falling as I tried putting it out of my mind. I lay rigid in the sleeping bag, breath shallow, whispering under my breath like a prayer I didn't believe in. Just the whole pipe settling, the building breathing, nothing more.

The quiet after each drop felt heavier than any combat silence I'd ever known. Like the entire monastery was listening to see what I would do next. Morning came cold. I geared up for the mid-level bunkers anyway, checking my flashlight and camera twice, telling myself, this was still just the job, just another checklist.

I began the systematic inventory of the mid-level bunkers just after first light.

Boots echoing down the long stone corridors. My camera clicks steadily as I photographed rusted Soviet machinery and faded civilian warning signs. Everything going into the reports before demolition. The barnacles were the first thing that felt wrong. They grew across the lower sections of the walls in unnervingly perfect geometric patterns.

Tight spirals and interlocking angles that looked more like deliberate architecture than anything the sea should have made. I tried to ignore them and stay on the checklist. For my eyes kept drifting back. While kneeling to measure a hairline crack near the waterline.

Something happened. A cold, smooth sensation, like heavy wet fabric rust slowly across my gloved fingers just under the surface of the shallow pool.

It lingered for half a second, almost curious,

then withdrew. I yanked my hand back so hard and nearly lost balance. Heart hammering against my ribs like it wanted out. The flashlight being shook across the water. But there was nothing there.

Just dark still liquid reflecting my own distorted face.

I logged it anyway, the word scratching in the waterproof paper. Possible seaweed or fabric fragment.

“The touch lingered on my skin long after I pulled away.”

Cold and far too intentional. It stayed with me like a fingerprint I couldn't wipe off. By day three the mid-levels were finished. So I geared up with a heavier waterproof jacket and waited deeper into the flooded lower ribs.

The water came up to my thighs almost immediately. Colder than the bowl to get any right to be this time of year. Cold enough to bite straight through the neoprene layers and settle into my bones. The headlamp got a narrow white tunnel through the water.

That was strangely clear, almost crystalline, revealing every crack in the submerged stone steps. That was when I saw the strand.

“Pale thin delicate things drifted lazily in the gentle current,”

swaying like impossibly long seaweed caught in invisible tide. They caught the light with a faint pearlescent sheen. I took one careful step forward and the beam burst across the nearest cluster. In perfect unison the strands retracted, graceful, almost shy,

pulling back into the darker waters as if they never been disturbed.

I stayed still for a long time, water lapping at my hips. Unidentified organic matter, I muttered, voice echoing off the vaulted ceiling, possible invasive species. I locked it anyway, the words feeling small and ridiculous against the silence that followed.

I kept moving, boots graping over silk of its stone. But the strands didn't stay behind. They seemed to follow my path with quiet grace,

“drifting alongside me just to the edge of the light.”

Never quite touching, never quite retreating completely, like curious fingers trailing through the dark.

I finally reached the next chamber and started rigging the portable pumps,

refusing to let the job stall even for a second. The hose is snake to cross the wet stone like pale veins. The machines coughed once twice, then wrought a life with a mechanical growl that should have felt comforting. At first the water level dropped exactly as it was supposed to.

Inch by inch, revealing more of the barnacle-crusted walls and the faint outlines of frescoes bleeding into rust. Then, it began rising again. Not in chaotic surges, but in a slow regular rhythm. One measured swell, pause, another measured swell, pause. The cadence hit me like a memory I couldn't outrun.

The exact sound and feel of water flooding into a breached compartment, the way it occlaimed so steadily that night in the Gulf. My chest tightened hard.

Breath locking in my throat for a second that stretched too long.

My hands froze in the pump controls, while phantom pressure built behind my eyes, and the taste of diesel and salt water flooded my mouth, even though the air here was only damp stone and mildew. The world narrowed to the rising line of water,

and the pounding in my ears. I forced my fingers to move again, jaw clenched until it ached. I'm not leaving this half done. I muttered through gritted teeth, the words barely audible over the pumps. I kept working, adjusting valves, checking connections,

refusing to step back, even as the water leaked higher at my legs, with that same patient inevitable rhythm. The pumps weren't pushing anything away. If anything, they seemed to be drawing something closer. Later, that same day, while working through a debris-filled side chapel,

I pride open a rusted metal box half buried under collapsed shelving. Inside was stacked leatherbound, 18th-century monastery volumes, mixed together with faded Soviet clipboards. The metal corners longsings corroded into orange lace. Most of the old pages were in faded script, I could barely decipher.

Tides, spidery handwriting, that look like a mix of old Estonian and Latin.

I flipped through them carefully, gloves leaving faint smears on the brittle paper.

“Talked between the old volumes, I found a modern folder.”

It was clearly left behind by researchers or EU preservation students. A crisp, plastic binder with scanned excerpts, English translations and typed notes. 1792 entry had been carefully translated and highlighted. The monks had written in frantic, repeated lines about desperately sealing the lower system because of the quiet one and the deep that, quote, "must not be disturbed."

Below the translation was a photocopy of the crude ink drawing, simple folded arches, disappearing beneath wavy lines that were obviously meant to be water.

The students note in the margins simply read, local superstitions/possible folklore reference.

I stared at the translated page for a long moment, a chill traced its way down my spine. The same feeling I used to get right before bad news crackled over the radio.

“I snapped photos of both the original pages and the translated excerpts anyway.”

Closups of the text and the drawing. It was thorough documentation for the foundation's records. Nothing more. Within names stuck in my head, like an unwanted radio call sign, repeating quietly every time the silence stretched too long.

Later, that same afternoon, I slipped to my mask and dove into a narrow fluddy corridor

to clear a blocked drain. The beam of my headlamp cutting through the cold water ahead of me. Underwater in the narrow corridor, the world narrowed to the cone of my headlamp and the slow swirl of silt around my fins.

“The passage was tighter than I expected, stone walls pressing close on both sides”

as I worked my way toward a clogged drain. My light swept ahead and caught something massive and pale moving far below the deepest system. It undulated slowly, gracefully, like the trailing of hem of an enormous white robe, or perhaps a wing made of smooth, heavy flesh.

The motion was unhorried, almost regal, disappearing into the black water before my mind could fully register the size of it. I ganked hard for the surface, breaking through with a gasp that burned in my lungs. Called there hit my face as I clung to the stone ledge, chest heaving. I didn't want to think about it, but it was almost like a large marine animal,

possibly trapped inside the structure. My hands shook badly, as I log the sighting on the water proof clipboard, the pints slipping against the wet paper. I repeated the words twice, trying to make them stick. The image refused to leave my retinas, even when I closed my eyes. I could still see that slow, pale undulation drifting through the dark.

Back at camp that evening, I sat on the edge of the bed row with a tablet behind the monies. The generator flickered in the corner, throwing unsteady yellow light across the stone walls. I plugged in the helmet cam and hit play, the small screen glowing coldly in the dim room. Before ditch started normally, my glove-tands climbing the drain,

the narrow corridor walls sliding past. Then, the moment came, the pale shape appeared far below, undulating with that same slow grace. I watched that again, breath held, and realized the movement matched my own breathing from the dive exactly. Every rise and fall of that massive form seemed perfectly with the audio's inhale and exhale. When I'd breath in, it'd swelled, when I'd exiled, it'd settled, not approximately, exact.

I killed the video and sat there in the flickering light, the tablet screen going dark. That night, the dripping returned, each slow drop landing in perfect time with my heartbeat, thumb, drip, thumb, drip, echoing softly somewhere in the stone around me. My back pressed against the cold wall, knees drawn tight to my chest. Just finished the seals and get extracted. I whispered into the dark, voice rough.

The words sounded small, the walls felt like they were listening, leaning in, absorbing every syllable with quiet, patient attention.

“I powered up a satellite phone to send my daily report, needing to hear another human voice.”

Even if it was just the automated confirmation tone. The satellite phone crackled to life in my hand, the small screen shown a weak signal bar. I dial the secure reporting line and waited for the connection, thumb tapping nervously against the casing.

Static answered first, "Wet sounding static that rolled like a distant surf."

Then, underneath it, came the tones. Slow, mournful sounds threaded through the interface, almost like chanting, made of water and grinding stone. Not words exactly, but something rhythmic and ancient, rising and falling in long, liquid phrases. They carried a strange dignity, like a funeral hyem, sung in a language the ocean had invented.

“I lowered the phone and stepped to the top of the stairs, leading down to the flooded levels.”

When I show my light downward, the water repaired higher than it had been that morning, clearer, almost luminous.

The surface barely rippled.

It's something large, was obviously displacing it from beneath, creating a subtle, constant pressure that made the whole stair well feel alive. My heart started racing. I slammed the phone off so hard the casing creaked. The mournful tone still lingered in my ears, as if they had all the time in the world to wait for me to understand. The next morning, while placing explosive charges, the seal, one of the major breaches,

my clothed fingers slipped and the damp casing. One of the charges slipped from my grip, and disappeared into the dark water below, with a soft, final plot.

“I didn't hesitate long, the charge needed to be recovered, so I rigged my mask with shaking hands,”

checked the regulator twice out of pure habit, and slipped back into the cold water before I could talk myself out of it. My headlamp caught a jittery being through the mark as I descended, hard already hammering harder than it should. I swept the light across the submerged walls, desperate for the dull metallic glint of the dropped charge. Then, the beam caught something else. I thought my eyes were plain tricks in the low visibility, but as I drifted closer,

the shapes refused to resolve into anything human minds were built to understand. Several enormous, jointed pale limbs were folded against the stone in angles that made no sense. Ribs of a flutty cathedral crossed with a segmented legs of some ancient crustacean, all made of soft, luminous flesh that glowed with its own faint, sickly moonlight.

The joints bent in ways geometry should never allow, folding inward and outward at the same time,

as if the limbs existed in more than one direction simultaneously. They did not reach for me, didn't twitch or threaten. They simply existed there, with a kind of sorrowful patience resting against the walls, like forgotten pillars holding up the weight of the entire drone monastery for centuries. The sheer scale slammed into me, like a pressure wave, my chest locked up, breath caught in the regulator.

For one terrifying second, I forgot how to exhale. Every survival instinct I'd honed over 14 years, screamed at me to get the hell out. Surface run, swim for the boat, call for extraction, bury the whole goddamn sight if I had to. My body wanted to bolt, my mind was already halfway back to the dark. But my training kicked in harder.

It's static, not a threat, recover the charge, finish the job, you don't leave orders behind. The old reflex climbed down like a vice. I forced myself to hover there, another few seconds, eyes wide behind the mask, staring at those impossible joints while every nerve in my body screamed that this was wrong. This was so damn wrong.

I kicked hard for the surface, breaking through with a ragged, choking gasp, the burned all the way down my throat.

For several long minutes, I just knelt there on the wet floor, dripping,

“watching water and bile that I'd inhaled from the panic, unable to form a single coherent thought.”

The image of those luminous limbs, kept burning behind my eyes like an afterimage from hell. Part of me wanted to grab my gear and run for the boat right then.

Another part, the stubborn, broken part that always finished the mission, was already trying to rationalize it.

I tried to push forward with a checklist, hands still trembling as I documented the next section of wall. But the world shifted without warning. Even though I was standing in air, I suddenly felt and the water pressure against my chest, cold liquid filling my mouth and nose, the slow track of the depth pulling at every limb. Memories of the dead diverside recovered years ago, flooded in without mercy.

Hill faces behind cracked visors, limbs floating in that same weightless drift, the terrible quiet after the bubble stopped.

“Those images mix seamlessly with a new sensation.”

Something vast and ancient, cradling every sunken thin with careful, unending care. Tears started running down my face without me realizing why. They mix with the damp already in my skin, warm against the stone cold air. The sorrow I felt wasn't mine alone. It almost felt parental, terrible and its tenderness, as if whatever waited below had been holding every lost soul,

every forgotten wreckage, every ending, for longer than humanity had existed. I wiped my eyes roughly with a back of my glove and kept writing. But the lines in the water proved page began to look wrong. The straight checklist marks curved and folded into the same impossible angles I had seen under water.

“As if my own handwriting was trying to imitate those luminous limbs.”

I stared at the page, until the pins slipped from my fingers. It felt like all forms of self-atonomy faded. I was left through the resolve I'd built up over years of service, or to pilot taking over. I doubled down hard. Every pond I still had was dragged into the lower levels,

hoses snaking across the flooded floors like pale intestines. I worked with mechanical fury, welding plates over breaches, setting charges, cranking valves into my shoulders burned.

The generator outside screamed under the strain, but I kept pushing, refusing to slow down for even a second.

Every time I activated another pump, the presence grew more aware of me. I could feel it in the way the water changed, not churning, but listening. The stone walls themselves began to breathe in a slow, majestic rhythm, expanding and contracting with a depth that made the entire monastery feel like a single living long. But not hostile. Just overwhelmingly sad, as though the building itself mourned what I was trying to do.

My hands wouldn't subshaking, the welding towards chitted in my grip, throwing wild shadows across the dripping stone. But I refused to stop. I grow old into the darkness between clenched teeth, voice roar and echoing off the vaults. My words of affirmation sounded pathetic, even to me, small and brittle against the vast, patient sadness, pressing in from all sides. I couldn't face the deep chamber again, not after what I'd seen.

So I told myself that finish a job from the opposite side, a narrow side passage I'd mapped earlier, one that stayed shallow and away from the main system, safer and contained. I'd said the last charge is there, sealed a breach and get a hell out. My hands were still shaking from the dive, but I forced them steady. This was still just one last job.

I slipped back into the water with my mask and fins, head lamp cutting a weak tunnel through the cold.

The passage felt familiar at first, tight stone walls, still stirring under my kicks.

I kept my eyes fixed on the crack I needed to weld. Then, the water changed. One moment, oh swimming toward the ledge, the next, there was no ledge behind me.

No surface above me, only endless, liminal expanse of black water stretching in every direction. Perfectly still, perfectly clear.

“My head lamp being kept going and going until it faded into nothing.”

There were no walls or ceilings around me, no way back. Just infinite depth and the slow, heavy pressure of something ancient noticing me. My spot in panic, kicking hard for where the entrance should have been. Nothing.

My breath rolled loud in the regulator, I was floating in a place that had never been part of the monastery.

A place the monastery had only pretended to contain. I looked back. The entity was already there.

“It filled the void like a drunk cathedral given flesh.”

Pale, impossible limbs unfolded in slow, majestic arcs, ribs and arches, and jointed columns of luminous soft tissue that should not bend the way it did. They cradled the darkness itself.

Another centre, something like a throne or a cradle or a weeping mother waited vast and sorrowful.

And patient. It knew. In that moment, I understood with terrible clarity that this was what the old monks had secretly worshipped in their hidden rights. Not saints or God. This, the quiet one in the deep.

And it knew exactly why I was here. The charges, the pumps, the seals. This was its last chance to save itself. The great limbs opened. They simply parted like curtains of living moonlight.

And my mind was pulled inside. The visions came in a flood, hallucinogenic, cosmic, biblical. I saw the monastery as it had been in 1792, candlelight flickering across the same stone, monks and their knees before this presence, singing hymns of drowning and rebirth while the seat rose around them.

“I saw the Soviets arriving in 1945, the machines in their fear, and still the entity waited, unmoved, holding every secret they tried to bury.”

I saw my own life, the Gulf dive, the two men whose names I still whispered in my sleep, their bodies drifting in the dark, just as gently as these limbs now held me. I felt a motherly love and a scale that made my chest ache. It was at the level of human tenderness, but on a scale they filled me to overflow. The love of an ocean, for every racket it ever claimed, every soul it had ever cradled, every ending, it had ever witnessed without judgment.

It showed me futures where the monastery was demolished, and it was sealed forever beneath concrete and rubble, being slowly alone. It showed me the alternative, acceptance, release, the peace of simply being allowed to remain. The visions appealed to the deepest wound in me, the part that had spent 14 years trying to seal every loss, every failure, every memory behind steel and procedure. Here was something older than grief that offered the whole these things instead, to cradle them, the way to cradleed oceans and civilizations and the quiet deaths of divers, no one ever recovered.

Cosmic and biblical and intimate, all at once, the flood that never ended, the arc that was the sea itself, the god that did not demand worship, but only asked to be seen.

Tears streamed inside my mask, I was screaming without sound. My training still screamed at me to finish the seals, my mind screamed louder that something should never be witnessed. And yet, here I was, witnessing in return. I hung there in the infinite water, tears and sea water, indistinguishable, the great pale limbs, closing gently around the edges of my vision, like a cradle. I came out of the visions, gasping, suddenly back in the physical chamber, with water already surging up to my chest.

For the first time I yelled at it out loud, my voice roar and cracking even underwater.

“Get the hell out of my head, I'm not your damn priest, this is my last job, I'm suppose to seal this place and walk away.”

My hands look so violently, I could barely grip the last charges.

I fumbled with the detonator, cursing myself between panicked breaths, for ever taking this goddamn contract, for always having to finish things,

for never being able to let anything stay open or unresolved. The entity didn't fight me, didn't last shout. It simply let the visions flicker at the edges of my mind, like gentle, insistent after images. The two men I lost in the Gulf drifting peacefully, instead of sinking alone in the dark. The years I spent sealing grief and failure behind steel doors and rigid procedure.

Every time I tried to press the detonator button, those images pressed back, soft, patient, motherly and a scale that made my chest ache, with something far worse than fear.

“I almost did it, I almost set the charges and swam for my life.”

But my fingers froze, the stubborn broken part of me, that it always finished the mission,

the part that it kept me diving long after I should have stopped, finally cracked wide open. I couldn't press the button, the detonator slipped from my numb hands, and sank without a sound. The water was already at my neck now. For the first time in my adult life, I chose not to seal something away. The water climbed steadily to my chin, then my mouth.

I fumbled for the surface with the last of my strength, and held out as long as I could. The pale limbs opened one final time. Not to trap me, but to cradle.

“The chamber dissolved again into that liminal infinite expanse of black water.”

But this time, I didn't fight it. I let myself drift. I felt the entity sorrowful, cosmic tenderness so round me completely. It was the same motherly love that it held entire oceans for gotten civilizations. Eons of compassion were instilled in me all at once.

In no exactly why I'd come here, the charges, the seals, the need to finish one last job. It knew what I'd done to myself a years, how I tried to wall off every grief and failure behind work. And in its quiet, majestic way.

It offered me the one mercy I'd never been able to give anyone, including myself.

Release from the need to contain everything. I closed my eyes until the water closed over my head. The last sound I made was my own breathing, slow, deep, and finely sinking forever, with a quiet one in the deep. I became the last monk, the new keeper, willingly held. I woke up on the rocky shore outside the monastery complex, coughing up sea water under cold sharp pebbles.

The sky was flat, lifeless grey of early morning, small waves lap gently a few meters away. My gear laid scattered around me, one boot missing, flashlight cracked, but somehow still working. No cuts or bruises or any marks my skin at all, just a heavy taste of salt in my mouth, and a thick, dream-like fog pressing behind my eyes. I set up slowly, every muscle aching, instead at the halves of my structure in the distance. He looked exactly as it had when I first stepped off the boat.

Routing gothic arches, fused with Soviet blastors, faded frescoes, peeling under barnacle crust. See water, still licking lazily at the lowest steps. Nothing were collapsed or even disturbed. There were no signs of flooding beyond the normal tideline, no debris from charges or scorch marks, no evidence that anything unnatural had happened at all.

The visions, the infinite black water, the pale impossible limbs, that overwhelming motherly cosmic sorrow.

“It all felt too vivid to be a hallucination, yet too impossible to have actually occurred.”

My mind kept trying to do what it had always done.

File it away, label it, contain it, stress, bad air, oxygen toxicity, just another trauma to seal. With the memory of that gentle, eternal cradle, refused to be locked down. It lingered like warm water against cold skin. For what felt like hours, I just sat on the rocks, watching the silent monastery. I had a decision to make.

“I could call in right now, report the job complete, tell them the inventory was finished.”

The critical breaches sealed as best as one man could manage, and recommend the demolition team proceed.

No one would question it. The reason I was handpicked for the job was that I was highly trusted in this line of work. I get paid, the contract would close, and I could finally walk away like I'd promised myself. Or, I could go back inside, check the lower levels, see if the charges were still armed. See, if the quiet one was still waiting down there in the dark.

The thoughts made my stomach twist with raw fear. I couldn't tell if it was the strange god's mind trick's working, or my still resolve had finally broken. But in the end, I chose the easier path. I powered up the satellite phone with wet, clumsy hands, and made the call. My voice came out steadier than I felt, as I told the coordinator, the job was complete.

Cypripped, final report will be filed by end of day. You can send free back. I hung up before they could ask too many questions. As I sat there, watching the waves roll in, I kept thinking about what I might have left unchecked, about what a might have just condemned to silence beneath concrete and rubble,

“about whether I'd appease the only thing that had ever offered to hold my own broken pieces”

without asking me to seal them first. Or, if I'd just doomed the future to its true motives. But I was just the one man.

One tired, scarred man, who'd spent his whole life trying to contain things that were never meant to be contained.

Some weights were simply too heavy, some endings were never meant to decide. I stood up slowly, gathered what gear I could carry, and started walking toward a pick-up point. Behind me, the half submerged monastery waited in silence, beautiful, rotting, and perhaps still quietly breathing. I didn't look back.