Soul Distorted is a descent into a darkness to a place where fear grabs your scarred mind and destroys it.

1.
You wake in a brightly lit room, everything is white and clean. Clean is the smell in your nose. You are strapped into a chair designed to hold you in place. Someone has started asking questions about things you do not understand and cannot answer. When you do finally answer, you are speaking out loud but your voice sounds distant. The room starts to slowly spin, as it does, and the world goes dark again.

2.
36 hours earlier…
You are on a boat. Your boat. The sea laps at the hull in a familiar way and the breeze feels good against your skin, but you wonder why you ever took this job as it’s a deeper dive than you’ve ever gone on before and that makes you nervous. Freya looks at you, ready to go, and you snap out of your haze and gather your belongings. She always seems more prepared than you. You both climb into the mini sub at the stern and it lowers into the water until there is no more sky in the main viewer; only dark water stretching out for miles around you. Freya begins the descent procedure, announces this over the radio, and you begin dropping into the black below, eventually passing mountain ranges not normally seen by human eyes.

3.
Several hours later, you reach the lowest depths of the ocean. There is a massive object in front of you, a gigantic ship that should be in orbit, but instead, fell to this planet and into the sea for unknown reasons. You’re here to retrieve any information on what happened. Freya docks the sub with the nearest airlock and you climb through the tight squeeze after her, hearing the hatch click shut behind you.

After standing upright and staring into the gloom, the dead silence is alarming at first but you soon become aware of a distant, grinding hum and the ship's computer talking very strangely and repeatedly. Freya tells you to ignore it. You catch a glimpse of movement at the end of a long corridor, but then nothing. Turning away, you step straight into a bulkhead that rattles your nerves and cuts your head open around your right eye. Sensing a need for light, you switch on your torch. Walking on, you can hear scuffling noises and the computer talking to someone else. Surely no one else is here and could have survived the crash. Your thoughts turn to dead bodies but none have been seen.

After a few minutes of wandering you decide to split up to cover more ground. Freya takes a right turn and you continue on. After what feels like hours of walking in a straight line, you begin to notice strange symbols painted on the walls, painted so deep the brush strokes are cut into the walls. Whilst you wonder what fluids were used to create such designs, Freya appears behind you, running from something, looking frantic. She appears changed somehow, as if she has run for days, haggard and breathless and looks beaten up; a laceration around her right eye bleeds heavily. Staring into her face you catch a glimpse of something, something in her eye, or around it. She blinks heavily. You ask what happened and she says someone survived, someone is here and they’re insane. She turns away and leans against the wall to take a breath, then spins around and screams. It's a louder scream than you’ve ever heard before. The sound bounces down the metal corridors and back again. You open your mouth to scream but no sound comes out. You drop to your knees and try to cover your ears as you stare at Freya, who is still screaming at the top of her lungs, eyes wide and frantic. You notice her jaw is slowly lowering beyond the point at which it would normally stop. Her eyes roll to the top of her head and skin starts to stretch tighter either side of her face. The skin then begins to tear at the edges producing a flat, wet sound that you never wanted to hear. The ripping continues as the jaw drops until it reaches her neck and stops. Your own mouth closes quickly, in shock at what you have just seen. Your mind begins to drift as the ground begins to swim in front of you. You start shaking your head and stand, ready to flee. She remains still and steady, unaffected by your movement; you cannot take your eyes off her grotesque, distorted face.

As you stare, the wound around the right eye begins to rise and fall, and bulge like the ground when insects are close to the surface. The wound pushes outward, forcing the skin around it to stretch thin and for more blood to pour out. Just when it looks like the skin will rip away entirely, it slips back into place as small, claw-like hands, blood-red in colour, seep out of the wound, flexing slowly. Seemingly aware of each other, the hands above and below the eye meet in the middle for a moment, claws grinding together, ready to begin their task. As you watch this horror unfold, your focus is utterly gone. Your fear is beyond anything you could have imagined previously, you don’t even notice that the vision in your right eye has just been blocked out by something very close.

As Freya’s tiny, clawed hands separate, your own vision clears, but only for a second as the hands on both of your heads flex open and turn inwards, reaching for the eye in the socket. You can see this happening to Freya and also see the blurred, dark shapes painfully turning in your own open wound. The claws slide easily into the jellied chamber around the pupil and pull. After a brief moment of nothing but agony and dark dread, the eye bulges outward and gives, sliding out the socket and slipping free of its lids. The nerve that follows gives with ease, allowing the eye to drop from the claws to the floor. Their work done, the hands, bonded by their gruesome task, clasp together over the open socket and rest. While Freya watches on, tongue lolling lazily, you silently scream as your own eye drops to the floor. Your deathly quiet scream rolls on even though you have no air left in your lungs, veins in the side of your neck and face bulging. You fear you won’t be able to stop this and can feel the vision in your remaining eye fading fast as you begin to pass out. Your body falls forward and your face hits the metal floor.

4.
You wake hours later. The ground feels spongy and soft and you see trails if you move your head too quickly. It seems to take an age to move again, let alone stand up. You are covered in countless wounds but Freya’s once contorted face is normal again. Supported by Freya, you both quickly half limp, half run back to your submarine, deciding that this ship needs to be left here at the bottom of the ocean forever, answers be damned.

5.
The journey back up is troubling as you keep drifting in and out of consciousness. You are aware of something in the corner of your remaining eye but everytime you look, it's gone. Looking over to Freya, again, you again see something twitch in her eye and she turns away and blinks, but there’s nothing to see when she turns back to you.

By the time you get back to the boat, it's dark. You feel like things aren’t the same as before. You cannot work out what went on aboard that ship deep down underwater. You glance over at Freya and her face morphs back to the flesh‐ripped, disfigured face from before. You feel those fingers start to push their way out of your healing face wound and you begin to scream and feel your mind crack.

6.
Freya sails you to the massive Collasia Prime port to tell all of what you’ve witnessed. You struggle with flashbacks to that ship, screaming every time she approaches. Something lingers right behind her, just out of view, moving just after she does. You wake, after dreams spent in the depths of that ship, in a large, well lit room thousands of floors above the sea. Others are there too, but all eyes are on you. You turn one last time to look at Freya standing with the person who sent you down to that place. They both stare at you, unmoving, unnatural. Slowly, both of their jaws start to drop in unison as screams pour from the depths of their bodies. Others in the room don't move, don't react. Shaking with fear, you stand as arms grab you from behind and you are dragged off, kicking and screaming, away from the luxuries of the penthouse.

7.
You wake in a white room. Straps, lit by a bare bulb, hold you in place and someone is asking questions. You try to answer and tell them to ask Freya. ‘Who’s Freya?’ is the response you get.

8.
Your mind turns on this. You normally work alone and that sub is only really big enough for one person. You turn your head away from the glare of the light above and stare down a corridor, a corridor like the one on that ship. In the distance you hear a strange computer’s voice calmly asking for help. You can feel the cold, metal floor under your skin. You see yourself sitting on the floor, staring at those symbols and slowly your right hand reaches up to your face and into your own eye socket while you scream. Did you ever leave, is all this real? Your mind wanders away, adrift in an ocean of doubt and deceit, as your thoughts turn on themselves. Your empty socket is dark and cold as the room they leave you in every night. Strapped down for your own safety.