REVENANT

The factory-cathedral had been swallowing workers for a century before anyone noticed the pipes had started breathing. Each piston-stroke matched a heartbeat. Each furnace-roar followed a rhythm that no engineer had programmed. When the last foreman locked the gates and walked away, the machinery kept running on its own, feeding raw ore into molds shaped like ribs, skulls, and spines. Inside the main hall, where the assembly line met the altar rail, the last vortex of iron dust and lubricant blood was still spinning from the previous quarter — but now it had begun to pull inward, compressing into something denser, something that could feel the walls around it. Workers who came back to loot the place never found the exit. Their boots are still by the door. Their shifts never ended. The factory learned to operate them the way it operated the presses: slowly, precisely, and without ever stopping. This quarter, the machinery reached full capacity. The cathedral pipes sounded one sustained chord, and every dead worker opened their eyes at once, ready for the next production run.