Syren

Submission for the 2016 Creature Cabal

There are things we were never meant to find.
The problem is that those things want to be found.
Many subterranean explorers have gone down to explore the deep networks underneath the Earth, and they will tell you that darkness is more than the absence of light. After a few hours, total darkness can drive even the strongest minds insane.
This was something else, though. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, an expedition went to map the routes in a new system found in the then-little-explored country of Guatemala. The crew was down there for days, and soon, it was apparent something was off. Two of them started complaining about a high-pitched noise that nobody else could hear. This started driving them to do more and more bizarre things- sleepwalking at first, but then ramblings, and then absent-mindedly walking towards significant pits. This came to a head on the fifth night underneath. As the team rested, there were reports of a violet light near the camp, but no real sign of what it was. In the morning, only three remained.
Subsequent searches into the cave network have found nothing pertaining to the missing members, leaving many speculations as to what happened to them.

Rendered in Ink, edited in Photoshop