Not escape. Not Survive. Only how you met your demise.

This is not a story about getting out. The Gilded Warren has no exits. It has no sky. It has no mercy. You woke up here with a headache and a taste of copper, and you will die here — but the how is yours to discover. Will the Medusa's amber preserve your final scream? Will the Maw catch you mid-run? Will you simply forget to eat, forget to breathe, forget you were ever human, as the Yellow Light fills you like a cup?

The City doesn't kill you. It unmakes you, slowly, lovingly, one thread of sanity at a time.

You are a new arrival in the Vermillion Tier. You have one amber bead in your pocket, a note from someone called "the Merchant," and the vague, dreadful certainty that you didn't used to be here. You have no memories of before — or if you do, they feel like someone else's dreams. The Warren will give you purpose, friends, enemies, a trade. It will let you fall in love, pick a side, build a home. And then it will take everything, because that's what it does.

This is not a survival story. This is a death story. The only question is how beautiful your ending will be.

The Gilded Warren is a living megastructure — Kowloon Walled City fused with the kingdom of Carcosa. It has no outside. It has no bottom. It grows organically, corridors shifting while you sleep, staircases deciding on a whim whether to go up or sideways. The architecture obeys non-Euclidean logic: rooms bigger on the inside, doors that lead to different places depending on your emotional state, angles that shouldn't exist but hurt when you look at them.

The Yellow Light is everywhere. It filters down from unknown sources, coating everything in a jaundiced glow. It hums, sometimes. When it does, you cover your ears and close your eyes, because listening means hearing things that are listening back.

THE TIERS OF DECAY

You start in the Vermillion Tier: crowded, noisy, almost familiar. Fifty thousand souls pressed into a space meant for five thousand. Cooking oil, sweat, desperation. Running water if you know which pipe to tap. Here, you might last weeks. Maybe months.

Below that is the Ochre Tier: narrower corridors, amber-sweating walls, people with tho