Chapter 3.3. Journey to the Abyss

The Iron Cathedral. Episode 1: Path to the Abyss.  

 When the journey is more important than the recording.

• Location: “Peak of Sorrow.” High-mountain pass [COORDINATES REDACTED]. Object 9.13-1-111.
• Era: 12th Century / Re-envisioned: 21st Century.

I write these lines with a sense of reverence and a tremor that I still cannot suppress when remembering this story. Looking back, I realize: our journey in search of sound, our venture to record the album “in the mountains, ” could have ended not with a release, but with an obituary. Or worse, with madness—the kind that comes when sound ceases to obey man. We stepped onto the border of a world where there is no place for the living.

I did not come here for adrenaline, but for that which is capable of changing our sound. Only later did I understand that sometimes the path to sound is a path through one’s own fear.

When starting the story of where we recorded the music for the KriegesPhantom album, I paused. Even the word “premises” applies to this place only with a great stretch of the imagination. Geography chose our studio for us.

And although the approaches to the destination were closed by the military department, no one had any idea what kind of “object” the mountain range was hiding. Meanwhile, the transit permit arranged by Jürgen and the escort with special transport opened all paths for us. His connections with the military and his ability to overcome any barriers and penetrate closed facilities had become so habitual to me that I stopped questioning how he managed it.

Judging by the documents he unearthed while searching for extreme adventures: somewhere high in the mountains lay an old bunker with unique acoustics. During the Cold War, it served as a kind of echo sounder for calculating missile launches from anywhere in the world. Later, it was used by the meteorological service to monitor seismic activity and forecast earthquakes and eruptions.

Acoustics were the only thing of paramount importance to us, so we set out without hesitation. The route there led not so much upward as backward in time—through empty villages, mists, and small graveyards of the Crusader era.

The place we chose was marked on the archival map as an abandoned weather station in a restricted zone. But the map contained an error. Hidden among the rusty iron of the 20th century was the frame of a medieval Citadel. Local legends say that in the 12th century, a garrison of an Order stood here, whose name was erased from the Vatican chronicles.

But let’s take it in order.

 Ascent into the Haunted Sky.

To the north of the tourist trails, the mountains change their face. Here, the relief loses its picturesque outlines and takes on a threatening image. The ridges rise to the sky in sharp, broken peaks resembling the teeth of a dragon baring its fangs.

The clouds here do not float—they lie. Leaden masses cling to the stone as if the sky is tired of holding its own weight and is trying to lean on the ground. In these gorges, where the sun penetrates only for a brief moment, eternal twilight reigns. The air here is thick, dry, and has a strange metallic taste—as if the atmosphere itself had passed through the forge of unknown eras.

The road that carried us upward resembled a scar stitched across the mountainside. An old military track, paved with stone in the days when artillery was hauled by oxen, wound along the cliffs. The rutted trail clung to the edge of the abyss, curving around the rock with a harsh, relentless logic, as though its course had been decided long before the first wheel ever touched it.

On narrow ledges, stunted fir trees clung to the stone by little more than a miracle. Their trunks had been twisted by the winds into shapes that resembled agony; their branches knotted into impossible forms, while sheets of bark peeled away from the wood. They looked less like trees than desperate creatures clinging to the cliffs to avoid being torn into the abyss below.

The villagers in the valley fell silent the moment we showed them the map with our destination. Crossing themselves, they would quickly turn away, casting anxious, almost sympathetic glances over their shoulders. There was no warning in their eyes—only resignation. They knew that at such an altitude, human presence was nothing more than a temporary mistake.

We climbed higher until the narrow corridor of the gorge opened onto a small plateau.

There, wedged between two grey mountain ridges, lay an abandoned village.

It emerged from the mist as though it had been waiting for us all along. Several dozen houses, built from the same rough basalt as the surrounding cliffs, were almost indistinguishable from the mountains themselves. The geometry of their walls seemed subtly wrong, as though the buildings were slowly sinking—or resisting the shape they had once been forced to take. Only the clean angles of the walls still betrayed the work of human hands.

This was not the kind of decay that comes with time. It was something else. It felt as though life had left this place all at once, in a single day, leaving everything suspended in a motionless stupor.

The roofs had long since collapsed inward, exposing rotting rafters. Empty window openings stared into the gorge like dark eye sockets. Many of the doors lay beside the houses, torn from their hinges. A thin layer of ash coated the stone walls—its oily, unnatural hue giving the impression that something had drained the rock of its very essence. At the centre of what had once been the village square stood an ancient well, surrounded by cracked flagstones.

I stopped the vehicle and shut off the engine to check the map.

Silence came instantly.

It did not descend.

It arrived.

It filled the space so quickly that it seemed to have been waiting for only one thing—for the engine to fall silent. Mountains are never truly quiet. Somewhere a tree creaks. Grass whispers. Birds call to one another across the slopes.

Here there was nothing.

Even the wind had vanished.

Every sound disappeared almost at once, as though the very air were drawing it out of the world.

We stepped out of the vehicle.

Slate cracked beneath our boots.

The brief sound seemed so utterly foreign that we all stopped instinctively, as though we had disturbed a place that had existed without mankind for far too long.

I walked slowly between the houses, surveying the surroundings. 

The air smelled of stone dust, old timber, and dampness that had no business existing at this altitude. The walls themselves seemed to be dissolving back into the surrounding mountain, returning to the rock from which they had once been cut. The stone had not merely darkened—it seemed bleached of its substance, its texture fading as though it had weathered away in an instant rather than over centuries. In the cracks of the walls lay a strange molten residue whose colour could not be named.

Inside one of the houses, on the floor among fragments of shattered slate roofing, lay an overturned wooden table. Beside it rested a child’s wooden toy—so simple that it was impossible to guess whether it had lain there for decades or for centuries. 

On one of the walls, barely visible beneath the dust, someone had once scrawled in a trembling hand: 

“A grim spirit, gray and pale, has reached this abyss in darkness…” 

Beyond that, only a jagged scratch remained, as though the hand had suddenly slipped downward. 

For some reason, that unfinished message struck me as the most unsettling thing in the entire village.

So much time had passed since the people left that even the mountains had nearly erased the memory of their existence.

Hans stood beside a low stone fence at the edge of the upland.

He said nothing.

He made none of his usual jokes.

He simply listened to whatever was rising from the gorge.

“Do you think they lived here?” Konrad asked quietly.

Hans slowly shook his head.

“No.”

His thoughts seemed to wander somewhere far beyond that once-inhabited refuge.

“They were only waiting here.”

No one asked what they had been waiting for.

Somehow, we already knew.

Beyond the village, the human world came to an end.

The road to the Abyss began there.

 The Forbidden Zone.  

We left the village behind. It felt like the last place where people had ever lived. The road continued climbing, growing narrower and more treacherous with every turn. A few kilometres later the gorge opened abruptly onto a broad rocky clearing enclosed by coils of barbed wire.

The road ended there.

Ahead of us lay a massive landslide.

Piles of broken rock and twisted metal covered the clearing, while weathered signs reading “Danger Zone — Keep Out” and “Achtung! Militärische Sperrzone — Betreten verboten” left no doubt that this place had once been considered extremely dangerous.

The rusty frame of the weather station we were heading toward blocked our path and, against this backdrop, seemed like a ridiculous relic of modernity. Sheets of corrugated iron, eaten by corrosion, shook and groaned, trying to cover what was not meant for eyes.

It was a pathetic shell. For beneath the rotten concrete of the 20th century emerged a different masonry—massive, made of huge blocks of dark granite. The bones of an ancient world—the remains of a Teutonic Order watchtower, placed here eight hundred years ago to guard the pass not from men, but from what might come from the glaciers.

Massive blocks concealed an iron spiral staircase descending from the tower, leading, most likely, to the very “Bunker” we had heard about. It vanished downward almost unnoticed, as if the shaft itself had been designed to hide the way into the depths. The steps had been forged from black iron with raised edges, while the railing twisted in a heavy spiral. At each joint, the metal opened into distinctive Gothic patterns, shaped by a craftsman’s hand and softened by time. The beam of a flashlight slid along the iron and disappeared into the impenetrable mass of dark water below, making even the thought of a descent seem absurd.

This rock complex was clearly part of something larger. A ventilation shaft ahead marked the direction of the view that opened up.

Jürgen hardly looked at the ruins. His gaze was directed toward the clouds. He stood at the edge of the plateau and listened to the wind, as if trying to understand exactly how this altitude sounded.

The Temple of “Holy Steel” (Sanctum Ferrum).

My attention was caught by an abandoned Gothic cathedral standing at the very edge of the cliff at the end of the road, considerably battered by time but still well-preserved. Its black walls, built from blocks of roughly hewn basalt, seemed unnaturally dark even against the overcast sky. They absorbed light like a black hole. It looked as if the stone had not just been quarried, but scorched in some gigantic fire that occurred long before the appearance of humanity.

The scars of time had not destroyed it, but only exposed its essence. The wind had stripped away everything superficial, leaving only a naked, functional skeleton of war and faith. Narrow arrow slits, devoid of glass, looked at the valley with the arrogance of the blind.

It was a Fortress-Temple, built by people who knew a terrible secret hidden from the rest of the world. It seemed the walls of this bastion were meant to withstand not only siege engines but a direct strike from Hell itself.

I always draw during a journey, recording in sketches everything that leaves an impression, so that I can later return and refresh the memory. This engineer’s habit of taking notes arose from the belief: if you can transfer an object to paper, it means you have thought it through. Moreover, photography was prohibited here; my camera and phones were confiscated before the trip.

While the Mercedes-Benz G-Class (Wolf) army SUVs, equipped for cargo, cooled down after the climb, and the soldiers unloaded and set up camp (refusing to go further), I sat on the hood and moved the lead across the paper. The road ahead narrowed, and we would have to travel the remaining kilometer on foot with all the luggage. Fortunately, Hans, with his natural strength, replaced a freight locomotive, so that aspect didn’t worry me much. I was worried about the Cathedral!

The more I looked at the lines of the cathedral, the stronger a strange feeling grew—as if its form were subject not to geometry, but to some rhythm. The sketch does not convey the scale. The pencil slides, trying to find logic in these lines, but there is none. This temple was created by a mad architect in defiance of common sense. As if it weren’t built, but was an extension of the mountain, grown directly from it under colossal external pressure.

The drawing turned out ominous.

— “Looks like a headstone, ” Hans remarked, looking over my shoulder.

I am always ready for his jabs and wanted to object, but the pencil in my hand froze treacherously. He was right. A headstone. Only we didn’t know for whom yet.

An architectural paradox opened before us. The Romanesque style of the lower part contrasted with the Gothic above. Massive, squat walls grown into the rock were clearly created to hold a siege. And the spires, which should reach for God, were heavy, flattened, as if under the press of the sky itself. The pointed arches here did not strive upward as in the cathedrals of Cologne or Reims; rather, they resembled the ribs of a giant prehistoric beast that had lain down here to die and petrified. This was Gothic devoid of hope.

The temple was built to weigh the mountain down to the ground, as if what was hidden in its dungeons was trying to break out, and only the weight of these monumental structures kept it inside. 

Only the central spire extended upward, though its true height was invisible, as low-hanging clouds shrouded the entire highland, serving as a giant curtain separating this place from the rest of the world.

 (from the notes of Viktor Stahl)