The stars didn't twinkle that night.
They blinked.
Fluttered.
Like weak fireflies trapped between two panes of glass.
Luma sat cross-legged near the campfire, her gauntlet open and sparking, muttering expletives under her breath. Ion paced nearby, occasionally pausing to stare up at the flickering sky like he expected the universe to offer an apology.
Cassel, the young survivor, lay asleep with a blanket over him. Toma sharpened his blade with quiet resolve, every scrape a statement: We survive. We endure. We fight again.
Then—
Click. Buzz.
A whine through the static.
The campfire flickered in response.
Ion snapped to attention. "Did you feel that?"
Luma looked up. "That wasn't just wind, was it?"
"No. That was a signal. Buried deep."
Ion turned a knob on the amplifier core embedded in his staff, tuning through layers of audio like peeling an onion made of noise.
Suddenly—
A chirp.
A rhythm.
Three short pulses. Two long. A pause. Repeat.
Toma leaned forward. "That's Spire Courier code."
"Obsolete Spire Courier code," Ion corrected. "This pattern hasn't been used in decades. Someone's improvising."
Luma's eyes lit up. "Nico."
---
They traced the signal to a ruined signal tower half-buried in vines and phase-distorted stone. Inside, rusted machinery twitched like it was dreaming.
A lone Courier Drone, dented and patched, sat docked in the hub. Its wings buzzed irregularly.
Ion approached slowly, placing his hand on the side.
"It's barely holding together," he said. "But someone's keeping it alive."
The drone clicked open a message compartment and projected a flickering hologram—Nico's grinning face, covered in soot and grease.
> "If you're seeing this, congrats! You intercepted a dying bug carrying the blueprints to literally save the world. You're welcome."
He leaned back, smirking. Leo's voice came from behind the projection:
> "Nico, stop narrating like a comic book!"
> "Sorry!" Nico laughed. "We're sending you what we pulled off the Entropy Engine. It's raw. Incomplete. But it's something. Blueprint follows."
The recording glitched—but the files began to transfer.
Ion's gauntlet pinged. "It's encoded," he muttered. "Fragmented data stream. Looks like... analog modulation."
"I can help," Luma said, pulling her gauntlet close. "Let me talk to it."
She tapped the gauntlet twice. The device gave a sarcastic beep.
> "Oh, now you want my help?"
"Don't start," Luma muttered.
> "You fried my processor three days ago trying to boil soup."
"It boiled!"
> "You used a tachyonic loop!"
Toma blinked. "Is she arguing with her gauntlet?"
"Frequently," Ion replied.
---
Together, Luma and Ion sat near the fire, decoding the message line by line. Binary strings. Heat-mapped phase diagrams. All overlayed with glitchy audio spectrums.
Luma frowned. "It's not a machine... It's a field. The Entropy Engine isn't just a device—it's a system."
Ion's brows furrowed. "Like a... generator that doesn't just power, but unpowers. It injects disorder. Noise."
"And somehow," Luma added, "it uses living motion to sustain itself. This part here—see? Kinetic resonance matching. People move, it feeds."
Toma stared. "So the more chaos we fall into, the stronger it gets."
Luma nodded slowly. "It's not just feeding on destruction. It's orchestrating it."
---
Later that night, when the camp had quieted and Cassel was snoring, Ion sat alone with the decoded blueprints and the soft flicker of firelight dancing on his tired face.
He looked up at Luma.
"You were right."
She blinked. "That's rare. About what?"
"This isn't just science anymore. Not the kind we know."
He held up the printouts. "We're staring at an engine that doesn't break the laws of physics. It bends them."
Luma took the pages, gazing at the interlocking diagrams and lines of raw data.
"They called us fools," she said. "Back in the Spire. For dreaming the world could be more than formulas."
Ion gave a small smile. "Maybe it always was."
They shared a long silence, the stars above still blinking in and out like they hadn't made up their minds.
And far beyond the Verdant Expanse, a gloved hand placed a new stone on a table covered in moving sand.
Saren watched it vanish beneath a shifting grid of light and sighed.