The air inside the exclusion zone shimmered, a heat mirage without heat. The ruined plain stretched in every direction, a crater the size of a city swallowed by dust and silence. The sky above Enttle was the color of tarnished brass, streaked with pale, unending light.
Marc trudged forward beside Howard and Sergeant Lu Xian, their boots crunching over what should have been soil but gleamed like fused glass. The further they walked, the heavier the world seemed to get.
Howard's drones fanned out ahead, their rotors whispering. Each carried a small core of Aetherium that pulsed like bottled lightning.
For a while, they spoke in professional tones—numbers, readings, triangulation. Then the mirages started.
Shapes flickered across the plain: a convoy of soldiers half-seen, marching in perfect silence; a tank hull frozen mid-explosion; a child's bicycle upright on melted ground. The images came and went, unreal but perfect.
Howard rubbed his eyes. "Tell me you see that."
Marc nodded slowly. "I see it. And I wish I didn't."
Lu Xian muttered something in Mandarin and crossed himself.
Tecciztecatl's voice rolled through Marc's mind, steady as the tide. They are echoes, not ghosts. Memory burned into air. The field is thick with Aether.
Marc blinked sweat from his lashes. "Aether?" he whispered.
The blood of the Aetherians, the god said. It fuels their ships, their engines, their cities. When they fall, it seeps into the ground and dreams of what it once moved.
Howard looked at him, confused. "You say something?"
Marc straightened. "We're just seeing things that aren't really there, but we should fall back."
"Yeah," Howard said quickly. "We should. Right now."
Before they could move, another shimmer rolled through the air. The illusion snapped into clarity—a sleek, wing-shaped machine half-buried in glass. Its hull was silver-blue, marked by the sigil Marc remembered from nightmares.
Lu Xian spoke again, urgent, his Mandarin sharp.
Howard frowned. "What did he say?"
Marc translated automatically. "He says the ground's moving."
Then they felt it. The crust beneath them flexed like a lung.
Tecciztecatl whispered, That is not earth. That is a tomb.
Howard swallowed. "A tomb? Of what?"
Of gods who fell too far from heaven, the moon god murmured. And one who left a gift behind.
Marc's eyes were drawn to the wreck. A panel had come loose, revealing a compartment no larger than a man. Inside, nestled like a relic, was something metallic—a harness, curved and elegant, engraved in alien geometry.
Tecciztecatl's tone sharpened. That is a flight pack—Gaidan's, by its mark. The last of his kind used it to cross worlds.
Marc stepped closer, his breath catching. The harness seemed to hum to his pulse. "You're telling me this belonged to him?"
Take it. It answers only to those it recognizes as kin.
He reached out. The metal felt alive, warm despite the dead air. For a heartbeat he saw flashes: a boy with silver eyes soaring above battlefields, fire turning to wind beneath his wings. Then the vision shattered, leaving him trembling but clutching the relic.
Behind him, Howard's voice broke the trance. "Marc! The drones—something's wrong!"
He turned. The Aetherium drones had begun to rise higher, lights strobing in frantic rhythm. Their telemetry screens filled with static and unreadable glyphs.
"Shut them down," Marc barked.
"I'm trying!" Howard's fingers flew over the controller. "They're not responding!"
Lu Xian shouted an order to his own men; their larger Chinese drones began a recall sequence. Two responded. One didn't. It hung above them like a second sun, glowing white.
Tecciztecatl's voice thundered. It feeds. The field drinks its own reflection. You must stop this.
Marc gritted his teeth. "How did Aether get here in the first place? Gaidan stopped the war years ago—why is there still residue?"
Long before your kind walked upright, the god answered, the Aetherians built anchors on this world. Bases where their engines slept. When their empire fell, the anchors sank. Time forgot them. Now your wars dig them up again.
Marc cursed under his breath. "Still doesn't explain how it got unearthed now."
Howard, half-deaf to Marc's whispering, looked up nervously. "What's wrong with you? You keep talking to yourself."
Marc didn't answer. The god's presence was a weight behind his eyes.
The unstable drone cracked apart in the sky, releasing a ripple of blue fire that rolled across the plain. The mirages collapsed, and for a split second Marc saw the truth beneath: skeletal frames of Aetherian machines, half-buried towers of glass, and something vast stirring under the crust.
Lu Xian shouted for retreat.
Marc slung the jetpack over his shoulder. "Howard, call in the backup chopper—now! Drop the rest of your drones before this place eats us alive."
Howard grabbed his radio, shouting coordinates. "Falcon-Seven, this is Archer! We need extraction and air support! We're losing telemetry!"
Overhead, a low roar answered—the sound of rotors miles away.
Marc looked once more at the fractured sky, at the light pulsing through the fissures in the earth. "We're not just standing on a battlefield," he said quietly. "We're standing on the bones of gods."
The god in his head whispered, And not all bones rest forever.