The mountain groaned as we carved into it.
Every day the drills roared, steel teeth grinding through rock that had held its silence for millennia. Floodlights bathed the tunnels in harsh white, scaffolds rose like skeletal ribs, and the air grew thick with dust until it clung to skin, hair, lungs.
The workers moved like ants in the belly of the earth, hauling debris, pouring concrete, welding steel supports. Their shouts echoed in the caverns, bouncing off walls until they blurred into a single, restless hum.
And beneath it all, the mountain complained. Stone shifted. Water dripped from cracks. The earth seemed to whisper warnings we ignored.
Elara thrived in the chaos. She moved through the tunnels like a commander, her voice cutting through the noise: "Shift the supports two degrees! Reinforce this wall before you pour! No, the pressure valves go there—do you want this place collapsing in a month?"
Her clipboard was her weapon, her equations sharper than any blade. The crews followed her because they had no choice, but also because she radiated the kind of authority that made failure unthinkable.
I watched her with something between awe and fear.
She was making the sanctuary real.
But not everyone saw it that way.
The contractors had been told this was an expansion project — a subterranean data vault, a private corporate bunker. Enough truth to sound plausible, enough lies to keep them in the dark.
Still, whispers spread like cracks in the stone.
Why so deep? Why so wide? Why the strange angles, the ventilation shafts that didn't make sense, the tank designs no one could explain?
One afternoon, I caught two workers smoking near the mouth of the tunnel, their voices low but urgent.
"…never seen specs like this before. Not for data storage. Feels more like some kind of… I don't know, experiment."
"Yeah, well, I heard we're building habitats. Like… animals. Underground."
"Animals? That's insane. What kind of billionaire throws money into—"
They fell silent when they noticed me watching. One dropped his cigarette, grinding it out beneath his boot. The other muttered an apology and hurried back to work.
Marcus appeared at my shoulder, silent as a shadow. His gaze followed the men until they disappeared into the dust.
"You see?" he said quietly. "It's already starting."
"They're just rumors," I said, though my throat felt tight.
"Rumors are the first crack," Marcus replied. "If one of them talks outside this valley—if one of them tells the wrong person—you'll lose everything before it's even begun."
I looked back into the tunnel, at the half-built skeleton of the sanctuary. For a moment, doubt gnawed at me.
But then I remembered the wolf's yellow eyes in the forest. The hawk in my sketchbook. The mammoth in my dream.
"I won't lose it," I whispered. "Not for them. Not for anyone."
That night, the wind howled through the valley, carrying the smell of pine and stone dust. I stood on the ridge, staring at the lights glowing from the excavation site, the machines still growling into the earth.
Behind me, Marcus lit another cigarette, the ember glowing in the dark.
"You're pushing too fast," he said.
"We don't have time to move slow."
"You've got billions, kid. You've got all the time in the world."
"No." I shook my head. "The animals don't. Every day poachers kill more. Every day another species disappears. We can't wait."
He didn't answer. Just exhaled smoke into the cold night air.
I clenched my fists, nails digging into my palms. If they only knew. If they knew what was coming. What this place would become.
I glanced at the folded sketches in my coat — the ones Elara had seen, the ones she hadn't. The ones with labels scrawled across impossible habitats: Cretaceous Cavern. Leviathan Depths. Phoenix Spire.
No one else could know. Not yet.
This dream was fragile. Too fragile to survive outside whispers.
And if I had to bury the truth beneath a mountain of stone to keep it safe… I would.
The next morning, the mountain groaned louder.
A section of tunnel collapsed, stone raining down in a thunderous roar. Dust swallowed the workers. Shouts filled the air, panic rising like wildfire.
I ran toward the chaos, heart hammering, the world vibrating with the sound of falling rock.
When the dust cleared, no one was dead — thank God — but the tunnel wall gaped open, jagged and raw. Beyond it stretched another chamber, larger than anything we had uncovered before.
Elara stepped inside slowly, her flashlight sweeping across the walls. Her breath caught.
"This isn't on the maps," she whispered.
The chamber was vast, its ceiling vanishing into darkness, the walls glistening with mineral veins. Pools of water shimmered at the floor, perfectly still.
It felt untouched. Ancient. Waiting.
For a moment, none of us spoke. Even the workers fell silent, awe pulling the air from their lungs.
Then Elara turned to me. Her eyes were wide, not with fear, but with something close to wonder.
"It's perfect," she said.
I stepped into the chamber, my boots crunching on stone. The silence wrapped around me, heavy and alive. I laid my hand against the wall.
The mountain groaned again, but this time it didn't sound like warning.
It sounded like welcome.