A jackhammer was trying to split Salem's skull from the inside. That was his first, muddled thought as consciousness returned, not as a gentle dawn but as a violent seizure of sensation. A dull, throbbing ache pulsed behind his eyes, and a sharper, more insistent pain radiated from his ribs with every shallow breath. The air was cold, damp, and thick with the smells of mildew, stale straw, and human waste.
He clutched his head, groaning as he pushed himself up from a grimy stone floor. His hands, he noticed distantly, were wrong. They were too long, the fingers more slender, the skin paler and unmarked by the familiar scar on his right knuckle from a trowel mishap in his undergraduate days.
Panic, cold and sharp, began to cut through the mental fog. The agents.
His last memory was of a searing violet light, the cold weight of the Egg against his cheek, and the hard final eyes of the operative. They must have taken him. This had to be some black-site cell, designed to disorient him.
He forced his eyes to focus, scanning his prison. It was small, barely three paces in any direction. The walls were rough-hewn stone, weeping moisture. The door was a set of rusty iron bars, through which a single narrow slit of a window high on the opposite wall admitted a miserly beam of daylight. It didn't look like a modern interrogation room. It looked like a grave. A medieval one.
Confusion swamped the panic. Why this elaborate set-dressing? And his body… he looked down. He was wearing a simple, coarse tunic and trousers of some rough-spun material, now stained and torn. The body beneath them was not his own. It was leaner, younger, with a latent strength he could feel in the corded muscle of his forearms. The disconnect was so profound it was almost nauseating.
The scrape of a boot on stone echoed from the corridor. A figure shuffled into view beyond the bars: a man in a dented, tattered iron breastplate and a padded gambeson which had seen better decades. His face was grizzled, his nose veined and bulbous from drink. A guard.
The guard grunted, said something in a guttural flowing language that was utterly alien to Salem's ears. The words meant nothing, but the tone was one of bored annoyance.
Desperation clawed at Salem. "Hello? Can you understand me? Where am I?" he asked in English. The guard just stared, uncomprehending.
A wild thought struck him. They were in India. The agents must have brought him to a remote part of the country. Maybe this was a local dialect that could provide him communication. He racked his brain, trying to remember a single word of Hindi from his brief time there. "Kaun? Kahan?" he tried, his voice cracking.
The guard's expression didn't change. He just kept talking, his monologue a steady stream of incomprehensible noise. But as the man spoke, a strange sensation bloomed in Salem's mind. It wasn't a sound, but a feeling; a subtle internal vibration like a tuning fork being struck deep within his soul.
The guard's gibberish began to shift. It was as if a corrupted file was being repaired in real-time. The sounds didn't change, but their meaning started to resolve, clicking into place with an almost audible finality.
The guard completed his sentence, and Salem grasped every word; the translation was there in his mind, clear as if it was spoken in English.
"...we thought you would never wake up. The Captain will come for you, just wait."
With a final, dismissive grunt, the guard turned and shuffled back down the corridor, leaving Salem to himself in a silence now infinitely more terrifying.
He was bamboozled. Quite, utterly lost. He hadn't grasped one word of Hindi. It had been another language altogether. And the translation… it had simply… occurred. It was the Egg. It had to be. The artifact, the light.
He squeezed his eyes shut trying to block out the terrifying reality to find some center. Instead of darkness, his consciousness was tugged inward and plummeting into a space that wasn't physical. He stood in a a mental landscape under a starless sky. And there, at the center, hung the Egg.
It was exactly as he remembered it from the dig, a perfect, dark ovoid but now it was alive. A soft, internal luminescence pulsed within it, a slow, steady heartbeat of violet light. With every pulse, faint, shimmering waves of energy radiated outwards, washing over his spiritual form like a gentle tide.
In that moment, the final, impossible pieces clicked into place. He hadn't been kidnapped. He had died. His soul, at the moment of death, had fused with this artifact Professor Thorne had dedicated his life to finding, and it had somehow… transported him to a new body and a new world. The "Vessel of Stars" did not held a map or a weapon; it had held a passage.
He opened his eyes, the grim cell snapping back into focus. The panic was gone, replaced by a staggering, cold clarity. He was in another world. The thought was so colossal he couldn't process it. Instead, his mind, ever the pragmatist, latched onto the one thing he could control: the artifact.
His professor had named it the "Vessel of Stars," but that felt impersonal, a label from a dead text. This thing was now a part of him, his only tether to a lost existence and his only tool in this new one. It was his sanctuary, his noble enclosure in a universe of chaos. Aethelgard. The name surfaced from some deep well of academic memory, an Old English term he'd once stumbled upon. Aethel for noble, gard for enclosure. A Noble Enclosure. A fitting name for the vessel that now housed his soul and contained a sleeping sky of potential. The Aethelgard Egg.
The weight of it all should have crushed him but a lifetime in archaeology had taught Salem Vale one crucial lesson: you can't change the past, only understand it. Fretting over the unchangeable was a waste of energy. He was here and he was alive. And the Egg was giving him power. That was a fact to be analyzed and utilized.
Driven by this new, clinical curiosity, he tried to focus on the cell beyond the bars, to push his perception outward. The moment he willed it, a silent, invisible wave emanated from him, passing through the stone walls like a sonar ping. Instantly, a perfect three dimensional map of his surroundings, out to about ten meters, unfolded in his mind.
He could "see" the exact dimensions of the corridor outside, the empty cell opposite his, the uneven texture of the stone, even the iron bracket holding a spent torch. It was a Soulsense Pulse, a term that came to him unbidden, perfectly describing the ability. He sat back, stunned. This changed everything.
This time, the sound of heavier, more purposeful bootsteps gave warning of the Captain's arrival. His forties, lean and weathered of face, with a close-cropped beard flecked to grey and eyes the colour of flint - it was a face that appeared chiselled from the living rock. He wore a well-maintained leather jerkin over a mail shirt and there was a longsword at his hip. Authority was etched into his every movement. The grizzled guard stood slightly behind him.
The Captain's gaze, sharp and assessing, locked onto Salem. "So, the sleeper awakes," he said, his voice a low rumble. The Internal Lexicon translated it flawlessly, the meaning layering over the foreign sounds. "I am Captain Korbinian. You are in the town of Darrow. Your name?"
"Salem," he replied, his voice hoarse. "Salem Vale."
"Salem," Korbinian repeated, testing the sound. "A foreign name. From across the Serpent's Tail Sea, perhaps? Or further?"
He didn't wait for an answer.
"You were found unconscious in the woods west of here, with no identifying seals, no travel papers, no coin. Only the clothes on your back, which are of a fine make, yet unfamiliar." He leaned closer, his flinty eyes narrowing.
"So, who are you? A runaway noble son, too stupid to even grab his purse? A spy from Lord Valerius's domain, left behind by your compatriots? Or just a common criminal who robbed the wrong merchant?"
Salem met his gaze, letting the confusion and disorientation he genuinely felt show on his face. "I… I don't know. I can't remember anything before waking up here."
Korbinian gave a short, sharp laugh. "Amnesia. The oldest and lamest excuse in the realm. Do you take me for a fool?" His voice didn't rise, but the scorn within it was physical. "Very well. Play your game. The law is clear. No identification, no legitimate business, means you are a refugee. And refugees earn their keep. We have no use for idle hands, and the town's coffers are not an inn for vagrants."
He straightened up, his decision made. "You will be remanded to the Crown's service as a conscripted laborer. At first light you join the work detail for the silver mines in the Jagged Crags. The work is hard, the food is meager, but it will pay for the bread you've already eaten and the roof over your head this night. Consider it mercy."
With a final, dismissive glance, Captain Korbinian wheeled and strode away, his guard falling in behind him. Their footsteps faded, leaving Salem in a silence now charged with purpose. He scanned the cell around him, not despairingly but with the analytical gaze of an archaeologist at a new dig site. Rusty iron bars, stone walls, large lock. Nothing except the tattered clothes he wore and the mysterious artifact that was fused with his very soul.
But he also had the Aethelgard Egg. He had a map of his prison in his mind. And he had a very clear, very pressing reason to not end up in a silver mine. Salem Vale took a deep, steadying breath.
For only one moment did he hesitate, weighing the immense risk against the certain fate of a short, brutal life in the mines. His mind was made up: he would escape.