The descent tunnel narrowed until Kaelen had to crouch. The metallic ribs of the elevator cage groaned above him, suspended by a single trembling cable anchored deep in Layer 12. The air thickened—warmer, wetter—carrying the faint scent of something ancient. Not decay. Not earth. Something older than both.
Something alive.
He exhaled slowly.
Every step deeper felt… right. His lungs loosened. His bones relaxed. The weight of the Surface—the oppressive, crushing, perfectly calibrated gravity—finally loosened its grip on him.
The deeper he went, the more himself he became.
"Dive log begins—Kaelen Vane, unauthorized descent," he muttered, tapping the recorder patch on his wrist. It flickered, then stabilized. "Layer… estimate forty-eight. Air is stable. No sign of pressure spikes. Spinal Drive responding normally."
The cables above him rattled.
He stilled.
For a moment, nothing. Just the slow drip of condensation from the tunnel walls.
Then—
THUD.
A deep, resonant pulse vibrated through the stone. Almost rhythmic. Like a heartbeat.
Kaelen's eyes narrowed. "So the rumors were true."
He eased forward, one hand brushing rough rock. His light flickered across the walls—ancient carvings, but not chiseled by human hands. Shapes curved and spiraled in impossible geometry, patterns that shifted when he moved the beam.
Not optical illusion.
Epoch residue.
Fragments of the physics of an older world.
The tunnel finally opened into a hollow chamber the size of a small arena. Light filtered from luminous veins running through the ceiling—bioluminescent minerals, pulsating like veins beneath translucent skin.
But the thing in the center commanded everything.
A colossal hand—stone, yet not stone—jutted out of the earth at a forty-degree angle. Fossilized, but with no visible origin point. The wrist simply faded into bedrock. The fingers were curled, as if gripping something once real. Each one was thick as a tower support pillar.
Kaelen stepped closer, breath caught in his throat.
"There you are."
The Fossilized God-Hand.
Layers of reality folded subtly around it. Gravity felt slightly… off. Angled. Colors seemed sharper. His own voice, when he whispered, sounded a fraction delayed.
He reached out a hand. Not touching. Just sensing.
Closest to the fossil, the Spinal Drive flared awake on his back—threads of cold lightning snaking under his skin. Not painful. Energizing.
His entire body resonated.
Deep Era physics recognized him.
"Easy," he breathed to himself, grounding his stance. "Don't pull too much."
This was Layer Forty-Eight. A Threshold Era—halfway between modern physics and the magic world buried below. Using resonance here could be unpredictable. Even he wasn't immune to The Pale forever.
He opened his Anchor pouch and pulled out the Iron Age Anchor—standard tool, low risk.
But the Spinal Drive disagreed.
It pulsed—hard—sending a streak of resonance down his spine.
The Anchor reacted violently, lighting up with unfamiliar symbols, ones it wasn't designed to channel.
"What the—? Stop—!"
The Anchor ripped itself from his hand.
It shot into the ground with enough force to crack the stone.
Kaelen's eyes widened. His breath crystallized in the air.
The world lurched.
Not physically. Fundamentally.
Space around him warped, folding into a colorless sphere that expanded outward from the Anchor's impact point.
He stumbled back just as the entire chamber flickered—once, twice—like switching realities.
Then everything froze.
Literally.
A bullet of water—mid-drip from the ceiling—hung suspended in front of him. Dust motes stopped between breaths. The dim drifting mist turned still.
The world was frozen in a single moment.
But Kaelen wasn't.
His Spinal Drive glowed bright enough to cast shadows.
"Temporal bleed," he whispered. "But this is… too strong for Iron Age physics."
He turned toward the God-Hand.
It wasn't frozen.
The fossil pulsed again.
THUD.
The sound wasn't an echo. It vibrated inside his chest.
The thumb twitched.
Fossils didn't twitch.
Kaelen's heart thudded faster.
The fossilized stone shifted again—barely, but undeniably. A fragment of stone cracked off near the thumb, floating slowly in the suspended air.
"Chronoplast contamination? Or… something else?"
He stepped closer, each footfall echoing loudly against the still world.
His hand trembled. Not from fear. Instinct.
His disease—Temporal Rejection—triggered only when laws around him stabilized.
Right now, the world was anything but stable.
He felt… perfect.
He placed his palm against the God-Hand.
A shock rippled through him—not pain, but information. Thousands of whispers. Echoes of ancient physics. A flood of forgotten rules that once governed an older world.
His breath hitched.
Then the fossil moved.
Not the whole hand.
Just the index finger.
It shifted one centimeter.
But in a fossil older than recorded civilization, buried under fifty layers of earth and crushed by epochs—that was impossible.
The Anchor behind him flashed again, releasing another temporal pulse.
The suspended world twitched.
Then sound returned all at once.
The water droplet splashed against the stone.
Kaelen gasped and stumbled back, grabbing the Anchor. It burned hot enough to scorch his glove.
The God-Hand stilled.
Everything looked normal again—except Kaelen's heartbeat refused to slow. His spine was buzzing relentlessly.
The Spinal Drive recognized something inside the fossil.
Something that wasn't dead.
His comm patch crackled suddenly—static first, then a voice.
"Kaelen—do you read?"
Lira's voice, breathless.
He exhaled in relief. "Yeah. I'm here."
"It's Layer Patrol," she said. "They're sweeping near your coordinates. You need to move."
He wiped sweat off his brow. "Give me two minutes. I—"
"No time," she snapped. "They're tracking unauthorized resonance spikes. Whatever you just did lit up half the upper Layers. Move!"
He looked back at the fossil.
It had settled back into stillness but felt… aware.
"Fine," he answered. "I'm heading out."
He took one last look.
The index finger.
It had shifted again.
Barely a millimeter, but the dust pattern had changed.
Kaelen swallowed.
"Lira," he said quietly, "the fossil isn't fossilized."
A beat of silence. "What do you mean?"
"It reacted. Moved."
"That's not possible."
"Exactly."
He disconnected.
The chamber trembled again. Dust fell from the ceiling.
Not from the fossil.
From somewhere deeper.
A low rumble surged upward from the tunnel leading into deeper Layers.
Something else had felt the resonance spike.
Kaelen tightened his grip on the Anchor, reattached it to his belt, and backed toward the exit.
The rumble grew louder—like something enormous dragging itself across stone.
He didn't wait to see what it was.
He bolted.
His boots pounded down the narrow tunnel. The walls shook violently as if struck by something massive. A shockwave rippled behind him—displacing air, bending gravity for a second.
He stumbled as gravity flipped sideways for a heartbeat, sending him smashing into the wall. The Spinal Drive compensated, stabilizing his body before he fell into a spiral of warped physics.
"Great. Layer instability. Perfect timing," he grunted.
He pushed forward, half-running, half-gliding as gravity wobbled around him. His vision blurred at the edges—the world changing frame rate like malfunctioning video.
The rumbling behind him was growing closer.
He didn't dare look back.
"Come on—come on—almost there—"
The tunnel widened into a small cavern where he'd left his ascent cable.
But as he reached the chamber—
The cable was gone.
Completely severed.
Frayed ends dangled uselessly from the upper shaft.
Kaelen's stomach dropped. "Someone—no, something—cut it?"
He heard it then.
A sound like metal grinding against bone.
Slow. Wet. Ancient.
Then a whisper—no words, no language. A pressure against his mind, like a thought not his own brushing the edge of awareness.
Kaelen froze.
His breath fogged out in front of him… even though the chamber wasn't cold.
The whisper grew louder.
Resonance.
Coming from below.
He swallowed. Then pulled a Secondary Anchor from his pouch—one calibrated for stability rather than defense.
He slammed it into the ground.
The world jolted into coherence—gravity normalized, colors settled, sounds sharpened.
The rumbling faded.
The whisper vanished.
The Spinal Drive eased its glow.
Kaelen let out a shaky breath. "Okay… that buys me thirty seconds."
Sub-anchor channels stabilized physics briefly, but only locally.
He scanned the walls and spotted a narrow crack leading into a steeper slope. Barely wide enough to crawl through.
"Great," he muttered. "Claustrophobic escape route. My favorite."
He squeezed into the crack, dragging his pack behind him. The stone scraped his shoulders. At one point he had to exhale completely to slip past a tight pinch in the stone.
The rumbling returned.
Closer.
He crawled faster.
Finally the crack opened into a vertical shaft lined with rough stone. Faint light drifted from above—likely connecting to Layer 47.
He tightened his gloves.
"Climb it is."
He gripped the stone and hauled himself upward. His muscles screamed but his body felt lighter—deep physics easing his movement.
Halfway up, the whisper returned.
This time stronger.
A pulse of energy surged up the shaft, rattling pebbles loose around him.
The light above flickered.
His Spinal Drive flared, absorbing some of the pulse but not all. The resonance hit his senses—images flashing in his mind.
A buried city.
A sky without shape.
A giant silhouette with too many arms reaching upward.
A hand breaking through stone.
A voice asking—
"Why have you awakened me?"
Kaelen gasped and almost slipped. He braced his foot, heart pounding.
"No. No, no. That wasn't real," he whispered.
But he wasn't sure.
He reached the opening and rolled onto the flat stone floor of Layer 47. His entire body trembled. Not from fear—resonance overload.
He lay there for a moment, staring at the shimmering glow from cracks in the cavern ceiling.
The whisper no longer echoed.
But the question lingered.
Why have you awakened me?
Kaelen forced himself to his feet. He looked back down the shaft.
Dark. Silent. Waiting.
He dusted off his gloves.
"Tomorrow," he muttered, "I'm coming back with answers."
He didn't know if the fossilized god in Layer 48 had truly moved…
But something very real was waking up below them.
And it knew his name.