The drill platform screamed.
Not metaphorically.
Actually screamed.
The sound came from the metal itself—an agonized vibration as the excavation rig punched deeper than its tolerances were ever meant to allow. Warning sigils flashed red across the control pylons. Gravity stabilizers flickered like dying stars.
Layer 27.
They weren't supposed to be here yet.
Kaelen Vane stood at the edge of the platform, boots planted on cracked steel, the abyss yawning beneath him like an open wound in the world. Far below, the exposed cross-section of Earth glowed faintly—strata upon strata of compressed time, each layer a different truth, a different set of rules crushed into stone.
Behind him, someone swore.
"Anchor feedback is spiking!" a technician yelled. "Chronoplast consumption just doubled!"
Kaelen didn't turn.
He could feel it.
A pressure behind his eyes. A wrongness in the air. The Surface Laws—heavy gravity, fixed inertia, obedient matter—were thinning. Not breaking yet. Just… softening.
Layer 27 was old. Not ancient. Not magical.
But it remembered things.
Kaelen reached back, fingers brushing the metal ridges of the Spinal Drive grafted along his vertebrae. The device pulsed in response, its embedded chronocores lighting one by one like waking eyes.
A normal Excavator needed anchors.
Kaelen didn't.
That was the problem.
"Vane," the foreman shouted from the control deck. "You feeling that too?"
"Yes," Kaelen said quietly.
The platform lurched.
Gravity hiccupped.
For half a second, Kaelen felt light—almost weightless—and then the force slammed back twice as hard. Several crew members stumbled. One went to a knee, retching.
The Pale.
Not here. Not yet.
But it was close enough to whisper.
The drill bit struck something solid that wasn't rock.
The scream stopped.
Silence rushed in to replace it—thick, unnatural silence that swallowed the hum of machines and the hiss of steam. Even the platform's lights dimmed, as if uncertain whether they were allowed to exist here.
"Contact!" someone yelled. "We hit—something!"
The foreman leaned over the railing, eyes wide. "That's not bedrock."
Kaelen finally turned.
The drill had exposed a structure.
Not a ruin.
A surface.
Smooth. Dark. Veined with lines that pulsed slowly, like a sleeping heartbeat frozen into stone. Symbols—no, not symbols—instructions were etched across it. Not written to be read, but to be obeyed.
Kaelen's breath caught.
This wasn't Layer 27.
This was a Pocket.
A fossilized reality bubble compressed into the wrong depth.
Someone long ago had tried to bury a law itself.
The Spinal Drive surged.
Pain lanced through Kaelen's spine, sharp and intimate, like fingers digging into his nervous system. He gasped, dropping to one knee as overlapping sensations flooded him—heat without temperature, weight without mass, movement without direction.
The world flickered.
For a moment, he saw it.
Not the platform.
Not the crew.
But a different sky—angular, fractured, stitched together by rules that didn't care about continuity. Structures floated sideways. Shadows fell upward. Beings moved through the air by folding distance rather than crossing it.
Layer Deep.
Too deep.
"Vane!" the foreman shouted. "Your vitals are spiking!"
Kaelen forced himself to breathe.
This was how it always started.
The Surface hated him. Rejected him. Its physics pressed against his organs like a badly fitted cage. But down here—down here, the chaos loosened its grip.
His bones stopped aching.
His lungs filled more easily.
The Pale wasn't a punishment for Kaelen.
It was a negotiation.
He placed his palm against the exposed fossil surface.
The platform's sensors went mad.
Law readings contradicted themselves. Gravity vectors spun. Time dilation values briefly went negative before snapping back to zero.
The foreman swore again. "Pull him back! Now!"
Too late.
The fossil answered.
The etched instructions ignited—not with light, but with permission.
Within a ten-meter radius, the concept of continuous force unraveled.
Machines didn't break.
They forgot how to push.
Hydraulics went slack. Pistons froze mid-stroke. The drill, suddenly uncertain how to apply pressure across time, simply… stopped.
Crew members fell as gravity stuttered, then screamed as it returned sideways. One man slammed into a wall that was no longer perpendicular to the floor.
Kaelen stood.
The Spinal Drive blazed white-hot against his back.
Layer 27 laws peeled away like wet paper, replaced by something older. Simpler. Crueler.
In this reality pocket, force could not persist without intent.
A thrown object dropped after a heartbeat unless someone wanted it to keep moving.
Kaelen flexed his fingers.
The air resisted him, then yielded.
Power flooded through him—not strength, not energy, but authority.
He didn't generate laws.
He selected them.
"Kaelen!" the foreman yelled, voice warping as sound bent strangely around the pocket. "Shut it down!"
Kaelen looked at his hands.
The veins beneath his skin darkened, tracing unfamiliar paths. His shadow lagged half a second behind his movements, as if undecided about following.
The Pale was advancing.
Stone crept up his forearm, crystalline and fine, like frost that had learned geometry. Not painful. Just… claiming.
He pulled his hand away from the fossil.
The pocket resisted.
It didn't want to go back to sleep.
"Enough," Kaelen muttered.
He disengaged the Drive manually.
The backlash hit like a collapsed star.
The foreign laws snapped away. Gravity slammed back into place. Machines groaned as force remembered how to exist. Crew members collapsed, gasping.
Kaelen fell to both knees.
The stone receded from his arm, leaving pale, vein-like scars that pulsed once… then went still.
Silence returned.
Normal, ugly, Surface silence.
The foreman stared at the fossil surface, then at Kaelen. Fear replaced anger in his eyes.
"That thing," he said slowly. "It reacted to you."
Kaelen didn't answer.
Because he had felt something else.
When the pocket had awakened—just for an instant—something far deeper had stirred in response.
Layer 50 and below.
The Deep had noticed him.
And it was curious.
Kaelen pushed himself to his feet, spine screaming in protest. The Spinal Drive dimmed, its chronocores cooling, but not before one final pulse rippled through it.
A message.
Not words.
A direction.
Down.
Far down.
Toward a place the Surface world insisted didn't exist.
Layer-0.
The Core.
The First Law was no longer a theory.
It was a destination.
And Kaelen Vane had just announced himself to the buried gods of the Earth.