Elian hadn’t spoken in three hours.

  The transport shuddered above the tree line, blades kicking up a low thunder over the canopy, but no one said much. No one ever talked on these runs. Too much dust. Too many failures. Most of them knew better than to ask what they were being dropped into.

  Elian sat pressed between a stone-faced sergeant and a medical kit stamped with faded warning glyphs. He didn’t touch either. He kept his hands flat on his thighs and his head tilted just enough to avoid eye contact. He liked the hum of the engines. The repetition. The noise that kept him from thinking.

  “Your first time down there?” someone asked. A technician. Nervous type.

  Elian nodded once.

  “Don't stray off beacon,” the tech said, like it was a joke, but no one laughed.

  The drop site wasn’t marked on any standard recon maps. A blacked-out quadrant northeast of the equator, where satellites failed and wildlife migrated away from no known threat. But something had been detected—frequency pulses, harmonic distortions, equipment malfunctions that read like coincidence until they didn’t.

  Elian had seen the images. Stone formations too symmetrical. Shadows that stayed too long in one place.

  The higher-ups wanted eyes on the ground. Not drones. People. Ones with names and skin and a sense of fear. People who might see something the machines couldn’t.

  The camp was a temporary grid: three towers, one hub, no perimeter. Not because they didn’t want one—but because you couldn’t mark territory here. You tried to plant posts and the ground moved. Not a tremor. Just… wrongness.

  A comms officer checked Elian’s ID. “Special clearance,” he muttered. “Another dead brother project.”

  Elian didn’t react.

  He was used to that tone. Quiet, bitter envy twisted into half-jokes. He was a legacy whether he wanted to be or not. The son of a decorated commander. The younger brother of a soldier who went MIA on a mission just like this one—clean drop, dead signal, folded file.

  His father called it honorable. “He died in service. There’s nothing more to ask.”

  But Elian did ask. Still asked.

  Why there? Why alone? Why cover it up like a system glitch instead of a body?

  He never got answers.

  Just medals.

  And silence.

  Inside the command tent, a wall of static hissed softly from three monitors. The images weren’t useful—thermal blur, broken depth field, incomplete structure mapping—but Elian leaned in anyway. The formations weren’t natural. He’d spent enough years in the archive zones to know that much. These weren’t ruins. They were arranged.

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  Not by people.

  By something older than people who thought like us.

  “Corso,” the officer in charge said—gruff, tired, armor scuffed from years of side-missions and budget cuts. “You’ve read the last survey?”

  “I’ve seen it,” Elian said.

  “And you still want to go in?”

  “I’m not here for the surface structure.”

  The officer exhaled through his teeth. “You’re not here for glory either. Whatever’s down there, it’s not clean.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve got six hours. If comms drop, beacon recall auto-triggers in four.”

  Elian nodded.

  They didn’t shake hands.

  The jungle wasn’t supposed to be quiet.

  Not like this.

  Elian had grown up on bases surrounded by jungle—hot, aggressive, alive. Always something chirping, clicking, screaming in the trees. But here, every step he took felt like an intrusion. Like he was walking through something that had already decided it didn’t want him.

  The air was heavy, but not wet. The ground shifted in subtle ways. Roots curled out of the soil where his foot had just been. Not fast. Not hostile. Just… reactive.

  He scanned the tree line once, then again. The map wasn’t wrong. The geometry was.

  He found the first stone near the slope. Half-swallowed by vines, just visible under a collapsed tree.

  It wasn’t marked with anything specific—no names, no tribal iconography—but it had a shape. A kind of fractured loop. Not symmetrical. Not decorative. It felt… deliberate.

  He crouched beside it, touched the surface.

  Warm.

  Not sun-warm. Something deeper. Like it had been storing heat from before.

  Elian pulled a small field recorder from his side pack. No audio anomalies. No spikes. Still, he let it run and moved forward.

  The descent began just beyond the stone—down into a ravine that didn’t show up on any of the topographic data.

  The soil was too dark. The slope too smooth. No erosion patterns. No runoff. Just a perfect incline, cut into the earth like a memory that had been carved and forgotten.

  At the base was a clearing. Not open space—absence. Where trees should have grown, they hadn't. Where wind should’ve moved, it didn’t.

  He stepped into the clearing and immediately felt the change.

  His ears popped. Then his pulse slowed. Not dramatically. Just enough for his hands to feel distant. Detached. He looked down and flexed his fingers.

  Still there. Just… lighter.

  He moved forward.

  There was no obvious entrance. No door. Just a seam in the ground—barely wide enough for one person, nearly covered by shifting roots and moss. If you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t see it.

  He was looking for it.

  Not because it made sense. Because something felt drawn there. Like pressure finding the fracture.

  He knelt at the edge of the seam and exhaled once through his nose. Not out of fear. Out of habit. A ritual. Something to keep himself from imagining reasons to stop.

  Then he went in.

  The tunnel was tighter than it should’ve been. But the walls weren’t solid. Not entirely. They flexed slightly with his movement, like stone that remembered being something else.

  He didn’t speak. He didn’t breathe hard. He kept his pace slow, measured. His flashlight cut a narrow beam down the corridor, catching small glints in the stone—reflections that shouldn’t have been there.

  No carvings. No dust.

  Just the echo of something shaped by absence.

  And then it opened.

  The tunnel ended without warning, without lead-up. One step he was crawling—next, he was inside a chamber that felt too big for the space that had led him there.

  The walls weren’t visible. The floor didn’t echo. There were no corners. Just a low hum in the back of his jaw and the kind of silence that feels like it’s listening to you.

  He took one more step.

  That’s when the air bent.

  Not the floor. Not the walls. The air. Like reality had tilted three degrees off center and wasn’t correcting.

  His hands shook.

  Not from fear.

  From recognition.

  But he didn’t know what he was recognizing.

  Not yet.