The kettle whistled behind him, but Aven didn’t move.
He just stood there, one hand on the counter, staring out through the fogged glass of his kitchen window.
Seoul's skyline blinked quietly in the dark—half the city asleep, the other half pretending to be.
Somewhere across the river, a train wailed. He’d stopped noticing them years ago.
The kettle kept screaming.
He finally turned, killed the flame, poured half a cup and left it to steam beside a stack of worn excavation reports. Most of them were unopened. A few had coffee stains. One still smelled faintly of jungle rot.
Then his phone buzzed.
He wiped his hand on his shirt before answering.
“Mira.”
Her voice came through with too much energy for the hour.
“Turn on your TV.”
Aven frowned. “I don’t watch—”
“Trust me.”
He sighed, fumbled for the remote under a folder, and clicked the old set to life. Static, then a local news anchor mid-sentence.
“…appears to have collapsed during the storm earlier this week. Initial satellite images showed no structure at the site—only dense canopy. But early this morning, this aerial footage—”
The feed cut to a slow flyover of a broken clearing, vines hanging from fractured stone.
The ruin was massive—partially unearthed, jagged, like it had been ripped out of time instead of buried.
He leaned forward, setting the coffee down.
“They’ve contracted us,” Mira said. “Private backers. No university. No government. Just funding and the promise that we get first look.”
Aven didn’t speak.
“They’re sending in a team tomorrow,” she added, quieter now. “I’m already packing. I can forward you the full packet if you want to take the job.”
He didn’t answer. The image on screen lingered—a carved archway, half-swallowed by earth, marked with symbols that didn’t look quite right.
“It doesn’t look Mayan,” Aven muttered, almost to himself. “Could be Olmec, maybe Aztec—if it’s post-classic, maybe pre–Tlatilco—but…”
He trailed off, staring at the archway. The angles were wrong. The proportions were off. It looked too clean in some places and too weathered in others, like time hadn’t touched it all at once.
There were carvings across the stone—some broken, some faint. None of them matched anything he’d seen in thirty years of scraping dirt off ruins.
He leaned in closer. Paused.
“Could it be them?” he whispered.
“Who?” Mira asked.
He didn’t answer.
She waited a beat. “I pulled a few favors to get us on the list,” she said, more casual than the weight of that sentence deserved. “Told them you’d been chasing stuff like this your whole career.”
Aven glanced at the TV again. The arch. The jungle. The impossible suggestion of it.
“You packed already?” he asked.
“Mostly. Got a charter on standby in Manaus if you can get a flight.”
He nodded. “Forward me everything.”
Then paused. “Why now?”
Mira hesitated just a breath too long.
“It’s your birthday,” she said quietly. “And I figured... you wouldn’t remember.”
Aven blinked. Looked at the time.
She was right.
“…I’ll pack my bags.”
He ended the call, the screen still flickering in the background. The archway loomed there, half-swallowed by the earth. Watching him.
Seoul moved like a memory he hadn't finished writing.
The morning haze clung to glass towers and bent light off the river. Aven stepped out of his apartment with a duffel slung over one shoulder and a rolling case trailing behind him. The lock on his door jammed—he didn’t fix it.
He slid into the back of a cab, gave the airport name in Korean, and leaned against the window as the city blurred by. Students in uniform. Street food stands steaming through the cold. Lanterns left up too long after a festival he never bothered learning the name of.
The cab smelled like cheap cologne and dried noodles. He didn’t mind.
He had packed quickly.
Boots, gloves, field kit.
Two worn journals, one with a broken spine. A compass that always pulled west.
He left the books.
He hesitated over the photos—an old one of his parents at a dig site in Syria. Didn’t take it.
He scribbled a note to his neighbor:
Gone for a while. Lock might stick.
Incheon buzzed with the quiet chaos of morning departures.
Announcements rang out over muffled chatter and boarding calls. Aven moved on autopilot—check-in, security, coffee he didn’t drink.
He barely remembered boarding.
The plane lifted off just after sunrise.
He watched the city shrink through the window, glass turning to haze, buildings to dust.
By the time they hit cruising altitude, he’d closed his eyes. Not to sleep—just to stop seeing things.
Manaus came into view through a curtain of clouds—
a sprawl of rusted rooftops, crumbling brick, and jungle green creeping back in from the edges. The river coiled through the city like it remembered a time before it, wide and brown and slow. From above, the jungle looked endless.
Aven pressed his forehead to the window, watching the world blur as the plane banked. The airstrip cut a rough scar through the trees.
Customs was a blur.
Heat hit him like a wave the second he stepped outside—wet, thick, clinging. Sweat bloomed under his collar before he’d even found the curb.
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Mira stood by an idling jeep, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, arms crossed.
She spotted him and gave a half-smile. “Took you long enough.”
He pulled off his bag, tossed it into the back, and squinted against the sun. “I left within two hours of your call.”
“You pack like a widow.”
A voice behind her added, “He looks like one too. My kids would’ve had their boots on and bags packed before the phone even hit the table.”
Bren Koar stepped around the jeep, handing Aven a lukewarm bottle of water.
Older, broader, jaw like a cliff. His shirt was already stained through.
“Still carrying that same damn compass?” Bren asked, nodding to the chain at Aven’s belt.
“Still points west,” Aven muttered, cracking the bottle.
Mira opened the driver’s door. “Yaro’s waiting outside the village—he won’t come in. Says the land’s not clean.”
Bren rolled his eyes. “Of course it’s not. It’s the Amazon.”
“He’s the best guide this side of the river,” Mira said. “Doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t get lost. We’ve used him before.”
“I remember,” Aven said, climbing in. “He only said seven words the whole trip.”
Bren climbed in after him. “Let’s hope they’re better words this time.”
The jeep rumbled to life, and they pulled onto a dirt road lined with cracked pavement and weather-stained billboards in Portuguese. Jungle pressed closer with every mile.
The road gave out an hour in.
From there it was walking—packs slung over shoulders, machetes cutting slow paths through thick underbrush. The jungle pressed in like breath: heavy, wet, constant. Birds called in bursts. Something large moved through the trees once, but didn’t show itself.
Yaro walked ahead, silent as ever. A small man with deep lines in his face and a woven cord around his wrist. He didn’t look back to see if they followed—just kept walking.
“How long has it been?” Aven asked, brushing a web from his shoulder.
“Three years since our last trip,” Mira said. “Same place. Different site.”
Bren grunted. “Same heat. Same bugs.”
“You volunteered.”
“I lied.”
They kept walking.
By late afternoon, they reached the first marker—a weathered flag half-swallowed by vines. A sign that someone had started this dig before them and left it behind.
Yaro stopped at the edge of a clearing. Ahead: the jungle thinned, the light sharpened, and stone showed through the roots.
A ruin, half-choked in moss, slouched against the earth. The archway stood like a broken tooth, carved with shapes that didn’t belong in this century—or any other.
Yaro didn’t move.
“I don’t go past here,” he said.
Aven stepped beside him. “Why?”
“It’s not for me.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Yaro shook his head slowly. “Not mine to answer.”
He stepped back, already turning to leave. “I wait here. If you come back, I’ll take you out. If not, I won’t come in.”
Then he was gone.
Bren stared at the ruin. The air around it felt still—unnaturally so. Like even the bugs had stopped breathing.
He popped the strap on his sidearm, checked it, muttered under his breath. “I hate the jungle.”
Mira looked at Aven. “It’s worse up close.”
Aven nodded, already stepping forward.
They made camp a few dozen yards from the ruin—far enough that the air felt breathable again. Tents went up fast. Gear was checked. Lanterns tested. Mira moved like someone who’d done this too many times to waste motion.
Bren scanned the perimeter with the slow calm of a man who always expected trouble. He never looked directly at the ruin—but his fingers kept drifting to the grip of his pistol.
Aven set down his pack and crossed to the edge of the clearing.
The archway loomed larger now—stone weathered to near-collapse, but still standing like it had waited for something.
There were no visible carvings on the outer surface. Nothing modern. No markings. Just that wrong geometry—as if the stone had been bent before it ever cooled.
“We’ll sweep the outer structure in the morning,” Mira said. “See if we can trace any wall lines.”
“Already ahead of you,” Aven replied, crouching near a partially collapsed wall. “There’s a vent here. Looks like it used to be a staircase.”
He reached in with his flashlight. The beam swallowed by dust.
“Let me go first,” Bren said behind him. “You don’t know what’s down—”
The edge of the stone crumbled.
Aven dropped.
Not far—maybe ten feet. Dust billowed. A loud, sharp grunt.
“Shit,” Mira hissed, dropping to her knees beside the hole.
“You good?” Bren called, already pulling rope from his pack.
Aven’s voice echoed up a moment later. “I’m fine. Just surprised. Broken staircase down here—collapsed in places, but there’s space. Something hollow.”
Mira clipped into the rope before Bren could argue, disappearing into the dust. He followed a moment later, muttering the whole way.
The chamber below was cold.
Not cool—cold. Like it had never known sun.
Mira’s boots crunched on old tile. Bren dropped beside her, pistol drawn.
They all turned their lights outward.
The walls rose in perfect circles, stone set without mortar. And carved into every surface—faint, brittle with time—were murals.
Long-limbed figures. Spirals. Eyes without faces. Doors that opened into nothing.
None of it was Aztec. None of it was anything.
Mira stepped closer, brushing dust from a low panel.
“It’s not human,” she whispered.
They moved slowly, lights sweeping across ancient stone. The dust kicked up with every step glowed faintly in their beams—like it didn’t want to settle.
Aven stood still, staring at one of the larger panels.
“Here,” he said. “Look.”
Mira stepped beside him. Bren kept one eye on the shadows.
The mural stretched across nearly ten feet of curved wall, carved deep and stained with long-faded pigment. It showed a battle—not a mythic one, not abstract. Real. Brutal. Precise.
Orcs, broad-shouldered with tusked jaws and plated armor, charged a line of lean, angular figures—elves, or something close to them, wielding long blades curved like moonlight.
Above them, giants loomed, cloaked in stormclouds.
Behind them, a line of winged figures hovered mid-air—fairies, maybe, but not delicate. Their wings were jagged. Their eyes blank.
And at the edges of the mural—cities.
Tall. Strange. Not built like anything Aven had ever studied. One sat half-submerged in water. Another curled up a mountainside like a serpent made of towers. They weren’t symbolic. They were geographic.
Bren exhaled slowly. “You’ve seen this before?”
Aven shook his head. “No one has.”
Mira stepped closer. “This isn’t storytelling. This is a record.”
“And it shouldn’t exist,” Aven said quietly.
He touched a point near the mural’s base—where a spiral pattern repeated again and again beneath the carved armies.
They stood in silence a moment longer, watching the battle unfold in stone.
“It’s kids’ stuff,” Bren said finally. “Elves, orcs, giants… Fae.”
He shook his head. “My son plays games with this junk. Writes stories. Even has a plastic sword.”
Mira crouched down, tracing her fingers over the base of the mural where the spiral repeated.
“Except this is carved into ten thousand-year-old stone,” she said. “And it’s too detailed to be myth. Look at the scale lines under the cities.”
Aven nodded slowly. “This isn’t a story. It’s documentation.”
He turned his light, scanning further down the wall. More symbols. More weapons. More things that didn’t belong in any known civilization.
Then Mira’s beam caught on something behind them.
“Wait. There—door frame.”
They turned.
A rectangular doorway sat just beyond the edge of the chamber—partially hidden behind a collapsed pillar.
Stone lintel. Intact.
No carvings, but it felt different—clean, untouched by time or collapse.
They approached slowly.
Beyond it, a long narrow hallway opened into a massive black void. A bridge stretched out—stone, cracked, uneven—but holding.
Aven stepped to the edge, peering over.
The drop below went on forever. No end. Just darkness.
His flashlight hit nothing. Not even a glint.
At the far end of the bridge, set into the curved wall, was another mural.
Larger than the others. Dimly lit by something unseen.
They crossed carefully, one at a time.
Boots echoed off stone. No wind. No sound but breath and movement.
The mural was... different.
Two figures stood in the center—one male, one female, though not quite human.
The male was carved in jagged lines—armor made of stone and fire, eyes cut like stars.
The female was softer but just as otherworldly—a crown of thorns and moons, bare feet on a river that had no source.
They faced each other, hands almost touching.
Beneath them: cities. Dungeons. Beasts. Ruin.
Mira stared at it, voice quiet. “These aren’t gods we know.”
“They’re not anything we know,” Aven murmured.
Bren stepped back, uneasy. “Alright. This is enough for today. Let’s go back, get the gear, lights, scanners.”
Mira nodded, brushing sweat from her brow. “We’ll mark the path, come back with the whole team.”
She turned to Aven.
He wasn’t moving.
“I’m gonna stay a minute,” he said.
“Aven—”
“Just a minute. Take notes. Sketch the lines. I’ll follow in ten.”
Mira looked at him for a long moment, then exhaled. “Don’t touch anything.”
She and Bren crossed back.
Aven stayed.
The mural pulsed faintly—not with light, but with presence.
He stepped closer. Lifted a hand.
And touched the space between their fingers.
The doorway on the far side shimmered once—then vanished.
He turned, eyes wide.
Ran back to the edge. Called out.
“Mira?”
Nothing.
“Mira!”
He stepped forward.
The bridge groaned once—then crumbled beneath him.
No sound. No wind.
Just a fall that never seemed to end.
