The smoking husk of the pulse relay hissed with residual energy, sparks crackling where the structure had buckled inward from within. It wasn't sabotage. It wasn't decay. Benedict knew it the moment he touched the charred anchor stone—this had been a controlled failure.
He crouched by the wreckage, gauntlet fingers brushing dust and fractured circuitry, reading the mana residue with narrowed eyes.
> "Too localized," he murmured. "Too precise."
Yara stood a few steps back, arms crossed. "We've seen relay failures before."
"This isn't a failure. This is a signature." He tapped a faint glyph hidden beneath a scorched plate—one he hadn't seen in decades. It was a swirling hexagram, half-erased by time.
Benedict's heart stilled.
A few meters behind, Alec adjusted his visor and peered at the exposed core. "I don't recognize that symbol. Not from any active archive."
Marin, the quietest of the team, tilted her head. "There's still harmonic feedback. I think the relay's trying to finish a cycle that was never meant to complete."
Benedict nodded slowly. "Then someone wanted us to find something—right under our feet."
Marin's voice dropped. "You don't think this is leftover from the First Master's generation?"
"No," Benedict said. "Older."
He dug deeper. Under layers of scorched stone and synthetic shell, something clicked. A hum escaped the earth—a low, melodic resonance, and then something rose: a sphere of translucent stone, floating gently into his palm. Inside, a shifting pulse of color spun in slow circles like a slumbering eye.
It rotated.
And pointed.
Not north. Not to any registered beacon. It pointed somewhere else—somewhere forgotten.
Back in his lab, Benedict placed the orb within a containment cradle and began feeding it controlled bursts of mana. The sphere responded immediately—glowing softly, then displaying an overlay of a skyline he had never seen: towers curled like helixes, a horizon wreathed in luminous fog, bridges suspended on nothing.
Then, it collapsed into blackness.
His system flagged it: Archive Memory – CODE\_403: Erased.
> "You're not just a map," he whispered. "You're a memory. A buried one."
Yara, arms folded tight, leaned over his shoulder. "That city isn't listed on any planetary database. And you saw how it projected—no standard coordinate grid."
She watched Benedict work with the kind of intensity that didn't allow for interruptions. His hands moved with practiced control, his eyes scanning data overlays as though they whispered secrets only he could understand.
Yara didn't like it.
Not the tech. Not the mystery. And definitely not the look in Benedict's eyes. She'd seen it before—when he found something important, something that bent his attention like gravity bends light.
We're not ready for this, she thought. He's not ready.
She glanced at Marin, who hovered near the containment array with the analytical detachment of a lab rat observing a trap. Alec looked uneasy—joking too much, pacing with his usual nervous ticks. They all knew this was bigger than a corrupted relay. But none of them said it aloud.
Yara stepped closer to the sphere.
"What if it's not a beacon or a key? What if it's a test?"
Benedict paused. "For what?"
She met his gaze. "To see what kind of civilization we are. What we do when we dig up things left behind."
He didn't answer, but that silence meant more than words.
---
Marin stepped in, eyes narrowed. "What if this isn't just memory storage? What if it's a lock? Or worse—a lure?"
Alec tapped the containment shell. "This thing's giving off low-level dimensional resonance. You think it's stable?"
"I think it's trying to open something," Yara muttered. "Or maybe it already has."
"We're guessing," Benedict admitted. "And we might be wrong."
"So?" Marin said. "That's what makes it real. We're not machines. We don't wait for certainty. We act."
"That, or we're just impulsive," Alec added, rubbing his temple. "We have one weird artifact and suddenly we're all prepared to jump into the unknown?"
"We always jump into the unknown," Yara said. "That's our job. That's how Benedict built everything we're standing on."
Benedict raised an eyebrow. "Flattering, Yara. Are you sick?"
She rolled her eyes. "I'm just trying to talk sense into the rest of you before we're swallowed by a dimensional rift."
Alec gave a half-hearted shrug. "If we vanish, I hope the bureaucrats miss us."
Marin wandered closer to the orb, squinting at its faint shimmer. "You ever wonder if the ones who buried it made the right call? Maybe they erased the place because they couldn't trust themselves."
That thought lingered.
Benedict didn't respond immediately. He turned the orb again. The compass aligned to a second pulse point, just beyond planetary survey range.
"We'll follow it," he said, more to himself than to them. "If someone wanted this buried, it means it mattered."
Alec frowned. "We're barely holding political ground in Vehrmath. And now you want to wander into erased zones?"
Yara's voice was low. "I'm going with you."
Marin hesitated, then gave a curt nod. "So am I. Someone has to be the one who says 'I told you so' when this goes sideways."
That earned a faint smirk from Benedict.
"Let's make our mistakes spectacular, then," he said.
He turned his back on the flickering transmission logs from the Vehrmath summit and focused on calibrating the compass's rotation.
The coordinates it gave were impossible.
They pointed outside registered planetary zones. Beyond satellite sweep.
Beyond maps.
Standing atop Vehrmath's central spire at dawn, Benedict held the compass aloft. It rotated once more and pulsed softly, like a heartbeat.
Alec stood beside him, scanning skyward. "Whatever this thing is, we're already off the charts."
Marin murmured, "Do we even know what we're waking up?"
Yara stepped closer, eyes locked on the horizon. "Does it matter? We've come this far."
"Humans aren't AI," Marin added softly. "We don't calculate, we gamble. And sometimes, that's how we find what machines never could."
A gust of wind ruffled Benedict's coat. He looked at the rising sun, at the city built on new tech, new ambition—and then at the artifact in his hand, tied to something older than he could imagine.
"They tried to erase you," he said. "But not well enough."
The past wasn't buried.
It was waiting.
---