The wind in West Syverian Territory was unlike anything Alex had experienced in Crescent City. It didn't simply howl—it scraped. Across the frozen valleys of Glacier Hollow, the cold carried teeth. Even wrapped in reinforced travel gear issued by the RSA, his breath frosted instantly, crystallizing against the hood of his dusk-black coat.
The escort team marched in disciplined silence, three agents ahead, two behind, trudging across the ice-covered ridge that overlooked the Rift containment zone. Below them, nestled in a gorge of jagged obsidian stone and glacial spires, sat the primary observation facility—a field compound shaped like a collapsed star, half-buried in frost and stabilized only by thick pulse-anchor rods dug into the terrain. One of the guards glanced back at Alex as they approached the outer perimeter.
"Watch your step, Director," she said curtly. "The Hollow doesn't take kindly to misplaced footing."
Alex gave a single nod. He wasn't here to impress them—nor to explain himself. He was here to listen to the Rift.
They descended into the compound, passing through triple-layered gates sealed with blood-coded glyphs. Unlike Crescent's refined arcology centers, the architecture here was brutalist—thick walls, exposed pipes, minimal ornament. The very air seemed to hum with latent energy, as though the Rift below never truly stopped whispering.
⚜️ Inside the Facility
"Director Alex," a researcher greeted him with a tired salute, deep circles under her eyes. "I'm Lead Analyst Vekar. You're just in time for the third temporal pulse."
"Temporal pulse?" Alex echoed.
Vekar nodded toward a glass panel overlooking the Rift fissure. "We don't get spatial expansions like Crescent. Here, the anomaly... breathes."
He stepped forward and saw it for the first time.
Below the facility, embedded in the ice like a scar across the world, the Rift fissure pulsed with slow, rhythmic energy—glacial blue veins cracking and closing like the lung of something slumbering. But it wasn't simply pulsing with light. It was echoing. Every twenty minutes, reality itself seemed to stutter, as though remembering something from a future that had not yet happened.
"How long has it been doing this?"
"Two years. Grows stronger with each lunar cycle," Vekar said, gesturing toward a graph screen. "We've started tracking memory loss, dissonance, dream leaks. One agent reversed aging by twelve years before the process killed him."
Alex said nothing. But he could feel it too—the shifting air, the quiet sense of being watched from within the Rift itself.
The Rift wasn't expanding here.
It was listening.
🩸 Nightfall – Internal World Reflection
Back within his quarters that night, Alex closed the heavy metal shutters against the storm outside. But even here, alone, the world did not feel entirely his.
With a whispered thought, his awareness slipped inward—into the depths of the internal world he'd cultivated since his resurrection.
The starlit palace shimmered into view. Celestial torches glowed along the arching halls, and far below, the Blood Core Pool shimmered a deep crimson, breathing in slow unison with him. But there was instability now—threads of foreign resonance that clung to his soul like frostbite.
"Elara," he called softly.
From the eastern corridor, she approached with a low bow. "Your Majesty."
"There's something wrong with the Rift here. It doesn't simply warp space—it erodes time."
She nodded. "I've been tracing faint strands that slipped through the gates. Their pattern isn't like Crescent. It's older. Woven tighter." She hesitated. "Almost like it was braided with will."
He narrowed his eyes. "This Rift wasn't formed by collapse. It was carved."
The system flared gently beside his consciousness. Its voice was calm but weighted.
"Warning. Foreign dimensional anomaly detected. Trace signal embedded in Rift pulse contains linguistic data: 'Ura-Khel Dominion.' Unknown civilization. Probability of ancient incursion: 63%."
Alex frowned.
"Origin?"
"Unable to verify. No known alignment in recorded celestial lattices. Suggest observation. No intervention."
He stared out across his internal world. Beneath the throne, the shallow blood pool quivered—like it too had heard something ancient moving.
⚜️ A Visitor from the South
Three days later, the compound's air alarms trilled once—not a breach, but an arrival.
A long, narrow vessel sliced through the snowfall outside, trailing sigil-powered hover rings and bearing the golden-white standard of the Southern Wastes. The design was unmistakable—tiered fluting reminiscent of bonecraft, with angular carvings that vibrated with distant runic harmonics.
Vekar stared out the window, pale. "We didn't approve diplomatic observation."
"You don't deny the Southern Wastes when they knock," said one of the agents beside her grimly. "You just try to avoid being touched."
Alex said nothing but adjusted his coat collar and stepped toward the landing pad.
From the vessel emerged a single figure, fully masked. The emissary's armor shimmered like layered ivory and bore no House or Domain insignia. A translator crystal pulsed at their throat.
The voice that followed was hollow and distorted:
"We request permission to observe the anomaly. It hums an old song once buried. It is... familiar."
Alex met the figure's gaze—or what he guessed to be the gaze—head-on.
"I wasn't told to expect observers."
The emissary tilted its head. "We were not told to be expected."
No one dared refuse. Not with the Southern Wastes' reputation for twisting Rift-harvested energy into advanced symbiont machines and soul-reactive weapons.
Later, in private, Vekar muttered to Alex:
"They've been quiet for decades. Why send an emissary now?"
Alex didn't answer.
Because he already knew the truth.
The Rift had started singing louder.
And someone had heard.
🩸 Whisper of the Crystal
That night, as the wind returned in howling sheets across the ice fields, Alex sat alone in his room.
He reached into the sample case beside his cot and withdrew the shard recovered from the Rift's edge—a crystal sliver that pulsed faintly in time with his own heartbeat.
He held it to his temple.
For a moment, he heard a whisper—not through the air, but inside his blood.
"Blood remembers."
He didn't flinch. Just stared out into the whitestorm.
Whatever was coming… it wasn't just a threat to the RSA.
It was a memory that had waited eons beneath the ice.
And now it was waking.