The Siberian wind howled like something ancient and angry. It clawed at Cassandra Rayne's coat, tore through her gloves, and numbed her lips until they stopped working right. She stood in front of a steel doorway that looked like it had been carved into the earth by something that didn't care for human comfort.
This was Site-71.
They told her it was a research site. A place for containment and study. But when the armored door groaned open and the heat hit her stale, recycled, tinged with bleach and something older—she felt it in her gut: this place was a tomb.
Someone just forgot to bury it.
Her escort didn't say his name at first. He just looked her up and down like she was a folder he had to skim through. Older man, white coat stained with old coffee, one eye twitching just enough to notice.
"You the linguist?" he muttered.
Cassandra nodded. "Cassandra Rayne. Linguistics and cognition. I was told—"
"Doesn't matter what you were told," he cut in, already walking. "You're here because something started talking again. That's all you need to know."
She followed.
The halls were too quiet.
The kind of quiet where sound got nervous and kept to itself. They passed checkpoints, thick doors, glass eyes in the ceiling. Everything screamed "safety" in that cold, paranoid way government buildings always did when they were hiding something.
Cassandra counted doors to distract herself. Seven. Always seven. One set was labeled "ECHO" and had warning signs in languages she didn't recognize.
"Name's Grumman," he finally said, tapping his ID at another scanner. "Don't expect me to remember yours."
The door slid open with a hiss.
Inside was a room that didn't feel real.
A cube of glass floated in the middle of the room, suspended above the floor like gravity had politely stepped out. Inside the cube was a person. Or something that wanted to look like one.
But every time she looked too long, her memory blurred. Her brain adjusted it to something simpler. Like static. Like fog with teeth.
Grumman stood beside her, staring through the glass like it owed him something.
"It calls itself 'The Architect.'" His voice was lower now, rougher. "But it forgot what it built. We've been trying to get a translation for years. Last week, it started talking again."
He handed her a file.
Every word on the page was upside-down.
"This isn't-" she started.
"It is," he said. "Our machines crash trying to read it. The last time someone tried to correct the orientation, they had a seizure and bit off their tongue."
She stared at him.
He didn't blink.
Later, in the observation deck, she listened to the audio logs.
The voice was layered, echoing like three people speaking at once, each in a different room. The words were haunting, strange. But then one sentence broke her spine from the inside out:
"Do you remember the shape of a mother's name, Cassandra?"
She froze.
"...How does it know my name?" she whispered.
Grumman didn't look at her. "It's been saying your name for days. You weren't even cleared until this morning."
That night, her room light flickered and stayed on. She hadn't touched it.
Her Foundation laptop, still packed in its foam case, powered on without warning. She watched in silence as the screen blinked to life. A folder appeared on the desktop:
[THE EPITAPH PROTOCOL]
No sender. No trace. No explanation.
She clicked it.
Inside was a single file:"The Word That Ends The World"
She opened it.
There is a sentence.
A sentence so perfect, so complete, that to speak it aloud unravels everything.
It does not describe reality.It replaces it.
We discovered it.We buried it.
But it remembers.
And it has found her.
Her door creaked open.
She turned around fast. No footsteps. No voices. Nothing.
Only the faint reflection of herself in the glass window near her bed.
Only
Her reflection didn't move.
It stood there, grinning.
The next morning, an alert echoed through the Site."Containment Breach Sector Echo 5."
Cassandra didn't hesitate. She grabbed her ID, her coat, and the memory of the sentence still echoing in her mind like a name she wasn't supposed to know.
Whatever this place was…
Whatever she had been brought here to translate…
It was waking up.
And it already knew her.