A hum. Then a rupture.

The Zenith groans under the strain of reentry, metal scraping sky. Flames dance across the viewport as Orna’s thin atmosphere tears against the hull. The ship is falling—fast and sideways. Sabine’s voice crackles through static.

“Rerouting power to stabilizers. Impact is inevitable. Attempting soft fail.”

“No no no—don’t!” the stowaway growls, elbow-deep in the navigation panel, his obsidian eyes locked in a battle of instinct over protocol. “You’re overriding the override.”

The traveler braces, caught between Sabine’s logic and the stranger’s fury. The stowaway shoves his staff deeper into the mainframe socket—ancient technology interfacing with something synthetic, unknown.

“Emergency transfer of control to manual,” Sabine mutters, almost reluctantly. “You better know what you’re doing.”

But it’s too late. The ship twists in air like a wounded bird. Glass explodes inward. A flash of white. And then—

Silence.

Dust drifts across the crash site—an intersection buried between stone towers of the City of Stillness. No sirens. No alarms. Just stillness.

The traveler coughs, pushing himself upright from the fractured deck. The stowaway is already standing, unscathed, brushing ash from his coat. A faint jingle.

The traveler blinks, hears it again. Metal. He squints.

Sabine’s voice breaks through, sharper now, still tinged with static:

“Scanning anomaly… identification: active military tags, encoded. Confirmed medals of service: three. One dishonorable discharge. One classified.”

The traveler narrows his gaze. “Did you serve?”

The stowaway looks away. “Long time ago. I was a ghost long before this city ever slept.”

The hatch creaked open with a hiss of stale air. A faint luminescence pulsed below, neither warm nor cold—just present. The general led first, his boots landing on the iron-rung ladder with practiced certainty.

The traveler hesitated. Behind him, the wind above Orna stirred like a warning.

Sabine flickered to life in the peripheral of his vision—projecting symbols, erratic light trails. They hovered in his frame like drifting constellations. Shapes bent and unbent into equations he couldn’t solve.

Neural Link Initiated.
Sabine? What are you seeing?

[UNKNOWN LANGUAGE STREAMING—SOURCE UNVERIFIED]
Sprites. Spirits. They’re whispering. Into the mainframe. I don’t know who they are. But… they know us.

The traveler swallowed hard and descended.

Deeper in the passage, the general’s voice echoed off stone.

“Thirty years ago, this city didn’t breathe like it does now. I was stationed here. Undercover. Sentry-class, black-tier clearance. We weren’t meant to be seen.”

He turned down a narrow corridor, ducking beneath a carved arch overrun by moss and glyphs.

“The agency—what’s left of it—doesn’t remember me. Or pretends not to. Double-crossed me during the final shift. Left me down here with ghosts and a name that no longer unlocks doors.”

Sabine’s projections sharpened. The traveler watched as shimmering silhouettes of figures—too small, too fast—raced across the stone. One paused. Looked back at him. Then vanished.

Sabine, is this a memory?

No.
It’s a guide.

The general kept talking, each word heavy with the weight of betrayal and unfinished war.

“They called it The Stillness, but it was never still. Not really. Something’s always moving in the dark. Always listening.”

He stopped in front of a sealed gate made of etched obsidian.

“This is where I lost who I was. And where I found what they feared.”