The stone vibrated softly against her cheek, though the rest of the chamber lay draped in the ghostlight hush of the ruins. Thalyn exhaled slowly, eyes half-lidded, the echo of past memories still pulsing behind them.
Her back pressed to the cracked column, she sat in the dark chamber, legs folded beneath her, posture somewhere between rest and collapse.
“…It’s reactive.” Korr’s rough voice broke the silence. “Neural resonance, I think. Biofeedback. Possibly an override function, hardwired into the lattice. With the right cortex, it wouldn’t just interface. It might... answer.”
His voice had the parched edge of someone too long buried in whispers and dust.
“You want to test it on someone without knowing what it does, again?” Elara’s response was tight with concern. “Don’t you remember what happened to commander?”
Their argument hissed through the shadows, pitched low and cutting. The object in question, a spiraling shard of Elder alloy, half-organic and pulsing faintly, rested between them on a slab.
Thalyn turned her head slightly, observing them with tired detachment. Elara's fingers drummed at her side. Korr was leaning over the device, his bony fingers twitching just above the spiral.
“And here we see the mating ritual of the velvet doctor and the bone-crazed archivist,” Arvie said, voice dry as powdered ash. “Truly, a courtship for the ages.”
Thalyn almost smiled, but a knot in her gut pulled tighter. It wasn’t pain, not quite. More like a whisper. A feeling that had no word but one meaning: Go.
She rose, silent. A droid stood in attendance at the door. She was mistress now.
The air outside the chamber hung heavy with the weird clarity of twilight. Nether clouds glowed violet beneath the cliffs. The strange sanctuary of the ruins still held, no poison seeped in here. The jungle waited, brooding beyond the windows.
She moved fast, muscle memory guiding her. Past the curved hallways, deeper into the bones of the ruin, until the smaller command center rose before her like an ancient heart. It recognized her at once. The droids inside turned in perfect unison, heads bowing.
“Mistress,” they intoned.
The second throne sat coiled in the center of the room, like a serpent waiting to strike. It lacked the gravitas of the central seat, but it hummed. She hesitated. That pull again, dry and urgent, like thirst.
Thalyn stepped forward and sat.
The throne stirred beneath her, rising with a subtle shift. She placed the crown on her head.
For a moment, nothing, then her vision fractured. Vertigo sliced through her, gone before she could brace against it.
The chamber remained, but like a veil lifting, the world pressed in.
She gasped.
The jungle lay layered through her vision, depths she’d never noticed now unfolding like secrets. Threads of bioluminescence ran through the undergrowth like veins. Heat shimmered along the edges of her awareness. Life, everywhere. Crawling, clinging, drifting at the limits of sight.
She could feel them, their motion, their heat and damp breath. It was less like seeing and more like being inside the jungle’s skin.
Her companions glowed like embers: Elara and Korr, back in the command chamber. Jaxon farther off, near the cliffs. Moving slow, deliberate. Mining, probably. She could almost feel the flex of his muscles as if standing beside him.
The throne allowed more than vision, it offered proximity without presence. With the barest will, she could draw the ghost of any location close, as if peering over a shoulder or whispering through the veins.
“Oh, this is going to be addictive,” Arvie murmured. “Mistress, with vision like this, you could spot a shardwing mid-flight.”
Thalyn wasn’t listening.
There were other signals, faint, yet sharp in a way that left no room for doubt. They hummed in threads beneath the ambient static. Not life, but potential. Attractor tides, like yearning.
She stiffened.
“Droid,” she said. “What am I feeling?”
The construct pivoted its obsidian head, optics whirring with a soft modulated hiss. It seemed to listen to a deeper frequency.
“The nearest resonance clusters are thalorite, mistress. Embedded through the cliff strata west of here.”
There was a deeper flux somewhere beneath them all, almost subliminal.
She narrowed her eyes. “There’s something else.” A trace, threaded through her perception.
The droid’s response came slower now, like it had to reach for the answer. “A secondary locus. Not clearly defined. Possibly a potent artifact. Signature matches mutacell profile.”
She turned fully to face it. “Where?”
Instead of answering, the droid lifted its arm. A thread of static licked the air. Her mind flared.
A map bloomed behind her eyes, not just overlaid, but etched into the terrain, like ghostly fire.
A city emerged in her mind’s topography, enclosed, ribbed in atmospheric shielding, nestled within the valley like a coiled relic.
“There,” she said, more to herself. “Probably in Revantis.”
The droid clicked softly.
“The signal’s stronger in that direction. Now that you’ve attuned to it, the map can mark the resonance for now. You may recall the trace when needed.”
She didn’t answer. Just stared east, where the skeletal curve of the domed city rose pale on the horizon.
The map in her mind-console shimmered, like fog parting to reveal a path she'd been seeking. Tendrils of light pointed toward Revantis… but another flux surfaced, deeper, older, threading through the layers like a buried vein.
Thalyn leaned forward.
The second pull wasn’t just in her thoughts, it was her thoughts. A craving nested in bone. The quiet yearning she’d carried since waking. Now it had form.
She swallowed. “There’s another.”
The droid paused. Its voice shifted subtly. “A long-range signal, yes. Purpose undefined. Strength anomalously high. Localization is undecided.”
“That’s not an answer.”
A pause. “Designation exceeds access level. Perhaps the mistress will find meaning in the journey.”
“Translation,” Arvie said, “your fancy castle has a haunted basement, and it wants you to crawl in blind.”
Thalyn’s mouth twitched. But something cold stirred behind her ribs.
She pushed herself up from the throne, exhausted by the experience. The mental map faded, but the feeling remained, clawing the edge of her awareness.
The droids bowed again as she passed.
By the time she returned to central command, night had settled like a velvet hand. Biolights pulsed in the pillars, and the air carried that strange hush again.
All three of them were there now.
Jaxon leaned against a bulkhead, arms folded, smudged with ore dust and sweat. Korr was fiddling with a severed drone limb. Elara sat cross-legged, her gaze soft but alert.
“I found something,” Thalyn said as she stepped into the spill of overhead light. “In Revantis. I can sense, a mutacell cache, or something just as potent. The other throne helped me spot it.”
Jaxon’s jaw worked. “So, we knock on Abrisen’s front gate?”
“We cut his leash,” Korr muttered, not looking up. “But he still owns half the stalkers inside that dome.”
Jaxon grunted, adjusting the sling of his detector. “They’ll be busy. Low sector’s a graveyard with delusions, gangs eating each other over scrap tech.”
He looked at Thalyn. “You sure this isn’t a ghost? You’ve been wired to two thrones now.”
“It’s not,” she said. “The pull’s real. And it might not be long before the whole city breaks into another territory war. I’m not saying we go tonight.”
“You sure?” Elara raised a brow. “You look like something’s chasing you.”
Thalyn hesitated. “No, something’s calling.”
Korr made a noise somewhere between a cough and a curse. “More riddles. The ruins are already halfway alive. Now they whisper too?”
Silence stretched between them. Jaxon scratched the scar along his jaw, then gave a short nod.
“We go quiet. Low sig. I like it that way, whispering into the beast’s ear.” He jerked a thumb at the loot behind them. “Besides, salvage to sell.”
“What about Echo?” Elara asked suddenly. “You were under for a while. What did you see?”
Thalyn looked down at her hands. Flexed her fingers, still getting used to how perfect they felt. “He made it. Smuggled into an old academy med-bay. They patched his NeuroLink with an illegal pod. Then got out.”
There was a long silence.
Finally, Jaxon stretched, the joints in his cybernetic arm groaning like old floorboards. “Well, let’s get some rest. You look ready to fall over.”
“I am.”
Elara touched her arm as she passed. A brief, silent comfort.
Thalyn lay in the side alcove, eyes closed but mind churning.
The tug was still there. Now that she’d felt it, it didn’t fade. A needle in her thoughts, vibrating with silent insistence.
As she drifted toward sleep, Arvie’s voice slid in.
“You feel that, right? That tremble? Like a storm under your skin? Something’s coming, mistress, and it’s going to change you.”
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