The air tasted like iron and static.
Cael crouched at the lip of a broken ledge, one boot pressed into the jagged stone, the other dangling into the dark below. Wind whistled through the ruin, dry and keening, like breath exhaled from something long dead. The light overhead wasn't sunlight—it pulsed in slow, artificial beats. Artificial sky. Artificial stars. But the pain in his thighs, the tremor in his arms, the thin slice on his cheek—that was real enough.
"Signal's thinning," Hal murmured behind him. "We go deeper, we lose uplink. And if we lose uplink, we lose recall."
Cael didn't look back. He was staring at a scar. A literal one, carved into the landscape like a wound left by some god-sized knife—jagged, half-sutured by stone and wire. The land here didn't behave properly. Edges melted. Angles bent the wrong way. Distant buildings leaned as though underwater, their windows catching the light and distorting it into colors no one had names for.
It was called a Vestige Zone. A Dream Fracture. A scar where unreality bled into the world.
And scavengers like him were sent to pick it clean.
"Timer's ticking," Hal said again. "You freeze up, you die. That's how it works."
"I'm not frozen," Cael said.
Just listening.
Because beneath the whistle of wind, the static hum of the comms, and the soft beeping of their survival monitors—there was something else.
Whispers. Too distant to understand. Too close to ignore.
Cael stood, carefully, balancing on the crumbling edge. The wind tugged at the hood of his hazard suit, pressing fabric against bone. Three others stood behind him—Hal, Riss, and Bronn. The latter two carried pulse-lances. Hal had the artifact kit. Cael had the eyes.
"Down there," he said. "I saw movement."
Riss snorted. "You 'see' ghosts in the walls."
"Better ghosts than jaws," Bronn muttered, checking his pulse-lance for the fifth time. "Last guy to ignore a flicker got half his spine rearranged."
Cael ignored them. He began the descent, fingers searching the rock like they knew its shape already. The light dimmed as he moved down—shifting not into darkness, but into some other texture of brightness, one that flickered between violet and silver and something that made his skin crawl.
The closer he got to the bottom, the clearer the whispers became.
Not voices. Not exactly.
Memories.
It hit him as he touched ground: the scent of soap and ash. A door closing. Someone humming in another room. His breath caught—not because it was familiar, but because it was almost familiar. Like a dream you couldn't place, but knew you'd had before.
He turned, slowly.
There it was.
The object.
It didn't look like anything in particular—just a sphere, smooth and black and matte, suspended a few inches above the ground. It pulsed. Once. Twice. Like a heartbeat.
And then it stopped.
He reached out.
"Cael, don't touch it!" Hal's voice crackled in his ear, half-static, half-panic.
But his fingers were already inches away.
The sphere pulsed again—and for a moment, he wasn't in the scar.
He wasn't anywhere.
Silence.
Not the silence of emptiness—but of meaning too vast to understand.
Cael stood on nothing. Above nothing. Around nothing.
Before him was himself.
Or something wearing his face.
But its eyes were wrong.
Too wide. Too still. No breath moved its chest. No shadow bent around its form.
It spoke—but not in sound.
"You are not me yet."
Then it vanished.
Cael woke with a scream.
He was back in the scar. The artifact was gone.
So were Hal, Riss, and Bronn.
Gone, except for their suits—crumpled like shed skin. Their survival monitors still beeped, hollowly. A high-pitched whine echoed across the ruin.
His pulse meter blinked red. Heart rate: 180. Respiration erratic. Cortisol spike: lethal range.
But he wasn't dying.
He wasn't dead.
The sphere was gone, and the whisper was still inside his head.
Still whispering.