The heat under the ridge was different now.
It didn't roar, or pulse, or scream like something fractured. It breathed. In and out. In and out. Subtle. Lurking. Alive.
Sira crouched at the edge of the sinkhole, the faint amber of her torchlight fluttering along the curve of glassed stone. She hadn't descended yet. Not because she feared what was below—but because of what wasn't. No sulfur plumes. No dead heat. Just a cold, dry pull, like something had once exhaled and never drawn breath again.
Behind her, Riku stepped silently into view, followed by Kael and two glaive sentries. One of the wyrmlings hovered far above, barely more than a shadow flickering against the sky's low cloud bank.
"No seismic shifts in the last twelve hours," Kael muttered, tapping his compact sensor rig. "But something down there was big enough to collapse a tunnel without cracking surface layers. That's deliberate engineering. Not accident."
Riku said nothing.
Sira nodded toward the rim. "I dropped a depth rope. Four levels. First shelf is stable. The rest… slants. Like the old drainage tunnels beneath the basin, but wider."
"How wide?" Riku asked.
"Caravan-wide. With clearance."
That meant planned movement.
The kind sovereigns didn't talk about publicly.
Riku dropped into the sinkhole without hesitation. His boots struck the second shelf with a crunch of old dust and melted slag—char residue blackened with age, not flame. The air was sterile. Not the kind of stillness that followed battle. The kind left behind when something larger moved through and left the world too afraid to breathe afterward.
Kael and Sira followed without instruction.
The descent took minutes. Each shelf narrowed into glass-ribbed turns, spiraling toward a central corridor lined in hardened obsidian. Once, it might've been natural. Not anymore. Riku ran his fingers along the walls—scratches. Repetitive. Intentional. Marks made not by claws, but by tools. Worn tools.
He crouched and lifted a shard of fractured chisel-stone. The grain was unfamiliar. Pressed with a spiral-insignia he didn't recognize.
Not a tribe's. Not sovereign. Something older.
Kael turned his rig to scan the curvature. "Still no sovereign trace. No chat-linked tech either. But there's a repeater node… melted. Not ours. Not Ashen Tide either. Could be Thread's."
Riku gestured for Sira to move ahead.
The tunnel sloped into darkness, and the heat changed again. Less radiance, more ambient pressure—subtle pressure, like a presence buried behind the stone.
Then Sira stopped. Held up her hand.
They gathered in silence at the tunnel's mouth.
Ahead was a chasm. Circular. Wide. Artificial. Its walls were perfectly ribbed with obsidian veins, still pulsing faint red. But the strange thing wasn't the shape. It was the silence. The kind that wrapped sound and pressed it flat.
In the center stood a massive gear-like door—vertical, sealed, with no mechanism visible.
A door designed not to open easily.
Kael knelt by the edge and scraped his sensor along a hair-thin groove that ran from the rim to the wall.
"Pressure line," he whispered. "Old. Subterranean ventlock. You'd need internal pressure build or precise ignition to pop it."
Sira studied the grooves more closely. "They left it closed for a reason."
"They?" Riku asked.
Sira pointed. Along the bottom edge, half-erased, were boot prints.
Not clawmarks. Not beast steps. Prints. Left by a biped. Patterned.
Riku stepped forward and placed his boot next to the indent. It matched in length.
"Someone came through here within the last ten days," he said. "And they didn't seal it behind them."
Kael frowned. "Could've gone deeper. This might just be a checkpoint."
Riku didn't answer right away.
He stepped to the edge, drew a small flare capsule from his belt, and clicked it once. It hissed to life in muted green, illuminating the vertical gate. There were symbols etched along the core seam, too deep to decipher without closer tools.
He didn't take another step.
"Mark the path. No breaches. No probes. Not yet."
Sira looked at him. "You're walking away?"
"Not walking," he said. "Waiting."
He turned from the gate and walked back into the tunnel mouth without looking again.
"Whatever's down there," he said, "already knows we're here."
And for now, he intended to let it wonder what he was waiting for.