The forge wall pulsed once in the night. No one saw it. No flame, no sound—just a quiet flicker in the stone near the vent channels, like a breath exhaled in the dark. Then, silence again.
Kael was the first to notice the change—not in the wall itself, but in the relay plate embedded in the northern overlook. He tapped the interface twice. A feedback loop buzzed once, then went dead.
"Strange," he muttered.
He tapped it again. No change.
In the forge hall below, Sira was mid-drill with two of the newly armored glaive squads. The air vibrated faintly with their coordinated lunges—quick, low, precise, under the eye of a warrior who no longer tolerated showmanship. One of the wyrmlings—now near adolescent—sat coiled by the forge stairs, watching the steel forms with a gaze like a waiting judge.
Kael appeared at the top of the gantry.
"Riku," he called down, "we have a signal. Not system-tier. Something ambient. Something close."
That got his attention.
Riku climbed the steps with him, following Kael to the ventshaft interface. The stone had cooled near the plate's base, but there was a new pulse beneath it—rhythmic, not random. Not quite seismic either.
"What kind of signal?"
"Low resonance. Almost... harmonic." Kael ran a hand over the relay node. "No pattern at first, but then it started repeating. Four low pulses. Pause. Three higher tones. Same spacing every time."
"Coordinates?"
Kael nodded. "Western basin rim. Maybe a kilometer past the fractured obsidian outcrop. Between the old drift tunnels and the geyser scar."
Riku stared at the readout, frowning. "That's vented terrain. No one builds there."
"Exactly."
Sira joined them a moment later, sweat still clinging to her brow.
"You think it's sovereign work?" she asked.
Riku shook his head. "Too clean. Too quiet. If it were tech-based, we'd have thermal footprints. If it were beast movement, we'd have tremors."
Sira folded her arms. "A trap, then."
Kael disagreed. "If it's a trap, it's baiting something that doesn't know it's being watched. That's not how sovereigns lay traps."
Riku made the decision fast.
"We go. But quiet. And fast. Just us."
By nightfall, they were halfway to the signal source.
The geyser fields hissed quietly in the moonlight, steam rising from obsidian fissures in unpredictable bursts. They moved low, avoiding open ridgelines, ducking between vent stacks that spat out bitter heat at regular intervals. The land here was raw—newly made by tectonic shifts and magma flow during the last Blood Moon.
The signal grew stronger. Not louder. Clearer.
They found it after cresting a shallow rise overlooking a collapsed lava flow.
A stone pillar—barely a meter tall—sat wedged in a fracture near the edge. It wasn't part of the terrain. It had been placed.
Carved. By hand.
Kael knelt beside it and brushed off the fine ash that had settled along its surface. Beneath the dust, grooves gleamed faintly—runes? No. Not runes. Conductive channels. Etched metal lines, like a circuit array wrapped in primitive stone.
Riku crouched beside it, fingers hovering over the top where the signal origin pulsed beneath the surface. No heat. No current. But he felt it—something tugging beneath the stone, subtle and magnetic.
"It's not broadcasting," Kael said quietly. "It's listening."
Sira stiffened. "To what?"
They didn't have time to guess.
A low vibration began underfoot. Not enough to throw them off balance—just enough to shift the ash.
From the shadows of the nearest vent ridge, a shape moved.
Riku froze.
The thing wasn't shaped like any beast he'd seen—no fangs, no claws. Tall. Lithe. Armored, but not in metal. Its limbs moved too smoothly, joints too flexible. Its face hidden beneath a glassed mask. Not sovereign. Not beast.
It paused at the edge of the ridge. Didn't draw a weapon. Didn't flee.
It looked at the stone pillar.
Then it turned and walked away.
Not a sound. Not a word.
Just vanished into the mist like it had marked what it needed and left.
They didn't follow.
Sira exhaled slowly. "You want to tell me what that was?"
Kael didn't answer. He was watching the signal relay on his sensor.
The pulses had stopped.
Riku stood.
"Something's mapping the crater. Quietly. Deliberately."
"And not for us," Sira said.
"No," Riku agreed. "But we're not invisible anymore."
He turned from the stone pillar and started walking back toward Blackridge, the cracked earth hissing beneath their feet.
"And neither are they."