It began with the roots.
Not the flame-roots—those Riku and his engineers had charted down to the last filament—but the older ones, the ones that twisted far below, relics of a deeper system they'd chosen to leave untouched. They had seemed dormant, petrified under centuries of pressure and heat. But they hadn't been.
Veit was the first to see it. He'd been tracking a drop in geothermal consistency near the southern trench, blaming a cracked ventseal. What he found instead was a crack in the stone—no wider than a finger, but pulsing faintly with pale light. Not red. Not fireborn. Something else.
He didn't call for Riku right away. He called for Kael.
By the time Riku arrived, there was a low hum vibrating through the ground—steady as a forge bellows, but deeper. Older.
Kael had cleared the trench and moved all non-combatants back to the second line. A double ring of spearmen circled the crack. Sira paced the inner perimeter, eyes narrowed.
Riku knelt beside the fissure. It wasn't wide enough for a hand, but the light leaking through it didn't cast shadows. It bent them. Drew them inward.
He laid a palm against the stone and winced.
It wasn't heat. It was memory. An echo of something ancient crawling along the edges of his mind—images of mist-choked stone corridors, of screaming that was wordless, of things that didn't bleed but shed.
"It's not just a breach," Kael said, voice low. "It's an entry."
"To what?"
Kael's lips thinned. "I don't know. But it's not new."
Sira approached from the south ridge, her boots coated in fine white dust. "We've got three more veins showing the same glow. The pulse syncs between them—every six seconds."
Riku stood, dusting his hands. "Seal the trench. Claybrick and flamecrete. Fast-set. I want it done before nightfall."
Kael didn't argue.
But as the workers moved in, shoveling slag and compound, the hum deepened.
And that's when the soil breathed.
Not trembled. Breathed.
A soft rise and fall, as if the stone had lungs.
The center fissure split wider.
Only by inches—but enough.
Something slipped through.
It wasn't fast.
It wasn't large.
But it was wrong.
A body that looked like cracked alabaster, like porcelain fired too long and then left to cool without glaze. Thin arms, jointed too many times. No face—just a flat oval with concentric ridges, like a seashell that had grown blind.
It didn't move toward them.
It listened.
Riku froze.
The humming stopped.
In its place, a high whine rose—not from the breach, but from every metal tool within ten meters. They vibrated—a thousand tiny cries from blade and hook and hinge.
The creature cocked its head.
A spear flew.
Sira's.
It struck center-mass, impaling the thing straight through.
For a moment, it staggered.
Then it folded.
Not like his own phenomenon. Not that silent, invisible rewriting of quantity or quality.
This was something else.
The spear unwound. Its shaft separated into strands of bark, of reed, of sand—and then into nothing.
The creature didn't move.
It just erased what it didn't want.
Riku's fingers twitched at his belt, brushing the hilt of his sideblade.
"No fire," he said aloud. "Ash-tether only. No steel."
Kael and Sira understood immediately. Orders relayed. The inner ring broke apart, reforming with slings and root-chain nets.
The creature took a single step forward.
And stopped.
It raised a hand and touched its face—where a mouth might've been.
Then spoke.
But not aloud.
The words came into their minds. Not all at once. Each person heard a different sentence.
To Riku: You remember beginnings that were not yours.
To Sira: You carry a wound you call a name.
To Kael: You will not survive the answer you seek.
To Ilven, who'd just arrived, out of breath and weaponless: You came back late for a reason.
Ilven fell to his knees, shaking.
Riku moved first.
He stepped forward, raised his hand—not with a weapon, but with a coil of fire-root wire, sparking faintly at the tips.
The creature tilted its head again.
Then, slowly, it bent its knees—and sank back into the fissure. The crack sealed shut behind it. The glow died.
Only silence remained.
Riku didn't speak. He didn't have to.
They reinforced the seal again. Not with stone.
With memory.
That night, in the war tent, he wrote a new page in his ledger. Not under "threats." Not under "folds."
A new tab:
Pale Things
He drew the shape of the breach. The posture of the creature.
And then, for the first time since his arrival on Day 0…
He drew a question mark.