The corridor beneath the cradle was narrower than the one before, almost claustrophobically so—its walls drawn tighter by rootlike growths that seemed to flinch away from light. Riku walked in front again, fingers still wrapped around the notched staff, now secured across his back. The air had changed. Warmer. Wetter. It tasted faintly of copper and something older than blood.
Sira knelt at intervals to check for tremors. "Still pulsing," she muttered. "Heartbeat... slow. Intentional."
Kael, eyes on his device, frowned. "The signal I traced earlier is accelerating. If it's alive—whatever 'alive' means here—it knows we're approaching."
Riku said nothing. He didn't need to. He felt it.
It wasn't just a pressure or instinct. Something in the cradle had touched him when he took the staff—an inheritance without words. The same way heat seeps into skin after touching fire. You don't realize you've been changed until the burn sets in.
The tunnel opened suddenly.
They stepped into a cavern unlike any they'd seen before.
It wasn't carved, and it wasn't grown. It was grown then carved—a space born of something that had once lived and then remembered shape. A dome nearly forty meters across, filled with stalks of translucent obsidian-vein glass, each arching upward like rib-bones trying to rebuild a god.
They shimmered faintly—no glow, just reflection. Their own movements shimmered back at them in hundreds of slender curves, like they were walking inside a memory trying to remember itself.
At the center of the chamber was a low basin, carved of pale graystone, inlaid with threadlike veins of rose-gold metal that pulsed rhythmically. Inside it was a second cradle—similar in structure, but whole. Empty.
Not forgotten.
Waiting.
Kael stepped cautiously toward it, his device flickering. "It's here. This is the source. Or… the anchor."
Sira circled wide, her eyes sharp. "No signs of motion. But the echo's layered. Too clean."
Riku moved forward alone.
He stopped at the edge of the basin. The cradle was simple—elegant. A hollow for a body. A ring around it, carved with slivers of an unknown script. The words shimmered faintly when he leaned close, but offered no translation.
He glanced toward Kael.
Kael approached slowly. "It's not language. It's behavior."
"What?"
"The script—if you can call it that—it changes slightly based on posture. Movement. It's reading input and projecting expectation."
Sira exhaled through her nose. "You're saying it's... predicting us?"
"Predicting you," Kael said, turning to Riku.
The glow across the ring brightened.
Riku took a breath and placed his palm at the foot of the cradle.
There was no reaction.
Then he laid the staff beside it.
The moment it touched the stone, the pulse intensified. Vein-glass stalks around the chamber shimmered once—synchronizing.
A hum began.
Soft. Faint. Like the whisper of wind through bone.
Then came the shift.
From the edges of the basin, small spindles of root-thread rose upward, curling together into the form of fingers—thirteen on each side—forming a ribcage of living wood above the empty cradle. It bent slightly, as if inviting weight.
Kael spoke quietly. "I think... it wants something placed there."
Riku looked at the staff, then the cradle.
"No," he said slowly. "It's not asking for an offering."
Sira cocked her head. "Then what?"
"It's recognizing one."
Riku removed a coil of cloth from his belt—folded leather strips laced with copper stitching. A keepsake. A map. One of the oldest items he carried from the early days at Blackridge. He'd crafted it when they first cleared the basin's southern ridge—used it to mark the first wind tunnels, the first geothermal veins. It was outdated now. But it had witnessed everything.
He placed it in the cradle.
The light flared.
Vein-glass stalks lit in sequence. One. Two. Four. Six. Twelve.
Then the glow narrowed into a beam—thin, like a laser without heat—and scanned the cloth.
A pulse struck his system.
[Object: Early Blackridge Mapping Pelt – Condition: Stable – Use: Historical Tracing][Observed Pattern Recognition Complete][Item Significance: Preserved Symbolic Scaffold][Effect: Qualitative Thread Re-integration Detected][Resulting Shift: Enhanced Structural Memory Integration – +38% tracking fidelity for all subterranean passages mapped henceforth]
Riku blinked once.
Sira tilted her head. "You just got... better directions?"
Kael looked stunned. "That map is now more accurate than anything I could generate manually."
Riku retrieved the cloth. It was warmer now. More solid in the hand.
The cradle collapsed back into the basin.
No explosion. No crescendo. Just completion.
But the hum never stopped.
And from deeper within the vein-glass chamber, a second sound began—low, harmonic. Like a choir of roots singing from somewhere below.
Sira was already adjusting her stance. "It's waking something else."
Kael held up his device. "Multiple faint signals below us now. Movement. Patterned."
Riku stood slowly.
He tucked the map away, slung the staff, and nodded once toward the tunnel that continued downward.
"We're not done."
And the hum—steady, patient, relentless—followed them as they walked forward into what remained below.