The silence was worse than the scream.
Elara Voss stood frozen in the dark, one hand outstretched, the other gripping the dead flashlight like a lifeline. Her breath fogged the air—ice cold despite the depth of the pit. The faint scent of earth and something metallic filled her lungs. No sound, no movement, no Lukas.
She forced her body forward. One step. Then another.
Her fingers scraped the wall—rough, ancient stone beneath her gloves. She followed it, blind, groping toward the vault's entrance. A few more steps, then—
Light.
A flicker, barely perceptible. The tablet Lukas had found lay nearby, glowing faintly with dull red veins that pulsed like a dying heartbeat. The symbols on it—those impossible, shifting runes—seemed to rearrange every time she blinked.
She knelt down, reached for it… then stopped.
A smear of blood trailed beside the tablet.
"Lukas," she whispered. "This isn't funny."
No reply. Only the vault breathing around her, as if the stone itself were alive.
She picked up the tablet. The moment her fingers touched it, a wave of dizziness slammed into her like a physical blow. In her mind—no, deeper than her mind—a single word echoed:
> "He is not gone."
She fell backward, gasping.
A whisper curled into her ear from behind. So close. Too close.
"Elara…"
She spun, but no one was there.
She fled.
---
Back at the campsite, everything was wrong.
The tents had been torn open from the inside. Equipment was scattered, the generator sparking erratically. Her laptop screen was cracked in a spiderweb pattern—symbols etched into the glass that hadn't been there before.
But worse than all of it—the others were gone. Every member of her team. No footprints, no notes. Just silence. And that smell again.
Metallic. Like blood… and rusted iron.
Her phone had no signal. The sky was already dimming, the forest swallowing the light far too quickly for the hour.
She looked back toward the excavation site.
The vault was no longer visible.
Not just hidden—gone. Buried, sealed, as if it had never been there at all.
---
Elara sat inside her tent, tablet in hand, her flashlight's battery draining fast. Her journal lay open beside her, pages filled with scribbles she didn't remember writing. Circles. Symbols. Names.
One name underlined again and again:
Kenji Watanabe
Kyoto University – Folklore Department
She had never heard of him.
And yet… she knew she had to find him.
The whisper in her mind was growing louder.