The cave didn't smell of bat droppings or damp stone.
It smelled like memory.
Not the kind you carry in photographs or diaries, but the older kind — the kind that clings to walls, seeps into bones, lingers in silence like the echo of a name you can't quite place.
I ran my fingers along the rock, the glove catching slightly on a groove. My headlamp flickered once — just a tremor in the beam — but I froze anyway. I've learned to trust flickers. In my line of work, they're often the first sign that something doesn't want to be found.
This place wasn't on any map. Not the official ones, anyway. Just a footnote in a Ming-era survey: "Ruins above the Cloud Divide — abandoned after the Year of the Weeping Bell." Superstitious nonsense, most would say. But I've spent enough time in forgotten corners of China to know that superstition is often history wearing a mask.
The chamber was small, circular, its walls painted in faded mineral pigments — cinnabar red, malachite green, ground bone white. The images were fragmented, worn by time, but one motif repeated: a dragon and phoenix entwined, not in harmony, but in struggle. The dragon's body coiled with an unnatural number of joints — nine, to be exact. An old Daoist symbol. Forbidden after the fall of the Ziyan Sect.
I crouched, pulling off my glove. The stone was cold, but not inert. There was a hum beneath the surface, so faint I might have imagined it. Or felt it in my teeth.
That's when I saw the inscription beneath the central mural.
Three characters, carved deep:
忘则崩
"To forget is to collapse."
I exhaled. My breath didn't fog. Strange, in this cold.
I reached out. Not to touch the words — I knew better — but to trace the edge of the symbol. Just a light pass, like a scholar verifying a rubbings.
The moment my fingertip met the groove, the air changed.
It wasn't a sound. It was a pull, deep in the gut, like falling through the floor of a dream. My headlamp died. Not flickered — died. And yet, the room didn't go dark.
It filled with light — a dull, pulsing glow, as if the mountain itself had begun to breathe.
I was no longer crouched. I was standing on a ridge, wind tearing at my clothes. The sky was wrong — bruised purple, streaked with veins of crimson, like a wound in the heavens. Below, a temple burned with fire that didn't burn. The flames were black, slow, crawling up the wooden beams like oil. No smoke. No crackle. Just silence.
Figures in white robes formed a circle. One held a jade disc above his head — the same symbol from the cave, glowing faintly. They were chanting, but I couldn't hear the words. I felt them — a vibration in my chest, a pressure behind the eyes.
Then the sky split.
Something fell. Not a bird. Not a comet. A man — or the shape of one — wrapped in ash and sorrow. His face was turned toward the heavens, mouth open in a silent cry.
And then, clear as a bell:
"I only wanted to save her."
Pain lanced through my skull. I gasped, stumbling back — no, into — the cave. My back hit the wall. My headlamp sputtered back to life.
I was alone.
My glove was back on. My notebook was in my hand, though I didn't remember picking it up.
On the open page, written in my own handwriting — but not by my conscious hand — were three words:
He knows you're here.
I closed the notebook slowly. My fingers were steady. My breath, even.
But deep in my chest, something had shifted.
Like a door, long sealed, had cracked open.
And somewhere beneath the mountain, something ancient
inhaled.