Miles away, the tremor rolled under Eldenmere like thunder trapped beneath the ground.
Windows rattled. Streetlights flickered. Dogs barked at nothing.
In the control tower of the small hydro plant on the lake, Thane Hollow lifted his head from a stack of diagnostic sheets. The monitors flashed warnings—power surge, magnetic distortion, seismic anomaly. He rubbed his temples, thinking it was another false alarm.
Then he saw the waveform on the central screen.
It wasn't random noise. It pulsed in perfect intervals. Like a heartbeat.
He frowned, zooming in. The frequency wasn't coming from the lake or the turbines. It was radiating from the forest beyond Saint Corvin's ruins.
"Not again," he muttered. He had recorded something similar six months earlier—a short-lived energy burst that no one in town believed. The pattern had haunted him since, whispering that Eldenmere was sitting on something older than fault lines.
Thane reached for his phone to call the university lab, but the signal vanished. Every monitor went dark. Static buzzed through the speakers, then a voice—soft, broken—murmured three words before the system died completely.
"He remembers you."
Thane froze. The sound wasn't from any transmission. It came from the speakers themselves, like the circuits were speaking.
He grabbed his jacket and ran outside. The rain had stopped. The air carried a charge that made his hair rise. Above the forest, lightning arced in complete silence, illuminating a column of pale mist rising straight into the clouds. At its base, the trees swayed outward as though pushed by a breath from underground.
Something was waking, and it wasn't finished yet.
---
Back beneath the church, the world had gone still again. Aira crouched beside the cracked stairwell, dust coating her hair and clothes. The air smelled faintly of roses, but underneath it was iron—fresh and sharp.
Her arm throbbed. The glow on her wrist had dimmed to a faint shimmer. She pressed her palm against the stone, trying to steady herself. The mark pulsed once more in time with the faint heartbeat echoing through the chamber.
She whispered, "Please stop," not sure whether she was talking to the mark or to the thing inside the coffin.
The lid shifted another fraction of an inch.
A thread of dark mist spilled out, curling like smoke but moving as if it had weight. It slid across the floor toward her boot, paused, then sank into the ground. The runes on the walls dimmed. The chains went silent.
Whatever force had awakened seemed—for the moment—to rest.
Aira forced herself up. Her knees shook, but she managed the first step up the stairs, then another. When she reached the door at the top, it opened easily. The storm outside had vanished, leaving only the smell of wet earth and the far-off rumble of the lake dam.
She didn't look back.
As she crossed the graveyard, she could still feel the heartbeat, faint but steady, echoing through the soles of her shoes. She knew that if she turned around, the church would look the same—ruined, quiet, harmless. But something beneath it was breathing again.
By the time she reached the road, the clouds had broken apart. A single star burned directly above Eldenmere, too bright, as if watching.
Somewhere below, in the dark chamber, the coffin gave a final shudder. The frost melted from its surface, and the pale hand withdrew.
The lid slid open a few more inches, revealing nothing inside but blackness deep enough to drown in. Then, faintly, the sound of a slow inhale filled the room.
The air moved. Dust lifted. A whisper followed—ancient, hoarse, almost human.
"After all this time."
And the heartbeat began again.
Eldenmere slept uneasily that night.
At 11:43 p.m., the town's power grid failed for exactly seven minutes. Every bulb, every streetlamp, every phone screen went black. Then, one by one, they flickered back to life. No one could explain it in the morning.
But some had seen things during the darkness—shapes moving in the mist, the shimmer of eyes that weren't human.
In the forest, birds burst from the trees in a single wave and vanished toward the lake. The wolves in the reserve stopped howling. Even the river slowed its rush, as though listening.
At the edge of town, a woman stood on the balcony of an old inn, a cigarette glowing between her fingers. Mira Corvan, substitute history teacher by day, witch by bloodline, stared toward Saint Corvin's ruins. Her pupils narrowed to thin slits as the column of light faded from the clouds.
She felt it in her bones—an ancient signature, unmistakable. A pulse that once ruled empires and burned heavens.
"He's back," she whispered, voice trembling between fear and awe.
The cigarette fell from her hand. Sparks died in the wet grass. She turned toward the mountains where the old ley lines converged, already planning what wards to rebuild and what names to forget. The world had just changed, though no one else knew it yet.
---
Beneath the church, dust settled over the open coffin. The mist inside coiled lazily, reshaping itself like smoke learning to breathe.
A single droplet of Aira's blood had fallen onto the coffin's edge. It slid inward, absorbed into the darkness.
The heartbeat steadied.
Then, from within the black, two faint lights opened like eyes remembering the shape of the world. Their glow painted the chamber walls in soft silver. The runes flared one last time, as if in greeting.
Outside, the church bell—silent for a hundred years—rang once.
Its sound echoed down the valley, across the river, through every sleeping street of Eldenmere.
Aira, already home and shaking beneath her blankets, woke with a gasp. The mark on her wrist pulsed again.
Far below her feet, something smiled in the dark.
And the first night of the new age began.