The wind howled across the mountain pass, but there was something unsettling about the quiet that lurked beneath it.
Micah hunched down by a rocky ledge, keeping one hand pressed against the frost-covered stone for balance.
The view from here was incredible—snow-dusted peaks stretching everywhere, valleys lost in thick clouds, and way off to the southeast, that nasty, pale smudge that meant Omniraith land. Even from this far away, just seeing it made his skin crawl.
He adjusted his pack, flipping open the cover that hid his sensor equipment. The thin metal interface caught the light through a coating of snow. Everything looked normal. No warnings flashing.
But something about the readings just didn't sit right with him.
He heard boots crunching through snow behind him. Lio Venn dropped down next to him, his breath coming out in sharp white puffs. "Everything's holding steady," he muttered, already checking the numbers on his handheld device. "Temperature's fine, no weird signals."
Micah didn't say anything right away. He kept staring at the panel—watching that steady green light pulse—and tried to feel what the numbers weren't telling him.
Something was definitely wrong.
He tapped the sensor again. "Check out this delay pattern," he said quietly.
Lio squinted at it, leaning closer. "The delay's barely anything. Less than a millisecond."
"Yeah, but yesterday it was perfect," Micah said. "Clean as a whistle. Now there's this... drag to it."
Lio paused, then ran the calibration again. The numbers blinked, settled back down—but they still weren't quite right.
There was this tiny glitch hanging around the edge of the scan, like a shadow you could barely make out.
"Maybe it's just the cold messing with things," Lio suggested, though he didn't sound convinced. "Or the equipment's getting old. This stuff's been around forever."
"No," Micah said. "Something's watching."
Lio looked up at him. "What do you mean?"
Micah shook his head. "Just got a feeling about it."
He hated putting it like that—the Ashari were all about facts and evidence, not gut instincts.
But he'd been doing this work for years, reading patterns and working in the field, and his instincts rarely steered him wrong.
Lio let out a long breath. "We'll make a note of it for the tech guys."
Micah nodded, sealed up the panel, and got to his feet. The wind grabbed his coat, whipping the edges around his legs as he looked out over the landscape again.
The mountains sat perfectly still. Nothing moving anywhere. No obvious danger. Just the bone-deep cold and that heavy silence under all the noise.
But the silence felt thick somehow. Weighted. Like something had just stopped talking... or was getting ready to start.
They began heading down, their boots finding a steady rhythm on the path that only Ashari patrols ever used. The snow had been light when they'd climbed up, but now it was coming down harder—muffling their steps, dampening every sound around them.
Micah glanced back once.
The ridge looked empty.
But there was something about how the wind moved around those rocks that made his stomach knot up. Like they'd been watched the whole time—and whoever was doing it didn't need to leave tracks to follow them.
The mountain swallowed them whole as they crossed inside.
One second they were dealing with wind and stone and endless sky—the next, they heard the soft hiss of filtered air and the quiet mechanical hum of hidden doors sliding shut.
Inside Elora, everything was shadows and gleaming surfaces.
The outer hallways ran deep into the mountain's core, carved with obsessive attention to detail.
You could hear pipes humming faintly behind the walls, carrying heat and power like blood through veins.
Overhead, light flowed through thin crystal channels, pulling the last rays of sunlight from the peaks down into the darkness.
Micah pulled back his hood, his breath still fogging in the processed air. The silence here was completely different—clean, sterile, artificial. You couldn't hear the wind anymore. Just your own heartbeat echoing back at you.
Lio stepped in behind him, shaking snow off his gear. "It's always weird how fast the air changes. Like stepping from one set of lungs into another."
A guard emerged from a hidden alcove up ahead—fully armored, helmet on, wearing the orange markings of Elora's Solar Engineering Corps.
His visor glowed with scanner light, automatically checking them both out.
"You're running late," the guard said, his voice tinny through the mask.
Micah raised an eyebrow. "Actually, we're early. The sun hasn't even dropped behind Heartspire yet."
"Council doesn't care what time you think it is," the guy shot back. "They're meeting right now. Head straight to the core level. Don't stop anywhere."
Lio blinked. "What's the rush?"
The guard hesitated—just for a split second, but long enough to matter.
"High-priority briefing. A Myrvane messenger showed up less than an hour ago. Says the Core Nexus is... changing."
Micah went completely still.
Something cold wrapped itself around his chest and squeezed tight.
The Core Nexus wasn't something people talked about casually. Not in public. Hell, not even in strategy meetings.
It was one of those things that lived right on the border between fact and legend—real, absolutely, but so buried and so dangerous that even the Ashari barely mentioned it out loud.
He caught Lio's eye. The younger man looked just as rattled as he felt.
Micah exhaled slowly and nodded. "We're moving."
They walked past the guard and deeper into Elora, their footsteps echoing in the hollow quiet. The mountain city spread out around them in careful layers—levels stacked like bones in a spine.
Every hallway had a reason for being there.
Every turn was planned out.
Nothing in Elora was just for show.
Even the patterns etched into the metal walls served a purpose—working circuit paths that carried light and power while displaying Ashari symbols that whispered their silent mantras.
Efficiency is love. Risk is waste. The mountain breathes because we keep it running.
They passed the inner transport hubs and decided to walk down instead.
The main elevator shafts would be jammed with Council staff and logistics people by now. Walking gave them time to think—or at least try to.
Micah's brain wouldn't stay quiet.
The Core Nexus is moving.
He remembered learning about it during strategy classes—some ancient network of buried systems, left over from before the war started.
People said the Omniraith didn't actually build it.
They just woke it up.
That all their power came from plugging into something much older, much deeper. The planet's command center, sleeping under the ground.
And now it was stirring?
He really didn't like where that thought was heading.
As they got closer to the third level, the corridor lights dimmed a bit, shifting from white to a colder blue.
The deeper you went in Elora, the more the whole city seemed to change mood—not just how it looked, but how it felt. Up top, the air seemed practical, normal, even optimistic.
Down here, everything was about war.
The council's secure level loomed ahead, protected by two more guards in full powered armor. One of them opened the inner door without saying a word.
Inside, the meeting was still coming together—advisors talking in low voices, tactical screens flickering, holographic maps updating with fresh information.
But you could feel the tension like a living thing in the room.
On the main display, a pulsing red grid was slowly spreading across a world map, growing outward from a single point at the center.
Micah stared at it.
The Core Nexus was waking up.
And whatever it had in mind...
It was on its way.
The Council needs you two to go to Sylvalen," the officer said, voice tight. "The Thornkin need to hear this. Before it's too late."
They accepted the mission without hesitation and set out immediately for Sylvalen Forest.
Meanwhile, on the other part of the mountain.
The wind screamed overhead. Below, buried just under that frost-covered rock, something was listening.
Still as death. Hidden. Waiting.
It didn't blink. It didn't breathe. It didn't have to.
Its optical sensors tracked two figures making their way down the pass—one taller and weathered; the other moving with more precision.
Both carrying Ashari equipment. One of them activated some kind of device near the cliff. The pulse was weak, but it was enough. Enough to trigger old lines of code buried in the drone's brain.
> Signal detected
> Security bypassed.
> Location recorded.
Information flowed silently into a buried relay station under the ice, where it would get passed down—way, way down—to the Core.
Above, the two figures kept moving, completely unaware. Their voices got lost in the wind. One of them stopped for a moment, eyes narrowing—like he sensed something. But there wasn't anything to see.
Nothing... not yet, anyway.
> Visual profile captured.
> Heat signature mapped.
> Continued surveillance authorized.
> ...
> Standing by for orders.
The machine started pulling back, disappearing bit by bit into the rock around it.
Not shutting down.
Just hiding.
The wind howled overhead, covering its last trace.
And the watcher kept waiting.