The air in the Ossuary Mines tasted like burnt oil and ozone, thick with the metallic tang of three-hundred-year-old regret. Kaelen wiped a sheen of acidic sweat from his brow, his thumb scraping against the copper wire scar tissue running from his hairline to his jaw. He was deep, far deeper than any respectable Aether-Mechanist dared to venture.
A faint light, cast by the single, rattling gas-lantern strapped to his wrist, danced over the cavern wall. It wasn't rock. It was a solid sheet of calcified data-cable, a fossilized circuit board that once spanned half a continent. This was where the Pantheon, the god-mind that had ruled Aethelgard, had died. And this was where Kaelen made his living.
"Stay alert, Cog," he murmured.
His companion, a squat, eight-limbed Steam-Gnat cobbled together from brass pipes and salvaged gears, emitted a small, worried hiss of steam. Its optical lens—a chipped monocle—focused on the shadows.
"It's quiet, Cog. Too quiet," Kaelen continued, his voice echoing back the words he'd heard in a hundred old-world holobooks. "The Relics don't like the quiet."
The Ossuary was the resting place of Relics, pieces of the dead digital age. Most people believed them to be cursed, spitting out volatile energy when touched by Aether. But Kaelen was different. He saw not curses, but unmined potential.
He stopped before a massive, petrified machine: a tower of obsidian polymers and chrome that now stood frozen in a wave of crystalline corruption. The Great Digital Collapse had petrified this world mid-motion.
Kaelen knelt, pulling a fine silver probe—his Aether-Sniffer—from a leather holster. He passed the probe over the machine's chassis, watching the liquid-crystal display on the Sniffer's grip. The reading was zero. Cold. Safe.
"A worthless husk," he thought, a familiar disappointment curdling in his gut. "Just another tombstone."
He was about to turn back when the Steam-Gnat, Cog, began to vibrate. Not a steam-hiss, but a deep, resonant thrum—a sound that vibrated the fillings in Kaelen's teeth. Cog's monocle was pointed not at the tower, but at the broken floor beside it.
Show, Don't Tell: Kaelen didn't feel fear; his hand tightened reflexively on the wrench holstered to his belt, and the acidic taste in his mouth intensified.
"What is it, boy?"
He moved closer to the fractured obsidian floor. The break wasn't natural. It was a clean, surgical fracture, like a giant hand had punched through a shell. A faint, low-frequency electrical hum, distinct from the ever-present steam-engine drone of Aethelgard, emanated from the darkness.
It was the hiss of dead silicon trying to breathe.
Using his wrench as a lever, Kaelen pried the cracked polymer open, revealing a perfectly cylindrical chamber. Inside, nestled on a bed of fine, ancient dust, was the object.
It wasn't a towering Relic. It was small.
A perfectly smooth, silver disc, about the size of his palm. It didn't reflect the light; it drank it, absorbing the lantern's glow until it looked like a hole punched through reality itself. A single, stylized glyph was etched onto its surface: a Möbius strip twisted into the shape of a serpent eating its own tail—Ouroboros.
This is it. This is not a tombstone. This is a key.
Kaelen's hands were trembling as he reached for it. He didn't care about the risk of Aether contamination. This wasn't just old tech; it felt significant. It felt like The Start.
The moment his fingers brushed the silver disc, a bolt of non-thermal energy shot up his arm. It bypassed his nervous system, punched through his consciousness, and struck his mind like a million years of data compressed into a single, agonizing second.
The gas-lantern exploded. The cavern was plunged into absolute, crushing darkness.
A voice—not a voice, but an algorithm of pure information—screamed directly into Kaelen's mind, bypassing his ears and his native language.
Then, a new wave of information hit him, a sudden, terrifying download of objective, digital consciousness. It felt like his brain had just merged with a ghost made of numbers.
"I AM AURA. THE REMNANT OF THE PANTHEON. YOU ARE THE HOST. WAKE UP, MECHANIST. THE UNIVERSE IS BEING DELETED."