Verdant Expanse, Outpost Zeran – One Day Later
The morning haze settled over Zeran like a fog of static. Elder Ion stood by the warped ridge, marking signal peaks with chalk on pieces of bent copper he'd scavenged from the vines. Luma paced nearby, watching the way the trees bent ever-so-slightly toward the center of the hill.
"This entire place is a resonant chamber," Ion muttered. "A signal amplifier disguised as a village."
"Or grown into one," Luma added, "like the plants aren't mutating randomly… they're obeying."
Ion raised a brow.
"Obeying what?" he asked.
Before she could answer, a high-pitched whoop echoed from the workshop near the town's edge — a cluttered, lopsided shack bursting with gears, toolboxes, and sparking wire nets.
"Get down!" a voice shrieked.
A moment later, something exploded — not violently, but with a hiss and a pop like a steam kettle being kicked.
Then came laughter.
Inside the workshop, smoke curled in the air and a young girl stood grinning amidst the chaos.
She wore a patchy coat stitched with LED thread and had one mechanical lens clipped to her right eye, which magnified and refocused with every blink. Her arms were smeared with graphite, and her dark curls were tied up in a knot held by a wrench.
"Oh," she said, spotting them in the doorway. "You're not the Spire courier."
"No," Luma said, coughing lightly. "Thankfully."
The girl gave a mock bow. "Name's Juno. I fix things that shouldn't be broken and break things that shouldn't be fixed."
"Sounds… productive," Ion said dryly.
"I like her," Luma whispered.
Juno rolled her eyes and waved them in. "You're the ones sniffing around the signal, right? Good. I've been tracking it too."
She kicked over a stool, revealing a flat table covered in scavenged tech: radio receivers, a broken Courier Node, even a dismantled Interference Wand — a rare device that normally stayed locked inside Spire labs.
Luma's jaw dropped. "Where did you get that?"
"Some idiot courier left it behind. Took me a week to unlock the casing. Almost melted my fingers." She beamed. "Worth it."
Ion crossed his arms. "You're tampering with classified Spire tech. You could be exiled for that."
Juno smirked. "What, you gonna exile me from the world that's already crumbling?"
A beat of silence.
Then Ion nodded. "Fair."
Juno pulled up a projection screen — an old glass panel she powered with a humming generator crank.
Static formed, then smoothed into waveforms — erratic but rhythmic, like a digital heartbeat. "This is from last night," she said. "Your vine hill? It's broadcasting at decaying harmonic intervals — basically, it sings in a broken language. But look at this."
She flipped the display. A topographic map appeared with signals overlayed in glowing orange.
Luma squinted. "That's not random."
"Nope," Juno said. "That's directional routing. Like a map — the pulses are bouncing between nodes. I found three more signal sources outside the village, forming a triangle."
"A triangulation pattern," Ion muttered. "To focus a point in the center."
"Yeah," Juno said. "Only one problem."
She zoomed in on the center.
"There's nothing there. Just dead rock and an old well."
Luma stared. "Have you scanned the well?"
"I tried," Juno said. "Signal's too scrambled. But it feels like something's down there. Like…" She hesitated. "Like it's listening."
They made the trip that afternoon.
The well stood at the edge of a dry field, surrounded by yellow grass. Its stones were cracked, the rope frayed, but the crank still turned.
Juno tossed a sensor pod down.
The screen she carried with her began flashing — then froze. A single word displayed in flickering text.
"AWAKENING."
Luma's skin prickled. Ion muttered a word in a language she didn't recognize.
Then came the sound.
Not loud.
Just there.
A hum from deep underground — layered, unnatural, almost… mechanical. Luma staggered slightly, grabbing the stone edge of the well.
"I know this pattern," she whispered.
Ion's head snapped toward her.
"It's the same as the Phase Inverter," she said. "Same frequency traces. But slower. Older."
Juno looked between them. "What's a Phase Inverter?"
"A weapon," Ion said. "One that tears stability apart by interfering with matter's resonance. But this…"
He tapped the well stone.
"This precedes it."
That night, Luma, Ion, and Juno sat around the workshop table, lit by flickering generator light. The signal had gone quiet, but only for now.
"We need to go down there," Juno said. "Into the well."
"It could be a trap," Ion warned.
"It could be the truth," Luma countered.
Juno's eyes sparkled. "Either way… sounds like fun."