Chapter 122: Echoes and Dust
The wind howled across the Andean ridge, not like a song, but like a warning.
Thin air scraped the cliffs, dragging flurries of snow and whispers of forgotten languages across the jagged stone.
Philip stood alone atop a desolate plateau, the third site in five days.
Above him, the sky shimmered with veins of flickering aurora mana layers bleeding from the peaks, whispering across the leyline fractures below. Some would have called it beautiful. But to Philip, it felt sterile.
He reached into the ather.
Nothing.
Not even a hum.
The gem on his forehead remained dull, unreactive. His core a pool of swirling ather remained still, like a predator asleep.
He exhaled.
"The third dead end," he murmured.
The first two locations an ancient bone harp sealed inside a mountain crypt in Nepal, and a crystalline urn floating in stasis above the ruins of Thebes had been impressive in scale and craftsmanship. But neither had been what he sought. Both resonated with divine origin, yes. But not Emperor origin.
The difference was precise.
The divine left signatures like perfume lingering, loud, easy to trace.
The Emperor's work left imprints law shifting, silent echoes that bent time and space.
Philip crouched beside a narrow fissure near the edge of the plateau, peering down into it. The relic here was supposed to be buried deep beneath the stone. What remained now was a half shattered obsidian idol carved with ancient Andean glyphs of famine and decay.
He reached into it with a thread of mana.
Cold.
Hollow.
Just another fossil.
He stood and glanced at the projection chip Athena had given him. The holographic map flickered to life again, floating midair beside his head. It showed red, yellow, and blue markers scattered across continents. Twenty one total. Six were behind him. Of those, two had sparked minor interest, but none had stirred the gem in his head.
Philip's fingers hovered over the next blinking red coordinate.
Northern Morocco.
He frowned.
Athena had flagged it as "unusual": a bonded host a child whose signature was unstable and too deeply fused for removal. The relic embedded within her wasn't exhibiting expansion or corruption. If anything, it had gone quiet… or dormant.
Philip hesitated for only a second.
Then tore space like paper.
Reality cracked and folded.
When it unfolded, he was standing at the edge of a dry valley just outside Ouarzazate. The air was sharp and clean, tinged with sand and silence. Ancient stone ruins poked from the earth like the teeth of buried gods. Time had half swallowed them in windblown dust.
Beyond the ruins, an oasis shimmered still, mirror like protected by a domed field of nearly invisible wards, stacked like layers of glass. They weren't aggressive. Just cautious. Defensive magic made by someone desperate, but not malicious.
Philip stepped through them. The grid flickered faintly as it recognized his ather.
Inside, a girl sat at the center of a crumbling ring of monoliths. Eleven, maybe twelve years old. Brown skin kissed by sun. Hair braided in simple, practiced rows. Her eyes glowed faintly not with divine fire or awakened arrogance, but something calmer. More ancient.
Above her heart floated a splinter of obsidian. Thin. Perfectly shaped.
It pulsed slowly, like the heart of something that refused to die.
Philip stilled.
This wasn't just an artifact.
It was a fragment of divinity Death aligned, possibly pre divine in structure.
But it wasn't leaking. "Are you here to take it?" the girl asked quietly, eyes still glowing.
Philip crouched. "No."
She studied him. "They all want it."
"I don't."
"It's mine now."
"I can see that," he replied.
He looked closer not with eyes, but with his evolved sight, The shard was not converting her.
It was feeding her.
Her soul had grown thick with layered echoes. The fragment wasn't a curse it was a seal. She was keeping something buried. Not intentionally. She had likely been chosen because she could bear it. Her body and spirit were changing slowly shifting to match whatever it was that lay inside the relic.
Philip reached for the aura behind the stone
And then, it recognized him.
Only for a second.
A flicker.
A tired, ancient eye cracking open in the void, peering through the girl's heart watching him.
He stood. "Stay hidden," he said. "Stay quiet. If anyone comes for it run."
The girl nodded once. "I will."
Philip hesitated. There was something in her steel beneath her calm. Something unbreakable.
He walked away.
He could have helped her but his instinct told him she doesn't need his help
He turned away, but the artifact pulsed once acknowledging him. Like a tired eye cracking open, then shutting again.
That night, as Philip sat beneath the stars in a desert outpost outside Ouarzazate, he reviewed the other sites. Of the six he'd already checked, none anything close to viable resonance.
But neither had matched.
And worse… the ather in his chest had remained still. Until now.
He opened a fresh page in his log and scribbled a note:
"Morocco: Not Emperor Origin. Possibly Gods fragment.
Then he turned to the remaining list.