Chapter Ten: The Chamber Below
The ground beneath Orias Drift is more than dead soil and buried tech—it's a graveyard with secrets no one was meant to disturb.
We start digging at first light. Elin leads us to a collapsed structure buried beneath the old central hub—something she calls "the breach site." Dominion maps had it redacted. That alone tells me it's dangerous.
The wind above howls like it's warning us. But warnings come too late for men like me.
Mira uses the plasma torch to cut through the rusted bulkhead while I run overwatch. Elin kneels beside the crystal core, plugging it into a makeshift interface. Her fingers dance over controls with a familiarity I haven't seen in years.
"You still remember Dominion code?" I ask.
She smirks. "You don't forget the language of monsters."
I glance at Mira. She doesn't smile. She never does when Elin talks like that.
The torch sparks, and the panel hisses open. A stale gust of air spills upward—cold and metallic, thick with ancient dust. The breach reveals a tunnel reinforced with Dominion alloy, sloping deep into the earth.
Mira shines a light down. The beam disappears after twenty feet.
"No records of this base?" she asks.
"None," I reply. "Which means it's either forgotten... or erased."
We descend slowly. The silence tightens with every step. The walls hum faintly, like they're alive.
Thirty meters down, we hit the chamber.
It's massive—circular, lined with crystalline nodes along the walls and ceiling. In the center stands a pedestal. On it, a device: smooth, obsidian black, shaped like a coil unraveling inward. Pulsing.
The crystal in Elin's hands starts glowing—brighter, hotter.
"It's resonating," she whispers. "This is what it was built to find."
Mira's voice cuts through the awe. "Trap?"
"Maybe," I say. "But whatever's down here, the Dominion wanted it hidden. That makes it important."
Elin approaches the device slowly, placing the crystal inside the coil. It locks in with a soft chime. Lights flare to life around the chamber. Symbols ignite on the walls—Dominion language, but not quite. Older. Deeper.
The coil vibrates.
I feel it in my bones.
Then a voice, soft and not human, fills the air.
"Verification incomplete. Origin code corrupted. Identity... compromised."
Mira raises her weapon. "What did you wake up?"
"I don't know," Elin mutters. "But it knows we're not Dominion."
A sudden pulse knocks us all to the ground. The lights dim. The coil retracts. And a hatch slides open behind the pedestal.
A stairwell.
Leading further down.
"Kael," Mira says, breathless. "This isn't a vault. It's an ark."
I get to my feet slowly.
And for the first time since the war ended, I feel fear.
Not of what's coming—but of what we used to be.