There were certain things Minjae never thought he would experience again—a rusty pull, a far-off scream that once rung through another universe's skies. Yet here he was, seated by himself in the empty company break room on a slow Thursday evening, drinking lukewarm green tea out of a paper cup. Something awakened deep inside of him.
It was a small thing. Barely perceptible.
The lounge was half-in-the-dark, the whir of the vending machine filling the void. A muted TV glowed in the corner, its soft light casting over vacant chairs. Its loop of headlines cut into each other: economic predictions, trade disputes, energy costs. Noise, the kind that people let flood over them while scrolling their phones.
But at the bottom of the screen, a crawl moved along. A few short words, lost in the sea of bigger stories:
*Remote archaeological site makes unexpected crystalline structure discoveries.*
The anchor continued without giving any report. The camera flashed to a fuzzy video feed: rock land, desert winds beating against tarps, dust filling the shot. Workers bent over jagged rocks where something looked peculiarly shiny.
To all of them, it was nothing. A fad, if that.
Minjae cocked his head, forehead furrowed.
The film wasn't good, but his eyes landed on an etching in the crystal face. Etchings. Sweeping curves crossing each other not like mad mineral growth, but like scaled impressions—too familiar. The memory came unwanted: ancient ruins blackened with firelight in Elandryss, covered in runes dragons once crossed.
It wasn't enough to decide. But it was enough to stop him, green tea still in his hand.
---
Hours later, alone in his apartment, Minjae pulled the video from all over the internet. Blurred re-posts. Blog clips. Local news reposts a couple of hours later swamped by celebrity blogs and political debate. He slowed down the frames, changing angles, attempting to pick up the flash of light along the crystalline ridges.
The artifact—or whatever it was—was gone from the site already. Official announcements claimed that some university lab was holding it in its custody, but no experts had been summoned. No publication. No white paper. Nothing, as though they had decided to inter it.
"Coincidence," he snarled. His voice was faint. "Even if it's not… there's no room in this world for the arcane."
But the air was thick, as if the room itself was in waiting, holding its breath.
---
His phone rang. A message from a research division coordinator flashed on the screen. Minjae was about to swipe it aside as another maintenance notification, but the title piqued his interest: *Archived Order Form – Query Flagged.*
He read it.
The attachment innocuous—a thousand-year-old requisition for copies of fake gemstones, purportedly sold to museums ten years ago. Innocuous, on the surface. A curiosity buried in red tape.
Something brought him up short.
The seller's name.
**Vaelmorran Holdings.**
Minjae blinked once, twice. His heart rate slowed.
That name didn't belong here.
He had employed it once, years ago, in a tutorial of a private-server he'd created to practice on. A token to himself, to the child who once soared as something more in Elandryss. "Vaelmorran"—a word he'd invented, constructed out of drakon-tongue sounds, and signifying *hidden crown.*
It had been a silent placeholder, a lingering bit of his own brain.
But here it was, rooted in a page of paper, signed and dated, stamped with the seal of a company dissolved no one would want to recall.
Not his. Not anymore.
His fingers hovered above the keys, uncertainty paralyzing him. Whoever had deposited that trail knew he would see it—or wanted to know who would respond.
Dragons did not take bait sightless.
---
He did not ask directly. Not yet. Instead, he started writing a innocuous petition in the name of one of his many shells—a third-party dummy corporation created to conduct mundane audits. The petition was framed as a standard performance review, routed through innocuous conduits, with no trace of him.
Each word on the form was accurate. Each blank filled to appear uninteresting.
Minjae leaned back once he had sent it, massaging his temples. He had discovered decades ago that silence was armor. To rush was to welcome fire. Wiser to let currents change and christen their own shape.
Discomfort remained, though. The name had been given too purposefully. Too specifically. A breath from another time sewn into the mechanisms of this one.
He closed his laptop with deliberate slowness.
Somewhere in the city, on Seojin's executive floors, two men lounged in a dark conference room. Monitors hummed quietly against the wall, their screens illuminated in faint light. Reports were strewn all over the table.
"No ID on the owner yet," one grunted, scrolling through a report. "Everything is layered, buried too deep."
"No signs at all?"
"Nothing worth taking up. If he's here, he's wrapped in silence.".
The second man tapped his finger on an audit summary, his movements slow, deliberate. "Then maybe we've been staring too long at the company itself."
"You mean—?"
"Outside the company. Outside the obvious."
The words hung between them, heavier than the silence that followed.
---
Back in his apartment, Minjae stood by the window, the city sprawled in neon haze below him. Raindrops scattered the light into fractured halos across the glass.
The world did not change. But down below, something had changed.
Not a rupture. Not yet.
A flicker.
A far-off heartbeat pounding inside of a lighthouse no one could recall constructing.
He spoke into the silence, near-whispering:
"It begins anew."