The helicopter cut through the sky like a blade.
The city fell away behind us, a sprawl of towers and smoke. Ahead stretched the wilderness — jagged mountains, dense forests, rivers coiled like silver snakes. Clouds clung to the peaks, spilling mist into the valleys below. It was raw, untamed land, the kind my father had always dismissed as worthless.
Beside me, Elara leaned forward in her seat, headset crackling as she spoke over the roar of the rotors. "We need a site with density. Granite, basalt, anything that won't collapse once we start carving. Depth is essential. No one can know what we're doing, not even the contractors."
Marcus sat across from us, arms crossed, sunglasses hiding his eyes. "And how exactly do you keep an excavation this size secret?"
"Disguise," Elara said without hesitation. "Above ground, it's an office tower. Maybe two. People see what they expect to see. No one questions steel and glass anymore."
She glanced at me. "But beneath? That's where the real work begins."
Hours later, the helicopter dropped us onto a ridge above a vast valley. Pines stretched in every direction, dark and endless. Snow capped the mountains, their cliffs cutting into the sky like teeth. The air was sharp, clean, almost too pure to breathe.
I stood at the edge of the ridge, staring down into the wilderness. The forest swayed in the wind, alive with unseen movements. Somewhere far below, a wolf howled, its voice carrying across the valley like a promise.
"This," Elara said, stepping up beside me, "is where it could live."
Her eyes swept across the ridges, calculating. "Dense rock. Natural cover. Minimal human activity. Supply lines could be hidden in the valleys. With the right excavation, we could hollow this mountain into something vast."
She crouched, scooping a handful of soil, rubbing it between her fingers. "The earth is strong here. It'll hold."
Marcus joined us, scanning the treeline. "And how long before someone notices heavy equipment tearing into this place? Loggers? Hikers? Satellites?"
"Then we build what they expect to see," Elara repeated. "Above ground, nothing more than corporate expansion. A data vault. A communications hub. People will invent their own stories. And while they look at the surface…" She pointed down into the valley. "…we'll be building a world below."
The survey teams arrived within weeks, flown in under false pretenses. Contracts were signed, NDAs thick as novels. Marcus handpicked every worker, watching them like a hawk, ready to cut anyone who asked too many questions.
Elara worked like a commander, shouting over the roar of machinery, directing excavators and drills with ruthless precision. Her boots crunched across the frost, her clipboard never leaving her hand.
The first drills bit into the mountain, steel teeth gnawing through stone. The sound echoed through the valley, thunderous and alien. Dust billowed into the air, coating everything in gray.
And then, one morning, the mountain gave way.
A wall of rock crumbled beneath the drills, collapsing into rubble. Beyond it stretched a cavern vast and silent, untouched for centuries.
We stepped inside together, floodlights chasing away the dark. The ceiling arched high above, hung with stalactites dripping into black pools. The air was damp, cool, heavy with the weight of time.
Elara's breath caught. "It's perfect."
Her voice echoed, bouncing through the cavern. She spun slowly, eyes wide, taking it in. "Stable temperature. Natural acoustics. Stone density is ideal. This chamber alone could house an entire ecosystem."
Even Marcus, stoic as ever, looked unsettled — as if we had stumbled into a cathedral, a place meant for something older, something greater than us.
And maybe we had.
I laid my hand against the cold stone wall. My skin tingled. For a moment, it felt alive.
This is it, I thought. The heart. The first root of the sanctuary below.
Weeks blurred into a rhythm of dust and thunder.
Excavators chewed deeper into the mountain, carving tunnels, hollowing chambers. Support beams rose like skeletal ribs. Concrete flowed into molds, hardening into walls. The cavern transformed from natural wonder to engineered possibility.
At dawn, I walked the ridges above, boots crunching through frost. The forest stretched endless around me, birds wheeling above, rivers cutting silver veins through the green. I breathed the air, sharp and clean, and tried to imagine wolves running through artificial forests, eagles soaring through skylit caverns, whales gliding in tanks deeper than submarines dared to go.
One evening, as the sun bled red across the horizon, Marcus joined me. He lit a cigarette, the ember glowing against the dark.
"You really think you can pull this off?" he asked.
"I have to."
He took a drag, smoke curling into the air. "Your father would've called this madness."
I almost smiled. "Good."
The first stone was officially broken months later. A small ceremony, though no one dared call it that.
Workers lined the tunnel mouth, machines humming behind them. Elara handed me the detonator, her face smudged with dust, her eyes gleaming with something I had never seen in her before: belief.
"Do it," she said.
I pressed the button.
The dynamite roared, the mountain shuddered, stone exploded into dust. The tunnel stretched forward, deeper than it had ever gone.
When the echoes faded, silence returned — deep, heavy, reverent.
Elara turned to me. "The sanctuary is born."
That night, I stood alone in the tunnel, the darkness swallowing me whole. I laid my hand on the rough stone, whispering into it, my voice carrying through the cavern.
"This is where it begins."
And in that silence, I swore an oath:
That every creature I could save would find safety here.
That no poacher, no trafficker, no shadow of my father would undo what I was building.
That this place would be alive.
Eternal.
The sanctuary below.