The cargo airship Solace cut through the night sky like a silver scar. Beneath it stretched the vast darkness of the Southern Hemisphere empty oceans, scattered islands, and an unbroken horizon of cold. For Noah Veihend, this was the first time in years he had left Europe, and the silence of the upper atmosphere felt almost sacred.
He sat near the ship's observation window, watching the curvature of the Earth. Neon storms flickered over distant cities, glowing like infected wounds on the planet's skin. In the aisles, traders and mercenaries whispered deals about black-market tech, cryo-drugs, and human gene contracts. Few spoke openly. Travel toward Antarctica had become nearly impossible since the Southern Cordon was declared restricted territory by the Global Union, citing magnetic instability and "biohazard anomalies." But there were still people like Noah willing to risk the crossing.
He carried no weapons, only a reinforced thermal pack containing the printed journal from Project Helix, a portable sensor tablet, and a compact recorder. He had memorized the coordinates from the file latitude 78° S, longitude 93° E somewhere near the ancient Vostochnaya Trench.
Hours passed. The hum of the turbines grew steadier. Outside, the color of the clouds shifted from black to iron-grey. Dawn approached.
Captain Li, a middle-aged woman with eyes as sharp as surgical steel, stopped beside him.
"You're the scholar, right?" she asked in a tone that carried both curiosity and warning.
"I was," Noah said. "Now I'm just looking for something lost."
She studied him for a moment, then nodded. "You won't find anything south of sixty degrees. Nothing but wind and ghosts. The last expedition that tried to go further vanished two years ago. Only fragments of their signal reached us. Said something about a pulse… like the ground itself was alive."
"I know the risks," Noah replied quietly. "But what they found might explain more than what they lost."
Li smirked. "Everyone on this ship is running from something. Maybe you're running toward it." Then she walked away.
By midday, they reached the southern checkpoint—an enormous floating station known as Novaterra-9. Its steel structure groaned under gusts of polar wind. Massive turbines kept it suspended above the ice, drawing geothermal energy from vents below. Soldiers in frost armor patrolled the docks. Scanners flashed over every passenger, searching for contraband or religious artifacts objects banned under the Secular Purity Act.
Noah's heart thumped when the guard inspected his pack. The printed pages of the journal fragile, yellowed paper were now illegal under data preservation law. The guard flipped through them carelessly, frowned, then tossed them back. "Obsolete junk," he muttered. Noah exhaled softly.
He spent the next few hours in the station's transit dome, studying navigation maps. Most of Antarctica had transformed over the last century. What once was endless ice had fractured into geothermal valleys, black rock ridges, and bioluminescent moss plains that glowed faintly in the dark. Satellite imagery showed massive root-like structures spreading under the Vostochnaya Trench geological anomalies that matched descriptions from the Helix journal.
That night, the ship refueled and continued south. Through the reinforced glass, Noah saw a faint green shimmer on the horizon the Aurora Australis. For a moment, he thought of Eva and Mari again. They would have loved this, he thought. Then came guilt, and the quiet ache of memory.
Three days later, they crossed the 70th parallel. Communication signals became erratic. The compass readings twisted unpredictably, as if space itself bent under unseen pressure. Captain Li ordered half the systems shut down to prevent overload.
On the fourth night, a storm struck. Lightning without thunder flashed across the sky silent and blue, illuminating waves of frozen mist. Passengers panicked as the ship buckled. Through the chaos, Noah saw something below the clouds: a faint vertical shape, glowing faintly green, like a pillar of living light reaching upward from the Earth.
He gripped the window. "The tree," he whispered.
The ship's engines sputtered. Alarms blared. Within minutes, Solace began to descend uncontrollably. Li's voice shouted through the comms: "Impact in two minutes! Brace for emergency landing!"
Metal screamed as the ship tore through the fog. Below them was not ice but a vast plain of glass-like surface, black and smooth, reflecting the aurora above. The crash was brutal. The hull split open. Debris scattered across the frozen expanse.
Noah's ears rang as he crawled from the wreckage. The wind howled like a living thing. Bodies lay half-buried in frost. He pulled his pack close, coughing, his breath crystallizing instantly. Around him, the silence was total an oppressive stillness broken only by the faint hum beneath his boots, as if the ground itself vibrated.
When he looked up, he saw it clearly for the first time.
In the distance stood the primordial tree. It wasn't a tree in the ordinary sense it was a colossal, semi-organic structure of black and silver fibers, twisting upward beyond sight. Faint veins of light pulsed along its trunk, like blood moving through metal. The aurora above bent around it, drawn inward as though the sky itself worshipped it.
His instruments flickered, useless. The magnetic field here was unstable yet he felt a strange calm. The data in the Helix journal was true. The myth was not entirely myth.
He whispered to the wind, half in awe, half in prayer:
"Elyon… if you still exist, let me understand what this means."
But no answer came only the low, rhythmic vibration of the ground, deep and ancient, like the heartbeat of the Earth itself.
Noah pulled his coat tight and began walking toward the towering silhouette. Behind him, the wreck of the Solace burned quietly, its fire swallowed by the endless cold. Ahead of him, the world seemed to breathe.
The journey to the truth had truly begun.