Grethon announced the expedition with the hollow calm of a man who'd stopped bargaining with fate.
"There are structures beneath Graycross." His voice carried no ceremony, no fire—just the weight of inevitability. "Old ones. Pre-Shattering. The System's been studying them for weeks."
The chamber lights carved his face into sharp relief, shadows pooling in the hollows of his cheeks. Behind him, the others waited: Thex radiating nervous energy, Kael's arms crossed in skepticism, Vren a silent void that swallowed attention. The air felt stretched thin, taut as a tripwire.
Thex leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "What kind of 'old' are we talking? Valuable old, or kill-you-dead old?"
Grethon's eyes flicked toward him. His form flickered—a split-second distortion like signal interference. Kydris's chest tightened. The taste in his mouth shifted to bitter metal: fear laced with resignation, the flavor of watching someone die in slow motion.
"Both," Grethon said. "There's knowledge down there. And something else. A tool—ancient, dormant. The System's been tracking its resonance signature. Three days ago, it started screaming."
He moved to the table where a map lay spread across warped steel. His hand trembled as he pointed, fingers half-translucent in the dim light. "The expedition's dangerous. Your survival probability sits around thirty percent. Maybe less."
Kael's jaw tightened, his emotional signature rippling with doubt Kydris could taste like spoiled citrus. "You're asking us to descend into Pre-Shattering ruins? That's not an expedition, that's a death sentence."
"Not asking," Grethon corrected, steady despite the way his edges kept blurring. "Kydris needs to reach what's waiting. The rest of you provide support, grounding, witness." He paused. "And if things go wrong, you get him out."
Thex's brightness flared despite the grim context. "Then count me in."
Kael hesitated, then exhaled sharply. "My curiosity's always been stronger than my self-preservation. Guess we're doing this."
Vren inclined his head—acknowledgment or acceptance, impossible to tell through the void that clung to him like armor.
The cohort agreed.
None of them could explain why, not really. Later, Kydris would wonder if the Compass had already been calling, pulling them toward this moment through threads none of them could see.
They had two hours to prepare before departure.
Equipment sprawled across the chamber's floor: resonance dampeners that hummed with suppressed frequency, essence containment vials glowing faint violet, navigational crystals that pulsed in synchronized rhythm. Thex tested each piece with methodical precision, his hands quick and sure.
Grethon sat against the wall nearby—or tried to. His form kept phasing slightly, like he couldn't quite remember how gravity worked. Kydris crouched beside him, keeping his voice low.
"How much longer do you have?"
Grethon tasted like rust and ash, the flavor of something beautiful burning down. "Days. Maybe a week if I'm lucky." He met Kydris's eyes. "But I need to reach what's below before I fragment completely. Before there's nothing left to remember why this matters."
His consciousness was unraveling in visible increments now. Moments where his presence thinned to near-invisibility before snapping back, desperate and fraying. The taste around him was cosmic dust settling after an explosion—the flavor of entropy winning.
"Then we leave now," Kydris said.
Grethon's mouth curved, barely. "Yeah. Now."
They gathered supplies in weighted silence. The Lattice hummed through the walls, a frequency Kydris had learned to hear beneath the world's surface—anticipation and finality braided together, like the universe itself knew something was ending.
They entered the tunnels two hours before dawn.
Industrial steel corridors gave way to ancient stone within the first fifty meters. The walls here were smooth, almost glassy, carved by tools that predated modern understanding. Kydris ran his fingers along the surface—it was warm, not with heat but with residual resonance, like touching skin that remembered being alive.
Gravity shifted at the second junction. Not a gentle slope but a lurch, reality deciding "down" meant sideways now. Kael stumbled, caught himself against a wall that rippled faintly under his palm.
"These passages shouldn't exist," he muttered, his scientist's mind grasping for logic. "The spatial geometry doesn't—it can't—"
"Pre-Shattering architects understood something we forgot," Grethon said, his voice already distant, stretched thin. "That space is negotiable. Reality's only solid when consciousness insists it is."
By the third major depth, geometry became optional.
Corridors looped back on themselves in impossible angles. Walls met at degrees that had no name. A doorway they passed shimmered with heat-distortion, and through it Kydris glimpsed the same chamber they'd left ten minutes ago—except the version through the door was flooded, water lapping at equipment they were currently using.
The air changed with each level. Familiar oxygen and ozone gave way to something older, sharper—the smell of ages compressed into matter, like breathing the exhalation of dead civilizations. Kydris's Cartographer ability unfolded ahead of them, tasting the tunnels, mapping safe routes through deteriorating structure.
Sweet, crystalline boundaries marked stable passages. Bitter, corroding flavors warned of collapse zones where matter had forgotten how to stay solid.
"This isn't human construction," Kael said, wonder bleeding through his fear. "These spaces exist partially outside normal spacetime. Look at this." He gestured to a wall inscription—symbols that seemed to shift when viewed peripherally, stabilizing only under direct focus.
Thex ran a gloved hand along a pillar that pulsed with faint bioluminescence. "It feels alive. Like it's breathing."
"Residual consciousness," Grethon explained, each word requiring visible effort now. He navigated by resonance alone, his physical body too unreliable to trust. "The structures feed on attention. They remember being important."
Hours blurred together—or maybe subjective centuries compressed into minutes. Time felt negotiable down here, another variable the Pre-Shattering had learned to rewrite. Kydris's perception stretched, tasting something vast and sleeping beneath their feet.
This wasn't just ruins. This was a city. An entire Pre-Shattering metropolis layered below Graycross, preserved in stasis, waiting for something to wake it.
The taste shifted to profound depth: ancient memory crystallized into stone and glass, the flavor of eons compressed into architecture.
Then they reached the final descent.
The temperature dropped twenty degrees in ten steps. Condensation formed on Kydris's skin, cold and immediate. The walls here were darker, smoother—not carved but grown, organic curves that pulsed with faint light. The smell intensified: ozone and copper and something else, something that made his Cartographer sense recoil instinctively.
Grethon stopped at the threshold, his form barely cohesive. "Beyond this point, reality stops making promises. Stay close. Don't touch anything that glows. Don't respond if you hear voices."
"Comforting," Thex muttered, but he checked his resonance dampener twice.
They descended.
When they reached the final chamber, sound came first.
The constant hum that had accompanied their descent shifted, deepened—multiple frequencies layering into harmonics that made Kydris's bones vibrate. His enhanced perception resonated with recognition, like hearing a song he'd never learned but somehow knew.
Then taste flooded his mouth. Not metallic, not cosmic, not any flavor with a name—something entirely new. The taste of Pre-Shattering consciousness, a civilization's accumulated knowledge still lingering after millennia, compressed into sensation.
Then they saw it.
The chamber opened before them like a cathedral built for gods who'd forgotten their names.
It was vast—impossibly so, stretching beyond what could fit within the planet's crust. The ceiling vanished into vapor that wasn't quite fog, consciousness given temporary form that drifted and coalesced. The floor shimmered with intricate geometries: shifting sigils and boundary lines arranged like maps of the Lattice itself, glowing faint blue-white.
At the chamber's heart stood a pedestal carved from single piece of black stone. And on it—
Kydris's breath stopped.
A crystalline device rested there. Circular, vaguely metallic, rotating slowly through axes that shouldn't exist. Its surface wasn't solid—light passed through it and bent around it simultaneously, creating rainbow fractals that hurt to perceive directly.
As it rotated, segments seemed to occupy multiple positions at once, experiencing all angles in superposition. The taste was indescribable: cosmic and vast and aware, the flavor of intelligence that had been conscious since before humanity learned to think.
It tasted like purpose. Like a tool that had never forgotten what it was built to do.
Thex's voice came out strangled, his emotional signature torn between awe and hunger: "What the hell is that?"
"The reason we're here," Grethon whispered. His form was barely holding now, edges dissolving into the chamber's vapor. His hand passed through his own equipment when he tried to adjust it.
Grethon drifted toward the pedestal—not walking, not quite flying, just existing closer with each moment. Each movement visibly cost him, consciousness fragmenting and reassembling with painful slowness.
"This is a Compass," he said quietly. "One of the oldest artifacts from the Pre-Shattering era. Not a physical tool—consciousness given temporary form. A navigation device that operated across dimensional boundaries, through spaces that don't exist yet or stopped existing long ago."
He stopped three meters from the pedestal, not touching, just observing with the reverence of someone witnessing their own ending. "It's been dormant for millennia. But thirty-two days ago, it woke. And when artifacts like this wake, they call. They reach through the Lattice, searching for consciousness compatible with their frequency."
Kael's voice sharpened, cutting through the chamber's hum. "And you're saying Kydris is compatible?"
"Exceptionally." Grethon's form flickered more intensely now, multiple instances of him overlapping and separating. "His resonance pattern matches the Compass's optimal bonding frequency with ninety-seven percent alignment. Almost as if—" He stopped, leaving the implication hanging like smoke.
Vren's void-presence intensified, recording everything—visuals, emotional signatures, resonance patterns. Whatever his purpose here, he was capturing this moment with the focus of someone who knew it mattered.
Kydris stepped forward, tasting copper and cosmic dust on his tongue. His Cartographer ability extended toward the Compass, instinctive, and the moment his perception touched it—
The artifact responded.
The crystalline surface brightened. Rotation accelerated. Rainbow fractals intensified until the chamber filled with refracted light.
It knew him. It recognized him.
Grethon solidified slightly—pure effort of will holding consciousness together one last time. He moved between Kydris and the pedestal, meeting his student's eyes with terrible clarity.
"Once you touch it, your life stops being yours," he said, each word heavy with the weight of someone who'd watched others make this exact choice. "Artifacts don't serve users. They enlist them. Their agendas outlast civilizations, outlast species. You'll become what it needs you to be, and you won't get a say in the matter."
He was barely present now, consciousness actively fragmenting into multiple instances that kept losing coherence. When he blinked, the gesture required concentration.
"Then why bring us here?" Thex demanded, brightness dimming to amber. "Why show him this if you're just gonna tell him to walk away?"
"Because some calls can't be ignored," Grethon said simply. The taste around him shifted to profound love mixed with finality, like watching the sun set for the last time. "Kydris will bond with it eventually, whether we're present or not. The Compass will find him through the Lattice itself if it has to. At least here, surrounded by people who care about him, he has context. Understanding."
He looked directly at Kydris, and the air between them felt heavy, compressed with unspoken meaning. "You can walk away today. But it will reach you. Through dreams, through visions, through the Lattice whispering in frequencies only you can hear. When that happens, you'll wish you'd chosen this moment—when you were ready, when you understood—instead of having it forced on you when you're alone and confused."
Kael placed a hand on Kydris's shoulder, his grip tight. "You don't have to—"
"I do," Kydris said.
The emotional weight of the moment arrived exactly as it was passing—too slow, too late, like feeling pain after the cut. By the time he fully grasped the significance, he was already moving.
The moment had arrived.
Kydris's eyes locked onto the artifact.
In the corner of his vision, the System interface pulsed to life—clinical, mechanical, utterly inhuman:
⟨ SYSTEM ALERT ⟩
► RECOGNITION PROTOCOL: ACTIVE
► COMPATIBLE CONSCIOUSNESS: DETECTED
► BONDING SEQUENCE: AVAILABLE
► WARNING: BONDING IS IRREVERSIBLE
► WARNING: POST-INTEGRATION COGNITIVE SHIFT >95%
► QUERY: INITIATE INTERFACE BONDING? [Y/N]
The interface felt more alive than any HUD he'd encountered, like the System itself was holding its breath.
Kydris stepped forward. The distance between him and the pedestal collapsed—one meter, half a meter, thirty centimeters.
The Compass's light began bleeding into his own. Boundaries between them started dissolving, two frequencies finding resonance, syncing toward unity. The taste in his mouth became singular, unified—the flavor of two consciousnesses about to merge.
In the heartbeat before contact, Kydris hesitated.
This was the last moment of being fully himself. After this, he'd be something else. Someone else. Something the Compass wanted him to be, needed him to be, had been searching for across centuries.
He thought of Grethon, now nearly invisible, consciousness scattered across the Lattice like starlight. Of Thex, whose brightness had dimmed with understanding. Of the factory worker he'd been six weeks ago—exhausted, hollow, grinding through existence without purpose.
Of the predator he'd become after his System integration, tasting the world in ways that both thrilled and terrified him.
Of the something-else he was about to transform into.
All of it led here. All of it was inevitable.
Grethon's voice drifted from very far away now, barely a whisper threading through the chamber's hum: "Choose, Kydris. While you still can."
Kydris reached forward.
The Compass's light surged toward his hand—not as attack but as greeting, as recognition, as welcome. His fingers extended, crossing the final centimeters, and in that suspended instant before contact, meaning flooded his mind.
Not words. Not language. Pure transmission, ancient intelligence speaking directly to his consciousness:
⟨ RECOGNITION ⟩
⟨ SEEKING: COMPLETE ⟩
⟨ FOUND ⟩
⟨ YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MINE ⟩
⟨ THIS MOMENT WAS WRITTEN BEFORE YOUR SPECIES LEARNED TO NAME THE STARS ⟩
⟨ WELCOME HOME ⟩
Then contact.
The world became light—