I looked at that word again.
VAEL.
Until a few hours earlier, to me, ley lines had simply always been there. The families had built bases around them, powered systems with their energy, and used their power for generations.
Now we knew that we did not truly know their origin either.
And as I looked at the records recovered in China, I thought about something that, until then, had been pushed aside by everything happening around us.
We knew about the existence of the Kartnod, magic, ancient history, the war that had been hidden, and the existence of the Supreme Beings.
We had answers.
Incomplete, contradictory, and increasingly difficult to accept, but we had them.
Most of the world had no idea what any of this really was.
How were they dealing with it now that everything had been exposed in the worst possible way?
CHINA — DECEMBER EIGHTEENTH
It was close to eleven at night.
The battle losses were still being updated.
Eleven ships sunk.
More than thirty fighters destroyed.
More than two thousand soldiers dead.
News networks maintained constant coverage of naval operations in the Yellow Sea and throughout the Pacific. Civilian orbital observation systems, maritime analysis platforms, and international services continuously shared the positions of forces that could still be tracked.
For two days, millions of people had been analyzing the same images.
Not only those of the enormous black ships that had appeared off the coast of Japan.
Also those of the forces that had appeared to fight them.
A university in Shanghai had published an analysis that afternoon of the emissions recorded during the battle. They had used data from civilian satellites, atmospheric stations, and maritime sensors distributed throughout the Pacific.
The report reached a conclusion that was difficult to ignore.
The two unidentified forces that had intervened alongside the Chinese Navy used energy systems that did not match any registered technology. It also noted that researchers had found anomalies in areas where civilian systems lost accuracy without any satisfactory technical explanation.
Regions where air and maritime routes had repeatedly been altered.
Facilities that appeared in records and disappeared in later updates.
The study had been public for less than three hours when other research centers began verifying the data.
They found matches in Europe.
Also in the Americas.
Australia.
Russia.
Africa.
No one could yet explain what they meant.
Then reports from Mexico began to arrive.
A fleet was moving across the Pacific.
Civilian identification systems took only seconds to establish the correlation.
Its structure was an almost complete match with the ships observed off China.
The discussion began.
Why were they in the Americas?
Thousands of kilometers away, the information was spreading faster than any government could control.
Global networks did not depend on a single source.
Thousands of civilian satellites observed the planet.
Commercial vessels automatically shared weather and maritime information.
Private navigation systems analyzed ocean routes in real time.
Universities maintained their own observation networks.
Companies collected orbital data for agriculture, transportation, mining, and climatology.
An attack on that scale left too many traces.
And now millions of systems were comparing them.
Information coming from Mexico began to merge with the records from China.
Then other alerts appeared.
The United States.
Canada.
In less than ten minutes, international military monitoring platforms began marking three separate events in North America.
One on the American coast.
Another near Victoria, Canada.
And a naval force approaching Mexico.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
American command centers had already received information about the threat before Portland was attacked.
Minutes later, national defense systems were activated.
Explosions.
Partial loss of communications.
Multiple attackers.
Unidentified technology.
Analysts began comparing the signatures with records obtained in Japan and China.
They did not match.
That created a new problem.
It was another force.
Five minutes later, Canada reported explosions near Victoria.
The Americans requested information.
The initial response was unclear.
There was no registered Canadian military installation in the affected area.
But orbital data showed combat.
The first civilian sensors also began detecting it.
Within minutes, the question began spreading across the networks:
Who was attacking them?
MEXICO
The situation there was different.
The fleet approaching its coast could be identified.
The problem began when something went out to meet it.
The first detections were interpreted as Mexican military aircraft.
That identification lasted less than a minute.
There were no matches in public records.
Or in military ones.
Several aircraft had appeared over the skies of Chiapas and were flying at high speed toward the ocean.
Civilian systems began tracking them.
Speed.
Altitude.
Acceleration.
Energy emissions.
The first automated analyses began circulating almost immediately.
MANUFACTURER: UNKNOWN.
MODEL: UNKNOWN.
OPERATING FORCE: UNIDENTIFIED.
One university system that had spent the previous two days studying the battle in China compared the emissions from those aircraft with those recorded when the unidentified forces had appeared to assist the Chinese Navy.
The findings were posted on an academic network.
Then they were replicated.
Within minutes, they were everywhere.
And across every platform, one question began to spread.
How many forces like these exist?
In Mexico City, the same question had different consequences.
The Secretary of Defense demanded to know where those aircraft had come from.
No one could answer.
He ordered a review of every military installation in Chiapas.
Infrastructure records also failed to explain how aircraft with those characteristics could have operated from the region without being detected.
Then someone requested a review of historical data from the area.
The answer was even stranger.
There were inconsistencies.
Sectors where geological surveys did not match across different periods.
Property records that ended abruptly.
Flight restrictions whose administrative origins were difficult to trace.
None of it explained the existence of those aircraft.
The president received the report as the first unidentified aircraft reached the ocean.
—Are you telling me someone built this inside our territory and we do not know who?
No one answered. Everyone was visibly shaken.
The same problem began to emerge in Canada.
Authorities were trying to determine what was being attacked.
Civilian systems had already roughly located the area.
But when journalists and independent platforms began asking questions, no one could give them a clear answer.
Private property.
Protected environmental areas and farmland.
Nothing that justified an attack on that scale.
Then the first orbital images taken after the explosions appeared.
There were multiple structures where there were supposed to be agricultural fields.
Images and videos of the attack began circulating uncontrollably.
In Washington, D.C., information from Mexico and Canada began to be cross-referenced with reports from the attack on Portland.
The three governments established a joint channel. They had to deal with what was happening.
The United States had a naval base under attack.
An aerial battle was taking place in Canada.
Mexico had combat aircraft emerging from a facility its own government did not know existed.
And chaos among the civilian population was about to erupt.
The first official statements called for calm and confirmed that the three governments were coordinating their response to the emergency.
A group of journalists published reports that, days earlier, several heads of state had simultaneously altered their schedules.
Canceled meetings.
Transfers to secure facilities.
Entire blocks of classified communications.
The changes coincided with the days following the first attacks.
Individually, they did not mean much, but together they began to form a pattern.
The question first appeared in independent media.
Then it moved into the major news networks.
How long had the governments known?
In New York, representatives from several countries requested an extraordinary session of the United Nations.
Some governments demanded that everything they knew be made public.
The leaders who had participated in the secret meetings knew the reason.
They knew there were groups that had remained hidden for thousands of years; that the threat was connected to events human history had never recorded.
But even they did not know the whole truth.
Mexico had just proven that.
Canada as well.
The strategy agreed upon days earlier had been a gradual disclosure.
Verifiable data.
Civilian preparation.
International cooperation.
Avoiding panic.
Now the public was moving faster than the plan.
Independent investigations continued.
An orbital mapping company published a comparison of regions where anomalies had been recorded during the previous weeks.
Japan.
Russia.
Brazil.
Canada.
Mexico.
Southern Africa.
Australia.
Then it added the locations where unidentified forces had appeared.
And more questions began to emerge, too many to ignore.
That night, a broadcast began spreading from Europe.
It did not come from any government.
It was an analysis presented by a historian who had spent much of her career studying restricted zones.
Behind her was a screen displaying several open documents.
—I cannot tell you who they are —she said—. Nor can I prove what exists in these places. But I can prove one thing.
She displayed a map, and names and dates appeared across it.
Some went back centuries. It showed how, over time, natural disasters had occurred in many parts of the planet at the same locations that were now being attacked.
—These anomalies did not begin a few weeks ago.
The broadcast surpassed one hundred million views before it ended.
The woman pointed to the images of the forces that had appeared in China.
Then she showed the aircraft fighting off the coast of Mexico.
—Whoever they are... they have been deceiving us.
And the broadcast ended.