Chapter 2: The Gateway Awakes

Act I: The Threshold

The coordinates didn’t feel like directions.

They felt like pressure.

Thomas rode for hours, the ATV’s engine whining as it fought the shifting sand and uneven rock. The desert changed as he went—wide open flats giving way to harsher terrain, then to fractured ridgelines that rose like broken teeth. Every so often he caught himself checking the sky, as if expecting something to be watching from above.

Which was ridiculous.

Except nothing about today had stayed inside the borders of ridiculous.

Solace remained quiet for long stretches, present but not intrusive. It didn’t chatter. It didn’t reassure. It simply was, a steady weight in the back of Thomas’s mind—like a second set of eyes open behind his own.

He hated how quickly he was getting used to it.

At mid-afternoon, the landscape narrowed. The ground became less sand and more stone, carved by time into channels and ravines. The canyon appeared almost suddenly, a dark slash across the desert. Thomas slowed at the lip and killed the engine.

Silence poured in.

The canyon looked wrong—not in shape, not in scale, but in absence. No animal tracks. No sun-bleached bones. No signs that anything had ever lived here. The wind entered and died, as if swallowed.

Thomas sat still on the ATV for a long moment, hands on the grips, letting old instincts sort the scene into threat and pattern.

“Why here,” he muttered, mostly to himself.

“This location was selected for concealment and stability,” Solace replied.

Thomas swung his leg over and stood. The heat in the open desert had been brutal, but down here it felt muted, as if the stone held its own climate. He adjusted the strap of his pack and started forward.

The canyon walls rose higher as he moved, the light thinning into a dim, copper haze. His footsteps sounded too loud. Every scrape of boot on rock returned to him a half second later—echoes that didn’t behave like normal echoes, bending as if the canyon didn’t want to give sound back cleanly.

A few minutes in, his scanner flickered once, then died.

Thomas paused. “That’s new.”

“Electromagnetic interference,” Solace said.

“Or a warning,” Thomas replied, eyes narrowing. He reached into his pack and pulled out the orb.

It sat in his palm like a small, patient planet—smooth, cool, faintly pulsing. Even holding it still felt like making contact with something that could outlast him by a thousand lifetimes.

“You’ve been pretty confident for something that just climbed into my skull,” Thomas said under his breath. “You sure this isn’t a trap?”

“Your suspicion is logical,” Solace answered. “Your caution increases survivability.”

Thomas scoffed and kept moving.

The coordinates led him deeper until the canyon opened into a wider basin, ringed by jagged formations like a broken crown. In the center stood a rock face that looked unremarkable—just another wall of stone, sun-scored and silent.

Thomas stopped anyway.

Because his body knew.

The hairs on his arms rose. His skin prickled, not from heat but from something like static. The orb in his hand pulsed once—slow and deliberate—as if taking a breath.

“Proceed,” Solace instructed.