Darius had seen the shipyards before.

Everyone had.

From the high terraces during the Awakening of the Sleepers, they had stretched across the horizon like the exposed ribs of some immense, patient creature—vast frames rising out of the land, orderly and still. From that distance they had looked ceremonial, almost noble. A civilization remembering what it had once been capable of.

Up close, the memory changed shape.

The scale didn’t impress so much as it pressed. The air felt cooler here, not cold, but shaded in a way that made the skin aware of itself. Sound behaved differently. Their footsteps didn’t echo the way Darius expected; the stone seemed to absorb noise, dulling it, as if loudness itself were discouraged.

He slowed without consciously deciding to. His body recognized something before his mind caught up.

The cradles were enormous—arched supports designed to hold ships that could have swallowed cities. Anchor points bore no fractures, no blast scoring, no evidence of panic or haste. Instead, they were worn smooth, rounded by centuries of touch and maintenance long after the last vessel had departed.

This wasn’t abandonment.

It was care without continuation.

The geometry was still flawless. Load paths made sense. Stress lines were elegant. But there was no urgency in the design anymore. No sense of forward motion.

It felt like infrastructure that had been gently told it was no longer needed.

Darius breathed in. The air carried a faint mineral tang—stone and crystal warmed by filtered sunlight—threaded with something subtler, almost metallic, like old circuitry left powered down for too long. Not dead. Waiting.

“These weren’t shut down,” he said quietly.

His voice sounded smaller here, as though the space preferred restraint.

Amina was already a few steps ahead of him. She moved differently on her home world, not lighter, not faster, just certain. Her hand brushed the surface of one of the massive supports as she passed. The stone was warm beneath her fingers.

“They were set aside,” she said.

The distinction settled into him like redistributed weight.

During the coronation, the shipyards had been framed as history. Proof of capacity. Evidence that her people could build fleets large enough to trouble empires.

Standing here, Darius understood the part that had been left unsaid.

These weren’t ruins of collapse.

They were artifacts of refusal.

“That kind of restraint,” he murmured, looking up at the empty cradles, “takes discipline.”

Amina’s mouth curved faintly. “It takes something rarer.”

They walked deeper between the frames. The ground beneath their feet shifted subtly—stone giving way to a composite that yielded just enough to feel alive. Somewhere, water moved. Not loudly. Not to be heard so much as felt—a low, steady presence under everything.

That was when Darius felt it.

Not the shipyards themselves.

Something beneath them.

A pressure behind his sternum, like the moment before a storm breaks. The fine hairs along his arms lifted. He stopped breathing for half a second.

He’d felt it during the Awakening—faint then, distant, easy to dismiss as atmosphere or ceremony.

Here, inside the bones of ambition deliberately laid down, it was closer.

Focused.

Attentive.

His gaze caught on a seam running along the base of one of the supports. Not a crack. Not decoration. Geometry that didn’t carry load or guide movement. A pattern that refused to explain itself.

“The Lattice,” he said.

The word came out steadier than he expected, as if it had been waiting in the back of his throat for days.

Amina stopped. When she turned, there was no surprise in her expression—only recognition, as if he had finally stepped into a current she had always known was there.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Now you’re close enough to follow it.”

They didn’t enter a chamber so much as leave the shipyards behind.

The passage they took curved away from the open frames, narrowing just enough to quiet the sky. Light softened. The mineral tang faded. The air warmed, carrying the clean scent of water and sunlit crystal. Their footsteps grew quieter still, until sound felt almost unnecessary.