Kaelen hated the sound of his own breathing.
Not because it was loud—it wasn't.
Not because it echoed—though in the Deep, even a heartbeat sounded like a hammer.
But because every breath reminded him that the Surface tried to kill him a little more each day.
Down here, in the dusk-lit throat of Layer-11, breathing felt… right.
He inhaled, and his lungs didn't squeeze like clenched fists.
He exhaled, and the pressure behind his eyes loosened.
He was born wrong for the world above.
But down here?
Down here he wasn't wrong at all.
The descent shaft opened into a tunnel shaped by machinery he didn't recognize. Its walls were smooth, metallic, but folded like origami—modern engineering fused with impossible angles from deeper ages. The light from his visor cracked across the walls, making them shimmer like they were half-frozen in time.
He stepped forward, boots grinding on rubble.
WARNING: LAYER SHIFT UNSTABLE
His wrist-band flickered red.
"Yeah, I know," he muttered. "You don't need to sing about it."
His back pulsed—warm, unsettling, rhythmic—like something alive was sitting inside his spine. The Spinal Drive was awake.
He didn't activate it.
He didn't need to.
It was hungry.
The tunnel finally opened into a cavern. Not a natural one—Kaelen doubted anything in Layer-11 was natural anymore.
This was a Collapse Chamber.
A place where a dead era had folded in on itself.
Chronoplast glittered in the dust like crushed glass, pale and cold. He crouched, scooping a piece into a vial.
"Surface price for this much?" he whispered.
Three months of rent… if the landlord wasn't threatening eviction.
Four months of meds… if he actually wanted to stay alive up there.
He pocketed it.
He didn't even want to think about going back yet.
Something moved behind him.
A soft, delicate crunch—like a foot pressing into old bone.
Kaelen didn't turn immediately.
He slipped his hand toward the Anchor holster at his waist, fingers brushing the Iron Age spike.
Another crunch.
Closer.
He turned.
For a moment his mind refused to accept what he was seeing.
A creature stood at the edge of the cavern, half-shrouded in dust. Its body was vaguely humanoid, but stretched thin like wet parchment. Its skin—if it could be called skin—was fractured stone. Not gray. Not brown. Pale, like limestone.
A Pale-Spawn.
Fresh one, too.
It blinked, and small cracks crawled across its eyelids.
Kaelen inhaled sharply.
Not out of fear.
Out of recognition.
This thing wasn't from Layer-11.
This was from Layer-47 or lower.
Nothing from that deep should be this close to the Surface.
He took a step back.
The Pale-Spawn shuddered. A faint snapping noise came from its neck as it tilted its head.
Then it opened its mouth, and dust spilled out like breath.
Kaelen whispered, "What in the First Law…?"
The creature lunged.
Kaelen slammed the Iron Age Anchor into the ground.
At once, the air changed.
A heavy stillness.
A world without chemistry.
Combustion ceased.
The creature's stone claws, crackling with some kind of internal chemical heat, sizzled—then died cold.
It stumbled, confused.
"Yeah," Kaelen said, gripping a shard of steel from his belt, "bad era for you."
He darted forward, slicing across the Pale-Spawn's arm. The cut tore stone, spilling dust. The creature screeched—a dry, brittle sound like wind through a collapsed tomb—and struck wildly.
Kaelen ducked, rolled, and drove the shard into its chest.
The Pale-Spawn convulsed.
Cracked.
Collapsed into a pile of white rubble.
Kaelen pulled his shard free, panting.
Then he realized something.
There was still dust in the air.
But not from the creature.
From deeper within the tunnel.
Someone else was coming.
Kaelen retreated behind a broken steel beam just as voices drifted toward him.
"…reading high Chronoplast concentration. Layer-20 spike, minimum."
"Impossible. We're not deep enough."
"Tell that to the meter."
Their boots clanged—a sound too ordered, too uniform.
Official.
Kaelen felt his heartbeat dive.
Regulators.
The Surface government's excavation enforcers.
He wasn't supposed to be here—Deep-Dive Scavenging without a permit was a criminal offense. Just being caught with a Spinal Drive would get him thrown into a Quantum Cell for permanent "observation."
He flattened himself against the beam.
Two shadows emerged into the cavern. One was tall, wiry, with a visor that lit the ground in blue arcs. The other was bulkier, armored in chrome-laced plating.
Kaelen recognized the armor markings immediately.
Layer-0 Enforcement Division.
Elite. Untouchable.
Unkillable, unless the universe itself changed the rules.
The tall one scanned the cavern. "Do you smell that?"
"Dust," the armored one replied.
"No. Not dust." The tall one crouched, scooping some of the white powder from the Pale-Spawn corpse. He rubbed it between his fingers. "This is fossil-grade matter from a Magic Era. And it's fresh."
The armored enforcer stiffened.
"That shouldn't be possible on Layer-11."
"It isn't." The tall one stood. "Which means someone illegally pulled Laws from far below."
The armored one's visor glowed red. "A Resonance criminal."
Kaelen's chest tightened.
If they found the Anchor embedded in the ground, he'd be dead or worse.
The regulators walked toward the Iron Age spike.
Kaelen's breath froze.
They were three steps away—
Something trembled.
Not the cavern.
Not the air.
Time.
A ripple shook the dust, then the rocks, then the walls themselves, like the world hiccuped.
The tall regulator gasped. "That was—"
A second ripple slammed through the cavern.
The Iron Age Anchor snapped in half.
Kaelen's lungs seized.
His blood rang like metal.
His spine burned.
Not metaphorically.
Actually burned.
The Spinal Drive came alive without his consent.
Blue tendrils of light crawled across his skin.
"No, no, no—" he whispered. "Not now."
He pressed a hand to his back, gritting his teeth.
The regulators spun toward his hiding place.
"Energy spike!" the tall one shouted. "Spinal signatures detected!"
Kaelen bolted.
The tunnel swallowed him in darkness.
He didn't know if the regulators followed.
Didn't want to look back and check.
The Spinal Drive pulsed again, flooding him with resonance from an unknown layer. His vision warped, then sharpened, then warped again.
The world felt slanted.
Gravity tugged sideways.
Layer-52 physics.
Kaelen stumbled as the floor tilted ninety degrees beneath him. His boots slammed into what should've been a wall.
"Great," he gasped. "Just… perfect."
He pushed himself upright—or what counted as upright—while the tunnel twisted around him. Everything was wrong angles and wrong gravity, the architecture of an impossible era forcing itself into the present.
Behind him, voices shouted.
"There! He's pulling geometry from below!"
"Stabilize the tunnel!"
Kaelen ran faster.
He rounded a corner—then froze.
He had reached a dead end.
Except… it wasn't exactly a wall.
It was a black surface, perfectly smooth, perfectly still, absorbing his visor light like it was drinking it.
A temporal fossil.
A pocket of ancient reality sealed into stone.
Kaelen's pulse hammered.
Only one thing to do.
He lifted a hand—hesitated—then pressed his palm against the fossil.
Reality rippled.
The world dissolved.
And Kaelen fell.
He didn't fall through space.
He fell through time.
The air shifted around him. His body twisted, weightless, directionless. His spine surged with blue fire as the Drive synced with the fossil's echo.
Then, with a violent lurch, he was thrown onto solid ground.
He coughed, rolling onto his side.
Lights flickered overhead—dim, orange, trembling.
He sat up.
And stared.
He was in a corridor.
Not a cavern.
Not a tunnel.
A man-made corridor made of reinforced steel.
Dust lay thick on the floor.
Cracks spiderwebbed through the ceiling.
Screens along the walls blinked with dead static.
A sign hung crooked above him.
LABORATORY WARD C — CHRONOLOGY INTERFACE
Kaelen's mouth went dry.
He knew this place.
He had seen sketches of it in banned files. Reflective air-prints. Redacted incident reports.
This was the lost research facility that vanished fifty years ago during the Temporal Collapse.
No one ever found the ruins.
No one ever found what had caused it.
Kaelen took one shaky step forward.
Then another.
He wasn't supposed to be here.
But the fossil had thrown him into a sealed pocket of history.
He could die here.
Be erased here.
Never reach the Surface again.
His boot hit something metallic.
He looked down.
A broken badge.
Its edges were burnt, as if exposed to extreme heat or friction—Chrono friction.
He picked it up.
Through the cracked plastic, a faded name was barely visible.
DR. EIRA VANE
Kaelen froze.
His throat tightened.
His vision blurred.
His heartbeat pounded in his ears.
"Mom…?"
The corridor's overhead lights flickered again.
Then something growled in the dark.
Something not human.
Something that had been waiting here for fifty years.
In the abandoned era.
With him.
Kaelen clenched the badge, breath shaking.
And the darkness moved.