Kaelen felt the tremor before he heard it.
A long, low vibration rippled through the tunnel—like something exhaling beneath the stone. Dust rained from the ceiling. His Anchor-lamp flickered. Juno froze behind him, one hand hovering over her spectral scanner.
"Layer shift?" she whispered.
"No." Kaelen's voice was flat. "It's deeper. Something moving beneath us."
He stepped forward, brushing his fingers along the wall. The rocks were warm. Too warm. A warning hum pulsed through his Spinal Drive, sending thin blue sparks crawling up his neck like electric veins.
"Your graft's reacting," Juno said. "That only happens when an Era is destabilizing."
Kaelen didn't answer. His pulse had quickened, but not from fear. From recognition.
He remembered this warmth. This vibration. This electric tension in the air—like reality holding its breath.
The Deep was waking up.
He lifted his pick and stepped into the next chamber.
The Chamber of Bones
The cavern was wide—almost circular—with jagged crystalline shards protruding from the floor like a field of glass tombstones. But what dominated the room was the hole in its center. A perfect, cylindrical shaft descending into darkness.
Cold air rose from it. The kind of cold that belonged in places untouched by physics.
Juno tested the edge with her scanner. "Depth… unknown. You're not seriously going in there?"
Kaelen knelt at the rim.
There—etched along the inside walls—were runes. Faint, ancient, shimmering with a soft amber glow. Not symbols from the Industrial Layers. Not even from the Magic Eras.
Older.
Much older.
"Juno," Kaelen said quietly, "this chamber wasn't carved."
Her eyebrows rose. "Then what made it?"
Kaelen pointed to the spiral imprint circling the inner walls—five thick grooves that twisted downward like an enormous thumbprint.
"A hand."
Juno blinked twice. "…I'm sorry, what?"
"A fossilized imprint of a hand," Kaelen said. "A god-hand."
She stepped back. "You mean like the myths? The beings from the Pre-Geometry Layers?"
"Those aren't myths."
He touched the spiral groove, and the entire chamber trembled. The fossil-energy reacted to him—specifically to the chaos within his Spinal Drive.
The amber runes flared brighter.
Juno scrambled away. "Kaelen, stop touching the ancient, universe-breaking weirdness!"
But it was too late.
The floor cracked.
The Awakening Below
Chunks of rock collapsed inward, falling into the shaft. A shrill wind howled upward, spinning dust into a vortex around Kaelen.
His body felt weightless for an instant.
Then the gravity flipped.
Kaelen was yanked downward as if pulled by an invisible hook.
"KAELEN!" Juno threw herself forward, catching his wrist just as his boots slipped over the edge.
But the pull was too strong—like a magnet dragging him into the impossible.
"Let go!" he shouted. "It'll pull you in too—"
"No chance!" Her voice strained. "If you die, the Guild is going to tear me apart!"
He didn't doubt it.
Juno's fingers slipped.
Kaelen dropped.
For six seconds, he fell through pure darkness.
Then—
THUMP.
He landed on a surface that was somehow soft and metallic at the same time. Air whooshed out of his lungs. His Anchor-lamp smashed beside him, extinguished instantly.
He lay still, eyes adjusting to the gloom.
When he finally stood, he realized—
He wasn't in a cavern anymore.
He was standing on something alive.
The Fossilized Titan
The ground under Kaelen's boots wasn't stone.
It was skin.
Not flesh-soft, but mineral-hard. A fossil texture, yet retaining the smooth curvature of anatomy.
He stepped back, lamp-light flickering.
A massive forearm stretched before him, larger than the hull of a drilling ship.
The hand—perfectly preserved—was half-embedded in the rock. Each finger was as long as a city bus. The palm was lined with spiral grooves—the same pattern from the shaft above.
But what truly made Kaelen's breath catch wasn't the size.
It was that the hand was glowing—soft golden light pulsating beneath the stone like trapped sunlight.
"Impossible…" he whispered.
A god-fossil.
A real one.
No excavator had ever found a complete limb before. Only fragments. Knuckles. Teeth. A rib-section.
But this—
This was a whole hand.
Still fossilized, but humming with dormant physics from a forgotten Era.
He placed his palm against the stone skin.
His Spinal Drive reacted violently.
A shockwave of energy blasted up his spine, flooding his nerves with visions—broken snapshots of impossible landscapes:
Skies made of liquid light.
Creatures walking sideways on vertical air.
Forests twisting through dimensions like spirals.
A colossal figure standing above all eras, rewriting physics with each step.
The vision ended as suddenly as it began.
Kaelen staggered.
His hands trembled.
He understood now.
This wasn't just any fossil.
This was an imprint of an entity from the Abyssal Layers—a place where geometry melted, and gods sculpted the rules of reality like clay.
Layer 100+.
A god of the First Eras.
Dormant… but not dead.
"Kaelen!"
Juno's voice echoed from above.
He looked up to see ropes descending. Her silhouette peered down into the cavern.
"You're alive!" she yelled. "I swear, one day you're going to give me—what are you standing on?"
Kaelen smirked. "Something big."
She descended quickly and landed beside him. The moment her eyes adjusted, her jaw dropped.
"Is that—?"
"Yes."
She approached slowly, mesmerized.
"This should be impossible," she whispered. "God-fossils are unstable. They collapse into Chronoplast dust the moment you touch them."
"This one didn't."
"Because it's still active…"
They exchanged a look.
Juno swallowed. "Kaelen, we need to report this to the Guild. Now."
He shook his head. "If we tell the Guild, they'll isolate it. Classify it. Then erase it."
"That's the point." She gestured frantically. "Look at this thing! It can break the surface world! It can break everything!"
"That's why I can't let anyone else find it."
Juno stepped closer to him, her voice low. "And what do you think you're going to do? You can't control something like this."
He placed his hand on the fossil again.
The golden glow responded, pulsing brighter—like a heartbeat syncing with his own.
Kaelen exhaled shakily.
"I'm not trying to control it," he said.
"I think it's calling me."
Juno stared at him like he had lost his mind.
"Kaelen… only one kind of person gets 'called' by the Deep."
He waited.
"The ones with mutations."
He looked away. "My Temporal Rejection isn't a mutation."
"It absolutely is." She stepped in front of him. "You think the Deep is your friend? It's not. It's poison wearing a crown."
He didn't reply.
Because something else caught his attention.
The God-Hand Reacts
The golden light intensified—spreading across the veins of the fossil like molten metal. The stone fingers twitched.
Just once.
But that was enough.
The entire cavern boomed with seismic force.
Juno shrieked, jumping back. "It moved! IT MOVED! THIS IS NOT A FOSSIL THIS IS—"
"It's waking up," Kaelen said.
"No! Nope! We are leaving!"
But Kaelen couldn't move.
The Spinal Drive locked him in place, its graft-cables glowing electric blue. A thin beam of golden light extended from the fossil-hand, linking directly to his spine.
The god-energy was scanning him.
Analyzing his anomaly.
Reading him.
And then—
It pressed something into his mind.
A single word.
Not heard.
Felt.
Deeper.
Kaelen gasped and collapsed to one knee.
The beam vanished. The golden glow dimmed.
Juno ran to him. "Kaelen! Talk to me! What did it do?"
He blinked slowly. "It… gave me coordinates."
"What kind of coordinates?"
He looked toward the deeper darkness beyond the fossil-hand.
"To something beneath this."
Juno grabbed his collar. "We are not going deeper! Kaelen, this is the Abyss. Humans aren't meant to be here!"
But he wasn't listening anymore.
His Spinal Drive was still pulsing with golden light… and a new set of runes glowed faintly across his skin.
A gift.
A curse.
A message.
And the meaning was clear:
The hand was only a door.
Something greater waited below.
Something alive.
Kaelen pushed himself up. His voice was steady, almost calm.
"Juno," he said, "We're going further."
Juno stepped back, horrified. "You've lost your mind."
Kaelen smiled faintly.
"No. I think I've finally found where I belong."
He walked toward the abyss beyond the hand.
Juno cursed loudly but followed him, because despite everything—
She was more afraid of him going alone.
The darkness swallowed them both.And far behind them…
The god-hand's fingers curled ever so slightly.
As if waving them forward.
Or warning them to turn back.