3RD Person's Point Of View
Marisov sat cross-legged in the floating garden above Evolto's central spire, where gravity bowed to imagination and every plant was in bloom, regardless of season. The leaves hummed with quiet life, brushing against his small shoulders like they knew who he was. Around him, animals some native, others not even from this reality rested in a quiet circle, bound by an invisible trust.
He should've felt peace here.
But he didn't.
His fingers pressed into the soft moss, his eyes narrowed not in confusion, but focus. Something was wrong. He could feel it not in his mind, but in his essence the strange spark within him that Papa said was "older than this universe, and gentler than most would believe."
For the third night in a row, the whispers returned.
Not dreams.
Whispers.
From places with no stars.
From timelines that never happened.
From… something sealed.
"Marisov," a soft voice called it was Azura, standing at the edge of the platform. "You've been quiet lately. What is it?"
He turned, eyes large and honest. "They're afraid, Azura. Not just the people. The timelines. The memories. Even the stories I haven't heard yet are… scared."
Azura paused. Her maternal instinct warred with the fact that Marisov sometimes said things no child or god should understand.
"I can stop them from hurting us," he added after a moment, picking at a blue-glowing petal. "But I don't know if I'm supposed to."
"Who's 'they'?" she asked.
He looked at her with eyes that flickered for just a heartbeat too old for six, too clear.
"The thing beneath the city," he whispered. "The one not even papa remembers building around."
Azura froze.
There was no thing beneath the city. At least, not one anyone spoke of. Not one she remembered.
But the air around Marisov was growing colder.
"I think it knows who I am," he said softly. "And I think it wants to help."
He looked back up toward the artificial sun above Evolto.
"But it's lying."
Marisov didn't flinch as the air around him bent. Light warped. Time paused not stopped, but hesitated, as if holding its breath.
And then Zalthorion appeared.
Not walked. Not flew. Just was.
Golden fractals danced at the edges of his cloak, his eyes glowing not with anger but with ancient understanding. He didn't speak right away. Instead, he simply looked at Marisov.
"What did it say?" Zalthorion finally asked, kneeling down to meet the child's gaze.
Marisov's lips parted, hesitant. "It didn't use words. It used memories. Ones I didn't have. Ones… that weren't mine."
Zalthorion's face shifted subtly not fear, but recognition.
"Did you answer it?" he asked.
"I didn't need to," Marisov replied. "It already knew my answer. It knew me."
A pulse rippled through the air. Faint barely there but it caused several trees in the garden to wilt and wither instantly.
Zalthorion rose.
He spoke a word, and the withered trees regrew in a blink.
Then he looked toward the edge of the floating platform, eyes narrowing toward the vast cityscape below. "You weren't supposed to be aware of it. Not yet. Not until you were older."
"I think it changed that," Marisov said quietly.
Zalthorion didn't answer. That was answer enough.
After a long pause, he finally said, "You're important, Marisov. Not just for what you can do. But for what you choose to do. That's why I kept it from you. Not to protect you… but to give you a choice before the war reaches your soul."
Marisov stood up, brushing off moss. He was only six, but the weight he carried was larger than any Titan-class Jaeger.
"I already made my choice," he said. "I'm staying."
Zalthorion turned toward him.
"I know," he said softly. "But so has it."
Beneath Evolto City
Few ever descended below the core reactors. Fewer still came back the same.
This was where old infrastructure gave way to forgotten cathedrals of tech where obsolete AIs whispered in glitch-tongue and the walls pulsed faintly with the heartbeat of the city's creation.
Once, the Underlayers had been the foundation for growth. Now, they were sealed and locked only accessed by Exo-Guardians running diagnostics or ancient maintenance protocols.
And yet, something was moving.
Cameras long thought dead flickered to life one by one. Insects crawled over rusted metal, paused, then scattered in unison as if something unseen brushed past them.
A warning alarm blinked red in a forgotten chamber:
> Rift Pressure Detected
> Sector 0.01A - Depth 11
> Designation: The Vault of Echoes
Inside that chamber, a sarcophagus made of blackened alloy and sealed with Voidstone began to hum. Not loud. Not menacing. But constant like a lullaby buried under centuries of silence.
A voice, soft and synthetic, crackled over an untouched intercom.
"…Zalthorion… he shouldn't have buried this…"
And then, the sarcophagus twitched.
Just once.
But in the city's central command, dozens of disconnected warning lights blinked then stopped, hiding what had just occurred.
One Jaeger AI paused mid-calibration.
One orbital satellite's lens shifted half a degree.
And far above it all, high in Evolto's spires, Marisov tilted his head like he'd heard something only he could hear.
The sarcophagus's hum deepened, vibrating the air, sending waves of distortion through the abandoned halls of the Vault of Echoes. The walls, adorned with half-remembered runes and cracked inscriptions, seemed to breathe in time with the pulse.
There was a presence in the chamber something old. Older than even Evolto itself.
The alloy door of the sarcophagus shimmered. A faint, sickly green glow began to leak from the seams, spreading out like creeping vines, dark and oily. Something inside was awakening.
It hadn't been touched in centuries. It shouldn't have been.
Yet, a force that none could trace had started this process. The air hummed with a terrible anticipation, as if the city itself could sense it. It wasn't just a machine stirring it was something else. Something alive.
In the dim light, shadowed figures began to take form within the darkness: silhouettes of towering beings, their outlines barely more than whispers. They were watching. Waiting. And yet, their presence felt like an echo, a reflection of something that shouldn't exist anymore.
The Vault had been sealed long ago
But now, it was stirring once more.
A voice, deep and resounding, filled the space. It wasn't human, nor machine. It was primordial one that vibrated not only through sound but through memory, through time itself.
"Zalthorion… Zalthorion… You've sealed the echo. The spiral calls…"
With every beat of the hum, the presence inside the sarcophagus seemed to grow, its whispers deepening, saturating the walls. A dreadful recognition spread throughout the vault. The power within the sarcophagus was calling pushing against its prison.
It wanted out.
Meanwhile, Dr. Wagner was in his lab, hundreds of miles above the chaos.
Dr. Dietrich Wagner sat at the heart of his lab, hands shaking slightly as he adjusted the holographic schematics floating before him. The neural feedback from the latest Exo-Guardian models was more unstable than expected, but that wasn't his primary concern right now.
The reports had come in minutes ago disjointed, incomplete, but undeniable. The energy fluctuations from below had spiked.
The Underlayers.
He'd heard rumors whispers about the Vault of Echoes, the forgotten depths of Evolto City. He'd never believed them, not until today.
Wagner exhaled, rubbing his temples as the information processed. The glow from his terminal reflected off his glasses, revealing the lines etched into his face marks of years spent in this cold, sterile environment, far from the warmth of human connection.
He quickly punched in a new sequence of commands, pulling up a detailed map of the Underlayers. His mind raced.
Why now? Why after all this time?
The hum below had been nothing more than background noise to the city's operations until it had escalated.
He tapped his fingers on the desk, one by one. His fingers had been the ones to design this city, and yet there were parts of it that even he didn't understand fully.
Wagner keyed in a few more commands, requesting a direct line to Zalthorion. The response came almost instantly.
"Wagner." Zalthorion's voice was calm, but there was a sharpness to it, a tinge of something darker lurking beneath. "I assume you've felt the fluctuations?"
"Yes," Wagner replied, his voice tight. "Something's happening in the Underlayers. It's not just power surges something else is… stirring down there."
Zalthorion's silence on the other end of the line was telling. Wagner continued.
"The Vault of Echoes," he said. "I don't know what it is, but it's old, Zalthorion.
Zalthorion's next words cut through the air, cold and sharp.
"Secure the Exo-Guardians. Send them in."
Wagner hesitated, uncertainty flickering in his eyes. "No. We can't send them in blindly. The Underlayers are a known unknown. There are things down there even I can't predict."
"I understand the risks, Wagner," Zalthorion's voice softened, though it carried an underlying threat. "You're the one who taught me to never take chances. But now we have no choice."
Wagner swallowed. The pressure in his chest grew heavier, a foreboding weight that he couldn't shake.
"Very well," he said. "I'll prepare a team. But this time this time, we're not just dealing with malfunctioning tech. We're dealing with something alive."
Zalthorion didn't respond. But Wagner could feel the weight of the unspoken words.
He wasn't just preparing to fight malfunctioning tech. He was preparing for something that might be beyond even Zalthorion's grasp.
As Wagner turned back to his schematics, the first reports of the Exo-Guardians moving into the Underlayers began to flood his terminal. He didn't look at them not yet.
The hum continued from below. The feeling that something was watching, something waiting, lingered in the air. And somewhere deep in the heart of Evolto, the Vault of Echoes continued to stir.
LOCATION:The Underlayers
The descent was silent, save for the faint hiss of hydraulics and the occasional buzz of the neuro-synch interface as it adjusted to the Guardian's shifting terrain. The Exo-Guardians, elite soldiers encased in their heavily armored suits, slowly made their way through the dark, winding corridors of the Underlayers. The blackened metal walls gleamed in the eerie green glow of their motion sensors, casting long, twisted shadows that seemed to stretch and sway unnaturally, as though the very shadows were alive.
Their mission was simple explore, secure, and assess whatever disturbances had caused the sudden surge in energy from the Vault of Echoes. It should have been straightforward.
But there was something wrong.
The deeper they ventured, the heavier the air became. The lights flickered, and the silence was broken only by the faint scuffling sounds of something skittering in the distance. Their visors barely filtered out the unsettling whispers that seemed to emanate from the walls themselves, a low hum that made the hairs on the back of their necks stand on end.
"Stay alert," the team leader, Commander Jax, muttered, his voice crackling through their communication system. "We don't know what we're dealing with down here."
One by one, the Exo-Guardians scanned their surroundings, their weapons primed, ready for anything. Their advanced tech was enough to put down any standard threat, but this... this felt different. It was as if the very walls of the Underlayers were closing in on them, feeding off their every move.
Click.
The sound was soft at first, almost imperceptible. But then it grew louder, more deliberate something was approaching. The Guardians' visors whirred as they focused on the source, but there was nothing there. Nothing.
The sudden roar of metal scraping against metal shattered the silence.
"Ambush!" Jax shouted, but before he could raise his weapon, a massive, shadowy form lunged from the walls, claws slashing through the air. It was quick, too quick. One of the Guardians, a heavyset warrior named Gorran, was already in its grasp, his body lifted off the ground as he struggled against the powerful force.
Then, the form melted back into the shadows, disappearing as quickly as it had appeared. But the damage was done. Gorran's scream echoed through the corridor, cut off abruptly.
"Gorran! Report!" Jax barked.
Silence.
The other Guardians moved quickly, forming a defensive perimeter, but the tension in the air was palpable. They were being hunted.
Snap.
A sharp, bone-crushing crack rang out. Another Guardian, Aria, was pulled into the shadows with terrifying speed, her body jerking violently as whatever force had seized her crushed her in one swift motion. She never even had time to scream.
"This isn't right. They're hunting us," Jax muttered, his voice strained with the first signs of panic.
The remaining Guardians turned on their heels, retreating toward the main exit. But it was too late.
One by one, they were picked off taken into the darkness with an eerie efficiency, as if something intelligent was orchestrating their demise. The shadows moved with purpose, surrounding them, closing in, until there was nothing left but the occasional flicker of an electrical signal and the final, hollow silence of death.
Jax, the last remaining Guardian, made a desperate dash toward the exit, his pulse hammering in his ears. But as he turned a corner, he was met with a terrifying sight: a figure standing in the center of the room, its form towering and indistinct, surrounded by an aura of pure malevolent energy.
The being did not move, did not speak. But in that instant, Jax felt the cold, unyielding grip of something far older than anything he had encountered. His body trembled, his limbs seizing, as he reached for his weapon.
But before he could pull the trigger, the figure lifted a long, jagged finger and pointed directly at him.
Reality itself seemed to twist and crack. Time fractured as Jax's body was consumed by a burst of dark energy, his screams swallowed by the very walls.
Zalthorion's POV
Zalthorion sat still in his high-tech command center, his gaze fixed on the holographic screen before him. The haunting image of the last moments of the Exo-Guardians played out in slow motion, each agonizing second burned into his mind. He'd seen countless reports, countless battles. But this… this was different. The speed, the precision with which the Guardians were taken out, was unnerving, even for him.
The screen flickered briefly, and then, the replay continued but something changed. The figure in the Underlayers, the being that had slaughtered his soldiers so easily, now addressed the camera.
Its voice was not anythijg it was deep and unnatural, as if it were coming from the very fabric of reality itself.
"Zalthorion... Zalthorion… You've sealed the echo. The spiral calls…"
The words resonated within Zalthorion's chest, sending a tremor through his being. There was a recognition in the voice, something ancient, something unavoidable. The entity was speaking directly to him, addressing him as if it had known him for eons.
The hologram flickered again. The figure stepped forward into the frame, its body a blur of shifting darkness and jagged lines. Its long, spindly fingers slowly reached up toward the air, tracing a jagged path through the very fabric of reality. It was slicing through space itself.
The rift it created split the air wide open, a gaping tear in the universe, showing glimpses of an endless void, beyond time, beyond comprehension. The entity's eyes if they could even be called that glowed with an otherworldly fire, and a shuddering whisper escaped its lips.
"I have waited… long enough."
With a final, decisive motion, the figure's hand pushed forward, fully rending the fabric of space. The rift expanded, its edges pulsing with dark energy. Then, with terrifying speed, the being leapt through the rift, vanishing into the unknown.
Zalthorion remained silent for several moments, his eyes fixed on the last frame. The message was clear, and the implications were far worse than anything he had anticipated.
This was no random anomaly. This was no mere interruption.
The Vault of Echoes had been disturbed and the being that had awoken was not just a threat to Evolto City. It was a power that transcended everything.
And it had just made its move.