Volume One: Echo of Dust
The tunnel sloped downward at an angle so steep it felt more like falling than walking.
Riven kept one hand on the crumbling support rail, his other curled tightly around the worn grip of his sidearm. The ancient service tunnel reeked of dust and rusted coolant. Somewhere in the dark ahead, a low, constant vibration echoed through the metal bones of the ruin.
He wasn't supposed to be down here.
The lower levels of Arc-4's dead sectors were strictly off-limits, sealed off by ghost codes and forgotten regulations. But codes could be forged, and rules were for people who had something to lose. Riven didn't.
His steps were quiet, practiced. Boots muffled by debris, breath held as he passed through threshold after threshold of hollow silence.
The air grew colder. Not in temperature—but in texture.
He knew what that meant. He was close.
… Silent Drift
The phrase surfaced in his thoughts, unbidden. He grimaced and pushed it away. That was scav slang for when you got too deep, too long, and started hearing the walls breathe.
Ahead, the tunnel opened into a collapsed chamber. A collapsed elevator shaft yawned in the center, cables hanging like black vines, twisted and frozen in time. Light flickered from a cracked maintenance lantern on the far wall—faint and sickly blue.
Riven scanned the ruin, adjusted the coil battery on his hip, and stepped inside.
As his boots touched the broken floor, the Echo hit him.
It wasn't a sound or a light.
It was a pleasure.
Something old. Something buried.
He froze.
There it was again—a tug, soft and invisible, threading into his chest like a hook through cloth. It pulled downward, toward the edge of the shaft.
Riven moved without fully understanding why.
When he reached the lip, he looked down and saw it.
A chamber. Half-submerged in black water, sealed behind shattered layers of armored plating. The light from his shoulder lamp refracted strangely off the water's surface—like it didn't belong to this world.
More importantly, something was glowing beneath it.
A pale shape, curled like a fossilized embryo in a coffin of shattered alloy.
He hesitated. Every instinct screamed to leave it.
But instincts didn't feed you. Or buy clean air.
So he pulled a folding grapple from his belt, locked it into the wall socket, and descended.
… Echo Core: Unregistered
The text scrolled across his vision—his visor HUD flickering even though he hadn't activated the scanner.
He landed with a splash in the ankle-deep water. The glow came from within a cracked Core containment pod. Its surface was covered in frost and hairline fractures. Strange symbols pulsed across the curved metal like veins of light.
This wasn't ordinary tech. This was pre-Corefall. Maybe even older.
And it was still alive.
He stepped closer. The moment he touched the pod, the glow intensified—no longer passive, but aware.
Something behind his eyes whispered.
Not in language.
In memory.
Or the imitation of it.
A name that wasn't his. A silence shaped like thought.
…Echo-Null
His vision went white.
He stumbled back—but didn't fall. Because there was no ground anymore.
Just endless dark.
And the cold pressure of something watching him from behind his own skin.
… Static Field
He awoke face down, half-submerged in water.
Time had passed. Minutes. Hours. It was impossible to say. The pod no longer glowed. The light had died, and with it, the strange presence receded.
But something remained.
A presence at the edge of his mind, like a second breath he hadn't noticed he was holding.
He stood slowly, unsteady.
The chamber didn't feel abandoned anymore.
It felt empty.
Like whatever had been here had burrowed inside him instead.
His HUD flickered again—lines of alien code scrolling across the screen before vanishing. His echo detector was fried. His battery gauge flashed zero, though his weapon still hummed with charge.
The Core had done something to him. He didn't know what.
And he couldn't stay.
Riven climbed back out of the shaft, hands slick with blood he hadn't realized was his. The cut on his palm had crusted over, but it pulsed in sync with the whisper at the base of his skull.
Something was speaking in silence.
And it wasn't human.
As he reached the surface of the ruins, the light had changed.
It was darker now. The clouds above the wasteland horizon churned with oily mist. The wind carried a low whine like a signal caught between frequencies.
He didn't know it yet, but the ruin had marked him.
Not with light or scars, but with something deeper.
A resonance.
A drift.
And in the days to come, the world would begin to notice.
But for now, Riven just kept walking.
Because there was no one left to tell him to
Would you like me to continue with Chapter Two: Broken Sky, rewritten in the same flowing structure?