chapter 1: the fire stone

The air smelled of ash and damp earth as the people of Ember Root gathered around the Great Flame. Shadows danced across faces painted with soot and ochre. They came barefoot, cloaked in fur and barkcloth, led by tradition older than memory.

Peacland sat near the edge of the fire circle, shoulders hunched, eyes fixated on the object in Old Mother Yara's hands.

It pulsed softly in the dim, unnatural blue—oval-shaped, like a river stone, yet smooth as water and warm with no fire. The Fire-Stone.

"Tonight," Mother Yara croaked, "the ancestors speak."

The tribe listened, reverent and silent. To them, the stone was sacred. A gift from the gods who fell from the sky long ago, when the stars wept fire and metal rained upon the world. None dared question itís origin.

None but Peacland.

He was sixteen sun-cycles, and strange. Where others hunted and carved, he built traps from vines and stones that reset themselves. He made patterns in ash and wood, asked questions that made elders frown. But more than anything, he watched the Fire-Stone.

Not with awe.

With hunger.

That night, after the ceremony, while even the watchful dogs had curled to sleep, Peacland returned. He slipped past the bone-chimes and sleeping guards, crept into the sacred tent, and approached the altar.

His fingers trembled as he reached out.

The moment his skin met the surface, the stone awoke.

A surge of blue light, a sound like whispered thunder, and suddenly the world vanished.

He stood in a void of stars, floating, disembodied. Images poured into his mind—machines, languages, equations he couldn't yet read but somehow understood. A voice spoke.

"Protocol: Seed Retrieval. Prime Directive Active."

Peacland gasped as the vision ended.

He fell backward, stone clutched to his chest, eyes wide in terror and wonder.

The gods were not gods.

They were machines. Builders. Thinkers.

And they had left behind more than stories.

They had left instructions.

That night, Peacland could not sleep. He stared at the stars above, realizing they were no longer just fire-lights in the sky. They were places. Homes. Tombs.

And perhaps, a future.

He turned the stone over in his hands as the fire in the village center dimmed to embers. It pulsed faintly now, soft and warm, as if asleep. He touched it again, but no new vision came.

Peacland tried to recreate the symbols he saw in his vision—etched into the dirt, then carved into bark. None made sense. But he felt them. Like something just beyond memory.

Over the next few days, he studied in secret. He fashioned tools from flint and bone, attaching cords and hooks as if mimicking parts of what he had seen. The others in the village mocked him—called him dream-broken.

But Peacland saw deeper.

He watched the way birds adjusted their wings mid-flight. The spiral of a snail's shell. The shape of lightning in the distance.

There were patterns.

Designs.

The world was not just earth and sky—it was a mechanism.

And someone had built it.

One evening, while foraging near the obsidian cliffs, he saw something strange embedded in the rock—metal, coiled like rope, fused with stone. He scraped it loose, uncovering a piece shaped like a coil. It looked like part of the vision.

He took it home.

That night, he placed it beside the Fire-Stone. It hummed.

Faint, but real.

Peacland knew then—the vision wasn't madness. It was memory.

Left for someone like him.

Left for the future.

And he would follow it, even if no one else believed.

Even if it meant leaving Ember Root behind.