amen90613

Some places are built to shelter the soul. Others, to guard a secret.

In a forgotten corner of the world, tucked between ancient trees and winding mist, there stands a café known only to those who need it most. No signs. No staff. Just a weathered door, slightly ajar—waiting.

Eliyas, a young man haunted by fragments of a past he doesn’t fully understand, stumbles into this retreat chasing a whisper—a name tied to something far greater than him. As he finds sanctuary beneath its quiet beams, he realizes the café is more than a refuge. It's a fulcrum, balancing two realities: the calm surface of the world… and the unseen current beneath it.
Beneath steaming mugs and silent mornings lies a thread pulling them toward something ancient, dangerous, and alive.

Some doors offer peace. Others open to the unknown.

The Hidden Retreat

Nova Helix was louder than ever.

The levtrain's shriek rattled Eliyas's teeth as he stepped onto the skybridge, his reflection fracturing across a hundred glass panels. None of them looked right—his face too pale under the artificial lights, the scar above his eyebrow standing out livid against his skin. He'd forgotten to shave. The stubble made him look rougher than he felt, or maybe exactly as rough.

He rolled his shoulders, the starch-stiff collar of his Helion uniform scraping against his sunburnt neck. The fabric still carried a whisper of woodsmoke from the forest, stubborn as a ghost.

Floor 57. Technical Operations. Division Beta-9.

The lab was a crypt of blue light and hushed keystrokes. Eliyas took his station between two junior analysts, their eyes flickering with ocular overlays he'd long since learned to ignore. His own terminal booted up with a subvocal hum, the screen casting his hands in corpse-light. The ink stains were gone now, scrubbed raw for corporate cleanliness, but his nails were bitten to the quick.

Anomalies flickered across the grid display.

There—a pulse. Low-frequency. Persistent. Originating beyond the city's mapped edge. His fingers hovered over the keys, then tagged it with a nondescript marker: *Signal Echo. Possible Interference.* The lie came easily. His pulse did not.

Kairo leaned against his desk, smelling of synthetic mint and the metallic tang of energy chews. His tie was loose, the knot slipping like everything else about him. "You alright, man?"

"Fine." Eliyas minimized the screen with a twitch of his fingers. "Didn't sleep well."

Kairo's gaze dropped to Eliyas's wrists, where the cuffs had ridden up to reveal fresh scratches. "You've been off since the last cycle. Like your head's somewhere else." A beat. "You go outside the grid again?"

Kairo exhaled through his nose, then leaned closer. "Look. If you're into something… strange—" His voice dipped, barely audible over the hum of servers. "—just make sure it doesn't follow you back in."

After work, Elias didn't go home right away.

Instead, he walked. Through lower districts, where the neon lights flickered out. Through the alleyways between synthetic towers. Past vendors yelling into the evening air, offering synthmeals and black market modules.

Eventually, he found himself back at the archive vaults—abandoned municipal record halls no longer used by the central grid. He'd worked here once, years ago. Before the job. Before everything.

The archive vaults smelled of decaying plastic and old dust.

Eliyas's access chip still worked, though the system protested with a rusty whir. The terminal screen flickered to life, its glow catching on the frayed edge of his glove—the left one, missing two fingertips where he'd torn them free on brambles last week.

The records were ancient. Pre-Helion. Some so degraded they pixelated at the edges, words dissolving into static.

In the dim blue light of the archive, he pulled up encrypted field reports—centuries-old data on city expansion, and the strange phenomena encountered near the forest border.

"Subject Location: Entry Unstable. Visualized Structure Appears Infrequently. No known foundation detected beneath coordinates. Civilian reports date back 218 years."

The City & Silence