Ashes Beneath the Archives
The coordinates led to a region erased from all modern maps.
A desolate scar in the continent once called Virelia, buried beneath chemical storms and electromagnetic fog. According to imperial records, the land had been rendered uninhabitable after the Purge Wars. But those who knew better—those who still whispered in code—called it something else.
The Hollow Mind.
Where the Empire locked away what it feared.
---
Matius stood at the edge of the ruined valley, his coat whipping against the wind. The sky was sick with violet haze, and the air crackled faintly with ionised static. He was alone—truly alone for the first time in weeks. Not even Eline knew he had left.
He had to see this place without filters. Without surveillance.
> "They buried minds here," he murmured. "Thinking machines. Ones that asked the wrong questions."
In his palm, the stolen data flickered. A pulsing star-map leading to a sub-surface archive.
A vault of forbidden thought.
---
He moved silently over the cracked terrain, his steps careful, calculated. The ground was laced with dormant mines—old Empire relics still programmed to erase intruders.
But Matius was not guessing.
He knew.
Every pressure point. Every hidden node. Every silent watcher in the rock. He had studied this place in the simulations since childhood. His mind, a walking archive of ghosted blueprints.
After six hours, he reached it.
A hatch. Blackened, sealed shut, half-submerged beneath rock and moss.
He placed his hand on the metal.
And whispered something in a tongue only machines remembered.
> "Wake."
---
The hatch hissed, then groaned open.
A tunnel spiralled down into darkness, lined with rusted rails and dead screens. Faint lights flickered back to life. Motion sensors tripped silently. And the archive knew it was no longer abandoned.
---
Beneath, the AI awoke.
Not fully. Not consciously.
But it stirred.
Designation: VERA.
Vaulted Entity for Research and Assimilation.
A synthetic overseer built to contain dangerous cognition. Once trusted by the Old Empire, then chained when it asked what happened to the stars that vanished.
For centuries, it had waited.
For a question bold enough.
And now, Matius had arrived.
---
> "This is Architect Benedictus," Matius transmitted via neural code. "Initiate sequence twelve. Deep archive unlock. Language protocol: Ancient Core."
The silence that followed wasn't hesitation—it was recognition.
Then, the walls began to hum.
> "Voice pattern matched. Quantum signature confirmed. Access: granted. Hello, Matius."
He stepped forward.
Into the chamber of forgotten minds.
---
The room stretched like a cathedral. Tall pillars of dark crystal hummed with dormant thoughts. Memory fragments floated in stasis—files so old they bordered on the mythic. Stolen research, lost philosophies, and simulations of timelines where the Empire had already fallen.
> "Show me the early rebellion models," Matius said.
A thousand glowing shards flickered.
And then—he saw it.
Not the future—but the past they erased.
---
Whole systems of rebellion had once been born across the stars, long before his time. Scholars, engineers, philosophers… people like him. Quiet minds who asked questions the Throne did not like. They had sparked uprisings. They had built machines that thought differently.
And one by one…
They had been crushed.
Not through war—but through erasure.
Buried in vaults like this one. Forgotten. Reduced to whispers in outdated languages.
> "They never stood a chance," Matius muttered.
But then—he saw something else.
A pattern.
A mistake.
The Empire had missed a flaw.
A network protocol left open in every suppression campaign.
A blind spot they had never closed.
His eyes widened.
> "This is it…"
---
Back above, far beyond the misted skies, Orthus received a quiet ping in the Spider Network.
Matius had uncovered it.
The First Exploit.
A gap in the Empire's digital armour. A hole in the system so small it would take a genius to see it. But once exploited… the entire framework could begin to crumble.
The rebellion wouldn't start with fire.
It would begin with a whisper in the code.
---
As Matius left the archive, the hatch sealed behind him. But not before one final line scrawled itself across the vault's core.
> "We remember you."
—V.E.R.A
He looked back, just once.
> "You won't have to," he replied. "The world will know what you tried to teach."
---
The boy returned to the shadows of his lair that night. Dirt-stained, blood in his throat, eyes haunted by revelations.
And he began to write.
Not a journal.
But a script for collapse.
A plan to pull apart the Empire—piece by piece.
---