Rain lashed the glass canopy of the Havelock Station, a distant outpost perched on the edge of the Borealis Expanse. The sky beyond was an endless swirl of violet and ash, punctuated only by the occasional streak of plasma storms far out on the frozen horizon. Inside, the station throbbed with the sound of alarms. Red lights bathed the corridor in a warning glow, flickering with a chaotic rhythm that mirrored the unease spreading through the halls.
Dr. Elira Kael moved swiftly, her boots clanging on the steel floors. Her long coat trailed behind her, soaked at the hem with oil and something darker. The research vessel Aegis had docked only hours ago, bringing with it an artifact that shouldn't exist—a sphere of obsidian glass, etched with ancient symbols that pulsed like a heartbeat.
The retrieval team had found it buried beneath a glacier two thousand miles south, in a ruin untouched by sunlight for millennia. Since then, the station had been spiraling into madness.
"Status report," she barked as she entered the command deck.
Commander Varric, a grizzled veteran of the Frontier Wars, turned from the main terminal. "We've lost control of three sub-levels. Something's moving in the ventilation shafts. We can't get a visual."
Elira's fingers danced over a console, bringing up thermal scans. Something large and warm was slithering through the station's cold skeleton.
"How did it breach containment?" she asked, voice low.
Varric met her eyes grimly. "It didn't. The artifact's still in the vault. But whatever's happening—it started when that thing came aboard. It's not a coincidence."
Elira stared at the readings. The air pressure in several sectors was dropping steadily, too fast for leaks. Something was breathing in there.
Not a coincidence at all.
She remembered the glyphs etched into the artifact's surface. They weren't just decorative—they moved when no one looked, like a whisper slipping through time. One symbol had caught her eye: a mirrored spiral, said in old folklore to mean doorway. Not a portal—worse. An invitation.
Below them, something growled. A screech of metal rang out from sub-level four.
"We need to evacuate," Varric said. "Now."
"No," Elira said, her voice icy. "If we leave it here, it spreads. Whatever that artifact is, it doesn't want to be studied. It wants to wake up."
She turned, locking eyes with the commander. "Seal the artifact chamber. Full lockdown. I'll go down with a team and destroy it."
Varric hesitated. "You go down there, you might not come back."
"That's the idea," she whispered.
---
The descent into sub-level four was not unlike entering a tomb.
Flanked by two armed guards, Elira pressed deeper into the station's underbelly, where lights flickered like dying stars. Pipes hissed steam. The air smelled of burnt ozone and something sharp, something wrong. They passed the remains of a technician—limbs bent in unnatural angles, eyes wide open, mouth frozen in a silent scream.
"Whatever did this wasn't human," one of the guards murmured, hand tightening on his rifle.
They reached the containment vault. The door hung open.
The guards raised their weapons. Elira stepped inside.
The artifact hovered mid-air.
Gone was its opaque blackness. Now, it glowed like a miniature sun, pulsing with radiant symbols. Shadows rippled along the walls in shapes no geometry could describe—angular beasts with too many limbs, eyes that blinked in impossible directions.
Suddenly, the sphere cracked.
A sound rang out—not a shatter, not a scream. Something woke up.
A tendril of light erupted from the artifact, lashing toward one of the guards. He vanished in an instant, not turned to ash but erased—a smear of absence where a man had stood.
Elira threw herself to the ground. The other guard opened fire. Bullets passed through the light harmlessly.
"It's not a weapon," Elira whispered. "It's a message."
But a message to whom?
The light turned on her.
And in that moment, Elira saw.
Not with eyes, but with something deeper—ancestral memory, or perhaps fate itself.
She saw a world beneath the ice. Cities older than stars. A civilization of thought, not flesh—one that had spoken through stone and symbol long before the first mammal crawled onto land.
They had locked themselves away from the universe, sealed in slumber for a reason.
And now the door had been opened.
Elira screamed.
---
She woke in the infirmary.
The guard who'd survived said the artifact had gone dark the moment she passed out. It lay inert, the way it had before—just a black sphere in a cracked containment field.
But Elira knew better.
She could feel it, even now, like a second heartbeat. Something had entered her. A whisper in her mind, not quite words. Instructions. Promises.
"You're marked," Varric said, standing at her bedside.
"Yes," she replied. "And I think I'm the only one who can stop what's coming."
"Coming from where?"
"Not from anywhere," she said. "From inside. The artifact isn't just an object. It's a seed."
She stood, still shaky. Outside, the storm had stopped. A dead calm hung over the Borealis Expanse.
But the silence felt wrong.
Elira looked out the window, beyond the ice, beyond the stars. "We opened the door. Now we have to close it before something steps through."
---
Far beneath the ice, in a city of forgotten machines, a signal pulsed.
One by one, ancient eyes flickered open.
And the world exhaled, slow and deep.
The fire beneath the ice was waking.