The Last Dig

The mist curled low over the ground, swallowing the outlines of broken machines and shattered tents.

Bootprints, long since blurred by rain and time, led deeper into the ruins—marks of a forgotten desperation.

Gaius Perenos walked alone.

Shotgun low in his hands.

Eyes cold, calculating.

The expedition site had been ambitious once. Cranes, sensor rigs, generator packs—the scattered remains of corporate pride now rusted and bleeding sparks into the wet earth. Duskwell's banner, ripped and half-buried, flapped limply against a collapsed scaffold.

No survivors.

No bodies either.

Only the silence—and the machines that should have been still... humming softly in the fog.

Gaius crouched by a shattered crawler unit. Its front chassis had been ripped open, not by explosives, but something slower—like claws tearing through steel. His gloved fingers brushed across scorched metal, tracing the burn marks that spiraled outward, strange and unnatural.

Something had been here.

Something that wasn’t human anymore.

He found flare sticks driven into the mud like markers. Grave markers. But there were no graves.

Just echoes.

A low drone drifted from deeper within the wreckage. He moved toward it cautiously, every step calculated. The drone grew louder—a cracked signal on repeat, bleeding from a crushed comms panel still sparking weakly under a leaning support strut.

Static buzzed. Then a voice—fragmented, desperate:

"—whispers in the wire—"

"—inside us—"

"—seeded us—"

Gaius rose slowly, shotgun at the ready.

The mist moved strangely ahead—eddying not with the wind, but with an unseen rhythm, like breath.

Like a heartbeat.

The mist thickened around the wreckage, muting even the static.

Somewhere deeper, beyond the reach of the dead machines, something pulsed.

Faint.

Far.

Not made by human hands.

Gaius felt the shift in the air—the world growing wronger the farther one wandered from civilization.

Grief Hollow awaited.

And whatever had claimed this expedition... had barely begun to stir.

He slung the shotgun tighter across his body.

And he moved on—into the mist.