“You Dreamed It?”

 
Gaius set the mugs down with a soft clink. The steam that rose between them curled toward the ceiling—slow, spiraling, faintly tinted green from the resonance lamp in the corner.

He didn’t speak right away. Just sat across from her, fingers wrapped loosely around the ceramic.

Then, finally:

> “Alright. I think you want to know what I found out there.”

Lyra nodded, but said nothing. Her expression shifted—softened, maybe. She didn’t reach for her bag. Just listened.

So Gaius told her.

About the silence at the dig site. About machines that still hummed when their power should’ve been dead. About flare markers without graves. About data logs whispering with broken phrases—“inside us,” “the seed grows,” “never dead.”

About how the mist pulsed like breath. How the forest no longer creaked—it **waited**.

He stopped when her eyes broke contact.

She was reaching into her satchel now, carefully unrolling a folded page. No hesitation. No explanation.

Just a glyph.

Drawn in charcoal and water-soluble ink. Simple. Spiral-bound. Precise.

And wrong.

Gaius stared at it, face unreadable.

> “Where’d you see that?” he asked.

> “In a dream,” she said. “It started a week ago. After I read your first report.”

> “You dreamed it?” he repeated, skeptical.

She didn’t flinch.

> “More than once,” she said. “Always the same trees. But twisted—like bones wrapped in copper. And shadows between them. Not people. Not animals either. Something else.”

She traced the edge of the paper.

> “I didn’t draw it from memory. I drew it because I woke up **needing** to.”

Gaius didn’t answer. He reached over, flipped the resonance scanner on.

The glyph on the paper reacted immediately.

A low hum. Faint light. Matching the beat of a pulse that wasn’t either of theirs.

Lyra stared.

> “Is that... normal?”

> “No,” Gaius said, standing. “And neither is what I’m about to show you.”

He crossed to the far corner, flipped open a lead-lined case.

Inside: a jagged relic—bone-white, laced with faint green channels, humming so softly it felt like a thought forming in another room.

He placed it beside the glyph.

The scanner’s pitch jumped a register.

They didn’t look at each other.

Because whatever was in that paper, and in that fragment—

—it knew they were here.