A cool wind met them the moment the transporter shimmer faded.

Airex blinked against the kaleidoscope of light against dark, the sun high and bright and clawing in filtered beams and shafts through the canopy of trees. Tall evergreens rose along the lower slopes of the mountain range, keeping the forest floor shrouded in shadows. Needles and leaves shuffled under their feet, and the air was thick with the scent of sap. For a moment, there was nothing to hear but the wafting breeze and their own breathing.

Thawn adjusted her field pack, gaze flicking upward along the rugged incline. ‘This is… isolated.’

‘No wonder the authorities lost track of him,’ Airex murmured, checking the tricorder. ‘Kavel’s homestead is two hundred metres ahead. No clear paths. Be careful of your footing.’

The terrain sloped gently at first, then dipped to where the trees thickened and shadows drew nearer. For all of Airex’s lives and skills, outdoorsmanship was not among them, and he could not tell if the places where the undergrowth was ripped and torn were signs of a humanoid inhabitant or the comings and goings of nature.

The further they went, the more Thawn stayed close. ‘This doesn’t feel like someone who wanted a simple retirement.’

‘No.’ Airex kept his voice low, as if raising it would cause too much of a disturbance. He wasn’t sure why. ‘But he had nobody to hide from. No trouble with the law. He simply… left his research institute. His life.’

‘His family,’ she said. ‘I checked the records Luroth sent. Like the others: he was a thriving, successful person. And then he just… wasn’t.’ Her eyes rose to the tall trees again. ‘I keep feeling like we’re being watched.’

‘We are.’ Airex swept the tricorder again. ‘Motion sensors. No indication they’re linked to anything, though.’

Thawn pursed her lips. ‘I don’t know if it’s reassuring to be right.’

The trail widened at the base of an outcrop, where a cluster of trees leaned away to form a clearing. That was when they first saw the dwelling. Stone walls had been half-built into the rock itself, jutting outwards, and the metal roof panels had been overlaid with timber that had grown weathered and mossy over the long years. From overhead, Airex thought, it would be very difficult to notice that it was a structure at all, and not a continuation of rock or tree canopy. The windows – only two of them – were small, shuttered, and reinforced.

‘Life-sign,’ Airex confirmed from his tricorder, voice still low. ‘Just one.’

‘Commander.’ He glanced up as Thawn tugged at his sleeve. She wasn’t looking at the house, but the trees in the ring around the clearing. From a nearby branch hung an effigy of twigs and twine, twisting in the breeze, making a crude frame of a makeshift symbol. Small bones dangled off the bottom.

Thawn swallowed. ‘Is that…’

‘The symbol.’ Airex licked his dry lips. ‘It could be anything. He was a scholar of religion.’

‘It’s not the only one.’

He followed her gaze to catch the other slivers of movement at the clearing’s periphery. Here and there, other effigies of sticks and rope quivered in the wind. Some were other shapes; humanoid, animal. Others, indistinguishable forms.

Airex swallowed and advanced on the door, thick timber bound with iron. He lifted a hand and knocked.

The sound echoed dully, as if snatched by the cliff and trees. A pause. Thawn glanced at him, uncertain.

Nothing.

He gritted his teeth and knocked again, louder this time. ‘Doctor Mereth Kavel?’ he called, projecting his voice but keeping it measured. ‘My name is Davir Airex; this is Rosara Thawn. We’re working with your institute, and we have some questions for you.’

Silence stretched again. Then, from within, slow footsteps, level, controlled. A latch clicked. A heavy bolt slid back.

The door opened only enough to reveal a single dark eye in the gap, sharp, unblinking, framed by a face lined with age and sleeplessness.

‘I told them to stop sending people.’

Airex exchanged a quick look with Thawn before answering softly, ‘We’re not who you think.’

The eye watched them. Then the door was pulled open.

Doctor Mereth Kavel had once been the kind of man who lived in tweed and ancient halls of knowledge, who spoke softly at conferences and rooted through ancient books smelling of time and old parchment. Now, he was a wild-haired figure, muscle from hard-living on his wiry form, his skin sun-weathered, his clothes simple and hard-wearing.

‘You’re not Orvas,’ he said in a voice that creaked at the edges from lack of use.

‘We’re…’

Airex cut off Thawn without thinking. ‘We’ve come a long way to find you,’ he said by way of confirmation. ‘We think you’re one of the only people who might understand.’

Something flashed in Kavel’s eyes. ‘You’ve been spoken to.’

Thawn’s brow furrowed. ‘We don’t know who…’

‘I have,’ said Airex, gaze not breaking from Kavel’s. ‘She’s still coming to terms with it. I don’t know if it’s a warning, a threat, or a promise. But, yes. It’s like being chosen, isn’t it?’ It was as if there was a ringing in his ears, a sense of pressure at the edge of his awareness. ‘I just don’t know what for.’

Kavel gave Thawn a suspicious look now, then stepped back, keeping the door open. ‘Quickly,’ he urged. ‘Don’t linger outside. The unseeing eyes are everywhere.’

The door shut behind them, and they stepped into a room that felt like someone’s mind at the moment of fracture. Light from a single lantern threw long shadows across the cramped interior. The walls were plastered with sheets of paper and scraps of cloth, each covered in sketched oval sigils.

But unlike the untouched symbols of the Ashen Path and the builders, some of these were crossed out, some encircled, some painted over with spirals or thorned shapes Airex didn’t recognise. The floorboards were bare except where Kavel had chalked looping symbols around the perimeter, creating a broken ring.

Thawn’s breath caught as she took it in. ‘This is – you’ve changed it…’

‘They’re wardings,’ Kavel muttered, brushing past them. ‘Crude, but effective enough. The old gods dislike disorder they did not master.’

Airex’s gaze swept the room. Effigies adorned the corners, but dismantled and deconstructed, their skulls inverted, their wooden limbs broken and bound with wire. Herbs hung in bunches, jars of ash sat uncorked on shelves. And amid it all, the workbench, covered in hand-bound journals, torn diagrams that could be pencil-drawn subspace lattices, and, in the middle, charcoal sketches of symbols and walls.

Kavel saw Airex noticing it and laid a careful hand over the page.

‘You don’t look at that too long,’ he warned. ‘It remembers you.’

‘I have dreams,’ Airex blurted, and Thawn was staring at him like he’d lost his mind as he turned. ‘A dead friend whose face the god wears. And then – older things. Ancient chaos of my people. Ancient sins of mine.’

Kavel watched him for a beat. ‘The symbol?’ His gaze flickered to the oval marking. ‘The unseeing eye?’

‘That’s of your people. Your faith…’

‘The unseeing eye, a sigil of what modern Orvas society calls the “Age of Chaos,” as if our veneer of ordered civilisation can harness the madness of the universe.’ Kavel shuffled around, going to put the workbench papers away as if they were a source of shame. ‘The symbol of what was the most prevalent religion a thousand years ago, of our eyeless gods who saw all anyway. A reminder that flesh is fleeting and the spirit endures – and that we remind ourselves of this through suffering of the body.’

‘That’s your people’s old ways,’ Airex said, following him with his eyes. ‘I see other things. My people – we have old traditions about unending circles. I see them broken.’

‘Broken circles,’ Kavel muttered, and before Airex knew it, he’d plucked up a fresh sheaf of paper and with a blunt pencil was scrawling a loop over and over, then drew jagged lines through it. ‘Are those the signs of your gods? Or your devils?’

‘Chaos,’ Airex answered coolly. ‘Darkness.’ He didn’t know if he was lying about the dreams. He’d spoken without thinking, and now they echoed at the periphery of his thoughts, resonating as if being dredged out from his subconscious. Or from what he’d smothered.

‘Maybe you are chosen,’ Kavel continued, not looking up. ‘But I cannot help you if I do not know your ways. Gods or devils or abominations, there are rules, and you have to follow the rules -’

There was a new edge of hysteria creeping in, and Thawn advanced, voice quiet. ‘Is that what you told the others? Varnir, the rest?’

Kavel’s hand lashed out, not at her but at the pot holding pencils, which hit the floor with an echoing clatter as he rounded on her. ‘Varnir was a fool,’ he spat. ‘Thought he was special, thought he was chosen – granted insights into the universe, into the unknowable. But the flesh has to suffer – I told them, I told them…’

Thawn didn’t miss a beat. ‘What did you tell them?’ she asked softly.

‘They needed me to understand that something was there, that they weren’t losing their minds,’ Kavel growled, hands clenching and unclenching. ‘Scientists and fools who forgot the importance of the soul and the heart, of flesh and blood and not just thought, who believed they were above it all until it the blood called to them…’

Airex’s lips twisted in faint amusement to himself. ‘Ah, STEM scholars,’ he murmured, earning a sharp glare from Thawn.

‘They thought they could master it,’ Kavel continued. ‘That they were special and that it wasn’t dangerous. I gave them the keys to understand their visions, the symbols, the imagery, showed them the paths and lines of our old people, and then reminded them that the gods ask for nothing without a price!’ His voice raised now, finger jerking around the room as he stabbed it at each effigy.

Thawn watched him, immobile. ‘You helped them unlock their visions and dreams,’ she surmised gently. ‘But you thought it was dangerous and they didn’t.’

‘They saw grandeur, I saw darkness,’ Kavel snarled. ‘Then when we met, when we gathered, they saw the beating heart of the gods and decided to do its great work because they thought that made them great. And not merely supplicants.’

‘The great work,’ Thawn echoed. ‘Taking a ship? Building something?’

‘Stripping away,’ Kavel mumbled, marching to one of the effigies in the corner. He adjusted it, then readjusted it, making sure the wire biting into its limbs were tight. ‘Stripping away and moving and rebuilding to open the eye, to find the shape of the fold and cut the knot…’

Airex had moved past him, back to his worktable, and reached for the charcoal sketches. These weren’t merely symbols, but images; carved stone archways and pillars, and one picture of a square or a plinth or an altar that had been drawn so many times it was nothing but a smudge of squarish charcoal.

‘You saw the beating heart of the gods,’ he said softly, looking up. ‘Is that what this is? You met somewhere?’

Kavel froze at that. ‘We gathered. Called by dreams and darkness. Each of us chosen for a reason. But I was there to unlock the knowledge, show them to the heart, make them see what the unseeing eye needed to understand. I thought I was warning them.’ His expression twisted in fear and grief, and his hands came to his temples. ‘I thought I was warding them, not showing them, not unleashing…’

‘Kavel.’ Airex’s voice dropped as he marched over to him, holding the chaotic scribble. ‘You all came from different places, completely unaffiliated until these dreams brought you together. Then they all left, because they didn’t understand, they didn’t fear enough. Right?’ Kavel gave a quiet, frantic nod. ‘And you came together in one place. The beating heart of the gods.’ He lifted the paper. ‘Here?’

Kavel flinched back. ‘An old place. A forgotten place, a place I was shown. Scripture says it would take blood to make the heart of the gods beat, but for us, it only took one?’

Airex’s eyes snapped to Thawn’s.

She swallowed. ‘You killed someone?’

‘To make the heart beat.’ Kavel’s voice creaked. ‘Were they lost when the blood drained down? Or when the heart beat? Or long before?’ He tore away, muttering again to himself, hands buried deep in his hair.

Thawn marched up to Airex, voice low. ‘They all had visions, visions and dreams which led them to a place, the first time they met,’ she hissed. ‘Somewhere with, what, a Vezda device? A means of communication? Which took murder to activate. That’s when they got their instructions to build the facility.’

He watched her for a moment, then nodded and turned to Kavel. ‘Where? Where was the heart of the gods?’

‘To blind the unseeing eye you must shroud it,’ Kavel mumbled, unhearing. ‘Bind with thorns, for the soil remembers but the brambles shroud, for the old gods cannot master the wind and trees…’

Airex strode back to him, hand clasping his elbow. ‘I’ve seen it,’ he hissed. ‘And pretended I didn’t. A dead man staring me in the face before all around me was fire and blood. I hear the echo of myself in your friends’ scribblings, their madness to understand – not the fold, or the root, but that burning desire for, what, meaning? Greatness? Control?’ He leaned in. ‘I don’t have your old gods to whisper to me, I just have my own devils, and they see here the power and they want it.’

Kavel stared up at him, lip curling. ‘I will not feed the gods -’

‘I want to stop the gods,’ Airex hissed. ‘I have spent centuries silencing my own devils and now your gods want mine to howl again.’ He raised the charcoal again, the scrawled mess of stone and squares. ‘Where did you meet?’ he pressed. ‘Where is the heart of the gods?’