"What is all this stuff?"

More about "What is all this stuff?"

The cave shouldn’t have been there. Not this high in the hills, not carved with such precision, and definitely not beating with a faint green pulse like a sleeping creature. Kaelis lingered at the threshold, listening. The rain behind her softened into distant static. The air inside smelled of dust, cold metal and something faintly electrical, like old circuitry clinging to life out of sheer stubbornness.

She raised her flashlight, the beam slicing across tangled machinery. Tubes snaked from wall to wall, half-organic in the way they curved and coiled. And then she saw the lights: small orbs glowing with an alert, unblinking vigilance. They weren’t bright enough to be active sensors, but they weren’t dead either.

“Persistent little ghosts,” she muttered.

Her voice didn’t echo. The cave swallowed it.

Kaelis stepped inside, careful, deliberate. The ground was littered with the husks of obsolete drones and collapsed constructs, their plating etched with symbols from the Old City’s earliest years. If the core systems she shut down had been merely the surface of a larger network, then this place was the marrow.

Something shifted deeper in the cave — not movement, but awareness. A faint hum rolled through the cables, like a deep breath being drawn after centuries of stillness.

Kaelis tightened her grip on the flashlight.

“I shut down your city,” she said quietly. “If you’re planning to argue about it, now’s the time.”

No response came. But the green lights brightened, one by one, like eyes opening.

She stepped forward anyway, because that was the kind of adventurer she was: someone who kept moving even when the dark began to pay attention.

And the cave, patient and ancient, seemed ready to tell her a truth the Old City had buried.