The sound Dr. Castille's equipment made wasn't quite a scream, but it came close.
I spun toward her as sparks erupted from the echo detection array, the crystalline resonance sensors cracking like eggs dropped on stone. The main scanner emitted a high-pitched whine that made my teeth ache, then died with a final, pathetic wheeze.
"What just happened?" Elysia demanded, moving quickly to Dr. Castille's side.
The archaeologist stared at her ruined equipment with the expression of someone watching their life's work burn. "The resonance readings spiked beyond anything I've ever recorded. The sensors weren't designed to handle this level of echo density."
"How much beyond?" Lyra asked, though her attention seemed divided between the conversation and something only she could perceive.
"Triple the readings from the memory chamber. Maybe quadruple." Dr. Castille pulled a backup scanner from her pack, a smaller, cruder device. "Whatever's beneath us makes that chamber look like a child's toy."
Ashthorn hummed against my hip with increasing intensity. Not the gentle warmth I'd grown accustomed to, but something urgent. Almost insistent. I touched the hilt, and the sensation doubled.
"The blade's responding again," I said, drawing everyone's attention. "Stronger than before."
"Mine too," Lyra added quietly. Aegis floated behind her shoulder, its surface rippling with patterns of light that seemed to move independently of any external source.
Marcus had been examining the walls while we dealt with the equipment failure. Now he straightened, his weathered face grim. "You'll want to see this."
We followed him to what had appeared to be a solid stone wall at the chamber's far end. Up close, I could see what had caught his attention: a series of hairline cracks running in geometric patterns across the surface. Not damage from age or settling, but deliberate design.
"It's a door," Elysia breathed, her scholarly excitement immediately overriding any royal composure. "Look at the pattern. Those aren't cracks, they're seams."
She was right. The lines formed an intricate geometric design, though one that seemed to shift slightly when I wasn't looking directly at it. Like the echo-script in the memory chamber, but more complex. More alive.
"The question," Dr. Castille said, setting up her backup scanner, "is how to open it. I don't see any obvious mechanism."
Lyra stepped closer to the wall, and immediately the geometric pattern began to glow with soft amber light. She jerked back as if stung.
"It's responding to you," I observed.
"So I noticed," she said dryly, though her eyes held a mixture of unease and fascination. "The question is why."
"Only one way to find out," Elysia said, her voice carrying the kind of excitement usually reserved for discovering lost texts or solving ancient puzzles. "Try touching it."
"Your Highness," Marcus warned, "sites like this don't just open doors. They test people. Change them. I've seen..."
"You've seen what?" Elysia turned to face him fully, princess-mode temporarily activated. "Marcus, if you know something about this place, now would be an excellent time to share."
The guide's shoulders sagged slightly. "I've been to three sites like this over the past twenty years. Each one was different, but they all had one thing in common: they chose who could enter. And they all required... payment."
"What kind of payment?" I asked, though I wasn't sure I wanted to know the answer.
"Truth. Change. Sometimes more than you're willing to give." His eyes found Lyra's. "They don't just test your abilities, my lady. They test who you are. And not everyone comes out the same person they went in as."
The warning should have been sobering. Should have made us reconsider. Instead, I watched Elysia's eyes light up with the kind of fervor that had probably driven scholars to their deaths for centuries.
"Do you understand what we're looking at?" she said, gesturing toward the glowing wall. "This isn't just another echo site. This is a deliberate construct. A facility. Something the pre-Imperial civilization built with specific purpose." She turned to Lyra. "And it's responding to you specifically. Do you have any idea how unprecedented that is?"
"I'm beginning to get a sense," Lyra replied, though her tone suggested she wasn't entirely comfortable with the implications.
"The academic implications alone are staggering," Elysia continued, her scholarly passion building momentum. "If we can document how these ancient systems functioned, how they selected individuals, what criteria they used... we could revolutionize our understanding of echo theory."
"Assuming we survive the documentation process," Dr. Castille added pointedly.
"Science requires risk," Elysia shot back. "And this is the discovery of a lifetime. Possibly several lifetimes."
I found myself caught between Marcus's warnings and Elysia's infectious enthusiasm. The rational part of my mind agreed with the guide's caution. But the larger part, the part that had always hungered for significance, for understanding, was already reaching toward possibilities I couldn't quite name.
"What does your instinct tell you?" I asked Lyra.
She was quiet for a long moment, her red eyes fixed on the glowing patterns. "That whatever's down there has been waiting. And that..." She hesitated. "That it knows me somehow. Or thinks it does."
"All the more reason to proceed," Elysia said firmly. "If this facility can provide answers about your abilities, about your connection to the ancient network, then we have an obligation to investigate."
"An obligation to whom?" Marcus asked.
"To truth. To knowledge. To understanding what we're really dealing with." Elysia moved to stand beside Lyra, her royal bearing transformed into something more professorial. "Look, I understand the risks. But we've already triggered something by being here. The equipment failures, the increasing echo activity... whatever's beneath us is already awakening. Our choice isn't between safety and danger. It's between facing the unknown with preparation or facing it blind."
Lyra looked at me, and I saw my own conflict reflected in her expression. Fear and excitement warring with each other. The scholar in her wanted answers as badly as Elysia did. But the practical part that had survived an orphanage and earned a place at the Academy was naturally cautious.
"Your blade wants to go," she observed.
I nodded. Ashthorn's humming had grown so insistent I could feel it through my entire body. "What about Aegis?"
"It's... interested. Curious." She reached back to touch the shield's edge, and it pulsed brighter. "Not afraid, exactly. But aware that whatever happens next will be significant."
"Then we proceed?" Elysia asked, hope clear in her voice.
Dr. Castille sighed heavily. "I suppose this is why they pay me to document discoveries, not prevent them."
Marcus shook his head but didn't voice another objection. "If we're doing this, we do it properly. No one goes anywhere alone. We document everything. And at the first sign that things are beyond our control, we retreat."
"Agreed," I said, speaking for the group. "Lyra?"
She took a deep breath, then stepped forward and placed her palm against the glowing geometric pattern.
The response was immediate and overwhelming.
Light erupted from the wall, not harsh but everywhere at once. The geometric patterns expanded, flowing outward from Lyra's touch like ripples in a pond. But instead of fading, they grew brighter, more complex, more alive.
And then the wall spoke.
Not with words, exactly. More like meaning transmitted directly into our minds, bypassing language entirely. But if I had to translate the sensation into speech, it would have been:
The Inheritor has returned. The trials await. Will you prove worthy of what was left for you?
The voice carried weight. Authority. And underneath it all, something that might have been longing.
Lyra jerked her hand back, but the light continued to spread. The geometric seams widened, revealing not empty space beyond but a passage carved from living stone. Echo-script lined the walls, pulsing in rhythm with something that felt like a massive heartbeat.
"Well," Elysia said, her voice hushed with awe. "I think that's as clear an invitation as we're likely to receive."
"More like a challenge," Marcus muttered.
"Even better," Elysia replied, already moving toward the passage. "Lyra, the facility addressed you specifically. 'Inheritor,' it called you. Does that mean anything to you?"
"Nothing I can name," Lyra said, though something in her tone suggested otherwise. "But..." She looked at the passage, then at me. "It doesn't feel foreign. It feels like... recognition."
I stepped up beside her, close enough that our shoulders almost touched. "Then we face it together. Whatever comes next."
She smiled, and for the first time since the wall had opened, she looked genuinely excited rather than apprehensive. "Together. Though I have to admit, the scholar in me is desperately curious about what these 'trials' are supposed to test."
"Only one way to find out," Elysia said, practically vibrating with anticipation.
As we gathered our equipment and prepared to descend, I felt Ashthorn pulse one more time against my hip. Not urgent now, but... approving. As if the blade had been waiting for this moment as much as the facility itself.
Whatever lay ahead in the depths beneath Azmere, whatever trials waited for us in the ancient dark, we would face them as we had everything else: together.
The passage stretched before us, lit by echo-script that seemed to breathe with its own inner light. And somewhere in the distance, deeper than sound could carry, I thought I heard something vast stirring to wakefulness.
We stepped forward into the unknown, leaving the familiar world behind.
And the ancient door sealed itself silently behind us.