Prologue

​

"It's starting again," Ethan whispered, and the silence—terrifyingly—whispered back.

 

He jolted awake in that deceptive gray before dawn, when reality seems most permeable. The surrounding air crackled with an electrostatic charge that shouldn't be there, the ancient château walls expanding with unnatural precision, as if breathing. This was the third time this week. The memory fragments flooding his consciousness weren't his own—yet they lived in his mind with perfect clarity, quantum echoes from somewhere... or someone... else.

 

The hills of Provence outside his window should have offered comfort. Instead, they stood sentinel over whatever was bleeding through the thinning veil between what was and what could be. Ethan's fingers trembled as he reached for the journal beside his bed, the one documenting each incursion.

 

"They're getting closer," he wrote, knowing with bone-deep certainty that whatever sought him across the metaphysical divide had finally found him.

 

The world was holding its breath again, and Ethan Cross could feel it in the marrow of his bones.

 

A year had passed since the Hall of Records changed everything—since Ethan, Sofi, and Lila crossed the threshold and came out remade. The Guardians, once a shadowy order scattered and fractured, now had a home in an ancient château in southern France, its old stone walls humming with new life. Where there had been secrecy and suspicion, now there was purpose and collaboration. Security drones patrolled the grounds with quiet precision, while inside, quantum glass displays projected maps, data, and visions with a wave of the hand—technology reimagined, not to control, but to illuminate.

 

Ethan had changed most of all. Where grief and self-doubt once ruled him, there was a steadiness now—a clarity that came from his new connection to the Hall. It wasn’t omniscience, but something stranger: a sense of being aligned with possibility. His book, written in the quiet weeks after Egypt, had become a quiet phenomenon, pulling new allies toward the Guardians.

 

Sofi, his daughter, had grown into her role as Seer. The visions came easier for her now, their strangeness softened by practice and trust. Beside Ethan, she bridged science and intuition, her laboratory a tangle of resonance monitors and battered notebooks. She could see futures flickering at the edge of probability and understand the subtle ways their choices shaped the world.

 

Lila, ever the anchor, ran the new Guardian headquarters with a calm discipline. She trained new recruits, upgraded their defenses, and made sure nostalgia never outpaced practicality. They catalogued and integrated the old order’s relics—keys, symbols, and encrypted texts—understanding and respecting their power.

 

Together, the three of them had rebuilt the Guardians into something new. Their network stretched from Europe to North America, connecting teams of researchers, field agents, and mystics. The technology was extraordinary—portable resonance shields that could mask their movement, real-time translation for ancient languages, and compact med-kits using harmonic frequencies to speed healing. For the first time, the Guardians were prepared, not just for hidden threats, but for whatever was coming next.

 

And something was coming. Ethan could feel it in the silence between thoughts, in the way the data feeds sometimes flickered with symbols no one could trace. Every morning, as the sun rose over the vineyards, he felt the same question pressing at the edge of awareness: Was this the peace before the storm, or the last breath before the world turned again?

 

He glanced at Sofi and Lila—his family, his allies, the only ones who truly understood what had been lost and what still might be found. As the château came alive with the day’s work, Ethan knew one thing for certain: the story wasn’t over.

 

The world was about to remember something it had long tried to forget.

 

And this time, he was ready to face it. It wasn’t a question of when; it was now. Something was reaching out for him, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He needed to find Sofi, and he knew exactly where to should look.

 

The operations room, or what the Guardians call the Nerve, was built for moments like this. The architecture is pure function: matte-black walls laced with an array of touchscreens, kinetic holoprojectors fanning out from a central console, racks of data servers running so cool and silent that only the trained ear can detect the sound at all. The room is saturated with the aroma of old paper and ozone, like a library at the end of the world.

 

Lila enters, stepping into the pulse of blue-white displays. She scans the status readouts—no active breaches, no internal lockdowns—but feels the tension already present, as if the air has been stretched too thin to hold the world together. Sofi stands by the central console, one hand braced against the screen, her face pale and set. She glances up as Lila arrives, their eyes meeting in a brief moment of wordless communion.

 

“Is he—?” Lila begins, but Sofi shakes her head, her mouth pressed into a grim line.

 

“He’s coming,” she says. “It’s close.”

 

As if conjured by the words, Ethan appears in the doorway, stillness preceding him like a shockwave. His skin is paler than usual; the blue in his eyes is almost phosphorescent. He enters the Nerve with the air of someone walking into their own execution. Lila moves to intercept, but Ethan raises a hand—a gesture that is both warning and plea.

 

“Don’t,” he whispers, and immediately stumbles against the side of the console, fingers digging into the glass. The room flickers: lights stutter, screens glitch, and the hum of the servers drops an octave, like a chorus of voices losing confidence all at once.

 

Sofi moves to his side. She touches his arm, grounding him in the present. For a moment, nothing happens—just three people locked in a tableau, uncertain whether to flee or to hold fast. Then, as if a switch flipped in the world, Ethan's eyes roll back and the flood starts.

 

The Nerve dissolves into data. No, not data—memory, possibility, the raw substrate of the Hall. In the blink of an eye, the room becomes a vessel for something older and more precise than any of them could have imagined.

 

Ethan sees it first: a chamber deep beneath the earth, walls veined with living gold, every surface alive with moving glyphs. In the center, a pedestal of rough stone, upon which rests a thing that should not exist—a crystal, but not a crystal; a lattice of light and fluid, folding endlessly upon itself, fractal geometries looping through dimensions his mind cannot grasp. Around it, figures in robes chant words without sound, their faces blurred by the speed at which they vibrate.

 

Sofi is next. The vision pulls her in, doubling her consciousness back on itself until she can see through Ethan’s eyes and her own. She feels the hum of the artifact, but she also sees the consequences: memory fields collapsing, entire histories rewritten with the elegance of a master forger. In one thread, the artifact glows blue; in another, it pulses with fire; in a third, it shatters, and the world convulses in agony.

 

Lila, less sensitive to the field but no less determined, grips the back of Ethan’s shirt, her fingers cold and sure. She grounds them, pulling the vision into the present through the sheer force of her will. For a second, she feels nothing but the room—the hardness of the table, the scent of Sofi’s hair, the roughness of Ethan’s skin beneath her hand. But then the vision hits her, a tidal surge that knocks the air from her lungs.

 

She is in Atlantis, not as myth but as memory. The city spirals up from the sea in rings of white stone and silver, every building singing with a resonance that vibrates through the bones. The artifact is there, not yet hidden but being shaped—hands, many hands, sculpting it from a liquid medium that defies understanding. She hears laughter, a child’s cry, the echo of something beautiful and lost. She sees her own hands, smaller and smoother, tracing the glyphs into the artifact’s heart. The feeling is unmistakable: she has been here before.

 

The vision fractures, the threads pulling apart like DNA in a centrifuge. For a moment, each of them sees only their own fate:

 

Ethan, standing at the threshold of a cataclysm, forced to choose between annihilation and forgetting.

​

Sofi, her mind split into infinite facets, each one a different version of herself, all straining toward the truth.

​

Lila, alone in a chamber of mirrors, each reflection showing a possible world—and in every world, she fails to protect what matters most.

 

Then, with a violence that leaves them gasping, the vision collapses into a single moment. Back in the Nerve, the room flickers into focus. The only sound is Ethan’s ragged breathing, punctuated by the soft, incessant chime of an incoming alert.

 

Sofi is the first to recover. She drops to her knees, clutching her head, and speaks in a voice that is not entirely her own. “It’s an artifact. Not a weapon—a recorder. It can rewrite memories, alter beliefs. Whoever controls it can… can change the record.”

 

Ethan sways, blinking hard as the afterimages burn out of his eyes. “That’s why they hid it,” he says, the words coming in fits and starts. “Not to protect it from us. To protect us from it.”

 

Lila stands, bracing herself on the table. Her hand goes to her throat, fingers tracing the ankh as if for reassurance. “Voss,” she says. “If the Collective gets this—”

 

“He doesn’t know,” Ethan interrupts, his voice hoarse. “Not yet. But he will.”

 

They look at each other; the stakes settling over them like a pall. For a heartbeat, no one moves.

 

Then Lila snaps into action, voice sharpened by adrenaline and certainty. “We find it first. Wherever the Hall is pointing us, we follow.”

 

Sofi nods, already activating the holo displays and pulling up the coordinates burned into her memory from the vision. “It’s not here. It’s—” She pauses, the words catching in her throat. “Atlantis,” she says. “Or some part of it.”

 

Ethan laughs, a dry, incredulous sound. “Of course. It always comes back to the beginning.”

 

Lila is already issuing orders, dispatching encrypted pings to the outer circles, prepping the rapid deployment gear, and speaking with team members. The room surges to life around them, a machine suddenly certain of its purpose.

 

After a few moments Lila approaches Ethan, voice held low so as not to disturb the fragile coherence of his returning breath. “Three days ago,” she says, words clipped by urgency, “a pulse on the Northeast grid—greater Boston. We log those often enough, but I just got a comparison from Simone’s analytics. The spectral signature matches what just moved through you two. Too close to be a coincidence.”

 

Ethan hears the word Boston like the clink of glass in a quiet room. He doesn’t look away from the floating glyphs; he doesn’t need to. The Hall has already shown him the overlay: something or someone has awakened there, something old and powerful. “Quiet team, eyes only,” he says, the command falling into place with the certainty of muscle memory. “North American cell. Have them trace the origin of the signal and nothing more. No engagement, no extraction attempts. Keep us updated at every step. We stay on the artifact.” Lila nods.

 

Sofi looks up at Ethan, her face still pale but resolute. “Can you handle all this?” she asks, the question loaded with every possible meaning.

 

Ethan hesitates, then smiles—thin, but real. “We’re in this together. All of us.”

 

They hold the moment, each drawing from the other what courage and clarity they can. Outside, the first rays of sunlight strike the château, scattering through the tall windows and painting the Nerve in gold.

 

The hunt is on.