POV 1: Queen Elara – Forestia, The True Gate Complex

The wind shifted.

It wasn’t natural wind—not the breath of Forestia’s forests, nor the cold winds that whispered over the snow-covered peaks. This wind was dry, layered with the scent of old bones and forgotten time. Elara stepped back from the Gate, her silver hair rippling as the echoing chant of the priests fell into sudden silence.

From within the rift, something walked.

No, not walked—emerged. Its form was shrouded in layers of translucent material, almost like skin that hadn't decided what it wanted to become. It glimmered between shadow and mass, between person and void. Dozens of other shapes stood just behind it, motionless, as if waiting for a signal.

Elara’s breath caught in her throat. Not even her Lunar Sight could see clearly into them.

“Do you speak?” she asked, her voice calm but taut as a drawn blade.

The thing tilted its head. Then a chorus of voices, layered and discordant, poured out—not from its mouth, but from everywhere.

“You broke the seal. You inherit the burden.”

High Marshal Vyelar reached for his blade, but Elara raised her hand.

“We opened the Gate seeking wisdom. If you are the First, then speak. Show us what you were meant to protect.”

The creature—if it could be called that—moved forward. With each step, runes flared across the obsidian floor, recalling magic languages long extinct. The priests fell to their knees, some weeping. Others screamed.

Vyelar's voice was hoarse. “My Queen… these things… they’re not from beyond the stars. They’re from before the stars.”

Elara did not flinch.

“I know.”

POV 2: Jamie Lancaster – Geneva, UN Council Archives

Jamie stared at the frozen frame from Starlance's deep-sea footage. The stone pyramid. The open eye.

Around her, the elite minds of the UN Scientific Division muttered among themselves. Archaeologists. Magi-historians. Even a few Forestian scholars. All disagreed. All afraid to agree.

“I’ve run this through every model we have,” Jamie said, clearing her throat. “This structure existed prior to the leyline network. Possibly prior to Forestia’s tether to our reality. It’s not just old—it’s wrong. A temporal anomaly. It predates causality as we understand it.”

Someone scoffed. “Then how do you explain it?”

Jamie turned to the projection again. “We don’t. Not yet. But the whispers Solomon heard… they’re real. We found a resonance frequency embedded in the sonar files.”

She adjusted the settings. A low hum played through the speakers. At first, it was just vibration—uncomfortable but meaningless.

Then it spoke.

Not in words. Not even in thoughts.

But in memory.

Suddenly, everyone in the room was silent. Some blinked back tears. Others looked around as if they’d just awakened from a nightmare they didn’t remember having.

Jamie turned the audio off.

“We buried something beneath Antarctica. Long before we built our first cities. Before Elara’s ancestors arrived through the First Rift. Maybe even before Earth itself was fully formed.”

One of the Forestian scholars—a Moon Priestess named Selira—stood slowly. “You’re describing the Undergods. The Fallen Ones. Myths even we don’t speak aloud.”

Jamie met her eyes. “Myth or not, they’re waking up.”

POV 3: Solomon Kane – Aboard the Starlance, Submerged beneath Antarctica

The descent had grown darker.

Reina, the pilot, adjusted the controls, keeping the submersible stable as they descended past the ruins toward a new anomaly—a spiraling tunnel of perfectly carved rock, descending like a helix into the planet’s crust.

“Nothing’s natural down here,” she muttered. “This place was made.”

Solomon’s eyes remained fixed on the sonar.

“I can feel them now. Watching us. Not with eyes. With… hunger.”

The sonar beeped again. A shadow moved past the viewport. Then another.

Reina’s hands froze on the controls.

“That wasn’t a fish.”

“No,” Solomon said quietly. “That was something between being and not.”

He activated the sub’s external lights. The ruins below shifted. A staircase—massive, scaled for titans—revealed itself as sediment slid away. At the base was a door. A real door, not a metaphor.

It began to open.

Reina screamed as the sub shook, instruments sparking.

But Solomon heard the whisper again—clearer this time.

“Return the seal. Or be consumed.”

He closed his eyes.

“I think we’re not meant to be here yet.”

Then the lights died.

POV 4: Princess Dyana von Forestia – Geneva, Embassy Fortress

The room felt colder than it should.

Dyana adjusted her armored mantle and addressed the mix of human and Elven commanders standing in front of the operations board. Red markers now glowed across several old research sites in Antarctica.

“What do you mean Base Theta is gone?” she demanded.

The scout, a former High Elf turned Earth liaison, shook his head. “No explosion. No retreat. The perimeter wards just… blinked out. Like someone folded space in on itself.”

Dyana turned to Isabella. “Any readings?”

Isabella’s eyes were bloodshot, but her voice was steady. “There’s a spreading null field. Like a void sphere that’s eating magic itself. Our mages lost contact. Technomancers too. It’s like something consumes understanding.”

A younger Earth general leaned forward. “What’s the contingency?”

Dyana didn’t answer immediately. She turned and looked at the old ceremonial blade she kept mounted behind her. A relic of her great-grandmother, once used to seal away a monster in Forestia’s past.

She pulled it from the wall.

“Full recon unit. My command. I go to Antarctica.”

“Princess,” Isabella warned, “we don’t know what’s down there.”

“I know,” Dyana said. “That’s why I have to be the one to see it.”

POV 5: Mary – Orbital Research Station, Lagrange-3

Mary floated beside Dyug in the med-chamber, watching the silent Earth rotate far below.

The dreams were getting worse. Not hers—Dyug’s.

He’d begun whispering in his sleep. Not Elven. Not any language she’d ever heard. And yet… she understood. Felt it.

He twitched again, then groaned.

“Don’t… let them through…”

Mary reached for his hand. “Dyug. Wake up.”

His eyes snapped open—silver glowing like a sunrise before a storm.

“I saw it,” he gasped. “The world before ours. A sphere of screaming thought. A prison made of time. The Ravager Gate wasn’t the only thing buried down there. It was a lid. And now it’s cracked.”

Mary didn’t hesitate. She reached for the emergency comms console.

“This is Commander Mary of the Royal Recon Corps aboard Orbital Research Station Nightingale. All Human and Forestian forces, be advised: hostile entities of pre-dimensional origin are breaching containment. I am authorizing Protocol Genesis.”

The console blinked. Protocol Genesis requires triple sovereign authority.

She turned to Dyug.

“You’re still a Prince of Forestia.”

His hand hovered over the panel, fingers trembling.

“If we do this, we’re saying the war never ended.”

“No,” Mary whispered. “We’re saying it changed.”

Dyug pressed the seal.

POV 6: Queen Elara – Forestia, The True Gate Complex

“They are not gods,” Elara said, watching the figures step into the torchlight. “They are mistakes.”

The lead being paused. Its form was beginning to take on more structure—limbs that looked vaguely humanoid, but eyes like void-craters stared out from its shifting face.

“Mistakes are the bones upon which civilizations build thrones.”

Vyelar and the remaining knights raised their weapons.

“They speak in riddles,” one muttered.

“No,” Elara said. “They speak in truths we forgot. Because remembering them would break us.”

The being stepped forward and reached for her.

Not in threat.

In offering.

A glowing shard hovered in its palm. It pulsed like a beating heart.

“The key to remembrance. Take it, and know what your kind did to us.”

Elara hesitated.

Then she reached forward and touched it.

And the world fell away.

POV 7: Solomon Kane – Unknown Space

He floated.

Not in water.

Not in air.

In thought.

Memories not his own surged through him—of stars being born in screams, of ancient empires that chained reality like a pet, of beings who shaped physics like children playing with clay. And of their fall.

He saw her—Elara—receiving the shard.

He saw Jamie, standing before the UN, unaware she was descended from one of the Wardens who sealed the tomb.

He saw Mary and Dyug, readying for war not just against enemies, but against knowledge.

And he saw himself, not as a soldier…

But as a key.

A part of the prison.

He gasped—and awoke.

The sub was dead. Reina was unconscious. But before him, out the cracked viewport, a message had been carved into the stone with impossible precision:

“YOU WERE ONE OF US.”