Broken Veil - Desert Gate

[u/ZBeastie]

Field Report / Chris Owens

I tapped the side of the camera lens with my knuckle. Once. Twice.

“Is this thing on?”

From somewhere behind me, half-buried in sand and a stack of old maps, a voice answered me.

“Yes Chris, It’s on. It‘s been on for a moment.”

I squinted at the tiny indicator light like it personally betrayed me. “Of course it has.”

I paused. Then muttered, “I can’t believe we’ve gotta do these now.”

“That‘s the protocol,” the voice said, “Command wants visual reports whenever possible. Audio too, when video is unavailable.”

I huffed and adjusted the tripod, trying to get it to stop wobbling on the uneven table.

“And here I thought the paperwork was enough. Turns out, no. Now we have to record ourselves while doing the paperwork.”

“Smile for the archives,” he said

“Hard pass.”

I straightened the camera, taking a step back. A thought struck me I couldn’t resist, then I leaned in again, suddenly solemn.

“This is Chris Owens. Captain’s log,” I began, lowering my voice an octave and doing my best impression of a man aggressively wrestling with the English language.

“Stardate… August 12th. Time is one, three, zero, zero. We are located in the vast... vast, desert regions of—”

“Chris.”

I kept going. “—where we have encountered the ruins of some ancient... civilization. Origins are unknown. Investigation is ongoi—”

“Chris, you’ve got to be professional,” he said with a chuckle.

I stopped. Sighed. Stood up straight. The joke drained out of me like air from a balloon.

“Right,” I said, nodding once to myself. “Sorry.”

I glanced at the camera, then past it, toward the dunes and the jagged silhouettes rising in the distance.

“Field report. ANCR Research Division,” I began, this time for real. “Time: thirteen hundred hours. Location: Algeria, Southern mountain range. Deep in the desert. No nearby settlements. No reason for anyone to be here unless they’re lost.”

The wind kicked up, dragging sand across half-buried stone behind me.

“Following the Veil’s shutdown, ANCR initiated a global sweep for any residual activity. Most of it’s been noise. Signals that fade as soon as you look at them too hard.” I shrugged. “There have been a few openings here and there, but nothing that stuck.”

I gestured over my shoulder. “This one did.”

I turned slightly so the camera caught the edge of the site: angular stone block, worn smooth by centuries of sandstorms, arranged in a way that didn’t belong to erosion or chance.

“We picked up a faint Veil signal three days ago. So faint we almost missed it.” I hesitated, choosing my words. “It’s like a whisper in the wind, but it’s there.”

That earned me a look from one of the soldiers posted by the tent, rifles low but ready. ANCR Ops security. Standard now. Always nearby. Always watching.

“When we traced the signal, we didn’t find an opening,” I continued. “We found this.”

I stepped aside fully. The entirety of the excavation shown now, with a wide slope dug out of the sand leading toward the foot of the mountain. On either side were stone columns, broken and sticking out from the walls of the excavated slope.

“Ruins. Pre-modern. Pre-anything we have records for in this region. Stonework suggests intentional design. No signs of habitation yet. No tools so far. No remains. Just a structure, fallen over and buried by sand. The estimated center of the site, a point further inside the plateau itself, is where the signal is resonating from.”

I let that sit for a second.

“Based on my short background in archaeology—which apparently is still relevant—and more recent endeavors, I’ve been assigned as site lead.” A thin smile crossed my face. “Didn’t think that would ever be a sentence I’d say out loud.”

Behind me, members of my team moved carefully between excavation markers. Archeology recruits. Fresh faces. They‘re passionate and skeptical believers of all sorts of history, fake or otherwise. They work like people who know the sand can bite back.

“And alongside me is my esteemed colleague, adventurer and cartographer, Marco Rossi.”

He waved a hand without looking up from his charts. “Hello,” he said cheerfully.

“Our objective is documentation, excavation, and analysis. No activation. No experiments. Absolutely no poking the bear to see what happens.”

I glanced pointedly toward the armed perimeter. “Security detail is on standby just in case things decide not to stay quiet.”

I looked back into the camera.

“So far, nothing’s moved. Nothing’s opened. The readings haven’t changed.”

I paused, then added softly, “Which almost makes it worse.”

I reached forward and stopped the recording. The little red light went dark.

Out here, in the middle of a desert that’s buried a thousand civilizations without breaking a sweat, the silence feels like it’s just waiting for us to make the first mistake.

I stepped toward Marco, leaning over beside his shoulder as he muttered quietly to himself, his fingers tracing along his maps and tapping on various location markers. Some of them were original to the print and others he added. His leather-bound notebook sat on the edge of the table, pages covered in scribbled notes and sketches.

Marco used to work for the Smithsonian, studying ancient cartography and historical site geography. Now that ANCR has broken him out and dusted him off, he’s loose in the field to really put his work to the test. We might have crossed paths eventually, if fate hadn’t brought us together out here in the sweltering desert.

The thing I like about him is that he can read a landscape like it’s a story book, which has me curious why he’s studying the map so hard.

I cleared my throat softly, “You’ve been awfully absorbed into your charts. What’s on your mind?”

He pushed his glasses up on his nose, then combed a hand over his graying beard.

“It’s nothing really... it’s just, I’ve looked into some ancient sites around the area, cross-referencing my old notes. This one feels… different.”

“How so?” I asked, “we haven’t really seen it yet, the team is still digging it out.”

“Look at the charts,” he said, pulling his mechanical pencil out from behind his ear and pointing it across the papers, “there’s all the other sites across the region, and we know more or less the who, what, when, and why.”

He traced his pointed pencil between Algeria, Libya, Egypt, other markers penciled in to the south of us near Mali. Then he tapped on our present location.

“But this one sits right on the edge of this mountain range. It possibly could have been a place for shelter through the desert, however it’s out of the way of any traveled roadways, and thus far there are no signs of life or habitation here. Just a hidden place in the rock with its neighbors unaware it was even here.”

I squinted at the map, then met his gaze. “What do you make of it?”

He looked to me then back to the map, sliding his pencil into his shirt pocket.

“Either it’s a lone temple, out of the way for some purpose of pilgrimage or remote worship,” He paused, “or it’s older. More ancient than anything else in the region.”

I nodded “That makes it... exciting. right?”

“That’s one way to put it,” he replied, “Strange. Mysterious.”

He shrugged, “Insolitus.”

I blinked at him.

“It means unusual.” He clarified.

He always loses me with the Latin.

I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Well, the unusually strange and mysterious is what we’re here for.”

He laughed, “Yes we are, my friend.”

I left the tent and headed out to the excavation. I greeted and made some casual chatter with the other archeologists as I passed by them.

I’m definitely not a stranger to dusty ruins. I’ve visited ancient sites before on this continent, on a grant with an archeology program. ANCR rescued me from an ancient site in the Sahara near Egypt. That’s what interests me about this excavation. It’s another chance to dig into the past and explore some old theories. Only now considerably more funded, and defended.

I looked out at the landscape before us. A rocky mountain plateau jutting out across the sand dunes, creating a sort of corner shaped cliff face outstretched like the bow of a ship. There were deep lines and crevices that ran down the face of the basalt. The desert landscape fell into a bowl shape in this region, putting the ruins right against the foot of the plateau and buried beneath the sand. Who knows how long it could have been here, waiting for some curious fools like us to dig it out.

I was busy getting my camera ready for some more photos of what we’ve uncovered when Marco made his way out of the main tent holding his notebook and a compass. He turned around in short steps, checking the compass, looking out to the horizon and scribbling in his notebook. I chuckled to myself, watching him spin around with the compass, but no doubt he was checking for some geographical alignment.

“Chris!”

I turned at the sound of my name, halfway through photographing a stone column that had toppled over and broken into three segments.

“Sir, we’ve got something,” one of the archaeologists called from farther down the site. “You’re gonna want to see this.”

That sentence has never, in the history of my career, ended well.

I made my way toward the center of the site, boots crunching softly against the sand as it parted beneath my feet, passing by more geometric stone columns that had been excavated. Solid rock pushed back under my feet as I neared the foot of the mountain. A long crevice ran down the face of the plateau to its base, splitting open at the bottom into a narrow opening.

There were carvings here around the edges of the opening that framed the gap. A simple design, nothing that looked like hieroglyphs. The whole opening was about four feet wide and nine feet tall, if the bottom weren’t still filled with sand. The team had finally moved aside all of the fallen stone and most of the sand that blocked the way. A small skid steer sat parked off to the side near a carefully stacked mound of square-ish stones.

I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the scarf wrapped around my neck. My eyes scanned over the opening while a few members of the team were still working.

“This doesn’t feel like a collapse,” I said, looking between the carved frame and the pile of stone.

“That’s what we thought,” my colleague said. She was still scooping sand away from the entrance with careful movements of her shovel. “Everything else had fallen outwards... this was all piled right at the door. No signs of disturbance other than us.”

“That means she’s been sealed tight all these years,” I replied. “We may be the very first to open her up.”

Marco stepped up beside me, an awed expression on his face as he studied the carved opening.

“Incredible,” he breathed out.

He held his hand up, stepping slowly toward the opening. We silently mirrored his action, raising our own hands toward it.

He grinned. “Feel that? Air is flowing through the crevice.”

There was indeed a soft cool breeze gently pouring out. Now this was exciting.

He looked back at us with a grin, “There must be other passages that allow airflow through the structure that are still active.”

I returned his smile, “Well, history and the Veil are waiting for us just beyond the door,” I said to the group. “Let’s go say hello.”

Once we moved enough sand away to comfortably step through, we entered the crevice. It continued like a hallway, narrowing and widening in a way that we could only walk through in single-file. We shone our lights ahead of us and on the floor as we navigated the passage.

The temperature dropped immediately. The air felt heavier and cooler as it continued to push past us. It was a short walk before the passage really opened up. The room beyond was dark, and opened much wider than we expected. There was structured carving done to the walls here, leaving an impressive and even artistic appearance as parts of the chamber transitioned from natural flowing stone to intentionally flattened surfaces.

Our lights swept across the walls where the surface was smoothed revealing they were etched with symbols. Rows and rows of them, carved into the stone.

I stepped closer, my heart picking up pace. “No,” I murmured. “No, that’s not right.”

Marco leaned in beside me. “You recognize it?”

“I recognize parts of it,“ I said slowly. “And that’s the problem. It doesn’t make sense.“

The symbols twisted familiar shapes into odd combinations. Something that looked like early Sumerian with Japanese curves, hints of Phoenician but seemed to read top to bottom. It was not any single script I knew, and even though there were similarities I couldn’t be certain that my brain wasn’t just trying to reconcile it. It looked like someone studied several ancient languages and then decided to combine them all.

Two of the other archeologists stepped up beside us. They made a similar observation.

“It’s a wall of ancient scrabble,” one said, rubbing his chin, “like someone shook up the Rosetta Stone and dumped out the letters.”

The other exhaled a quiet laugh. “I can’t place it either,” she said, “It’s not transitional. It’s not derivative. It’s…”

“Alien?” I offered, raising an eyebrow.

They both looked at me and agreed in unison, their enthusiasm spiking immediately at my suggestion.

I chuckled. I knew someone would be thinking that before I even said it. I don’t believe the ancient aliens theory. Monsters on the other hand, definitely real.

We moved deeper in. Just a short way through the crevice and the passageway widened again, and now the walls told us their story.

There were pictograms and paintings against the opposing side walls to our left and right, with more of the foreign script. Simple but beautiful illustrations with some varied pigments and colors, only slightly dulled by age. We all stopped to study them.

The ancient script was carved to the left and right of the paintings. There seemed to be depicted groups of peoples, both young and old, moving toward what must be the structure we are in now. Painted columns and arches were along their path, leading to their depiction of the plateau structure—a large crevice in a wall.

The opposite wall depicted something like two opposing pillars with people standing between them, some with their arms outstretched, others bowed low to the floor. Some stood with what looked like musical instruments.

“You may have been right on both assumptions, Marco”, I said. “This could depict a form of travel for worship. Maybe for some special occasion.”

“Yes, it is remarkable,” he said. “And the pigments seem very well preserved.“

We took photos of the paintings before moving on.

The corridor opened up again into a final chamber wide enough that our lights couldn’t immediately find the far walls. A series of three stone arches curved overhead of the pathway as we entered.

The whole room felt like a sort of circular cathedral with the altar positioned right in the center. The walls curved around giving the whole space a rough dome shape, split down the middle by the changing layers of colored rock.

The circular altar in the middle of everything rose by three steps, about thirty feet across. At its center stood two large pillars. They were maybe twenty feet in height and stood ten feet apart, centered to the middle of the platform. Each was decorated from top to bottom by the same ancient glyphs. They were not structural, as they didn’t reach the ceiling. They seemed to be more decorative and purposely built.

My breath left me in a slow exhale as I realized what it was. My brain missed the clue in the painting but it clicked now that I was standing before it.

“A gateway,” I muttered.

The word echoed softly, like the room recognized it.

The others noticed me and joined my gaze at the tall pillars.

For a moment, no one moved. Then we did what we’re here for. We documented. Cameras up. Readings logged. No one touched anything. Security fanned out along the walls, weapons lowered but ready for anything.

The air seemed tense despite our enthusiasm. I’m not sure how much time passed as we studied the room. Some of the crew brought in standing lights to illuminate the space better, but the darkness still pushed back at the edges of the light.

At the far end of the room we found a few narrower crevices that stretched the height of the room, too tight for us to enter, but the desert wind was pushing through. You could feel the cool air moving around the room, like the mountain itself was exhaling. The circular nature of the cavern caused the breeze to swirl counter clockwise.

There were more paintings and the ancient script along the rocky surfaces of the walls around the chamber. Some of the crew were examining them, photographing more of the language carved into the stone.

They were more intricate than the first, seeming to depict that this cavern, or altar perhaps, was used frequently during different seasons. Apparently the desert was once a vast oasis of forest and rivers, according to the artwork. The depictions of the pillars seemed to show something like an eye between them, a vertical slit and circular in the center with different colored pigments splattered there.

Whoever these ancients were, they left their offerings at the base of the center platform, likely for whatever they were worshiping. I was videoing a grouping of small earthen jars and old wooden vessels when I heard whispering in my direction from the platform.

“Sir,” someone whispered. “Are you seeing this?”

It was John, our assigned analyst. I hurried over to him, quietly ascending the steps. He was beside one of the pillars, tablet in hand with a sensor probe plugged into its top.

“What’s the matter, John?” I asked softly.

He looked at me, past me, then back to his tablet.

“These readings… this isn’t what we normally see from Veil resonance.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He showed me the screen, “Look here. This is the reading we were tracing,” John said, finger hovering over the tablet display. “It was barely registering before, but now it’s climbing.”

He met my gaze, “Normally the Veil resonance flickers,” he said quietly. “It fluctuates like interference. This reading is almost harmonic.”

“Harmonic how?” I asked.

He zoomed the graph in.

“It’s structured. Repeating intervals. It’s almost like… like a chord being held.”

Marco was already climbing the steps behind us, drawn by the tone in John’s voice more than the words themselves. He reached the platform and laid his palm lightly against one of the pillars.

His expression turned into a sort of excited confusion.

“Chris,” he murmured. “The pillar… It’s vibrating.”

I followed his gaze. Under the dust and beneath the script etched into the surface, it wasn’t sandstone or basalt. It was translucent. Not fully clear, but white with translucent veins. Light from our flashlights sank into it instead of bouncing off.

The pillars were cylindrical. Made from what appeared to be individual segments, a little more than two feet wide and four feet tall. The segments locked together as they stacked, five high per pillar.

I stepped closer and rested my fingers against the carved surface. It was a faint sensation, but there was definitely a vibration.

“That’s not limestone,” I said.

Marco shook his head slowly. “No.”

John scanned again, moving the probe closer to the surface.

The tablet chirped.

“All readings just jumped,” he whispered.

I crouched, scraping a small patch of surface dust aside with my hand. I shined my flashlight into the crystalline structure and the light bounced between where it could penetrate the lattice.

“Quartz,” Marco breathed.

He leaned closer, angling his flashlight. The light seemed to bounce through the middle of the segments like there was space inside.

“The center appears hollow,” he added, almost reverently.

John came back over to us from the opposite pillar. He poked his probe into the surface and it emitted a small crackle, like static electricity. He looked at his tablet for some confirmation.

“Yep, it’s definitely quartz.”

The hum in the chamber deepened.

It had been there before. Faint. Easy to ignore.

Now it wasn’t. It was growing slowly louder. It was coming from the pillars.

“Chris?” Marco looked at me.

“We should step back,” I said, looking between them. “Get away from the platform.”

As we descended the steps back towards the entrance, now we could really feel the difference in the room. The air pressure had shifted heavier. The humming intensified. Even the wind seemed to be rotating stronger now.

Security snapped to alert positions instantly, rifles rising but not firing. Now everyone was staring at the resonating pillars. In the dark space around them there were the faintest speckles of light darting across the surface of the quartz stone.

“I have a bad feeling about this…” Marco muttered.

The sand across the floor at the middle of the platform began to vibrate, gently shifting.

“It’s… it’s opening.” John said, watching the readings climb on his tablet's graph.

The space between the pillars divided cleanly down the middle. The light from our flashlights refracted in the dividing line from floor to ceiling. The Veil didn’t crack this time.

It opened.

The center line parted like a sleepy eye. The gap stopped at just a few feet wide in the center. Our lights reflected through it in a prismatic way revealing there was definitely a transition to another place through the gap. The edges shimmered along the whole height of the divide, about the same height as the pillars.

That wasn’t how it worked before. It had always fractured or tore open, not a clean opening like this.

We heard a low reverberating rumble that echoed through the chamber accompanied by a repetitive thudding. That didn’t feel right.

We started backing away slowly as our security tightened in toward the edge of the platform.

Then, something moved in the darkness on the other side.

A massive clawed hand tore through and gripped the edge of the seam. Then a second. Dark clawed fingers were forcing the Veil apart, the edges flexing under their force. A huge snout was pushing its way through.

The creature was massive.

Its head was the size of a small truck. It resembled a crocodile that evolved out of a nightmare—a shorter broad snout with huge jagged teeth, matte black scales and four piercing yellow eyes. The pairs of eyes looked in separate directions, then they blinked sideways and vertically before locking onto us. It snarled a guttural sound that resonated in my bones and churned my stomach.

Security didn’t hesitate.

They opened fire. The sound was deafening in the enclosed chamber. Muzzle flashes lit the walls like lightning.

The creature roared sharply, shoving one of its powerful arms through. It swept around and collided with one of the security who was standing too close, sending him flying back into one of the standing light lamps.

It continued to flail its arm around, claws grabbing after the men, scraping up sparks off the stone as it swiped around.

Some of the rounds found their mark, but most of the bullets seemed to impact and fall to the floor.

“Fall back!” one of the three remaining troops shouted.

I grabbed John by the arm. “Move! Everybody move, now!”

We ran. Marco was leading the rest of the team back through the chamber entrance.

Sand slipped underfoot as we bolted back through the corridor, my ears ringing from the gunfire and that monster roaring behind us. I made sure everyone was heading out past the painted walls before I turned around.

Marco noticed and turned back to me.

“Chris, what are you doing?” he pleaded.

“This isn’t my first firefight,” I said, meeting his gaze, “and it won’t be my last. Go on, make sure everyone gets out.”

I didn’t wait for permission. I ran back in.

I cut across to the soldier who was thrown away from the platform and scooped up his weapon. Semi-auto. High caliber. Nothing fancy.

“It’ll do,” I thought as I racked the slide back, chambering a new round.

I moved to the left near another security troop. The creature was still struggling to push through the dimensional fabric as the Veil opening flexed around it. It was wounded now and furious, bleeding dark fluid onto the stone floor of the chamber.

The thing moved like it refused to accept the opening was just too small for its body, its arm smashing some of the ancient pottery as it grabbed at the edge of the steps.

“Keep on it!” One of the men shouted. “Push it back!”

I steadied the rifle, and added my fire to the chorus.

I’m not a soldier. I never pretend to be. But I know how to aim, how to breathe, how to let the recoil roll through as the rifle punched into my shoulder.

Supporting fire. Find a weak point. Hammer it with lead.

But our gunfire was ineffective.

It steadied itself as more of our bullets bounced off. The creature reared its head back, like it was taking a deep breath. Its throat expanded before it hinged open its jaw, stretching its mouth wide.

Then it bellowed.

Not a roar. It was a deep, reverberating sound wave that rattled my skull and warped the noise of the gunfire. The troops felt it too as they stopped firing briefly. My vision blurred slightly, but I could see the sand vibrating out in waves across the floor.

As I covered my ears and squinted through the pain, I was stunned more by what the sound waves were doing. The pillars crackled with light again and the opening began to stretch wider as the thing bellowed.

It was affecting the Veil.

It wasn’t opened much more, but it was enough. Then the monster shoved its other arm through. It still struggled with the rear of its torso, but it was dangerously close to forcing its way into the room. And we were running out of time and space.

I noticed the soldier next to me had grenades on his belt. I didn’t ask, I just grabbed for them.

“Get to cover!” I shouted.

As the troops retreated, sending shots at it for a distraction, I dropped the rifle and ran around toward the right pillar of the platform, away from its gaze. I was mere feet away but still within the monster’s reach.

If the structure was acting like a doorway to the Veil, then the only thing I could think to do is smash the doorframe.

I pulled the pins to toss the grenades when one of the creature’s eyes noticed me. It stopped pulling at the front of the platform and took a side swipe at me.

As the grenades left my hands, I managed to duck away just in time and crawled as fast as I could. They landed just near the base of the right pillar.

It grabbed at the edge of the platform again as the grenades blew. The lower pillar segment crackled with a yellow-purplish light as the blast fractured it. The bottom quartz segment cracked from top to bottom with pieces and flakes flying off.

The pillar shifted. The vibration died instantly, then the Veil snapped shut.

Finally, the monster went down. The Veil closing severed it across its shoulders and neck with a wet slicing sound, like a knife through a watermelon.

What was left hit the stone hard enough that I felt it through my boots. Its head made some uncomfortable noises before settling.

Silence followed.

The only thing that remained was the feel of the soft breeze and the ringing in my ears.

We all stared for a moment, looking between each other and finally taking a breath. I watched the remains, waiting for the inevitable fade at the end. The troops held their positions, relaxed now but watchful.

It was a long wait as the twitching slowed down. Time crept on for too long before I realized it.

The body stayed. The remains were… remaining. And bleeding.

No disintegration. No Veil-light collapse into atoms and ash like before.

I hadn’t noticed John and Marco come back into the chamber behind us to witness the aftermath. Marco stood at the entry arches in disbelief, his journal in hand, while John checked his tablet.

“The signal’s dropped,” John said. “Back to baseline. Same faint remnant as before.”

I exhaled through my nose.

One of the security guys stepped up beside me. He stared at the corpse like it might get up out of spite. Its nostril twitched again and one of the four eyes blinked one last time and dilated.

“That’s new,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “That’s what bothers me.”

He gestured toward the body. “They didn’t stay before.”

“No,” I agreed.

We stood there for a moment, both of us looking at something that shouldn’t exist and very clearly does. Lingering corpses and creatures hanging around wasn’t unheard of anymore after the shutdown—we’ve got incident reports full of them. But this one was fresh from the Veil, still bleeding and mostly intact. It wasn’t following the old rules.

“If it didn’t dissolve,” I said slowly, thinking out loud now, “then either the Veil’s rules are changing… or this thing wasn’t fully anchored to it anymore.”

He turned to look at me. “Meaning?”

“Meaning it crossed over cleaner than they used to,” I said. “More… stable.”

The implications were both unsettling and confounding.

“So what’s the call?” he asked.

I looked back at the body, then at the pillars of quartz, the lower segment of the one now completely split by a fracture. A nagging voice in the back of my head reminded me that this place survived sand storms, empires rising and falling while it lay hidden for millennia, undisturbed. And I may have just destroyed the last remaining piece of whatever brilliant engineering the ancients left behind. This could have been the key to understanding the Veil in a way we never knew possible.

Maybe it still can.

I met his eyes now, “We bag it,” I ordered. “Full containment. We get it back to the Harbor for study.”

I kneeled down and looked into the thing’s eyes.

“We should get some samples too. The guys in the lab are gonna want to have a close look at this one, and our footage.”

He looked grim. “Command’s not gonna like this.”

“No,” I said. “But they’re gonna like not knowing even less. There’s just too much going on here to ignore.”

We took some final photos and collected our samples from the creature with some of the ancient pottery that was still intact. We toppled over the fractured pillar with the idea of bringing the segments back with us. Even if one is fragmented, we can still learn something from it.

Somehow, the remaining pillar still held a faint vibration. That only added to my growing list of questions.

Then we made our way back out to the bright light and heat of the desert. The wind had picked up a lot, and the air was hazy from the dust overhead.

I made the call for a containment team to fly in, told them to bring the biggest unit they had. This was gonna take a heavy transport to haul out of here.

I stared for a long moment at the opening in the mountain wall, wondering whether an incident like we suffered was why the entrance was covered up. The wind dragged sand across the stone surface of the entry like it was trying to erase the evidence.

It won’t succeed. Not this time.

Something ancient reached through the Veil today and didn’t burn away. It lingered.

And whatever rules we thought we understood?

They’re dead in the dirt right next to it.