The glow of the terminal screen painted Elias's face in flickering blue, his eyes scanning line after line of corrupted data. His fingers bruised from yesterday's fieldwork, nails still edged with dirt—danced across the keys with restless precision. The stale air of the archive room clung to his skin, thick with the scent of overheated circuitry and old plastic. Somewhere in the building's bones, a ventilation fan sputtered, its uneven whir the only sound beyond the quiet tap of keys.
The entry wasn't just a report. It was a ghost.
Fragmented logs surfaced like debris from a shipwreck—decades-old testimonies encoded in dead formats, their metadata scrubbed but not quite erased. The pattern emerged slowly, pixel by pixel:
A place that wasn't always a café.
A watchtower with a door that shouldn't open.
A stone gate where the hinges were made of shadow.
An inn that stood where no roads led.
All different. All the same.
Elias leaned closer, the glow of the screen catching the faint brown tint in his messy black hair. His thermal shirt—sleeves pushed up to the elbows—stuck to his back with nervous sweat. The scar across his left eyebrow itched, but he didn't scratch it.
ENTRY: 87-H | YEAR: 176 A.H.
"The tower appeared at the edge of Sector 4's deadzone. My daughter saw it first—said the stones were singing. The man inside had eyes like still water. He served us tea that tasted of flowers I couldn't name. When we returned, there was only forest. My daughter still hums the tune she heard there. I still dream of the silence."
— Alarian Noh, Grid Architect *(deceased 181 A.H.)
ENTRY: 113-X | YEAR: 239 A.H.
"The threshold had no door, just... an absence of wind. Inside, paintings moved when I wasn't looking. The man knew my name before I spoke it. He said I'd signed the guestbook in 201 A.H. I've never signed anything in my life."
— Orien Vale, Shadow Cartographer (Missing 240 A.H.)
Elias's breath fogged the screen. Always a man. Always that same quiet presence, threaded through centuries like a stitch in time. The descriptions varied—sometimes his hair was darker, sometimes streaked with grey—but the weight of his gaze never changed.
A notification blinked in the corner of the display:
[RESTRICTED: C-1739-ETHER]
The encryption was old-world, layered like an onion. Elias's hands moved without thought—a local override here, a spliced codec there—his ink-stained fingers flying. The terminal whined in protest, its cooling fans kicking up as the firewall dissolved.
The screen went black.
Then, in plain text:
"You are not the first."
A loading icon spun. Grainy footage resolved—306 A.H., helmet-cam perspective. A female soldier, Nova Helix insignia on her sleeve pushed through undergrowth, her breath ragged in the audio feed. The camera glitched violently as she crossed some unseen boundary—
—and there it was.
The café.
Not quite as Elias knew it. The lanterns burned brighter here, the wood darker, the vines thicker. But the doorway was identical. The soldier collapsed to her knees, her gloves scraping moss as she steadied herself. The camera tilted up.
A silhouette filled the frame.
Broad-shouldered. White hair catching the light. One hand—calloused, a broken chain around the wrist—reached out, not in greeting, but in recognition.
The feed cut to static.
Elias realized he'd stopped breathing. The archive room's chill seeped into his bones as the terminal's fan slowed, its job done. Outside, the city hummed on, oblivious.
This wasn't an anomaly.
It was a rendezvous point.
And someone—something—had been keeping the guest list for a very long time.
Someone was keeping watch.