Even as Babel hummed with cosmic resonance, the Earth stirred with secrets buried too deep for time to erase.
In the unbroken solitude of Antarctica's Queen Maud Exclusion Zone, a seismic tremor revealed something impossible:
A megastructure, hundreds of kilometers across.
Not Hyperborean.
Not Helion.
Something older.
Cloaked in fractal camouflage, resistant to satellite scans, it had been invisible—until the Babel Signal reverberated through the quantum mesh.
Mikhail dispatched an elite Concord expedition led by:
Warden Miroslav Romanov, the Last Siberian.
Agent Irina Volnova, the empath with cognitive echo recall.
Anya, the Tsarevna, who carried a piece of Leviathan's frequency.
What they found was breathtaking:
A crystalline city embedded in the ice.
Not abandoned.
Occupied.
They called themselves the Vaelari.
A hidden species—or perhaps a divergent evolution of Homo sapiens.
No one could say.
Their skin shimmered like copper alloy.
Their speech came in multidimensional tones, deciphered only through Babel Codex echoes.
They had watched mankind for millennia.
"We are the Gilded Veil," their leader said. "The curtain drawn before your gods."
The Vaelari had not built Leviathan.
They had fled from it.
They had predicted the Spiral, once.
And chose silence over salvation.
But Babel's message had disturbed the cosmic substrate.
The Chorus Null's ripple reached even them.
Mikhail proposed alliance.
But the Vaelari refused.
"The Iron Crown demands unity," Mikhail warned.
"And the Spiral has begun."
They offered instead a test:
One week in the Veil.
No machines.
No Doctrine.
Only raw humanity.
Anya accepted.
And what she saw inside shattered her.
The Veil possessed a record of every divergent human timeline—paths never taken, horrors avoided, victories forgotten.
And in almost all of them—
Mikhail became a tyrant.
Only one showed salvation.
Where the Doctrine fractured.
And something greater emerged from its ruin.
Anya returned… changed.
"Father," she said, "what if the Spiral isn't a threat? What if it's a chance?"
Mikhail stood silent.
Babel pulsed.
And far above, Chorus Null began to form a response.