POV: Sage Elara Windwright

The scent of aged parchment and dry ink was Elara’s sanctuary. Dust motes danced in the sparse light filtering through the grimy viewport of the Royal Archives, illuminating towering shelves crammed with scrolls, holobooks, and ancient data-crystals. To most, it was a tomb of forgotten things. To Sage Elara Windwright, it was a living, breathing library, a whisper of a time before the Ascension.

She adjusted her spectacles, her ancient fingers, gnarled with age and arthritic pain, carefully unrolling a brittle parchment. It was a fragment, barely legible, from the pre-Ascension records, marked with the official seal of the "Ministry of Relocation." Her usual research involved more benign topics – the lineage of the Sky Kings, the evolving designs of the atmospheric condensers. But the tremors, and the unsettling whispers from the Council about the tethers and dwindling resources, had driven her to the forbidden shelves. The ones labeled, ominously, “Project Sky-Shield.”

She had been a child during the Great War, barely old enough to remember the blue sky before it turned to smoke, the feel of solid ground beneath her feet before they fled into the clouds. Her memories were fractured, dreamlike, often bleeding into what she now suspected were prophetic visions. But she remembered the terror, the hurried exodus, the blinding flash of light as Aeridor tore itself from the surface. And she remembered the unspoken fear in the adults’ eyes, a fear far deeper than mere destruction.

The parchment fragment spoke of "Phase Gamma: Permanent Disengagement Protocols." Disengagement from what? The world was dead. Why would they need protocols to permanently leave a dead world?

"There you are, my old friend," Elara murmured, her voice raspy from disuse. She pulled a heavy data-crystal from its shielded slot. This was a true relic, a "First Cycle" archive, theoretically wiped clean during the Ascension. But Elara had always had a knack for finding hidden things.

She inserted the crystal into a clunky, antique reader. The device whirred to life with a protesting groan, its holographic projector sputtering before a flickering image materialized. It was a schematic, detailed and complex, of Aeridor. But not the Aeridor she knew. This version had… roots. Massive, almost biological-looking tendrils that plunged deep into the earth, pulsating with captured energy. And beside it, a symbol she’d only seen in the most obscure historical texts – the crest of the "Solar Conflux," an energy collective from the time before the Great War.

Then, a series of short, choppy video logs began to play. A frantic, harried man in an old-world military uniform, his face streaked with soot, his eyes wide with desperation.

"—Protocol is initiated. We cannot hold the line. The… things… are breaching the perimeter. Our only hope is Project Sky-Shield. It will buy us time. Decades, centuries, we don’t know. Just enough for… for the surface to heal, for the enemy to starve themselves out. We go up, and we take… it… with us."

The video flickered, distorted. "The weapon. It’s the last hope. If we use it on the surface… irreversible. But in the sky… contained. A deterrent. It’s what they’re after. They’ll follow. We just have to stay higher, faster, longer than they can reach."

Elara gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. The weapon? They hadn’t simply fled to the clouds; they had carried something with them. Something dangerous. Something that the "enemy" wanted. It wasn't just survival; it was an active part of a continuing war. And it explained the whispers from her dreams, the flashes of impossible weaponry, of strange, insectoid machines scuttling across a ruined landscape, reaching for the sky.

A new log appeared, even more corrupted. A woman’s voice, calm despite the chaos. "They are signaling. From below. Our scouts report… life. It’s faint, but it’s there. Survivors. We must assume they are not hostile. The 'war' may be over for them. But our directives are clear. Maintain isolation. The weapon must not fall."

Isolation. That was it. That was the core of their kingdom’s existence. Not safety from a dead world, but isolation from a potentially hostile, or perhaps simply desperate, living one. And to prevent the weapon from falling.

A sudden, sharp series of beeps cut through the archival hum. The old reader’s status lights flashed erratically. It wasn’t a malfunction. It was a signal. Coming from the data-crystal. A new, unscheduled transmission.

Elara frowned, leaning closer. The signal was faint, almost imperceptible. But it wasn't the war-era logs. It was recent. And it was external.

It wasn't coming from within the crystal. It was coming from below.

A series of complex binary codes scrolled across the screen, then resolved into a sequence of pulsed frequencies. It was a primitive, but undeniably intelligent, signal. A distress call. Or perhaps… a probing.

Her heart hammered against her ribs. Life below. Survivors. And they were reaching out.

Suddenly, a jolt of energy surged through the crystal reader, shorting it out with a crackle of static. The screen went black. A thin wisp of smoke curled from the vents.

Elara stared, her mind reeling. The signal was gone. Jammed? Or simply too weak to penetrate the kingdom’s defenses? But she knew what she had seen. And what she had heard.

She stood, her old bones protesting, and walked to a hidden compartment behind a false shelf. She pulled out a small, intricately carved wooden box, its surface warm beneath her touch. Inside lay a single, smooth, obsidian shard. She clutched it, her mind churning with the implications of the hidden truth. The Great War had never truly ended. They weren't refugees; they were guardians. Guardians of a terrible secret, a weapon that could devastate the surface anew.

And someone, somewhere, was trying to reach them. Or something was trying to stop that connection. The echoes from below were growing louder, shattering the comfortable lie of Aeridor’s isolated existence. And Elara knew, with a chill that went deeper than the archives’ musty air, that the kingdom’s true history was about to collide with its precarious present.