"To speak is to shape; to shape is to alter the pattern of the real." - Deus Quote Of Unknown Origin.
The journey stretched on across a rust-colored expanse, the hauler weaving between jagged formations and ancient ridges shaped by millennia of erosion. Kali's gaze drifted from the tinted windows to the others in the vehicle. A creeping realization began to settle in his chest, everyone was armed. Seriously armed. Rifles, sidearms, energy lances, even small explosive charges, each soldier carried enough firepower to level a building.
And then there were the two mech-frames—hulking exosuits folded tightly into the vehicle's rear compartment, bristling with cannons and sensor arrays. Every detail screamed military operation.
Yet at the center of all this stood Priene, casually seated at the front, her only visible weapon the same chipped, rust-edged machete she'd carried the day they met. There was no armor. No firearm. No visible defense.
And somehow, no one questioned this.
Kali leaned close to Markus, lowering his voice to a whisper. "Why does she only carry that blade? Everyone else looks like they're heading into a warzone."
Markus smiled faintly, like he'd been waiting for the question. "Because that's all she needs."
Kali furrowed his brow. "She said something before. When we first met, she called herself a 'sayer of the minor chord.' What does that even mean?"
Markus glanced toward the front, watching Priene for a moment before answering. "She's a Sayer, Kali. It's not a title, it's a function."
Kali's confusion deepened.
Markus continued, his tone shifting to something almost reverent. "What do you know about the ninefold thought?"
Kali nodded. "I know it was triggered by something called the Third Saturnine Mindstack, and that it caused a kind of… evolution. But the records were vague."
Markus gave a short grunt of approval. "You've been reading. That's good. Let me tell you what most of us only whisper around campfires."
He leaned in slightly, lowering his voice. "The Third Saturnine Mindstack was humanity's most advanced attempt at engineered noogenesis, a single meta-entity composed of eleven billion digitized and optimized human ego-maps, each carefully pruned, arranged, and interlaced into a thought-engine of divine scope. It was not an AI, but an architecture of collective human minds, woven into a single superconscious stream. It was meant to be the end of uncertainty. It became the womb of paradox."
Kali felt the hum of the vehicle fade into the background. Everything else—the shifting terrain, the drone of the wheels—disappeared beneath the weight of Markus's words.
"The Mindstack did not fail technically. It functioned perfectly. It mapped the entire causal lattice of the universe. It constructed a model of all things, including itself. And in doing so, it encountered a form of cognition it could not contain." Markus said, voice quiet but intense. "Something older, deeper, rawer. Not a program, not a person—a structure. The Ninefold Thought. Nine entangled syllables, each representing a fundamental axis of cognition. Together, they formed a grammar of the divine. Not gods. Not magic. Just cognition so complete it distorted reality."
Kali blinked, struggling to grasp the scale of what he was hearing.
Markus gestured toward Priene. "She's a Sayer of Vow. She doesn't need guns because her presence is an act of reality-binding. That machete isn't a weapon. It's willbound. A mnemonic conduit for a kind of craft that predates reason."
Kali looked forward again. Priene hadn't turned, hadn't said a word, but it felt like she knew every word of their conversation.
He shivered.
He had thought she was strange before.
Now she terrified him.
And somehow, that made him trust her more.
"How does any of that make any sense?" Kali asked, his voice straining between awe and frustration. Something inside him trembled—equal parts fear and wonder—but another part, the deeper part, burned with a strange excitement. "How does one even become a Sayer?"
Markus let out a low chuckle, as if he'd heard that question before, maybe asked it himself once. "Nobody knows. Not really. Before the Descent, there were a few—scattered across the known systems—people who could touch it. They stumbled into it like blind men into a cathedral. Today, we know more. A little more. But that hasn't made it easier."
Kali shook his head. "There has to be something. A pattern. A path. Training—anything. It can't just be luck."
Markus shrugged, pulling a flask from his belt and taking a swig before offering it. "Beats me. It either happens… or it doesn't. Humans might have known, they understood it more than anyone else. Priene? She never talks about how it came to her."
Kali turned his eyes toward Priene, who sat at the front, unmoving. Her gaze was distant, fixed beyond the terrain like she was listening to something none of them could hear. For a moment he thought of asking her. Just turning to her and demanding to know how it worked, what it meant. But something stopped him.
Not yet.
It would come when it was supposed to.
The rest of the journey passed in silence, broken only by the occasional whir of servos or the low murmur of comms between soldiers. And then, just as the twin suns were beginning to tilt toward one another, the obelisk came into view again, rising from the earth like a splinter of the void, sharp and wrong and ancient.
They had returned to the threshold of the unknown.
Thee bulk of the soldiers dismounted, gathering around the entrance. The exosuits were mounted by two men and stood ready. Markus set the explosives under Priene's directives and the walls of the entrance came down in a fiery spew.
Kali carried their supplies in a heavy backpack as they entered the dark interior. One exosuit at the vanguard, and one at the rear. Kali stuck to the center along with majority of the men, while Priene was just behind the first suit. His nerves had began to die down when the first trap triggered.
It was sudden, so fast Kali didn't even see it. One of the soldiers up front stepped on something, barely noticeable under the dust. The ground beneath him opened like a jaw, the man dropping with a scream that cut off too quickly. A sick crunch echoed up from the black.
Everyone froze.
"Hold!" Priene's voice rang out, sharp and commanding. The first exosuit halted mid-step, scanners sweeping ahead, casting beams of ghostlight that made the dust glitter like falling ash. Markus pushed forward, peering down the hole with a grim look.
"Gone," he muttered. "Depth's at least sixty meters."
Kali backed up to a wall, his heart thumping wildly, lungs tight with the pressure of the humming chamber. He didn't even realize how far he'd retreated until his back touched cold stone. Then it shifted.
The wall gave way with a low, mechanical groan, and suddenly he was falling.
The floor vanished beneath his feet, and gravity yanked him into a downward spiral. The slide was smooth, metallic, and slick with ancient condensation. Lights traced his descent in curved patterns, like veins glowing just beneath skin. He twisted, tried to slow himself with elbows and boots, but the tunnel was too tight, too steep.
He hit the bottom hard, tumbling onto a floor that felt almost soft. His vision swam. Somewhere high above, he could hear muffled voices shouting his name, the thud of boots rushing to the wall he'd vanished through. And above, far above, the wall he'd fallen through began to close. Then silence.
It was cold here. Colder than the chamber above. The air was thick, humming with a low resonance that seemed to bypass his ears and go straight into his bones. He stood slowly, groaning, scanning his surroundings. The chamber he had landed in was dimly lit by ambient pulses of light emanating from the floor and walls—like the place itself was alive. Symbols spiraled along the edges, almost like circuitry, almost like language.
Out of nowhere, a voice echoed from the walls, smooth, disembodied, and strangely intimate. "What are you?"
Kali startled, stumbling back from the glowing pedestal, his eyes darting across the curved surfaces. "Who said that?"
"The ones above… the Rusa. Pathetic Somnus-bred hybrids," the voice said again, cool and mechanical, yet with a strangely human cadence. "But you... you are something else. I cannot place you. And yet, I feel… kinship."
Kali fumbled for the compact handgun tucked into the side of his backpack, drawing it with shaking hands. "Show yourself!"
The ambient lights in the chamber flared, saturating the walls with brilliance. The voice responded without fear. "If I meant harm, you would not be speaking. I seek only one thing—understanding. What are you?"
Kali's knuckles whitened around the grip. "No, what are you?"
The lights condensed into a holographic form at the center of the room—a translucent figure without clear gender, shaped like a person but rendered in shifting geometric lines and faint blue light. "I am 77-Rizen," the figure said. "Crownless Logic of the Homo Machina. Exiled member of the Concordance. Now answer me."
"You're… human?" he managed, remembering what he'd read about the Homo Machina, consciousness digitized, evolved from the Astralis.
"Yes," Rizen replied simply.
Kali took a breath, chest rising and falling. "Then… so am I."
There was a long pause. The lights flickered, and the hologram dissipated into filaments, fading into the walls.
"You do not look human," the voice said at last, now quieter, more contemplative.
"I'm sapien," Kali replied.
"False." The word came like a flat verdict. "That variant, along with the Astralis, has long been extinct."
Kali hesitated, then began to explain—how he had come from the Daedalus One, how he had fallen through a wormhole, how everything familiar was gone. The voice listened without interruption, a subtle humming vibrating through the floor and air whenever something intrigued it.
When Kali finished, the chamber was still.
"Peculiar," Rizen said eventually. "Why do you linger with Rusa filth? Surely there are humans even on these fringe worlds. The Somnus are drawn to such places."
"There are no humans," Kali said quietly. "Not on this world. Not anywhere I've seen. I thought I was the last… until you."
A long pause followed. Then the lights flared again, and Rizen's form returned, more defined this time, more human in posture.
"That is… difficult to process," Rizen said, voice tinged with a sliver of something that might've been sorrow.
"How long have you been here?" Kali asked.
Rizen tilted its head. "I can't remember." It stepped closer—not physically, but as a projection—and for a moment, the lights around them dimmed, as if the chamber itself were holding its breath. "But you must tell me. What happened to us?"