The wind howled across the jagged lip of the Hole, but it was not the wind that made the ground hum. Beneath the cliffside, the crater’s throat glowed faintly with a pale light, as if the world itself were exhaling milk-white fire.

Dr. Sera Kestrel pulled her scarf higher against her cheek and squinted down into the abyss. She could feel the undertone already—the low, thrumming resonance of the Philosopher’s Stone—like a second heartbeat hidden inside her skull. The others heard only the wind. That was her curse, or her gift.

Mateo Havel walked the line of the ledge behind her, checking each harness clip and carabiner with a slow, deliberate motion. The man never trusted equipment unless his own hand had tested it. His voice carried over the gale, gravelly but calm.

“Team,” he called. “This is the last check. Radios synced, dampers live, redundancies packed. Nobody touches raw Stone unless I say. Nobody hums at it, sings at it, or feeds it. We’re in, we’re out, three days max. Understood?”

The crew muttered assent, some eager, some tight-lipped. Ropes clinked. The cage they would ride down in—the reinforced descent cradle—waited at the edge like an iron coffin, bolted to a temporary rig of scaffolds and counterweights.

Sera stepped closer, her gloved fingers brushing the steel mesh. She glanced back at Mateo. “If you want them not to sing,” she said lightly, “you’d best keep me gagged.”

A few of the younger grad assistants laughed nervously. Mateo didn’t. His eyes, gray in the dim light, fixed on her until her smile faltered.

“You hear it already?” he asked, quiet enough that only she could catch it.

Sera nodded once. “Like always. The Tower is awake tonight. It’s… whispering.”

“Then whisper back later,” he said. “Not now.”

The cage groaned as the winch engaged. One by one, boots clanged onto the grated floor. The descent would take them past the jagged outer shelves of the ruined city and into the Mid-City, where the last expedition had mapped half-buried plazas and the first pods.

Sera tucked her tablet under one arm and leaned against the rail as the cage shuddered free of the cliff. The crater swallowed them.

Below, the Hole was a galaxy of broken spires and crystalline rivers, its darkness speckled with glows—pale blossoms of Stone, phosphorescent fungi, the slow pulse of breathing pods. Somewhere far beneath all of it, deeper than any expedition had gone, the Palace slept. And deeper still, the Tower of Babel waited with its silence and its secrets.

As the descent rattled on, a sound drifted up through the void, faint at first: a low, rhythmic knocking, too regular to be rockfall, too resonant to be metal. Sera stiffened, her eyes unfocusing as she felt the pattern slide into her bones.

“Do you hear that?” she whispered.

One of the crew leaned close to the rail, frowning. “Just echoes. Probably the rig.”

Sera shook her head slowly. “No. It’s not the rig. It’s a phrase. Someone is knocking a word.”

Mateo adjusted the damper dial on his prosthetic arm, eyes scanning the ruin-scape below. “Or something,” he said.

The cage shuddered again, descending deeper into the deep.