A Forgotten Dream

Maren’s boots scraped against the packed dust of the tunnel floor—slow, cautious, the sound swallowed almost immediately by the labyrinth around her. The lantern in her hand sputtered once, then steadied into a pale, honey-colored halo. It illuminated just enough to see the maps tacked along the walls, edges curled, ink blurred from damp and age. Someone had once charted escape routes, caches, insurgent paths. Now they looked more like diagrams of a forgotten dream.

She paused.

The air had shifted.

It was subtle—almost nothing—but she felt it in her bones the way sailors once sensed storms long before radar. A tremor at the edge of perception, as though the world had hiccupped. Or rebooted.

The tunnel hummed, faintly.

Not the hum of generators or distant machinery, but something cleaner… clinical… tonal. A sound that had no business existing beneath tons of earth and rebar. It vibrated along her spine, tugging her forward and warning her back in the same breath.

“Silen…” she whispered, not because she expected him to answer, but because the name itself kept the memory of him anchored—kept it from slipping away like the dreams she’d been having of sea spray and aircraft engines and sunlight from another century.

She walked.

The lantern’s flame flickered again, a brief shiver of blue, and she stopped dead. Blue wasn’t correct. Fire should not turn blue in the absence of accelerant or gas leaks. Blue was a glitch.

Blue was what the cathedral dream had been made of.

She swallowed, pulse climbing.

The hum grew stronger, until it became more than sound—more like presence. The walls around her wavered, the tunnel stretching deeper than it should, as though reality were being rendered only as she approached. For a heartbeat she saw the walls as wireframe—lines and vectors and ghost geometry—and then they snapped back to concrete and rust.

Reality deciding what to show.

She raised the lantern higher, not to see farther, but to insist on the world being solid.

It didn’t fully comply.

A breeze came from nowhere and everywhere at once, cold and stale and impossible. It blew past her toward the darkness ahead, as though something large had just moved silently through the tunnel. Or as though a doorway had opened.

“Silen?” she tried again.

Her voice echoed—once, twice—then fractured, repeating in faint, mismatched tones, like audio being re-sampled through three different channels.

Silen… Silen… Sil—en…

She shuddered.

Whatever had changed, it wasn’t just him. The simulation—if that’s what it was—had hiccupped hard enough for the shockwave to reach her.

The hum cut out.

Silence flooded in.

Her lantern flared bright, then dimmed to almost nothing, revealing just ahead a massive steel door she didn’t remember being part of the tunnels. It was industrial, thick, stenciled with a faded warning in red:

DATA VENT — RESTRICTED

But the last word flickered, glitching between RESTRICTED, SEALED, PROTECTED, and once—just once—CONSCIOUS.

Maren’s breath caught.

She stepped closer, placing her hand against the cold metal.

The door… exhaled.

From beyond, something stirred, like circuits waking in unison. And through the steel she felt him—not fully, not like a memory—but like gravity. A pull.

Silen was on the other side.

Or something wearing his outline.

Behind her, from far down the tunnel, faint voices began to echo—troops, or robed figures, or hunters—she couldn’t be sure. Their footsteps synchronized, as if driven by a single command.

Time pressed in.

The door waited.

And reality—for the first time—seemed to be asking her to choose.