The world calls it the Impact Zone—a wound in the earth where time itself feels wrong.
Roughly 20 miles across, blackened and warped by ancient fire, it is the most forbidden place on the planet. Drones fail. Satellites distort. And those foolish enough to enter are never seen again.
It is not just avoided. It is feared.
Most think it cursed. Governments have fenced it off with automated turrets, warning buoys, and silent no-fly protocols. Even the scavengers, desperate and mad, know better than to cross the boundary.
But on the morning of his 18th birthday, Kael crossed the threshold willingly.
He had never been normal—not since the dreams began.
For eight years, they came like clockwork. A rhythm under his skin, pulsing like a second heartbeat. Visions of dark skies, scorched stone, and a whisper from beneath the world. Always leading him west.
Last week, it changed.
A new image: a stone altar, surrounded by silence.
And a compass—his father's broken, long-abandoned tool—suddenly began spinning again, stopping only when pointed toward the Zone.
He took it as a sign. He took it as truth.
Because deep down, Kael didn't feel like he belonged in the world. But out here? In the silence and the hum?
He felt called.
Kael stole a skimmer bike. He slipped past guard towers. Traveled through abandoned trade routes, crossed old wastelands, and followed derelict rail lines until they simply vanished beneath blackened rock.
By the second day, he was on foot.
By the third, the sky itself seemed to change.
The air at the perimeter was sharp—metallic. Wind died here. Color faded. Sound dulled.
The first stretch was a graveyard of failed entries:
Twisted helicopter frames, sunken half into the earth.
Parachutes tangled in dead trees like torn wings.
Jet fuselages split open like carcasses, long since picked clean.
Skeletons—not all of them human—half-merged into stone, as if they had melted into the ground.
Each step forward was heavier.
Not just physically.
Emotionally. Spiritually.
The land rejected the unworthy.
Those who came before him had been erased.
Something shifted with every mile inward. The chaos lessened. The wreckage thinned. Even the strange glass-like soil began to feel smoother, untouched.
Untrodden.
He realized the truth: No one had made it this far. Not one.
Nature itself had conspired with the seal. Whatever force protected this place had bent time and death to ensure the tablet remained undisturbed.
At the crater's heart stood a single raised plateau—natural stone, but far too smooth. It rose in the perfect center of a silence deeper than the grave.
Upon it sat a slab—black, weatherless, humming faintly.
The tablet.
It did not glow. It did not beckon.
It simply existed, as if it had always been waiting for this very moment.
Kael stepped forward, heartbeat matching the rhythm pulsing beneath his feet.
He placed his hand on the tablet.
And the world shuddered.
Stone breathed. Glyphs crawled from within. A sound, not heard but felt, echoed across the crater like a bell struck inside the bones of the earth.
A pulse erupted outward, racing across continents unseen—through iron, through oceans, through minds.
Somewhere, ancient locks cracked.
Elsewhere, watchers stirred in panic.
And in dark corners of the world where things should not breathe, they awoke.
Kael's eyes glowed with a lightless shimmer.
And deep inside the tablet, something whispered back—for the first time in an age:
"You are the one."