Dawn on Aethel wasn't marked by a rising sun, but by a subtle shift in the mist, from charcoal gray to a pearlescent white. Elara met Kael outside the hub building. He handed her a bulky, custom-built apparatus that looked like a geiger counter grafted onto a frequency modulator.
"This will help localize the stronger echoes and dampen the psychological effect," he explained shortly. "Keeps them from overwhelming your senses."
"A ghost repellent?" Elara raised an eyebrow, strapping the heavy device over her shoulder.
"A stability field," Kael corrected. "Stick close to me. The quarry paths aren't safe."
They walked for an hour, descending into a massive, open-pit mine that scarred the center of the island. This was where the mainland corporations had once attempted to drill before the first, mysterious "accidents" and energy spikes drove them away. The walls of the quarry were striated with layers of rock and raw, crystalline mineral deposits that pulsed faintly with the island's blue light.
The hum was a roar here, a physical pressure against Elara's eardrums. The air crackled with static. The stability field device began to whine softly.
"We're close," Kael said, leading her to a deep recess in the quarry wall, a shadowed alcove where the rock shimmered with dark, oily potential.
"The energy signatures here are off the charts," Elara murmured, checking her data-slate. "It's chaotic."
"Shh," Kael commanded, holding up a hand. "Listen."
Elara focused past the hum, past the crackle of her own device. At first, there was nothing but the sound of the wind whipping the mist above the quarry rim. Then, the silence began to fill. Faintly, she heard the clink of metal on stone. Then another clink, faster this time.
Drilling.
She heard distant, shouting voices, distorted by the static. A man’s urgent cry of warning. The sounds weren't loud, but they were incredibly present, as if the events were happening in the next room, separated only by a thin veil.
Then the image hit her again, stronger this time: the overwhelming grief from the night before, now accompanied by the visceral terror of a sudden, ground-shaking tremor. The smell of fear and ozone was so real Elara almost gagged.
"It’s an overlap," Kael said, his face impassive, though his knuckles were white where he gripped the rock face. "The night of the first collapse, fifty years ago. A support beam gave way. Fourteen miners died here."
Elara could feel their panic, their final moments imprinted on the very air she breathed. Her stability device whined louder, flickering between green and red. The sound of the drilling intensified, morphing into a horrific scream of buckling metal, followed by silence.
The echo faded as quickly as it began, leaving only the constant hum and the sound of Elara's ragged breathing.
"That wasn't a recording," Elara whispered, shaken to the core. "That was... consciousness."
"Their souls," Kael confirmed. "The core feeds on that energy. It keeps them trapped here, replaying their final moments for eternity."
"Then we have to free them," Elara declared, the scientific curiosity gone, replaced by a fierce moral urgency. "If my equipment can stabilize the field, maybe it can gently dissipate the echoes, release them."
Kael looked at her with a hint of grim satisfaction. "Now you understand the island's purpose, Dr. Vance. We don't need the mainland's power. We need to respect the dead."
As they climbed out of the quarry, Elara’s mission had fundamentally changed. She wasn't here to map a resource for extraction; she was here to map a graveyard of trapped souls, and she had to protect it from a corporation that only saw dollar signs in the blue light. The true conflict had begun, and it wasn't with a phenomenon, but with her own employers.
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