They found a kingdom underground. Not ruins — a working kingdom. Gears turning, water wheels spinning, bellows pumping. All powered by nobody. The machinery maintains itself.
I descended with Brother Aldric and three soldiers. The entrance is a mineshaft outside Dunhallow. The miners broke through a wall and found corridors — clean stone, precisely cut, with channels for air circulation.
The kingdom stretches for miles. We found workshops, armories, a library with books in no language we recognize, and a throne room with a chair made of interlocking gears. The chair is empty.
The books are the real prize. Aldric recognized some of the diagrams — they’re schematics for flying machines. Machines that calculate. Machines that think. The civilization that built this was thousands of years ahead of us.
We need to get these books to the Academy. But there’s a problem. The deeper we go, the more the machines respond to our presence. Lights turn on as we walk. Doors open before we reach them. The kingdom is waking up, and it thinks we’re the ones who built it.
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