The first dart sank clean into the bare's shoulder.

We'd got en lucky.

The wind had dropped, the snow crossed us firm, and the animal had wandered close enough to the coast for us to approach without risking thin ice.

Five months into the season, we'd all developed the same quiet rhythm of professionals who'd done this too many times to get nervous.

Dart dose, wait, move in measure, collar release routine.

Only this one wasn't routine.

The bare swayed, shuddered once, then lay down without a sound.

Its bulk flattened, the snow steam rising faintly from its fur.

I gave the signal, and we crunched forward on snow shoes, our breath loud in the still air.

Up close, it was a healthy male, big paws, clean coat, thick with fat for the winter textbook specimen.

I had already poured the kit bag open when Amara crouched by his neck and frowned, Ah, guys.

At first I thought she was pointing at scar tissue, maybe a healed wound.

Then I saw the band of metal half buried in fur.

The bear already had a collar, and it wasn't one of ours.

This was old brass, gone green with corrosion, pitted and scarred, as if it had been on there a long time.

The edges weren't machined.

They'd been hammered into shape by hand, uneven but strong, riveted shut in a way that looked impossible to remove without breaking the animal's neck.

And there, etched into the metal was a date eighteen forty seven.

Beneath it, scratched deep enough to cut through tarnish, was a spiral, not the kind you draw on a board afternoon, but a shape that made your eye want to look away.

The lines overlapped in ways that shouldn't have worked, turning back into themselves, forming a loop that wasn't closed, yet had no beginning.

I stared too long and felt motion sick.

God damn.

One of the others whispered, this has to be a prank, right, some trapper's joke, yeah, Amara said, forcing a laugh, because Inuit hunters in the eighteen hundreds were hammering out brass in their free time.

I didn't laugh.

None of us did.

We finished the examination in silence.

We scanned its teeth, checked blood samples, and noted vitals.

Everything was normal except the drugs.

They should have knocked it out for at least an hour.

After fifteen minutes, the bear's eyes flicked open, slow, deliberate.

My froze, dark gun still hanging limp in my hand, still needing to be reloaded, a process that would take too long.

If the bear just stood up, the animals should have staggered fighting the sedatives instead.

Beyond reason, it just stood, not even a stumble, just up on its feet, watching us with that deep, unblinking black gaze.

We backed off, hands raised, no sudden movements.

The bear didn't follow, but it didn't leave either.

It simply stood there, massive and silent.

As we retreated to the skidoo and drove away.

Amara broke the silence on the ride back to camp.

Maybe it led us to it, she said.

It sounded ridiculous, but we also couldn't refute it.

That night, after gear was stowed and data uploaded, I dug through the digital archives of expeditions north of Ellesmere Island.

I scrolled past whalers, Royal Navy logs, early Soviet surveys, every scrap I could find.

The coastline was mapped in eighteen eighteen, but it wasn't explored.

Until eighteen fifty two, not one expedition had ever reached this far in eighteen forty seven.

The thing about Arctic field stations is that you have plenty of downtime once the day's data is logged.

Most people stream whatever satellite internet can handle.

Amara digs.

She has a thing for records, for turning footnotes into rabbit holes.

That night, while the rest of us played cards in the mess, she was still hunched over a laptop, scrawling through grainy PDFs of scanned expedition logs.

If no one was here in eighteen forty seven, she muttered, then, why the hell does the COLI say otherwise?

At first she came up empty.

I was half convinced the whole thing was a fluke, maybe some eccentric trapper had engraved the date for a laugh.

But then she pulled up something strange.

Not a published survey, nothing official, a letter archived in the basement of some royal society library, digitized only because an intern scanned the wrong folder.

It was barely legible, the ink smudged the script leaning between copper plate and panic.

Attached was a folded map, hand sketched, the paper crumpled and stained with oil.

The author identified himself as doctor Thaddeus Knox, Royal Arctic Surveyor eighteen forty seven.

Except there was no Knocks in any expedition roster, no mention in whaling logs, naval commission, nothing.

The man didn't exist in official records.

Yet here he was sketching out coast lines that shouldn't have been charted until decades later.

And right in the center of the map, amid Sidell's ink, in careful spirals and cross hatched patterns, was a mark umbra transitio shadow crossing.

Beneath it, Knocks had scrawled a note, the gradient holds the white King endures.

None of us knew what that meant, did we even want to.

But when Amara overlaid the coordinates onto modern charts, the result was chillingly precise.

It matched the stretch of flat sy Ice we'd flown over a dozen times, featureless, empty, nothing but wind scoured snow and pressure ridges.

I asked the obvious question, if this place is just ice, why mark it at all?

A Mara didn't look up from a laptop.

Maybe he wanted someone to come back.

The next morning, we packed light, just emergency gear food rations and a couple of sled mounted drones.

The plan was simple, quick flight out, confirm the site, and if it was a bust, we'd have wasted nothing but fuel.

The mood was sharper than usual, though no one said it out loud, but we all felt it that sense you get before a storm when the air hangs heavy.

Every time I glanced up from my pack, I caught a mara watching me, as if she were gaging whether I'd back out.

When I stepped outside to secure the equipment cases, I froze on the horizon.

Half a mile out, A dark shape sat on the snow, massive, motionless, the same bear.

The collar gleamed faintly in the dawn light.

It didn't move as we loaded gear, nor when we hauled the sleds to the strip.

But as the propellers roared to life and the plane nosed upward, I looked down one last time.

The bear was still there, unmoving, its head tilted back, eyes fixed on the sky.

The coordinates from Knox's map dropped us into what should have been nothing, just flat sea ice stretching to the horizon, white on white, until sky and ground blurred from the air.

It looked like we were chasing a ghost.

But as the plane dipped lower and Mara leaned against the window and swore, there, look at the shadows.

I didn't see it at first.

Then the sun hit at just the right angle, and the surface betrayed itself.

The ice folded inward in long, concentric ridges, each step curling in on itself like the grooves of a shell.

From above, the pattern was invisible, a trick of geometry, smooth as a billiard table.

But if you looked hard enough, the spiral was undeniable.

We circled twice to be sure, then found a stretch of flat ice half a kilometer away and brought the plane down on its skis.

The engine's roar faded into silence, leaving only the groan of wind across the fuselage.

We unloaded sleds and gear, then set out on foot across the snow, the spiral drawing us in step by step.

The spiral was not a natural formation.

The depression sloped gently downward, circling around a center point perhaps fifty meters across, and had that heart breaching through the ice, as though the earth itself had grown tired of hiding.

It lay a block of stone, nothing natural to the area, something stranger, black green, like oxidized copper, but polished, smooth, almost oily.

Its surface shed the snow as if it rejected it.

Every other patch of eyes within sight was frosted over, Yet the platform remained bare, A seamless plug set perfectly in the spiral center.

We approached, cautiously, dragging sleds behind us.

The closer we got, the more wrong it felt.

The ice didn't crunch under foot, It whispered, thin layers, shifting reluctant to carry our weight.

The air itself felt heavier, though the instrument showed nothing unusual.

Stone like this doesn't exist up here, muttered Lars, a geologist.

He knelt, gloved hand brushing the edge where ice met block.

This isn't glacial drift.

This was brought here.

None of us replied.

The idea of placement of someone hauling this slab here so long ago was too large to say out loud.

We made camp at the edge of the depression, tents set against the wind.

I tried to write notes that night, but found myself staring at the platform.

To the fabric of my tent, it looked smaller by day at night, beneath the shifting green wash of the aurora, it seemed immense, like the spiral wasn't carved around it, but rather out from it.

That was when Amara called softly from outside.

The bear was back.

It stood on the far side of the depression, higher up and the spiral ridge, still as a statue watching us.

This brass color caught the aurora's light, gleaming faintly green.

I felt my stomach large.

We had flown nearly forty miles from the tagging site.

Fares often wondered the icy planes hunting or resting.

For it to be here meant it followed us directly, no rests or stops.

It's obvious to say that isn't the normal behavior of a polar bear.

It's the same one.

Amara whispered.

Her breath steamed the cold air.

It didn't just find us.

It came here on purpose.

No one argued.

We all felt it.

The bear didn't move or charge.

It simply watched patient as the ice.

Then her second shape joined it on the ridge, another massive silhouette, broad shouldered, breath missing.

Then a third silent watching a camp.

The first problem came immediately, y batteries strained faster than they should have.

The drone controler lost signal twice even before we launched.

Compass needles jittered like they'd been set on spinning plates.

Lars cursed over the instruments, insisting the magnetic anomalies didn't make sense.

But none of that scared me.

Like Wadmara spotted.

Just before dusk, another one, she said, pointing at the ridge, Another bear stood watching us.

This one was larger as furm mottled with age, muzzles scarred.

It didn't even twitch an ear.

It had just watched.

And then twenty minutes later came another.

That was when unease turned into something sharper.

Polar bears are solitary hunters.

Two together as unusual, but that many sitting at a distance like centuries, silent and patient wrong.

It went against all our collective knowledge of a species we were experts on.

They're surrounding us, muttered Daniel's voice, low, like it was afraid the animals might hear.

Geez, they're actually surrounding us.

I caught myself running numbers in my head, distance to the plane, distance to the rifles we laid by the sledge.

The average sprint speed of a polar bear.

Every calculation ended badly.

If they wanted a charge, we wouldn't have a chance.

But they didn't.

They held their ground.

Their presence weighed heavily on us.

Every time one of us looked up from a task, there would be a white shape at the edge of vision, unmoving patient.

It didn't feel like hunger.

It was like we were being herded to distract ourselves.

We pushed ahead with the drone, using what power it had left.

We found a narrow feisure at the spiral's edge, a crack that led downward into blackness.

The machine dipped inside its camera, casting a cone of light.

For a moment, we saw impossible things, angles folding in themselves, stones shaped but melted, structures that seemed to have been carved or grown.

Layers of hexagons fused together in a lattice that looked disturbingly like bone.

Then the feed stuttered, the last frame froze on something curved, ribbed two organic architecture, and the drone went dead.

Daniels snapped, He swore, grabbed at the rifles and declared we needed to leave right then and there.

This is insane.

So many goddamn polar bears watching us like prison guards, equipment, dying, drones going to hell.

I'm not dying out here for some stupid map.

The Mara didn't flinch.

She just looked at him, her voice calm, they're not stopping us.

If they wanted us gone, we'd be gone already.

Don't you see they're leading us somewhere.

No one argued we couldn't.

However, their true intentions were still unclear.

That night, none of the bears approached non charged.

They stayed exactly where they were, each on their ridge outlined against the aurora.

But in the morning, when we woke, the snow told a different story.

Their tracks circled the camp.

It happened fast.

One second, Lars was edging along the spiral's rim to get a core sample.

Next, the ground gave way, with a sound like the world tearing open.

The snow sagged, then dropped.

Two figures vanished into the white spray.

Lars and Daniels.

The rest of us lunged for the edge, but it was too late.

The crack widened under our weight, forcing us back rope.

Get the ropes, Amara shouted, already on her knees knotting on line to the sled anchor.

We peered into the split.

It wasn't bottomless, just steep, a funnel sloping down maybe twenty meters, unnervingly smooth, like it had been carved by something other than water or weather, the kind of surface no cramp and would bite into.

Daniels was already scrambling to his feet, cursing his Parker torn at the shoulder.

Lars lay half buried in drift of the base, clutching his ankle.

Not broken, he gasped when we reached him, but it's bad.

His face was pale, jaw tight.

A sprain may be worse.

He could hobble, but if we needed to move fast, he'd be left behind.

The shaft walls reflected our headlamps, strangely light, bouncing too far, as if the ice was deeper, thicker than it had had any right to be.

We rigged a bellet line and descended one by one.

The silence deepened as we went down.

By the time my boots hid the floor beside Lars, I realized I could no longer hear the wind, no creak of ice, no groan of shifting snow.

The world above us was gone, sealed by silence.

It was like stepping into a vas vacuum.

Amara glanced upward.

Sound should carry down.

Why can't we hear anything above?

No one answered.

We dragged Lars to a hollow in the ice, a natural alcove, just wide enough for four of us to huddle, a concave wall curving like the inside of a rib.

The air was stale, colder than the shaft itself.

It would do for shelter, just enough time to rest, then we'd haul Lars back up.

In the morning.

Daniels sat apart from the rest, staring up at the shaft.

Who was watching?

He whispered?

I turned what He looked at me like he regretted speaking, but the words kept spilling.

When you guys descended before the snow closed, I looked up.

One of them was at the rim, the collared one.

It didn't move, just stood there looking down, And then I asked.

Daniel swallowed, Then he walked away.

No one spoke after that.

We lit the stove, made tea.

Tried to ignore the way the alcove walls glittered with frost.

The glow of the flame cast strange shadows, stretching them into angles.

That didn't belong.

Lars groan quietly angle packed in snow to keep the swelling down.

Sleep came thin and uneasy.

When I woke in the dim light of my head lamp, I noticed it first.

The alcove wasn't the same shape.

The black wall had shifted.

A jagged crack split down its center, just wide enough to fit a hand, and through it blackness yawned a tunnel.

The crack widened as we chipped at it with axes, each blow echoing dull inside the alcove, the ice fractured reluctantly, shearing in long vertical strips, until with a final snap, part of the wall gave way a hollow space, open beyond dark as a throat.

None of us spoke.

We simply looked at each other, then clipped headlamps to our hoods and went in.

The tunnel was narrow enough that we brushed both walls with our shoulders.

Its surface wasn't natural ice.

At first I thought it had been carved, but the grooves weren't the marks of tools.

They ran smooth, symmetrical, curling in arcs that defied any mason's hand.

The whole passage curved slowly downward.

Every angle the degree off true.

It made my head swim if I stared too long, like walking inside the geometry, that wanted to slip out of comprehension.

We hadn't gone ten meters before Daniels bent and picked a boots ale from the frost.

Its leather had gone stiff with age, the nails at its heel hand forged.

A little farther on, we found the rest of it collapsed into powder at his touch.

Soon there were more rusted chisels, a split pickaxe with a handle wrapped in strips of hide, a scattering of cloth fragments that might once have been bare pelts.

None of it seemed dumped or discarded.

It was arranged along the walls in a deliberate, curated order, as if left intentionally.

Knox Amara murmured.

Her voice was flat, as if naming him, explained and condemned the scene all at once.

The passage opened into the first chamber.

I had to stop in the threshold and catch my breath.

The space wasn't large, but it was dense, stacked in precise rows with slabs of the same black green stone we'd seen in the spiral above.

Each was the size of a coffin lid.

Their surfaces smooth, polished, no carving off words or images, but arranged.

One leaned against another, had a subtle tilt, another rotated a degree of center.

A third prop diagonally across them both.

It was deliberate architectural thoughts expressed without language.

Lars ran a hand over one, muttering about mineral composites, but I barely heard them.

The arrangement gave the impression of meaning, like someone had been trying to think in stone, to hold onto an idea too large for words.

We moved on, unsettled.

The next chamber was worse.

It appeared to have been hollowed directly from a single mass of glacier ice, a dome that gleamed like glass beneath our headlamps.

But the light didn't behave properly.

Instead of scattering evenly, it bent, warped, and converged the points, as if the walls were prisms.

Beams curved the long arcs, overlapping in ways that created after images in the eye.

When I blinked, I still saw the room glowing.

Daniels muttered, feels like we're walking inside a lens.

We pressed deeper, the air grew colder with each step.

Unlike the kind of cold we knew, this was layered dense, a cold that filled the lungs, until every breath dragged heavy, My eyelash frosted, our clothes stiffened with rime.

The silence deepened until I could hear the throb of my own pulse in my ears.

The tunnel curved one final time and widened into a chamber so vast, my headlamp being vanished into the dark before I could find the far wall.

The air was different here, stiller, denser, every breath crystallized in my throat.

It felt less like we had descended into a cave than into a vault.

A pocket sealed away for a millennia by the shifting bones of the earth and natural cryosinc locked by tectonics and pressure, untouched until now.

And at its heart, pressed against the front edge of the ice wall, was a hand not human.

It dwarfed us, larger than a scadoo, each finger long as a body, each nail a curved ridge of horn, worn smooth by unimaginable time.

The skin was pale, leeched of color, ridged with pressure, cracks, that splintered through the ice.

The edges of the hand blurred back into shadow, swallowed by depth, as though the rest of whatever owned it stretched far beyond the walls we could see.

We never saw the hole, only the hand.

That was enough.

The ice around it was different from the rest, solid, no bubbles or pockets of air, wet, veined with trickles that gleamed under our lights.

Drops ran slowly down the fissures, beating on the chamber floor.

The glacier was holding, but only just Daniels swore softly.

His voice broke the hush, like glass dropped in a church, which the closer we stepped, the clearer had became that people had been here before.

The floor was littered with remnants, splintered scaffolding, half encased in rime, the bent frames of lanterns, the skeleton of an old tripod drill.

Some of the gear was modern corroded aluminium battery housings walked with cold, but others were older chisels, timber braces, and a cracked oil lamp with the crest of the Royal Society Amara crouched by a rusted brace, running her glove across the corroded metal.

Different expeditions, she said, quietly, different centuries.

Near the base of the ice wall, half buried in frost, was a brass plate, green with corrosion.

We scraped it clear enough to read.

The letters had been punched deep, uneaven, but still legible.

It is not dead, it is cold.

The earth must not thaw.

I stared at the words until my eyes blurred, until the cold sank into my bones.

My mind kept circling the same thought, what kind of thing needs to be kept cold?

A sudden noise snapped to me back, a soft crackle, wet and sharp.

The eyes beneath the hand had featured further, a black seam running like a wound.

From it leaked something darker than water, thick frost spreading upward, staining the chamber wall in shagged black veins.

It's moving, Daniels whispered.

It isn't, Amara shot back, but a voice wavered.

I took a step closer, against all instinct.

I couldn't see movement, but I could feel it, A heaviness radiating from the thing beyond the ice.

No vibration or sound, just presence.

A Mara had gone silent.

She was kneeling by the sidewall, rushing frost away with the mit.

When I joined her, I saw what she uncovered.

More collars, the same brass collars we had seen on the bear.

Row after row of them, embedded deliberately, and the ice stacked like bricks in a wall, each one etched with spirals, each frozen into place, as if hammered into the glacier itself.

It was a Mara who found the satchel, half rotted leather wedged between a fallen scaffold, brittle straps fused with ice.

She cut it free and started searching for anceas on top of the piling questions.

Inside were notebooks, their pages warped and blurred by centuries of frost.

Alongside them a spool of microfilm cartridges sealed in wax, the kind used in the early twentieth century for long term archives.

We passed them carefully between us, reading by headlamp glow.

The words were fractured, sentences lost, the smears of mold with the fragments that remained were enough.

Not a god, but in version, the hand of reversal, the undoing of order.

It must not warm, it must not wake.

Each journal circled the same truth The thing locked in the glacier wasn't alive in any sense we understood.

It was a force given shape, a presence that gnordered the fabric of structure itself.

It was in creation or destruction, reversal, and always the bears.

They weren't predators or accidents of nature, but guardians that defied nature.

The callers were brands binding them to the task, a duty impressed upon them, passed down in ways no science could explain.

They've been here since Knox, Amara whispered, holding one of the journals close to the glow of the headlamp.

Maybe longer.

Daniel shook his head.

That's not possible.

Bears don't live a century.

They do, Amara said, though her voice shook.

These do.

It's why they don't attack, It's why they wait.

They've outlasted every expedition, every storm, every year since this place was sealed.

They're still keeping watch.

The thought chilled me more than the air ever could.

The same colored sentinel we tranquilized a live one, Knocks carved his notes in eighteen forty seven, alive now leading us here.

I thought of the collared bear we tagged, how it hadn't resisted, How it seemed almost expectant.

Was it even sedated when we tried to tag it, or was it just pretending?

The spiral depression, too, was explained, not in clear language, but in implication.

It wasn't a law, nor was it some mystical schedule meant to invite discovery.

It was a warning mark carved into the ice, to be seen only from the ground, a sign that said, here lies a lock.

Tend to it.

The bears goold guard.

They could lead, but they couldn't repair.

For that, hands were needed, human hands.

I felt the weight of that realization settle in my chest.

We weren't trespassers here, nor did we discover something.

We'd been summoned to a duty long abandoned.

They brought us, I whispered before I even realized i'd spoken.

The others looked at me, uncertain.

They could have killed us a dozen times over.

I went on, but they didn't.

They drove us here every time, they pushed us closer, because they can't do it themselves, but someone has to.

The silence that followed was heavier than the cold.

Each of us looked back toward the wall with a colossal hand pressed against the thinning ice, its blurred outlines, stretching into blackness.

The frost beneath it cracked again, a bead of water running down like sweat.

No one needed to say what.

We all felt that this place had been tended once and then abandoned, that the Guardians had endured without their stewards, that duty had lapsed.

And Maara closed the note book, her gloves trembling.

If this fails, she said, if the ice goes, it isn't just us that dies.

No one disagreed.

We had seen enough.

None of us said it, for the silence between us carried the decision.

Lars could barely put weight on his ankle, Daniels wouldn't stop shaking, and I felt a sickness in my bones that went deeper than cold.

We had to leave.

We packed the journals, the satchel, and a handful of collars chipped from the wall.

But then came the sound, a crack, sharp split, echoing through the vault like thunder under ice.

I turned the fisure beneath the enormous hand had widened further, My skin pressed against thinning of frost.

A patch had broken fully free for the first time, A fraction of the flesh of the thing was exposed.

It wasn't dead flesh like we'd hoped.

The pale skin shimmered with a slick translucence, veins pulsing faintly like trapped rivers.

Steam rose in slow curls, and from that tiny breech the chamber began to change.

Black frost raced up the chamber wall, crawling across scaffolds, shattering metal into flakes.

One of the journals curled in on itself, pages crumbling to powder, as if sentries had passed in seconds.

We panicked, scrambling ropes, dragging laws, shouting over each other, until Lamaras stopped us.

Wait.

She held one of the notebooks open, her breath frogging the page.

Look scrawled diagrams filled the margins, sketches of ice, rigs, annotations in knoxes, sharp script, layers, barriers, freeze, retreat, repeat, words blurred, but the meaning was plain enough.

They had fought this same fight before.

They didn't just leave, Amara said, They sealed it again, and again we can too.

We tore through the remnants, gathering anything that could help.

Rusty drills, fractured piping, frozen tanks of long spent chemicals useless.

But beneath the scaffolding we found something stranger.

A cluster of iron cylinders, thick wall capped with brass fittings, ice hauling tanks, primitive refrigeration gear the kind expeditions once used.

The store harvested ice.

The seals were warped but intact.

When amra pried went open, a draft of air hissed out, so sharp it crystallized on a glove.

Even after all this time, the old technology still bit with cold.

It wasn't much, but with what we had left in our packs, fuel, cool and a working pomp, it was enough.

The plan was insane.

We threaded the hose across the fisia, primed the pump, and fed our last reserves of fuel into the engine.

Melted snow sloshed through the line, spraying in a thin sheet across the crack.

Immediately we opened the antique tanks, forcing their breath of ancient frost over the surface.

The effect was violent.

Water seized the brittle ice almost on contact her skin, spreading jaggedly across the wound to force a new layer of cold.

All the while I saw the colors of life returning to the once dead, exposed flesh, the behemoth straining to grasp unto what little freedom it was allowed.

I could see moisture beating on its ridges, drops pattering against the floor like falling stones.

Where they struck, the ice sacked and bled black.

We worked until our gloves stiffened, until our lashes frozen shut, until lars collapsed against the wall, whimpering through clenched teeth, and slowly, unbelievably, a new layer formed, thin, brittle, translucent as glass, but a layer all the same.

The chain quieted, the black frost halted, trapped beneath the skin we had forced into place.

The hand loomed, blurred once more, behind a veil of ice.

None of us spoke.

We knew it wouldn't last hours, days, the season at most, but not forever.

That was when we saw that the way back was blocked.

At the mouth of the shaft.

Bear stood shoulders a shoulder, silent and unmoving, their collars gleaming with frost, a living wall of white.

Daniels raised his rifle, hand shaking.

We're not getting out of here, he whispered, But they didn't advance.

Their posture was docile.

They simply waited it was an aggression, it was an expectation.

Amara's breath hitched.

They want one of us to stay.

The words landed like stones.

We all felt the truth of them.

This place had been abandoned, as human stewards had vanished, their duty broken.

The bears had guided us here, not to witness, but to decide.

Lars tried to stand, His bad ankle gave way, and he crumbled again, cursing.

Daniels pressed a rifle harder into his shoulder, teeth bared.

I'm not dying here.

I looked at Amara.

She was already watching me, calm, despite the tears freezing on her cheeks.

I'll do it, she said, simply.

No.

I started for The bears shifted their massive bodies, leaning just enough to block the chat further.

Their silence was deafening.

The Mara touched my arm.

You'll go back, you'll tell them, maybe they'll listen.

There was nothing to say.

We hugged through the stiffness of our suits.

Lars clutched the hand with both of his, his lips trembling too hard for words.

Daniels turned away, shoulders heaving.

When we moved, the bears parted just enough for three to pass.

I looked back once, just once.

The Mara stood at the base of the ice wall, headlamp beam casting a shadow against the colossal hand.

She raised the collar on both hands and pressed it to the frozen surface, as if completing a circle.

The bears stayed with her, and we climbed.

We didn't look back as we climbed out of the spiral.

None of us could bear too.

The silence was crushing enough, no last words, just the hiss of our own breathing in our masks, the creak of rope, and the endless white above.

By the time we reached the surface, a storm had begun to close in the greater blurred in drifting snow, the black green platform already half buried, as if the world itself wanted to raise what we had seen.

The bear still waited on the rim, a silent guard of honor.

The plane took us south.

A Marra remained behind, sealed in that vault of ice with their impossible duty.

The weight of it pressed on me more than any silence could.

We completed our original mission and returned to command.

The debriefing was tense, back in a windowless room that smelled of coffee, and stale air.

Lars gave his account.

Daniels gave his.

I followed words, tumbling out as if an autopilot.

We said Amara had been lost in a gravasse collapse.

Conditions made recovery impossible.

She was m I a unrecoverable, tragic, but not unprecedented.

During the debriefing, I had the words in my throat.

I imagined standing in that sterile room and telling them everything.

The hand, the vault, the collars, a Marra standing sentinel at the base of the ice wall, her warning, if the ice goes, it isn't just us that dies here.

But I didn't, not because I was afraid they wouldn't believe me.

Because I was afraid they would and they'd come back with drills and charges and cameras, and the lock would fail.

I sign my name on the dotted line, ink scratching across paper, and with that the truth was very deeper than the White King itself.

I didn't want it that way, but I was scared.

It was better a single name marked lost than the whole world.

Undone months passed, the routine came back, field work reports, assignments.

I told myself I was fine, that she had chosen her path, and all I could do was honor it by keeping quiet.

But guilt doesn't soften with time.

It hardens, sharpens, until every quiet moment cuts.

I couldn't shake the memory of her last words, you'll go back, You'll tell them, Maybe they'll listen.

I didn't.

Not yet.

Winter returned, and with it another mission.

Not the same sight, but the same latitudes, same ice, same silence, same endless sky.

The Arctic doesn't change, It only waits.

One night.

Hold up in a weather tent, while the wind clawed at the canvas, I found myself staring at the short wave set we'd brought for contact.

Its dial gleamed faintly in the lamplight, the metal pitted from years of use.

I hadn't touched that frequency since the day we left her, but my hands moved before I could stop them.

I tuned the dial slowly and deliberately, to the numbers we'd used in our previous mission.

Static roared, then thinned.

Then Hello, her voice crackling, faint, distant, as if dragged across miles of frozen air, but hers my throat locked, Amara, are you are you okay?

There was a long pause.

The hiss of static filled the tent, the wind outside shrieking in chorus.

Finally, her voice came back, thin but steady.

I'm here.

I pressed my hand to my forehead, dizzy with relief.

How how are you surviving?

Food?

Heat?

Another pause, longer, this time, the bears provide.

I stared at the radio.

So many questions swam through my head.

I wanted to ask what that meant, what they brought her, what bargain had been struck, but the words stuck in my throat.

Instead, I asked, and the seal the fissure.

Static swallowed half a reply, but I caught the words that mattered.

It's holding for now.

The signal crackled, faded.

I twisted the dial, desperately, searching for her again, but only Static answered.

I sat in the dark, long after the wind died, her voice circling my head like the spiral in the ice.

It's holding for now.