The Morning After

Chapter Forty-Eight

The Morning After

Gray decided within twelve minutes that concussion protocols were designed primarily to punish people for having heads.

The room was too bright, the pillow was too soft in exactly the wrong places, and every twenty minutes someone asked him his name, the date, where he was, and whether the headache had improved. It had not improved. It had simply become more organized. Instead of filling his entire skull with psychic pressure and fractured memories, it now sat behind his eyes and throbbed whenever he moved too quickly, looked at a screen for too long, or became annoyed.

Unfortunately, all three conditions were difficult to avoid.

The nurse came in again with the same clipboard and the same patient expression. “Name?”

Gray stared at her. “Gray Linden.”

“Age?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Where are you?”

“Oreburgh League medical facility.”

“Why are you here?”

Gray considered several answers and discarded all of them when her expression made it clear she knew exactly what he was doing. “Concussion.”

“And how did that happen?”

“Legendary psychic blast.”

She wrote it down without reacting.

Gray frowned. “You believe me now?”

“I believed you the first time.”

“You made a face.”

“I made a face because you also said you were chased out of a cave by several thousand Unown.”

“That happened after the Legendary psychic blast. I feel those should be separate entries.”

“They are.”

Gray glanced toward the clipboard.

She angled it away from him. “Privacy.”

“It’s my chart.”

“And you are supposed to be resting.”

“I can rest while reading.”

“No screens, no paperwork, no research.”

Gray stared at her for a moment, then slowly turned his head toward Bastiodon.

Bastiodon occupied most of the available floor beside the bed, chin resting near Gray’s chair. He had refused every attempt to move him farther away and had eventually been granted temporary victory on the sensible grounds that removing a Bastiodon who had decided to stay would create far more disturbance than simply allowing him to remain.

Gray pointed weakly toward the nurse. “She’s unreasonable.”

Bastiodon opened one eye, looked at him, then closed it again.

The nurse smiled. “Your Pokémon disagrees.”

“You don’t know that.”

Her smile widened just enough to be irritating.

After checking his pupils one more time, she reminded him not to stand without warning someone and left the room.

Gray waited until the door clicked shut.

Then he reached toward the tablet on the side table.

Bastiodon raised his head.

Gray stopped with his hand halfway there. “You too?”

Bastiodon stared at him.

Gray withdrew his hand. “This is oppression.”

Bastiodon lowered his head again.

Gray leaned back into the pillow and closed his eyes.

That helped for approximately ten seconds.

Then his mother appeared.

Not physically.

Just memory.

Her hand against his cheek.

Warm.

Impossible.

Gray opened his eyes again.

White ceiling.

Hospital light.

No kitchen.

No porch.

No endless hallway full of lives that had never happened.

Good.

He let one hand fall to Bastiodon’s armor and found the old rough patch near the edge of the facial shield. The texture grounded him immediately in a way the hospital room could not. Real stone. Real weight. Real warmth beneath his palm.

Bastiodon rumbled softly without opening his eyes.

Gray left his hand there.

The door opened again several minutes later.

Cynthia came in wearing hospital trousers, a borrowed dark shirt, and a sling supporting her left arm. She looked better than Gray felt, which annoyed him until he noticed how carefully she moved when the door shut behind her.

“You’re supposed to be resting,” he said.

“So are you.”

“I am resting.”

“You were reaching for the tablet.”

Gray looked toward Bastiodon. “Informant.”

Bastiodon did not react.

Cynthia smiled and lowered herself into the chair beside the bed. Her hair was still slightly damp from having the cavern dust cleaned out of it, and a narrow bandage near her hairline marked where the cracked helmet had apparently failed less catastrophically than Gray’s. She looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with missing sleep.

Gray knew the difference now.

“How’s the shoulder?”

“Strain. No fracture.”

“And your head?”

“Concussion.”

“Good.”

Cynthia looked at him.

Gray frowned. “You know what I mean.”

“Yes. I do.”

For a while, neither of them spoke. The hospital room hummed softly around them, Bastiodon breathed beside the bed, and somewhere down the corridor a machine beeped at perfectly regular intervals.

Gray found himself appreciating the repetition.

Predictable patterns had become unusually attractive.

Cynthia eventually glanced toward the window. “Have you seen the videos?”

“No.”

“You’re going to hate them.”

“Bad footage?”

“Thousands of them.”

Gray looked at her. “Thousands?”

“Possibly more by now.”

“That was fast.”

“It happened over a city.”

Gray sighed.

There went secrecy.

Not all of it.

Enough.

Cynthia pulled her phone from her pocket.

Gray looked toward Bastiodon.

One eye opened.

“That’s different.”

Bastiodon stared.

“She’s showing me.”

Cynthia laughed quietly. “Do you want to see?”

Gray thought about the night sky filled with eyes.

“Yes.”

She held the phone where he could see without taking it.

The first video had been recorded somewhere near the commercial district. Gray recognized the Oreburgh rooftops immediately, along with the distant glow of the mine facilities.

Above them, the sky was wrong.

Thousands of tiny white eyes hung against the black.

The person filming whispered something Gray could not make out. Someone nearby said, much more clearly, “What the fuck is that?”

The camera zoomed badly and the image dissolved into digital grain.

That somehow made the Unown look worse.

Less like Pokémon.

More like symbols that had detached themselves from language and learned how to watch.

Gray watched a broad arc of them shift together across the sky. “That looked more normal in person.”

Cynthia glanced at him. “No, it did not.”

“Maybe concussion.”

“Maybe.”

She swiped to another video.

This angle showed the moment the first Unown began teleporting away. Tiny gaps opened across the formation without any obvious flash or effect, as if portions of the sky itself were being erased one eye at a time.

The comment counter beneath the video was already enormous.

Gray looked away first. “That cannot be hidden.”

“No.”

“League statement?”

“Drafting.”

“What does it say?”

Cynthia recited from memory. “Confirmed mass Unown event over Oreburgh. No confirmed injuries from surface activity. Public advised not to approach unusual Unown gatherings and to report sightings.”

Gray nodded slowly. “That’s sensible.”

“They aren’t mentioning the underground expedition.”

“Good.”

“Or Heatran.”

“Very good.”

“Or Darkrai.”

“Obviously.”

“Or Cresselia.”

That gave him pause.

“Good.”

Cynthia watched him for a moment, and Gray knew exactly what she was checking.

Whether he had changed his mind.

He had not.

“Cresselia spent somewhere around a thousand years trapped in that condition,” Gray said. “If she escaped and immediately went somewhere nobody can find her, I’m not especially interested in broadcasting her last known location.”

Cynthia nodded. “Darkrai too.”

Gray’s expression tightened slightly. “Especially Darkrai.”

That felt stranger to say.

For most of recorded folklore, Darkrai would have been the first name people blamed for anything involving unnatural sleep, nightmares, or minds wandering somewhere they should not. Gray had spent most of his career treating that sort of reflexive association with suspicion.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Now he found himself protective of Darkrai’s absence.

Darkrai had done enough.

More than enough.

If it wanted to vanish after reaching Cresselia, Gray had no intention of helping anyone chase it.

Cynthia put the phone away. “Rhea wants the debrief as soon as we’re cleared for a remote meeting.”

Gray looked toward the door. “The nurse said no screens.”

“Mine said fifteen minutes at a time.”

He stared at her. “Favoritism.”

“You argued with yours.”

“That should not reduce medical access.”

Cynthia smiled.

Gray shifted carefully against the pillow.

Bastiodon raised his head again.

“I’m not standing.”

Bastiodon continued watching him.

Gray sighed and settled back. “Everyone is very controlling today.”

By late afternoon, the medical staff finally compromised.

Gray and Cynthia were allowed one thirty-minute remote debrief, provided they stopped immediately if either of them developed a worsening headache, nausea, visual disturbance, confusion, or what the physician had described as “any other concerning neurological symptom.” Gray considered the final category unhelpfully broad, but he had already discovered that arguing with medical personnel only encouraged them to write things down.

They were moved from their individual rooms into a small consultation room at the end of the ward, where the lights could be dimmed and the screen brightness lowered enough that Gray’s skull did not immediately object. Someone had brought in two padded chairs, blankets, water, and a tray of crackers neither of them had touched yet. The room was warmer than the corridor outside, quiet except for the soft ventilation overhead, and smelled faintly of antiseptic and whatever herbal tea Cynthia had accepted from a nurse and then forgotten on the table beside her.

Bastiodon came too.

There had apparently been some discussion about whether a Pokémon of his size belonged in a consultation room. Bastiodon had resolved the debate by walking in after Gray and settling along the back wall with the heavy finality of a landslide. He took up nearly all the available space behind Gray’s chair, chin resting near enough that Gray could reach back without looking and find the familiar edge of his shield.

The main screen showed Rhea, Mira, Marcus, Moriyama, and Lyra. Roark joined from another Oreburgh operations office, with Byron seated beside him for reasons Gray did not question until the older man leaned toward the camera, studied Gray’s bandaged head for several seconds, and said, “You look like shit.”

Gray nodded solemnly. “Thank you.”

“What hit you?”

“Stone wall.”

Roark turned toward him.

Gray added, “After Cresselia.”

Byron absorbed that clarification with an ease Gray found almost insulting. “All right.”

Gray stared at him. “That’s it?”

“What else am I supposed to say?”

Cynthia’s mouth twitched beside him.

Byron considered Gray for another moment and added, “You should watch out for walls.”

Gray went still.

The remark was not profound. Byron probably had not meant anything by it beyond the obvious fact that getting thrown into stone was generally undesirable. But the cadence landed close enough to something Gray’s father might have said that the dream pressed suddenly against the edge of his awareness.

Watch out for cave-ins, dumbass.

For half a second the warm consultation room seemed less solid. Gray looked down at his hands, at the folded hospital blanket over his knees, at the faint adhesive mark where one sensor had been removed from his wrist.

Bastiodon nudged the back of his chair.

The weight of it shifted Gray forward slightly.

Real.

Gray inhaled carefully and rested one hand behind him against Bastiodon’s armor. “Yeah.”

Byron’s expression changed just enough to show that he had noticed something, but to his credit he did not ask. He leaned back instead, and Rhea took advantage of the silence before the conversation could wander any farther.

“We need sequence first,” she said. “Interpretation afterward.”

Gray approved of that immediately. There were too many things from the expedition that could become stories if they let themselves tell them in the wrong order.

Cynthia handled the initial descent. Her account was clinical without becoming detached: the probe route, the increase in Unown density as they descended, the growing psychic pressure, and their eventual entry into the chamber. She described thousands of Unown arranged in concentric formations around Cresselia and then the psychic blast that knocked both of them unconscious, resisting every opportunity to make the experience sound more dramatic than it had already been.

When she reached the point where she lost consciousness, Gray took over.

He described waking first, Cynthia still unconscious nearby, and Darkrai injured but repeatedly attempting to force its way through the inner Unown formation. He explained the dream effects as carefully as he could without getting dragged into the content yet, then described how Darkrai’s interference appeared to disrupt the formation enough to reduce pressure around Cresselia.

Moriyama interrupted there. “Reduced pressure around you, or at the source?”

“Both. At least according to what we could observe locally.”

Mira was already pulling surviving sensor data onto the shared display. Even through a screen, Gray could see her attention sharpen. “That matters.”

“I know.”

Cynthia took over again once the sequence reached the point where she had awakened. She described deploying Lucario while Gray released Blissey, their attempts at controlled disruption, Darkrai finally reaching Cresselia, and the Dark Void that spread beneath the trapped Legendary. The Unown formation weakened. Cresselia woke. She teleported away almost immediately, and Darkrai left through its own Dark Void shortly afterward.

Then the Unown turned toward Gray and Cynthia.

Roark leaned back in his chair. “All of them?”

Gray looked across the screen at him. “All the ones I could see.”

Cynthia shifted the sling supporting her arm. “Which was thousands.”

Roark rubbed both hands over his face and muttered something Gray did not catch.

Gray continued with the retreat: the Unown following upward through the cave system, the first changes among the sleepers below, and finally the mass emergence over Oreburgh. By the time he reached the swarm spreading into the night sky above the city, his headache had begun to pulse more sharply behind his eyes, but not enough to justify stopping.

When he finished, nobody spoke for several seconds.

The silence felt earned rather than awkward.

Lyra eventually broke it. “I leave you alone for one expedition.”

Gray looked toward her window on the screen. “You were not invited underground.”

“That was apparently my best decision this month.”

“Correct.”

She studied the bandage along the side of his head for a second, but instead of turning the moment into an argument she only shook her head and looked back toward Rhea.

Rhea did not bother with subtlety. “Neither of you is going back down there until medical clears you and I decide there is a reason worth discussing.”

Gray opened his mouth, more from reflex than actual disagreement.

Cynthia caught the movement. “Don’t involve me.”

Gray glanced at her. “Coward.”

“Concussed.”

That was fair.

Moriyama steered them back toward the scientific problem before Gray could find another objection. “I want the dream experiences documented while your memory of them is still fresh.”

Gray’s immediate reaction was resistance.

Not because the information lacked value. It had enormous value, which was exactly the problem. He could describe sensor behavior, physical symptoms, sequence, even broad structure. What he did not want was to unpack the contents of those dreams onto a shared screen while half the research team watched.

Cynthia noticed. Her gaze shifted toward him briefly before returning to Moriyama.

Moriyama seemed to understand too, because his voice softened. “Not necessarily during this meeting. I’m interested primarily in structure for now. You are the first awake human observers we know of who entered that field deeply enough to experience the effect directly and later recovered with intact recall.”

Gray looked down at the blanket over his knees and ran his thumb once along the seam. “Structure I can give you.”

He started with the simplest version.

He had been twenty-four.

He had been home.

His parents were alive.

He had been at university.

Bastiodon was there.

There had been dinner.

Everything was familiar and good.

He did not mention the future photographs or the impossible versions of his life in which his parents survived long enough to meet Pokémon they had never known. He did not describe the moment he realized the people in front of him were false while still wanting, with an intensity that embarrassed him even now, to stay with them anyway.

Those parts belonged to him.

For now.

“The important thing,” Gray said, choosing his words carefully, “is that it wasn’t unpleasant at first. It was the opposite. Everything was familiar. Everything worked. I was being given things I wanted.”

Moriyama listened without interrupting, so Gray continued.

“Once I noticed inconsistencies, the dream changed. It replaced the situation with another good one. When I started rejecting that, it changed again. Eventually I retained enough continuity between transitions to realize every new version was replacing the previous one.”

Mira frowned. “Replacing in the sense that you forgot it?”

“No.” Gray looked at her. “That was worse. I remembered enough to know what I’d lost.”

The consultation room seemed to become quieter around him. Cynthia lowered her eyes for a moment before speaking.

“Mine behaved similarly. Once I began rejecting the scenario I was in, the content restructured. The replacement tended to be emotionally preferable at first, which made recognizing the manipulation harder. But I retained enough awareness between transitions to know another version had ended.”

Moriyama looked toward the sleeper data on a secondary display. “Recursive positive-dream cycling with retained emotional continuity.”

Gray stared at him. “That sounds much nicer than it felt.”

“Yes.”

“It sounds like a spa treatment.”

Moriyama’s expression did not change. “It is a description, not advertising.”

Gray considered that and nodded. “Fair.”

Beside him, Cynthia took a small sip from the tea that had been cooling untouched for most of the meeting. The ordinary movement grounded the room again. Bastiodon shifted behind Gray and settled more heavily against the wall, producing a low scrape of armor against flooring.

Moriyama adjusted the model on screen. “If Cresselia’s natural effect encourages vivid positive dreaming or suppresses ordinary nightmare structures, Unown amplification may have driven that function beyond any adaptive range. The sleeper remains immersed. The dream resets or restructures when resistance emerges, but emotional carryover persists.”

Cynthia rested her good arm across her body. “So every transition becomes another loss.”

“Potentially.”

Gray thought of the hallway.

Door after door.

His parents.

Pokémon he had lost.

Lives that felt real until the moment they were taken away.

An endless supply of good things offered only long enough for him to become attached to them.

He understood the sleeping Fire-types beneath the mountain better now than he wanted to.

“They weren’t trapped in one nightmare,” he said quietly. “They were trapped in dreams they could lose over and over.”

Nobody rushed to answer.

Gray appreciated that. Some things became smaller when people answered too quickly.

Moriyama eventually nodded. “That is consistent with your experience.”

Rhea leaned closer to her screen. “And Darkrai?”

Gray understood what she meant. “Darkrai interrupts dream continuity.”

“Through what mechanism?”

“No idea. Dark-type interference with Cresselia’s field is the obvious hypothesis, but obvious isn’t the same as demonstrated.”

Cynthia nodded toward the data. “Dark Void weakened the Unown coupling almost immediately.”

Mira brought up the last surviving local readings from the chamber. “The drop is obvious.”

Gray watched the curve descend.

Cresselia’s field weakened sharply once Dark Void formed beneath her. It dropped again when she teleported, and after that the distributed signal through the underground system began declining as well. Not instantly and not evenly, but steadily enough that even Gray’s headache could not make the pattern ambiguous.

Rhea changed the display. “That brings us to the sleepers.”

Gray straightened without thinking.

Pain stabbed behind his eyes.

He stopped moving.

Mira saw it anyway. “Don’t.”

Gray frowned at her screen. “You’re remote.”

“I can still see you.”

“Terrible design.”

Lyra laughed softly, and that was the extent of it. Nobody made a production out of his injury. Gray settled back into the chair, found Bastiodon’s armor again with one hand, and let Mira continue.

She shared the telemetry from the lower sleeping cavern.

Gray forgot about the headache.

For days, the sleeping Fire-types had shown repeating neurological spikes: high-complexity dream activity climbing, collapsing, rebuilding, and climbing again. Individual patterns varied, but the overall structure had been disturbingly consistent across species and age groups.

Now that pattern had changed.

The spikes had not disappeared completely. Some abnormal activity persisted, especially in the deeper sleepers, but the relentless cycling had broken. Neural activity was beginning to move through slower, broader stages that looked less like forced dream recursion and more like something Gray had almost stopped expecting to see.

Sleep.

Actual sleep.

Gray leaned forward more carefully this time. “Since when?”

“Within minutes of Cresselia teleporting,” Mira said. “The decline starts before the Unown fully leave the lower system, so we can’t isolate which event mattered more.”

Gray looked at the timeline. “Cresselia leaving or the collective formation breaking.”

“Exactly.”

Moriyama highlighted several examples. “Some sleepers entered patterns consistent with ordinary deep sleep for the first time since monitoring began. Others remain abnormal, but they are improved. We’re also seeing metabolic changes.”

The next graph appeared.

Gray stared.

Resting metabolic rates were rising.

Not dramatically.

Tiny amounts.

But they were moving upward.

Circulation had shifted. Respiratory activity had increased. Cellular processes that had sat close to impossible stasis were beginning to move again.

For centuries, these bodies had persisted in a condition that should not have been sustainable.

Now the system was changing.

Cynthia leaned toward the screen. “The eggs?”

Mira smiled.

That was enough to make Gray’s pulse jump.

“Not hatching,” she said quickly.

Gray relaxed a fraction. “Good.”

Roark looked at him. “Good?”

“We are not equipped for thirty-seven ancient hatchings during a medical debrief.”

Roark considered that. “Fair.”

Mira enlarged the nursery data. “We have measurable developmental activity in eleven eggs that previously showed effectively flat readings. Very slight changes. Nothing visible externally. No shell cracking, and no movement we can confirm.”

Gray studied the numbers. “Metabolism?”

“Up.”

“Embryonic activity?”

“Probable.”

“Tissue degradation?”

“No indication.”

Gray sat back slowly.

That was enormous.

The eggs had not been dead.

Whatever state they had occupied was not conventional dormancy either, not if the developmental markers could begin shifting now after remaining effectively unchanged for centuries.

Something had loosened.

Something that had held them still was no longer holding them in quite the same way.

Gray looked toward Cynthia.

She was already looking at him.

Neither needed to say it.

This might be the first measurable change in those eggs in several hundred years.

Then Mira’s smile disappeared.

“There’s more.”

Gray focused on her again.

The feed changed from graphs to video.

Lower sleeping cavern.

Heatran lay near the central shelf, its huge body dark against the crystal-lit stone. Several of the awake Quilava moved quietly among the sleepers, checking them in the same patterns Gray had watched through cameras for days.

At first, the cavern looked almost unchanged.

Almost.

Then Gray saw the difference.

A small Cyndaquil lay near Heatran’s foreleg.

Gray recognized the position immediately. “That’s the one.”

Mira nodded. “The one that opened its eyes briefly during the Unown ascent.”

Nobody said anything else.

They watched.

The Cyndaquil breathed slowly, its body rising and falling in movements so slight that Gray would once have dismissed them as another stable part of the stasis.

Then one forepaw moved.

Not a twitch.

Not the random movement of a dream.

A deliberate shift against the stone.

Gray stopped breathing.

The Cyndaquil lifted its head.

Its eyes opened.

Fully.

No one on the call spoke.

The little Pokémon looked around with the disoriented stillness of something waking in an unfamiliar room. Its ears moved first, reacting to sounds Gray could not hear through the remote feed. Then its head turned toward the nearby crystal light, lingering there as if trying to understand the glow.

Finally, it looked toward one of the awake Quilava.

The Quilava froze.

For several long seconds, the two Pokémon only stared at each other.

Then the Cyndaquil made a small sound.

Weak.

Questioning.

The Quilava moved so quickly it nearly stumbled. It crossed the short distance between them and pressed close, careful despite the urgency in every movement.

Not crushing.

Not crowding.

Just touching.

The Cyndaquil leaned against it.

Gray’s throat tightened.

He had spent days looking at hundreds of sleeping bodies through cameras and monitors. He had reduced them, necessarily, into data: species distribution, neural patterns, historical continuity, metabolic suppression, dream-state abnormalities.

Watching one Pokémon wake made every useful category feel suddenly inadequate.

Heatran noticed.

The Legendary had been lying several meters away with its head down. Now that head rose.

The cavern seemed to become still around it.

Gray watched Heatran look at the Cyndaquil.

There was no immediate movement. No warning rumble, no visible heat increase, no shift into the alert posture Gray knew so well.

Heatran simply froze.

The Cyndaquil looked toward it.

Gray found himself wondering whether the little Pokémon recognized Heatran.

A thousand years made the question almost impossible.

Had the Cyndaquil seen Heatran before it fell asleep? Had Heatran been present when the stasis began? Had the same enormous volcanic Pokémon spent centuries lying nearby while this tiny Fire-type dreamed through lives that never happened?

The Cyndaquil made another quiet sound.

Heatran moved.

Slowly.

The slowness made it more powerful.

This was not the charging territorial force Gray had first encountered in the geothermal chamber. It was not the ancient destroyer whose actions may have buried a settlement, nor the exhausted guardian that had stood between Darkrai and the fracture through what seemed like sheer stubbornness.

Heatran approached one deliberate step at a time.

The awake Quilava stayed beside the Cyndaquil.

It did not retreat.

Heatran lowered its body.

Then its head.

The Cyndaquil watched.

Heatran brought its face down until the broad metal ridge rested close to the stone beside the much smaller Pokémon.

A low rumble began.

Gray recognized it immediately.

He had heard that sound through the monitoring equipment before. Heatran had used the same vibration near sleepers during their worst episodes, warming the surrounding stone and remaining close while ancient dreams tore through Pokémon that could not wake.

This time the Cyndaquil was awake.

Its ears lifted.

The little Pokémon turned more fully toward Heatran and listened.

For several seconds, nothing else happened.

Then it moved away from the Quilava.

One slow step.

Then another.

The Cyndaquil reached Heatran’s face and pressed its forehead against the broad metal ridge above the Legendary’s mouth.

Heatran stopped rumbling.

Gray’s vision blurred.

He blinked hard.

Concussion.

Probably.

Nobody on the call said anything.

Heatran remained perfectly still while the Cyndaquil rested against it, impossibly small beside something so ancient and enormous. The Quilava stayed close enough to touch either of them but did not interfere.

Then Heatran began the low rumble again.

Softer this time.

Gray looked toward Cynthia.

She had stopped pretending the footage was affecting her only as a researcher. Her eyes remained fixed on the screen, and the hand holding her forgotten tea had gone completely still.

Gray swallowed.

“It worked.”

Cynthia glanced toward him.

He saw the scientist in her hesitate before she said anything. Gray knew the correction before it arrived. Something had worked. Maybe Cresselia leaving. Maybe the Unown network breaking. Maybe Darkrai’s intervention. Maybe every one of those things had been necessary.

The cave system was too complicated to assign clean causality from a single event.

Gray raised one hand before she could begin.

“Let me have one.”

Cynthia looked at him for a moment.

Then her expression softened.

“It worked.”

Gray smiled.

On the screen, the Cyndaquil slowly settled against Heatran’s face as though the position required no explanation at all.

Farther across the cavern, another sleeper moved.

Then another.

Neither woke.

Not yet.

But they were changing.

After a thousand years, morning had finally started.