4308.265 · September 21, 1988 AD
Where the Walls Still Breathe
The plan was the library. Safe. Sensible. Somehow, four bicycles turned toward the abandoned mine instead—a decision no one remembers making. The Silver Queen has been empty for decades. Everyone knows that. Everyone is wrong. Behind walls that hold their breath, in compartments that shouldn't exist, secrets wait for hands brave enough to find them. But finding is only half the danger. The other half is being found in return.
"Buildings don't forget—they just wait for someone foolish enough to listen."
The plan was simple: library first, archives second, caution always. The plan lasted less than an hour. Something pulled them toward the Silver Queen—not logic, not reason, just the kind of certainty that settles in your bones before your mind catches up. By mid-morning, four girls stood in the doorway of a ruin that should have been empty.
It wasn't.
The journal was hidden behind a cabinet that hadn't moved in decades. Leather-bound, cracked with age, the initials S.H. barely visible in the dim light. Sally Harlow's handwriting filled the pages—excited at first, then hurried, then frantic. Maps with crosses marking places they recognised. Entries about being watched. About shadows that felt alive. About a mine shaft that went deeper than anyone knew.
The final page was smeared and broken, words trailing into nothing.
They should have left then. They almost did. But the groan came from somewhere deeper in the building—low, human, unmistakable. A shadow slid across the far wall, tall and deliberate, before vanishing into the dark.
They ran.
But the Silver Queen had already seen their faces.
