The Stillness Beneath

The drone hummed overhead, slicing arcs through the clouds like a silver hawk. Kai watched the screen intently—thermal scans, shifting shadows, ancient outlines emerging in layers. Every movement was data. Every flicker, a possibility.

But nothing stayed long enough to name.

Down below, Sienna traced her fingers over the moss-lined stones of the circle. The air here felt thicker, denser—like time had gathered and folded itself inward. Her notebook remained closed. She wasn’t here to write yet. She was here to listen.

She ran her fingers over a smooth engraving in the rock—a spiral, nearly worn away. It pulsed with something beyond history. A rhythm. A refusal to vanish.

She clicked the receiver.
“Kai. There’s something here. But it’s not what you’re chasing.”

A burst of static. Then:
“What do you mean?”

“It’s not a signal. It’s a silence.”

Kai frowned. “Sienna, that’s not—”

“Just… land. For five minutes. No cameras. No gear. Just you.”

A long pause. Then the drone began its descent, slow and reluctant, like a comet fighting gravity.

When Kai’s boots touched the earth again, everything felt different. The wind was gentler here. The urgency—the need to move—had thinned. He sat beside Sienna, shoulders almost touching, neither saying anything.

Sienna reached into her satchel and pulled out a small clay shard. “I found this buried under the lichen. It’s old. Hand-shaped. Probably worthless.”

Kai turned it over. “It’s perfect.”

And in that moment, something clicked—not in the drone, not in the scanner, but in them.

Some truths aren’t hunted.
Some stories don’t sprint.
Some discoveries wait.

That evening, as the sun lowered and everything turned gold, Kai didn’t fly.
They stayed.

And Sienna finally opened her notebook.

She wrote: Today, the wind stopped long enough to listen to the well.