Aurelia Thorne adjusted her gloves, staring down at the fragmented tile embedded in the concrete. The site was supposed to be a simple urban renovation—a courtyard expansion for a boutique hotel—but even in the midst of bustling city noise, her heartbeat quickened at the sight of the ancient symbol etched across the stone.
"Looks like someone left us a message," she murmured, brushing dust off the intricate carvings. Her fingers tingled, a strange warmth creeping up her arm. Her breath caught. And for a moment, the city sounds faded, as if the world itself had taken a step back.
She pulled her hand away and exhaled slowly. Get a grip, Aurelia. It's just a tile. A relic. Nothing more.
"Do you think it's medieval?" her assistant asked, lifting his camera with fumbling hands.
Aurelia straightened. "Older, definitely," she said, certainty settling into her voice. "Pre-empire, most likely. Whoever carved this wanted it to be noticed." Her eyes lingered on the curve of the symbol, the faint shimmer of something almost imperceptible beneath the stone.
A shadow passed across her vision.
Tall. Still. Watching.
Her pulse spiked as she glanced up—but the courtyard was unchanged. Workers moved about, oblivious. No one stood where the shadow had been.
She swallowed and returned her attention to the tile.
As her palm brushed the surface again, a sudden image flashed behind her eyes—streets soaked in blood, screams swallowed by silence, hands slick and trembling. Eyes looked back at her with unbearable intensity.
Aurelia recoiled, breath sharp in her chest.
That was... not a memory.
The interns called her name, pulling her back into the present. She stood slowly, forcing calm into her movements.
Whatever that was, she decided, it could wait. History didn't reveal itself to the hesitant—and she had a job to do.
Still, as the tile was carefully lifted from the concrete, a quiet certainty settled in her chest.
This was not the first time she had touched it.
The tile felt wrong in her hands.
Not warm—not neutral—but cold, an unnatural chill seeping through her gloves and into her skin. Aurelia frowned, tightening her grip despite the unease crawling up her spine.
Stone wasn't supposed to feel like this.
She swallowed and wrapped the tile carefully, forcing her breathing to steady. The symbol carved into its surface seemed deeper now, its lines darker, heavier than before.
As if it had noticed her.
Aurelia straightened, suddenly aware of the weight in her chest, the strange sense that something had shifted the moment she touched it.
She didn't know what the tile was.
But she knew one thing with unsettling certainty.
She shouldn't be alone with it tonight.
She returned to her office with the practiced efficiency of someone who had learned to outrun her own thoughts.
The lights flickered on with a low hum, revealing stacks of paperwork she had been avoiding for weeks. Grant proposals. Site reports. Emails flagged urgent by people who had never stood under a sun that felt personally offended by their existence.
Aurelia dropped her bag onto the chair and stared at the desk.
The tile sat there.
Of course it did.
She frowned at it, then at the empty room, as if expecting it to explain itself.
"I'm not impressed," she muttered.
The tile, predictably, did not respond. Damn, she was out of it today.
She exhaled and rolled her shoulders, reaching for her laptop instead. If she was going to be unsettled, she might as well be productive. Her screen lit up with unread messages, each one demanding attention with the subtlety of a screaming child.
None of them mentioned ancient stone tiles that made her skin itch.
That felt like an oversight.
Aurelia typed for a while, forcing herself into routine. Catalog numbers. Provenance notes. Carbon dating estimates. Normal things. Sensible things. The kind of work that reminded her she was still very much grounded in the present, thank you very much.
Still, her gaze drifted back.
The tile hadn't moved. It hadn't changed.
And yet.
She reached for her coffee mug out of habit, only to grimace when she remembered it was empty. Of course it was. Everything inconvenient in her life liked to arrive in groups.
"This is what happens," she told herself, standing up, "when you skip lunch."
Where the hell was Victor—her assistant—when she needed him?
Her voice echoed slightly in the office, too loud in the quiet.
She paused.
The tile sat on the desk, dark and unassuming, its surface catching the light in a way she didn't quite like. Stone was supposed to feel inert. Dead. Unresponsive.
This one didn't look dead.
Aurelia folded her arms, studying it with the wary expression of someone who knew better than to trust silence.
She had handled relics pulled from collapsed temples. Objects buried with the dead. Things that belonged to histories long finished.
None of them had ever made her feel like she was intruding.
She glanced at the clock. Late. Later than she'd planned.
"I'm taking you home," she said to the empty room, already annoyed with herself for phrasing it that way. "You're not haunting my office."
The word haunting lingered longer than she liked.
She shut down her computer, the screen going dark far too suddenly, and reached for her coat. As she did, her fingers brushed the edge of the tile.
Cold.
Not cool. Not the temperature of stone left sitting in an air-conditioned room.
Cold.
Aurelia froze.
Stone wasn't supposed to feel like this.
She pulled her hand back slowly, her pulse loud in her ears, and laughed under her breath—a short, brittle sound meant to convince herself more than anyone else.
"Get a grip," she whispered.
The tile remained exactly where it was.
Waiting.