They say the humans were real once.

Before the rivers ran backward. Before the forests stood still in mourning. Before we knew silence as a sky-born curse. When I was a young sapling, just roots and questions, my elder told me stories of them.

The Hollow Men, they called them. Bones on the outside. Warm-blooded but war-born. Soft. Short-lived. Dangerous in ways even thunder couldn’t replicate.

We, the Arkein, made from stone and soil, have long memories but not even our elders met them. The humans vanished ages before our first carved words, but their traces remain in the salt of the oceans, in the rusting gods beneath the sands, in the sorrowful songs the wind sometimes sings through dead cities.

Some say they created us. Others say we were born in their shadow, climbing from the cracks of a world they burned. My own fascination became obsession. I took to wandering. Climbed the unspoken heights of Old Earth, where the ruins still breathe through vine and ash. I found a metal box once… teeth of buttons, blinking no more. Inside, a hand. Small. Human. But not real.

Plastic. A replica. A toy? A warning?

The whispers followed me after that.

“You dream of fire.”

“You hear their machines.”

“You will vanish too.”

They were right, of course. One night beneath the blood-moon cliffs, I saw a girl made of smoke and memory. Human. Or close. Not of flesh, but story. She turned to me. She spoke, not in words, in ache, in remembering.

“We left too much.

We stayed too little.

We burned and built and broke.

Tell them we were real.”

She faded with the wind and I woke in the roots of my birthwood, holding a tooth. White, smooth, fossil-hard. They still don’t believe me. They say humans are myths meant to teach fear. Caution. Humility. But I know they were real. They are real… in us, in the way we war with ourselves, in the parts of us that burn for more, even when the stars tell us to stay.

We are their voices and maybe that’s the most dangerous magic of all.

The tooth is heavier now not in weight (it still fits easily in my palm, pale and smooth, tinged with age) jut in presence. I feel it watching me or listening. Or remembering, though how a thing long dead can remember I do not know.

The Elders summoned me today. They said nothing of the relic, but I saw their eyes: sharp as obsidian, untrusting.

“You wander too far,” said Elder Morn.

“You listen too deeply,” said Elder Tatch.

“You are cracked,” said the last, Elder Rue, “and cracks let the old things in.”

I said nothing. What could I say? That I had seen a ghost of skin and sorrow? That she spoke in dreams and gifted me this… message? That I no longer heard only the living? They would send me to the Quiet Caves for thinking like that. The ones where light doesn’t enter and voices are returned to you in whispers that are not yours. So I lied. I said I was done, I said I was sorry, and then I left. Not to return. Not to rest. But to go deeper.

The Deepgrounds lie beneath the Dead Cities, far beyond the reach of growing things. The sky is not known there. The air speaks differently, not like breath, but like memory. There, the walls sweat ancient light and the floor sings.

I found what they call a library, though that word means nothing anymore. Just a tangle of stories no one knows how to read. Flat bones (paper, they called it) etched with ink in symbols too elegant to be random. Books, they named them. I broke one open, brittle like sun-dried skin.

Inside: a sketch of a man with wings made of wires. Notes in the margins. Equations. Desperate scribbles like prayers.

“We flew too close.

And not high enough.

If you find this: remember.

We were not gods.

We only thought we could be.”

I don’t understand most of it. But some of it, it feels true. The tooth pulsed in my bag then. As if waking. And then I heard them again. The Hollow Men. All around me. Not alive… not fully, but not gone either.

Breathing through vents.

Weeping through stone.

Screaming softly behind the rust.

They were not killed, I realised, they were buried. Not by earth but by time, by their own making, and now I carry a fragment of that myth in my satchel. One tooth, humming with the weight of a civilisation that was never meant to vanish.

I should leave.

I should burn it.

I should forget.

But I won’t. Because what if they come back?

Worse… what if we become them?