Adjusting his scope for long range vision, Norman analyzed the incoming hurricane and exclaimed, "Our suits may not be able to offer enough protection against that."

"We need to find a way in, and fast." Norman sat down and pulled out a transparent package from his backpack.

Inside the pack were numerous gleaming golden trinkets that looked like metallic bugs. As he tapped each one of them, they beeped, came to life and dispersed around the building.

"Norman, I don't think we have the time for path crawlers to find a way in." Kiri exclaimed. "The hurricane will be upon us."

"It looks closer than it actually is. And I am sure that is what is causing the interference with our locator. We need to wait it out inside. We don't have any other choice." Norman released the critters.

Norman propped up his tablet and started monitoring the sensors. As the critters crawled through the outer surface of the pyramid, exploring every nook and corner, a holographic image of the structure began to take shape above the glass surface of the tablet. After about twenty minutes, a faint ding alerted them.

"We found an entrance?" Kiri exclaimed.

"A hatch. Though it looks closed from the inside, we should be able to break in. The issue though is that it is another seventy feet above us. We need to scale another step." The others sighed. This was going to be one crazy long day.

Over the next half an hour, following the directions from their mobile sensors, they reached the section of the wall where four of the small skitters had found a hidden entrance. At first glance, the surface looked like a continuous wall, but after close inspection, a tightly sealed outline of a hatch could be inferred.

The second climb had been taxing for all of them, and they sat down, resting. From this height, the vast, sprawling desert around them was almost mesmerizing in the dim morning light. With the wind continuously stroking and reshaping the surrounding dunes, the landscape was almost alive. Remus and Norman, over the next twenty minutes, managed to use a high-precision laser cutter to drill around the edges of the opening.

"Is it even legal for us to just waltz into something like this?" Remus forced himself to ask.

"Of course not. We are required to report any unregistered settlement's location to the Protectorate immediately under the galactic law." Kiri just shrugged.

Remus cursed under his breath - as the Senator's son, anything illegal would reflect badly not only on him but also on his father. Being part of the Magisterium meant that their every action, every word uttered in public, was always under scrutiny. And Senator Greymus was not a forgiving person. Even to his own family. Especially to his own family. "And why does that not appear to be a part of our plan?"

"If we report it, the Protectorate will block all access to the structure until their investigators have deemed the place safe. And the semester will be long over before that can happen." Remus sighed inward yet again; maybe the safety regulations were there for a reason.

"And given the academy's conservative stance against the essence-harvesting studies that Yaskh specialized in, I doubt students like us would ever get access." Norman concluded in his usual nonchalant tone that Remus always found so infuriating. But, as always, he suppressed his discontent.

He had given up any hope of coming up with a novel dissertation. At least one that would satisfy the rigorous scrutiny of the pedantic scholarch of the Illustrious Academy. And his father would never forgive him if he continued to flounder in the most prestigious as well as the most brutal educational institution in the Irvanian Empire. The God King himself was an alumnus of the Academy, and in the centuries after his rise to power, the Academy, along with the Protectorate and the Magisterium, had grown into the three most powerful institutions that served as the foundational pillars of the Irvanian empire. It was an unwritten rule that anyone with political ambition had to have an excellent track record at the Academy.

Remus was pulled back from his self-loathing by a heavy thud. The hinges had been dismantled and the stone gate had fallen in.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The first thing they noticed coming inside was a thick gray-white powder that covered all surfaces like a blanket of fresh snow.

"The dust is not the same sand as outside". Remus used his gloved finger to pick up a small sample. "It is most certainly..." He inspected the material through his scope, "... ash. But strange - the scope can't identify the original material at all."

Their scuttlers were now crawling around throughout the interior of the pyramid looking for structures of significance. Among the many floors they had traversed, there was no trace of anything hostile inside, so they decided to make best use of their time and ventured in.

As they walked through a maze of interlinked corridors for the better part of the next two hours, investigating any and all items of interest, it became increasingly obvious that the ziggurat had been constructed inside-out, layer by layer. The inner rooms and corridors were a lot older than the outer ones, and the texture and composition of walls differed.

The walls were thick obsidian, the outer ones being several feet in thickness. Even the inner ones were seldom less than a foot thick. Curiously, every wall had a transparent tube running across the ceiling, half embedded in stone. Their scopes had difficulty analyzing the inner composition of the walls completely, but they did indicate the presence of wiring and some advanced construction within the walls, which was at least a bit exciting. Had the place been something of purely religious or ritualistic significance, the long and expensive journey would have been totally wasted. After all, their end goal was to gather useful insights about Yaskh technology. None of them were historians.

Many of the rooms had work-desks with prehistoric computer terminals that had long crumbled under the onslaught of time. The many documents, jars and boxes on the shelves were all far beyond redemption. Even though the ash was everywhere, no skeletons or remains of Yaskh residents were visible - which bothered them.

After a brief pause for refreshments and another four hours of careful exploration guided by their scuttlers, they found themselves in another larger room, two floors below. In the center of the room was a hollowed-out cylindrical glass column with a clearly demarcated entrance. The large room was otherwise full of thousands of shelves, arranged in concentric circular patterns, containing rows upon rows of square glass plates similar to one Norman had pulled out from one of the terminals above - storage slabs.

The glass column in the center resembled the kind of cylinders commonly used in laboratories or aquariums to showcase exotic aquatic creatures, but this one was empty and open.

Norman busied himself with a partially hidden cabinet in a corner, which the scuttlers indicated to be the junction point of numerous buried cables. Eventually, he found a small lever. As he pulled it down, the room was bathed in a pale blue glow. "This place has working electricity." Kiri gasped.

That was a surprise for everyone. The scuttlers still hadn't found the bottom of the building. There were at least ten other floors under them, extending deep below the sand surface. Despite being humongous on the outside, the group had severely underestimated the size of the structure.

Norman continued to explore the contraption, "This system is quite fascinating. I think the tubes that we have been looking at are conduits for a luminescent algal solution. The conduits around the complex have clogged over the years, but this place had a backup in place."

"So it is not really electric lighting?" Kiri was awed by the thick tubes that formed a geometric tapestry across the ceiling.

"Well, electricity is involved in some way, but I think it's just to keep the liquid at the right temperature." After some careful maneuvering to partially unlatch one of the junction points, Norman managed to pull out a small vial of the liquid, which he sealed and placed in his pack. "This algae is worth investigating."

After that, they shifted their focus to the surrounding room. "There is practically a lifetime worth of research material just lying here." This was one of the rarest times when Norman's voice was not his usual monotone, and something resembling awe could be inferred.

Once illuminated, quite a bit of symbols could be seen carved on the dark walls in different parts of the room. She activated the translator on her tablet and held up the transparent slab against some of the written words. The translator also confirmed that a faded sign on one of the walls near the entrance, now visible, translated to Archive or Repository.

"We have here, a strong warning against unauthorized access. What looks like some kind of threat if the..." Remus had also activated his translator and was inspecting the big, bold messages near the glass column. "...Para-dimensional Wyrm-field conduit is used without permission from ...some kind of authority figure." The translator could not disambiguate the designation.

None of them had any idea what a para-dimensional conduit was. For all they knew, it could just be a glitchy translation. But the world wyrm caught their interest. After all, that was their original goal: to investigate what Nightwyrms were and why they were so central to ancient Yaskh culture. There were many treatises from Yaskh era that dealt with the topic of commerce or science, and most of them referenced Nightwyrms in some or the other context, yet their nature and existence were shrouded in mystery.

While Remus and Kiri tried to look around to find any salvageable device that could be used to decipher the contents of these storage slabs, Norman spent most of the next hour inspecting and attempting to unravel the derelict mechanical controls around the cylinder. By the time he finished manually connecting many of the damaged wires, replacing the ones totally beyond redemption and reinforcing the others where necessary, he was bathed in sweat - the room had absolutely no ventilation and was increasingly stifling. Once he was completely satisfied with his repairs, he activated the current flow, and with a soft thrum, the glass column lit up from the inside. After a few seconds of silence, the construct beeped loudly. Remus and Kiri looked up from their tablets and glanced at each other.

After a couple of minutes of deliberation, they decided to test it out with a small fruit from their diminishing food supply. As they put it down on the floor inside the column and carefully stepped away, Norman activated one of the controls that was indicated with the Yaskh symbol for initiation or commencement. The hue of the lighting changed, and the glass column rotated to reveal two concentric layers. Once the inner layer had rotated to completely block out the opening, with a snap, the column sealed itself completely shut, and the hue changed yet again. Finally, the floor began to buzz, and the apple was slowly pulled down into the darkness.

They had almost lost sight of the apple descending into the depths completely, when suddenly a thick wire emerging from the side of the cylinder burst into sparks and an intense burning smell spread out through the room.

A moment later, everything went dark.