Jaydn Qragest & the Sep’s Lost Eight: The Dig of Mdgoroun Pig

The skies above the Upper Shell were a colorless stew that never quite cleared. Clouds roiled like thoughts in a madman’s head, and below them stretched the glimmering dune-fields of Mdgoroun, a cursed scar on the continent of Tharis.

Jaydn Qragest adjusted his respirator and stared into the windblown distance. He’d arrived with a shovel, a datapad, and the ancient coordinates etched into the bone of a one-eyed fish priest. What he sought was myth. What he sought might just kill him.

The Sep’s Lost Eight were no ordinary artifacts. According to the scrambled texts recovered from the Temple of Glown, they were once shards of something divine — or at least governmental. A shattered intelligence from the age of sky cities and void whispers. But somewhere in the upheaval of the Collapse, the Eight had scattered, buried in the sands beneath fallen towers and dreaming fauna.

Jaydn had already recovered three. And he had scars from each.

This fourth? It was said to be guarded by the Mdgoroun Pig — not a beast, but a mechanism. Some called it a “burrowing god.” Others, a “sleeping trap.” Whatever it was, the last team that had come here left behind only teeth. Just the teeth, still chattering when the winds rose.

Jaydn did not scare easy. He pressed his boot down into the gravel, and the dunes gave a groaning sigh, as if warning him— last words carved into the shell of a broken sand-droid found two clicks east.

Dig Site Ǝ-14 was unmarked on most maps. Jaydn’s pad displayed it only when he aligned it with the bone code. He’d done so beneath the glow of twin moons while a broken-eyed hawk circled above.

The site was already whispering.

He deployed the burrow-crawler: a coiled machine of his own design. It didn’t dig. It asked the sand politely to move. A relic of polite engineering from the lost colonies.

Jaydn sat back and listened as it hummed, scanning for anomalies. It didn’t take long.

A chime.
Anomaly 4.2 meters down. Geometric. Resonant.

Jaydn’s heart thumped. He strapped on his gauntlet and descended. The sand parted like silk under the crawler’s influence, revealing slick black stone veined with violet moss — unnatural moss, almost… breathing.

This was it. The Pig’s Back.

He touched the surface.

The sky above cracked like a drumhead. Somewhere, he heard laughing.

Jaydn triggered his neural stabilizer. The laughter vanished. It was a defense — a psychic reflex embedded in the structure. He’d read about this kind of architecture in the journals of the Yost Eoht Cult: “Memory-rigged stone.” Not built by hands but dreamed into matter by artificial sentience.

He traced a glyph on the surface:

Two glyphs:

Then, the final one:

The stone shifted, and a slit opened. It wasn’t a door — it was a mouth.

He descended.

Darkness.

Not the absence of light, but the fullness of something else. Jaydn activated his shoulder-light. The interior of the Pig was all curves and echoes, metal that bent like skin and pulsed like lungs.

He walked through corridors of sensory feedback. Touch a wall — remember your first betrayal. Step into a chamber — relive a dream you hadn’t had yet. The Pig didn’t just guard the artifact.

It knew the artifact.

And it resented being forgotten.

Jaydn’s breath grew ragged. He gritted his teeth and pushed forward.

He found it.

The Fourth Piece.

It was suspended in a tangle of bones and roots, humming, spinning slowly — a polyhedral device that defied geometry. He reached out, but before his fingers touched it, the floor shook.

Something awoke.

A shape dropped from the ceiling, viscous and jagged — a construct of wire, tusks, and data. The Mdgoroun Pig in true form.the voice asked, not in sound but in temperature — his skin boiled, then froze.

Jaydn did not speak. He offered blood — a ritual drop from his palm onto the polyhedron.

Jaydn nodded“I would return the Eight,” Jaydn replied.

The Pig considered this. It moved aside.

But not before whispering:

Beneath the chamber was a chute of memory. Jaydn descended, visions tearing across his sight — wars fought in seconds, cities crumbling mid-thought, gods unmade with courtroom precision.

He landed in a crystalline space where the Builder sat.

It was a being of exposed thought. No face. No body. Just layered intentions.it asked.

Jaydn’s voice cracked:

The Builder was silent.

The Builder leaned clos

Jaydn woke with the Fourth clenched in his hand. The chamber was collapsing — whether due to his theft or the end of a cycle, he didn’t know.

He ran. The Pig howled, not in anger, but in sorrow.

He barely made it out of the mouth before the structure caved in, swallowed by dunes that forgot as fast as they buried.

Jaydn staggered into the sun. The polyhedron in his hands pulsed, changing shape every few seconds.

He had four.

Four of the Eight.

And now he knew their purpose.

In his ship — the Bq’Thq Lattice — Jaydn laid out the artifacts.

Each sang in a different frequency.

Together, they formed part of a phrase. A cosmic override. A backdoor left in the code of reality.

He could now feel the Sep. Not a god. Not a person. A protocol.

And someone had buried it.

He wondered what would happen when all Eight were reunited. Would the world reboot? Collapse? Be rewritten?

One thing was certain:

There was no going back.

On a silent hill, far from any map, the last three watchers stirred.
The reunion had begun.

Above them, three glyphs burned into the sky:

Jaydn Qragest was coming.

And the Sep would speak again.