: Elias stepped up to the monolith. He didn't bring a memory of the past; he brought a question for the future. As he spoke, a shard—the smallest one he had ever seen—darted from the highest tier. It didn't just take his words; it merged with his shadow.

Elias, the colony’s first xenolinguist, watched from the ridge as the "doves" returned. They were drifting shards of crystalline light, creatures that didn't eat or breed in any way humans understood. Instead, they carried memories.

In the lavender-skied canyons of Elara Prime, the was not a home for birds, but a resting place for whispers. It was a monolith of translucent obsidian, riddled with thousands of perfectly circular nesting holes that pulsed with a faint, rhythmic bioluminescence.

: Recently, the obsidian had begun to cloud. The light-shards were returning slower, their crystalline wings jagged and dim. The colonists were panicked—if the Dovecote died, their entire history, their very connection to the soil of Elara Prime, would vanish.