American Prophet — Book Two — Chapter 4: The Vaultkeeper
Teaser: Deep in the stair, a lone archivist keeps an underground vault alive with hand-cranked power and careful notes.
A figure stepped from the shadows: beard white, eyes steady. “I’m Elias Rowan,” he said. “You’re walking through thirty years of my notes.”
Old notebooks covered the walls—dates, pressure readings, fragments of scripture. He turned a crank on a small generator. A light climbed from red to amber, then held.
“I kept the vault breathing,” he told them. “Geothermal veins feed her still.”
Thomas realized he knew the name. “Rowan,” he said. “The uplifts paper. Before the nets failed.”
Elias nodded once. “I wrote what I could, while I could.” He led them past rows of metal cabinets and stopped at a sealed door stamped with three circles. “I never opened this without a second witness.”
Inside were analog copies of old maps. Not surface maps—mass maps. Strips of paper with thin black lines showed the earth’s weight shifting year by year. “This is GRACE era data,” Thomas whispered. “Before everything tilted.”
Naomi held a strip up to the light. The lines looked like music. “It’s the same song,” she said. “Just written another way.”
Elias smiled, tired and proud. “Then you’ll know what to do next.”
American Prophet 