Aftertone

A thousand years ago you could walk between worlds. Hundreds of them, connected by gateways — twenty metres of dressed stone, one ring inside another, standing in a wall or a courtyard or a hillside. Trade moved through them. So did people. Nobody thought it was remarkable, in the way nobody thinks a road is remarkable. Then, inside a single generation, every gateway went dark. Earth was cut off first, and worst. Long enough ago that nothing survived of it at all — no record, no story, no word. Only the site: a sealed stone circle in the ground on Cape York, with a mine built on top of it by people who had no idea it was there. A mining crew cut back a bench and found the top of it. The physicist sent up to explain it has heard a sound his entire life that no instrument has ever picked up. He stopped mentioning it when he was a child. He is about to find out he was right. AFTERTONE is an Australian shonen manga, drawn in black and white, published weekly.