full

“Somewhere in the White Void” by Domus Vocis

In a world where the Northern Hemisphere is encased in glaciers, an anthropomorphic archaeologist is sent out into London’s icy ruins.

Today's story is “Somewhere in the White Void” by Domus Vocis, who loves to write furry and regular fiction, and published his debut novel “The Adventures of Peter Gray”, and you can find more of his stories on Patreon or DeviantArt.

Read for you by Khaki, your faithful fireside companion.

Transcript
Speaker:

You’re listening to The Voice of Dog.

Speaker:

I’m Khaki, your faithful fireside companion,

Speaker:

and today’s story is

Speaker:

“Somewhere in the White Void”

Speaker:

by Domus Vocis, who loves to write furry and regular fiction, and published his debut novel

Speaker:

“The Adventures of Peter Gray”,

Speaker:

and you can find more of his stories

Speaker:

on Patreon or DeviantArt.

Please enjoy:

“Somewhere in the White Void”

Please enjoy:

by Domus Vocis

Please enjoy:

Dressed head to toe in layers of a thermal coat,

Please enjoy:

I revved my snowmobile’s engine.

Please enjoy:

It purred to life. I shielded my vision from the intense snowfall until it faded with the sunlight.

Please enjoy:

Speeding out into the cold, lifeless environment,

Please enjoy:

I spotted the excavation site two kilometers away in what used to be London,

Please enjoy:

Great Britain. “Armstrong,”

Please enjoy:

my coworker, a cougar in every sense of the word named Covell, spoke.

Please enjoy:

“I need you to be careful, like always.

Please enjoy:

Follow the beacon and report back.”

Please enjoy:

“Yessir,” I nodded.

Please enjoy:

My fingers grasped the throttle again.

Please enjoy:

I glanced in my rearview mirror to see the outpost’s hangar doors close themselves before disappearing into the winter fog.

Please enjoy:

Meanwhile, the howling winds barely allowed me to hear my commlink.

Please enjoy:

However, I remembered my orders:

Please enjoy:

search Site #9

Please enjoy:

and report back with any items.

Please enjoy:

A sudden gust of nasty frost covered the visors on my arctic mask.

Please enjoy:

Annoyed, I wiped them and twisted the throttle,

Please enjoy:

cautious of my speed.

Please enjoy:

The frozen landscape was untamed and unchecked for thousands of years,

Please enjoy:

while the city underneath existed even longer than the ice.

Please enjoy:

The glaciers had slowed down in this region,

Please enjoy:

allowing for more expeditions than previously planned.

Please enjoy:

I could imagine the buildings,

Please enjoy:

now carcasses of twisted steel and pillars,

Please enjoy:

remain abandoned as skeletons below.

Please enjoy:

Now forgotten by their builder’s descendants.

Please enjoy:

Save for a determined few. ‘Project

Please enjoy:

Atlantis’,

Please enjoy:

though not the most original of names,

Please enjoy:

revolved around mankind’s surviving efforts to catalogue the Northern Hemisphere’s historical sites.

Please enjoy:

If they still lasted through Mother Nature’s wrath.

Please enjoy:

“Beacon within eight-hundred meters…”

Please enjoy:

The diamond-like ice under my snowmobile had to be over three times as thick,

Please enjoy:

but a miracle occurred several days prior.

Please enjoy:

An unexplored glacial cave was discovered by an explorer drone.

Please enjoy:

Essentially, an air pocket as wide as several city blocks had formed beneath us,

Please enjoy:

while both satellites and historic records

Please enjoy:

indicated three locations of interests could

Please enjoy:

still be intact for excavation.

Please enjoy:

Luckily for me, our only exploration drones needed repairs, and they needed a volunteer to traverse the cavern on foot.

Please enjoy:

After some time, I finally arrived at the checkpoint.

Please enjoy:

Parking the vehicle, I stepped towards the tunnel

Please enjoy:

freshly carved through the ice.

Please enjoy:

My grip on the zipline tightened while plunging into the glacier’s depths.

Please enjoy:

Part of me feared a cave-in,

Please enjoy:

but that wasn’t from any human instincts I held.

Please enjoy:

Several minutes later however,

Please enjoy:

and my journey downward finally slowed to a steady halt.

Please enjoy:

The sight alone took my breath away.

Please enjoy:

Monoliths of metal ascended like spires,

Please enjoy:

some leaning or demolished from centuries of rust,

Please enjoy:

while bricks and chunks of the sidewalk brutally littered the icy floor.

Please enjoy:

My beam of light could

Please enjoy:

barely touch the glacial ceiling above,

Please enjoy:

yet sunshine barely managed to glow through the glacier’s crystalline shell.

Please enjoy:

Exploring these lost cities,

Please enjoy:

it continued to amaze me how archaic,

Please enjoy:

yet brilliant humanity’s former civilizations used to be.

Please enjoy:

“Unbelievable…” I murmured, slowly soaking everything in.

Please enjoy:

I felt like an ant in a model city crushed in half-frozen ruins.

Please enjoy:

Carefully, my fingers adjusted the visor camera.

Please enjoy:

“Are you all seeing this, guys?”

Please enjoy:

“Loud and clear, Armstrong, though there’s some interference.

Please enjoy:

Proceed and return to the Outpost within 15:00 hours.”

Please enjoy:

I followed the map until finding Location-of-Interest #1,

Please enjoy:

the front steps of a library whose walls were battered down from hundreds of years of Mother Nature’s wrath.

Please enjoy:

I stepped over decaying books

Please enjoy:

embedded into the frozen ground,

Please enjoy:

the shelves empty of man’s attempts to preserve the past.

Please enjoy:

Evidence of manmade firepits in various parts of the building

Please enjoy:

indicated nomads of the North

Please enjoy:

might’ve burned the books in order to survive.

Please enjoy:

How disgraceful, I thought to myself.

Please enjoy:

Couldn’t they have torched the bad romance novels instead?

Please enjoy:

It eventually came to finding four pristine textbooks and a couple classical novels.

Please enjoy:

Fine, onto the next marker.

Please enjoy:

Location-of-Interest #2:

Please enjoy:

a courthouse devoid of judges, lawyers, prosecutors and juries.

Please enjoy:

I discovered several large paintings lying on the cracked ground.

Please enjoy:

Each showed a man or woman of the past

Please enjoy:

who no longer gave judgement within its halls.

Please enjoy:

Reminds me of the Nairobi Courthouse, I mused.

Please enjoy:

Minus the trials involving terrorism.

Please enjoy:

Finding Location-of-Interest #3 however, led to an ancient museum nestled

Please enjoy:

against the wall of the ice cave.

Please enjoy:

After evidence piled up about the incoming new era,

Please enjoy:

there were efforts to preserve the history of past civilizations

Please enjoy:

through the ration wars and famines affecting the Equatorial Safe Zone.

Please enjoy:

Not all artifacts survived, sadly.

Please enjoy:

My navigating the walls and exhibits

Please enjoy:

only led to finding empty picture frames and relics

Please enjoy:

too damaged to be brought back to the Outpost,

Please enjoy:

but one item captured my attention.

Please enjoy:

Under a layer of solid snow

Please enjoy:

stood a stuffed sabretooth tiger on a faux-boulder.

Please enjoy:

The other displays had either been ransacked years ago or molted from age,

Please enjoy:

but this one hadn’t.

Please enjoy:

I stepped closer to feel

Please enjoy:

curiosity get the better of me, so I took my mask off.

Please enjoy:

Unlike this creature’s teeth that curled over his chin,

Please enjoy:

mine had been trimmed for convenience.

Please enjoy:

The air felt cool on my facial fur, and I could smell the pure winter

Please enjoy:

of age’s past, but what separated me from the stuffed exhibit feature

Please enjoy:

was the winter gear I wore and my upright stature.

Please enjoy:

“Hey there, cousin,”

Please enjoy:

I joked to myself.

Please enjoy:

“Didn’t picture finding you here…”

Please enjoy:

It was difficult to believe how far their species had come.

Please enjoy:

Whether it be enduring the Saharan colonies or Pacific superstorms,

Please enjoy:

the biomechanical bodies of an anthroid survived the harshest conditions.

Please enjoy:

However, my genetic design as a Sabretooth Class anthroid,

Please enjoy:

my body being amalgamated with robotics in

Please enjoy:

my limbs and the genetic makeup of a certain long-toothed feline,

Please enjoy:

recently changed Northern Hemisphere exploration.

Please enjoy:

I’d been made to combat subzero temperatures when my gear failed.

Please enjoy:

Now here I was, staring at one of my ancestors like my human employers used to do.

Please enjoy:

Before driving back into the Outpost’s hangar with the books in my backpack,

Please enjoy:

I squinted back outside to see the skyscrapers.

Please enjoy:

More history was out there,

Please enjoy:

somewhere in the white void,

Please enjoy:

and we were going to find them all.

Please enjoy:

I just knew it.This was

Please enjoy:

“Somewhere in the White Void” by Domus Vocis, read for you

Please enjoy:

by Khaki,

Please enjoy:

your faithful fireside companion.

Please enjoy:

Thank you for listening to The Voice of Dog

About the Podcast

Show artwork for The Voice of Dog
The Voice of Dog
Furry stories to warm the ol' cockles, read by Rob MacWolf and guests. If you have a story that would suit the show, you can get in touch with @VoiceOfDog@meow.social on Mastodon, @voiceofdog.bsky.social on Blue Sky, or @Theodwulf on Telegram.

About your host

Profile picture for Khaki

Khaki