Chapter 1: Prologue: The Silence before Awakening

The darkness ended before the silence. 

Ancient dust hung in the air as lights flickered, setting the gloom to dance in a ghostly rhythm. Stale air began to shift sluggishly as if that element had forgotten how to.  Wondrous contraptions began to stir to life in the immense hall. Worn devices that had the qualities of space-age machines and arcane devices. They were the strange amalgamations of a society pursuing every possible avenue.

Shadows multiplied by the glow of these awakenings. 

The great hall was warming out of its long slumber. The sounds of starting computers and energizing magics humed into echoes in the hall; twin tunes in a Discordian duet. A song that fought against the dead silence and found truce as a low murmur. It was a silence of waiting life rather than slumbering death. 

 Hushed sounds echoed against the subterranean walls like expectant whispers. Too polished to be called a cavern, all of the stonework was carved with great effort. Designed to encourage the feeling that the hall stood upon the surface. Each inch was carved perfectly in the impression of a building’s interior, but the tension in the air betrayed that illusion. The pressure whispering of the immense weight that this ceiling was braced against. Though the architecture was beautiful, it was not able to overwrite that sense of being trapped deep underground.

Confined in an air bubble.

Far from the sky. 

From this terror, fleeting distractions could be found in the workmanship of the hall. There were columns carved along the walls. Fashioned like the Greeks, but painted like the Egyptians. Engravings from the impossibly small to the grand murals decorated where it didn’t upset the smooth spaces. All of the stone work was aged, cracked, and smoothed from the passage of time. Kissed in places never attended by the makers. 

These were the traces one found in places long, and often, lived in. A culture had left their touch upon the stone of this vast space. Murals of a dozen styles and subjects began from the ceiling before raining down the walls. At the heart, was a masterpiece, an image placed above all things.  A bright blue sky made real with paint, only eternity marred the perfection. Its beauty could be thought of as a taunt or a weeping hope.

Whatever it was to the viewer, it led one to look at the great door. Inspiring them to consider its invitation as the only way free. Looming, but beguiling.

The light of crystal screens, enchanted and crafted, had been soft at first. Now the illumination had grown strong enough to reveal the whole hall. In this elder glow, the still and breathing bodies of sixty lay at the center of the hall, Their feet lay towards the door. Adjacent on their left were those strange arcane and mechanical devices. Three hallways were revealed to be attached to the colossal hall. Two north of their heads, and to the right was one lone hallway. 

The light interacted with an energy causing the bodies to be highlighted.  Revealing that they were held an inch above the ground by a flowing arcane framework. Symbols ticked and swirled in patterns faintly seen in the refracted light of the field. Runic designs embossed the floor beneath each person. Hovering above gleaming etchings. The energy was sprouting from the designs and cycled through the construct before returning back to the runes.

In unison, the comatose ones breathed in together and exhaled in a chorus. Sleeping. None twitched with dreams, but they breathed with a healthy tone. 

A new light appeared between the door and the sixty. It took the ghostly shape of a robed man fiddling with hazy screens. The glimmering specter flickered and shuttered, like interference was robbing their solidity. Even at the figure’s most stable, it was still hazy and intangible. It moved among the sixty with skips and hops. There would be a shimmer and the ethereal image would be at a different position. Or even shifted to another individual. It did not rush. Patient and careful as the shade gave each a studious look. Repeating the process with all of them at different angles. 

 After a time, the being returned to its original place and nodded with satisfaction. The robed ghost waved its hand and a glowing keyboard with screens appeared. Several commands were entered with silent typing or the shifting of switches under the ethereal screens.

The figure distorted in a whisper of static and was gone. A couple more cycles of breathing went by before the unity fell apart. No longer did the sixty breath together, but to each their own rhythms. In time, the silence was broken. New echoes reverberated in the hall. They were cries of fear and exclamations of surprise.

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