1 Prologue -The Silence before Awakening

The darkness ended before the silence. Lights flickered and set the gloom dancing to their rhythm. Contraptions began to waken in the hall to add their own glow to the air that was heavy with ancient dust. These worn amalgamations had the appearance of strange futuristic machines and arcane devices. The great hall warmed into new life from its long slumber. The sounds of starting computers and magics created humming echoes in the vast hall as twin tunes in a discordian duet. It was too polished to be called a cavern and the stonework went to great effort to impress the feel of a structure built on the surface. Each inch was carved perfectly to give the impression of the interior of a building, but the feel of the air told of an immense weight that the ceiling held against. Its columns and images were cracked and smoothed from the passage of time in places never attended by the makers. These were traces one found in places long and often lived in. The architecture was beautiful, but could not overwrite that sense of being trapped in an air bubble. The fact of being deep and contained within the earth was unforgettable. The masterpiece on the ceiling of the bright blue sky could only be a taunt that would lead one to look at the great, inviting door that offered the only way free.

The light of crystal screens, enchanted and crafted, were soft at first, but then bright to the point of revelation. In this new, elder glow, the still and breathing bodies of sixty lay comatose at the center of the vast space. Their feet towards the door, adjacent to those strange arcane and mechanical devices. An energy reflected the light revealing that it held the bodies an inch above the ground. Symbols ticked and swirled in patterns faintly in the reflected light of the flowing energy. In the ground below them the floor was etched with runic designs for each person.

In unison, the comatose ones, breathed in together and exhaled in a chorus. 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 an arcane object. The light flickered and shuttered like interference was robbing of its solidity. Even at the figure's most stable it was hazy and intangible in appearance. It looked over the sixty with skips and hops to look at each and then at different angles. There would be a flicker of the ethereal image and it would be at a different position or with a different individual. After a time the being returned to its original place and nodded to itself with satisfaction. The robed ghost waved its hand and a glowing keyboard with screens appeared. Several commands entered with silent typing or the moving of switches under the intangible screens.

The figure distorted, then in a whisper of static, and was gone. A couple more cycles of breathing went by before the unity started to fall apart. No longer did the sixty breath together, but to their own rhythms. In time, the silence was broken with cries of surprise and exclamations of fear.