In the bowels of the Grand Palais of Ibrosa, the seat of House Chalcis, there was a chamber. It was not common knowledge, but the descendants of the line of Jovon and Yariel saw it at least once, a large obelisk in the depths of rock deep beneath the palace that sprung out a plateau above the rest of the city, carved with means that were lost to history. The Grand Palais, however, was built by hand with understandable labor, though it too was ancient and stone that successive generations added to over centuries of expansion by its rulers, gilded with the riches of rule, a statement of the authority that sealed the Power away and ushered in an era of relative safe and plenty. There was, however, a beating heart of this place of corridors and wings, of regal additions and impressive stonework and it wasn't the throne room.

There was a glass-topped, overflowing garden of vines, leaves, flowers, fruits, berries, bushes and trees above it, and a door that led down to a stairwell that plunged deep into the heart of the mountain. The start of those stairs was the plinth of a statue, and it was the salvation now of one of those descendants.

Above was the roar of thunder from the aquebuses and the sound of steel on steel, the grunt of warriors engaged in battle and the deeper, more concerning sounds of the things that assaulted the Grand Palais. Beyond the smell of expended sulfur powder and blood was something worse; charred meat and superheated ozone from expended Power.

That was the horror of the legend come true.

The hallways were littered with the bodies of the fallen, holding grim chokepoints through the corridors to buy their charge a chance to make it to the bolthole of House Chalcis, beneath that statue. They died for the minutes, even the seconds, in knots of two or three holding key points within the halls, and formed up in the Gardens themselves in a firing line, resolute to make a last stand.

But they were soldiers, and the ball of flame that leapt from a doorway, landed among them, its bloom carving a smoldering hole in those ranks, then followed by another and another, was no thing soldiers ever prepared for. Not in thousands of years.

But they did their duty; their charge got past the door, which was slammed shut with the clanking finality of stone grinding on stone and metal falling into place. The door was a barrier that would be considered unassailable in most circumstances, but of questionable use against those that could burn their way through things. If they could hurl flame, what other horrors of the past might they inflict?

The deeper one went, the warmer it got, though it started out quite cool and drafty at the top. The architecture also changed, the smooth masonry of the palace giving way to the rougher surface of unfinished rock, left as it was cut. There was little light but what one took with them, though there was a candle up top, kept lit by attendants through tradition, though they did not understand the significance.

But at the bottom of those stairs, the chamber opened up into a longer, vaulted chamber with ribs cunningly placed along the walls to bear the mountains, interlocking throughout the corridor, which was an extremely high ceiling. There was a strangeness to the architecture, a stark contrast between the natural rock and the material used to hold the place up, which seemed more than simply polished stone; it was actually crystalline and warm to the touch.

And the obelisk at the far end was another curiousity. It was only human sized, but it had the feeling of immensity to it, set in a wall of stone with writing circling around it, runic, unseen elsewhere except as dead words. Here, they flickered with iridescent, snaking light and the stone itself gave off the warmth, like a room that held too many people within.

The hallway was vast enough of a space for footsteps to echo and for sound to carry, and in normal times there might be a solemnity to the place. But in the here and now of dire emergency, the old warnings, passed down mother to daughter, were the most important thing now. There was a socket beneath the obelisk, fitted to a specific amulet, also passed down mother to daughter. In the most dire of emergencies, it fit into that socket, but only if one had no other recourse and all was lost, the family myth said.

Enemies were hurling flame in the Grand Palais and there was no escape but this room. The warnings may have been delivered as a hypothetical, but the lethal reality was that an enemy had the Power and was using it. It wasn't exaggerated desperation; all was lost unless something changed. With no idea of what the contingency was for this situation, but following the instructions, the amulet, crystal of a different color but same consistency as the obelisk, went into the slot. There was a grinding sound as it turned and kept turning, increasing in speed.

That, of course, is when the obelisk started to crack. It started as a tremor and became a rumble as the warmth died and the iridescent light flickered out. The mountain felt as if it were moving, or was that the world?

@PrizeFighter