Prologue

The sun rose again on the sleeping world. Not that it was a particularly special world, but its habitants would say it as just that. A blue-green sphere streaked with white of clouds, illuminated on one side by the bright of the nearest star, contrasting with the dark in the absence of light on its other edge. Double moons drifted slowly through their cycle around the planet. They were a bizarre sight: one a perfect sphere of grey spotted with craters of miniature similar stellar bodies; the other an oblong crimson orb with an enormous hole that threaded its way through to the other side of the surface, tendrils of debris spider-webbing across the surrounding area. Its origin was a widely regarded myth in the minds of the planet’s inhabitants.

Not that it was a particularly special day, either, but for countless people in the world, it was just that. Either coming of ages ceremonies, or birthdays celebrated, it was a joyous day. For countless more, it was a day of pain. A day of pain that was no different than the day of agony before, or the torture tomorrow. For many more, the day would barely be remembered. It was just another day. Another day in which people came to life, lived, and died. Animals regarded it as just the same. Another day with which to fill with survival, killing, ravaging, scrounging, and breathing. To say the least, it was another day.

People woke at first light, dressed in the crisp morning air through the open window where the warm sun was shining. Breakfasts were made as the sun greeted them, wives left to care for the house as the husband went to work at the butcher shop, the blacksmith, the tailor, the apothecary, the barracks. The peaceful life was lived, much to the aversion of small children, dreaming of riding into battle against a faceless, horrible foe. The only images of war they held in their heads were the vague stories told by the aging grandfathers in their waning days of life, mind scrambled from sun and trauma.

When the flowing sun finally met the dark horizon again, the workmen across the land hung up their coats in the workhouses, and trundled their way home, where a clean house and a warm fire greeted their worn faces. The feet went up, the eyes, weighted with ale, glazed over and the man of the house went to sleep, followed shortly by the housewife, shepherding the children to their rooms and extinguishing the rusty oil lanterns. As the sun went down, darkening the sky, the houses and buildings followed suit, blending into the uniform blackness of night.

Deep, deep within the earth, past the rock and soil, past the raging molten lava, the heart of the planet resided. It wasn’t a physical place, placed in the incredibly intensive heat at the center of the planet. It was as physical as heaven or hell, the river Styx, Avalon. The heart resided in the planet as much as the planet resided inside the heart. As physical as it was, life still resided in it. Described in the mythological wonderings of the planet’s inhabitants, the heart was yet another, smaller, more perfect world, perpetually bathed in light.

Somewhere, deep within the heart, drenched in thick darkness that hung onto everything in its grasp, a cavern lay. A rock strewn cave carved out of the glowing, transparent, extraordinarily rare mineral hoarded on the surface of the planet, mythril. Yet, even as the cavern glowed from the extraordinary metal, the darkness hung in the places as shrouds, reaching from the far corners of the ceiling to the deepest crook in the ground. In the glossily, foggily clear walls, several blurs seemed to hang in suspension, some hanging closer to others than some, and some were isolated from the rest, yet all seemingly facing the rock pillar center of the vaguely circular room.

Echoing strangely in the globe-shaped room, bouncing off every surface of flat mythril until the entire cavern seemed to resound from the very air and darkness it self, a sound had started here that hadn’t started for centuries; A heart began to beat.