Saving the World - Awakening

Prologue: The Darkness

The pit loomed before Amara-Kharai, a massive force that she had created. She needed to remind herself that she truly had created this behemoth.  Men around her bustled around, their equipment humming quietly as they prepared for their shift in "The Pit."  That's what the people were calling it.  "The Pit."  There wasn't anything necessarily special about it besides it's size, yet the men and women of Zenith revered it.

"Good," she thought, "they should respect what we do here."

A low rumble emitted from the darkest depths, an uncommon but not rare occurrence.  She cast a casual look down, expecting nothing too abnormal.  What she saw was anything but.

She could faintly make out hundreds of little dots running up the ramps from the very bottom. Excavation machines were whirring up, the people driving them clamoring to get out as soon as possible. The sandstone walls shook, this time the rumble a bit stronger.

"What's happening?!" She shouted at the nearest official.

"We don't know, the workers at the bottom aren't responding," the man replied, aghast at the events transpiring before his eyes.

As she listened, the structures holding the pit together began collapsing, the bottom of the pit slowly becoming obscured by dust.  How could this have happened?  They had employed the best architects and excavators in the world for this job, after all.  Her people were dying in front of her eyes.

The rumbling stopped after a few minutes.  The dust slowly started to settle to reveal the devastating aftermath of what seemed to be an earthquake.  As it cleared, it was clear it wasn't an earthquake.

Before them, for all to see, was a darkness.  The bottom of the pit was completely obscured, not by dust but what could only be described as a void.  Now, the rumbling was replaced by silence, palpable and evil. This was much more than an earthquake.