The Hollow Deep - Chapter 0: Prologue

The darkness was absolute.

Not the darkness of night, where stars provided comfort and moonlight offered hope. This was the darkness of the deep—where light was an intrusion, an anomaly, a thing that didn't belong.

They had fled into it anyway. What choice did they have?

Above, the world burned. Demons swept through the broken alliance lines like fire through dry wheat. Valorheim and Karthia—enemies for generations—had united too late. The demon horde cared nothing for their ancient hatreds. It consumed them equally.

And now the survivors had run into the only place demons wouldn't follow.

The Progenitor ruins.

Old beyond any reckoning they possessed, forbidden by every culture that had come near enough to leave a record. The warnings carved into the tunnel entrance ran in three languages, two of them dead before anyone now alive had drawn their first breath. They all meant the same thing. Turn back. What sleeps below must not wake.

***

Cael stood at the threshold.

One hundred and twelve soldiers behind him. Valorheim and Karthian both, united by desperation. Some were wounded. All were afraid.

The tunnel mouth gaped before them like a wound in the earth. Cold air drifted from its depths—air that hadn't touched sunlight in ten thousand years.

"Last chance to turn back," someone muttered.

No one turned back.

Because behind them, the sky was red with demon fire, and the screams of the dying carried on the wind.

Cael stepped forward. Into the dark.

The others followed.

***

But all of that came later.

First, there was only the descent.

The tunnel swallowed them. Somewhere behind him, a soldier's boot scraped stone and the sound died without an echo—swallowed by the kind of silence that had been accumulating for ten thousand years. Cold air moved against their faces. The torchlight caught the carved warnings one last time and then the tunnel curved and took them away.

They didn't know what waited below. They didn't know the cost that would be demanded of them. They only knew that down here, in the deep places of the world, something slumbered. Something the Progenitors had sealed away in an age before human memory. Something that made demons look like a manageable problem.

And they were about to wake it up.