Legacy of the Fallen

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Legacy of the Fallen Page 46

by Luke Chmilenko


  There was a short pause as my hand rested on the crystal, then without any warning at all the room went completely dark as the azure light emanating from the crystal suddenly vanished, plunging us all into complete darkness.

  “Yep, this is about what I expected,” Sierra was the first to comment.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing there?” Lazarus’s voice followed a second afterward.

  Amaranth asked sleepily in my mind.

  “Uh, just hang on a second,” I replied loudly, seeing that all the crystals on the pillar had gone dark. Terrified that I had broken the device, I took my hand off the crystal and reached out to touch one of the others, hoping that I could undo whatever I had done earlier.

  “Shit, did the whole thing die?” Halcyon whispered from beside me, reaching out to also touch one of the crystals on the pillar we had grouped around.

  “Looks like it,” Caius whispered back, going as far as to poke several of the crystals with his fingers. “It almost looks like it turned itself off.”

  “Who the hell puts an off-switch right in the middle of…whatever this thing is?” I said under my breath as the three of us went through each of the crystals on the pillar, testing to see if any of them elicited any sort of reaction.

  Minutes passed as we continued to poke and prod the crystals in an attempt to reactivate the pillar and undo whatever it was that I had managed to do, but no matter what we tried, there was no visible reaction to our efforts. With every second that passed, it became more and more difficult for the three of us to hide our frustration at the lack of results, until I finally threw up my hands in the air, ready to admit defeat.

  “Okay, this—” The words were barely out of my mouth before once again without any visible signal, the room suddenly illuminated itself as if some distant switch had been flipped, the familiar azure light from the large crystal set in the center of the chamber resuming its bright glow and banishing the darkness.

  “—should work,” I finished, trying to hide my surprise while turning my head to look around the chamber as several white lights set high in the ceiling above us also activated, shifting the room from the deep azure tint that had been there just seconds earlier to a near daytime brightness.

  “Well, that’s better I guess,” Constantine commented as I turned to look in the party’s direction, all of them visibly squinting from the change in light.

  “Must have needed a chance to reboot?” Halcyon muttered quietly, sounding slightly unsure as he spoke. “Looks like the crystals are slowly reactivating one by one too.”

  “I honestly have no idea, Hal,” I replied, turning around to look at the pillar and seeing that nearly all of them were now steadily flashing with a magical glow. “But seeing what happened last time, I’m a little hesitant to poke it again.”

  “I know what you mean, Lyr, but we’re going to need—”

  A distorted mental voice rang through my head without warning, causing me to flinch and look at the pillar in surprise.

  “Did that thing just talk to us?” Caius asked, the rest of the party behind us immediately falling silent, surprised at the voice that had just appeared in our heads.

  “Whatever it was I heard it too,” Sierra said, her footsteps echoing across the floor as she moved closer to us.

  “Same here,” Drace added, a shuffling sound indicating that he too was following Sierra. “What did you guys do?”

  “No clue,” Halcyon replied with a shrug, just as the voice echoed through our heads once more. “I think it’s some sort of leftover technology…”

  the voice announced with urgency.

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