The Caverns of Kronos

The Palace - Part 2

     Malefactos’s first glimpse of the Puncturium chamber left even him stunned and speechless with wonder, much to the amusement of Karm, the rak mainly responsible for the room’s maintenance. He’d been working here ever since the early days of the Shadow, a hundred years earlier, and had seen many an arrogant, self important rak humbled and laid low by his first visit here. Four walls, a floor and a ceiling, he thought, in no little awe himself despite the time he’d served here, his familiarity with this place. This could be any room anywhere in the world, except for what it contains.

     Once, it had been a ballroom, one of several in the eight wings of a palace that was so large it was almost a city in itself. It was almost a hundred yards long and half that wide, and the ceiling was so high that rock giants could have walked around inside without bumping their heads. Six giant chandeliers had once hung from the ceiling, each one supporting hundreds of gemstones that had emitted light by virtue of the magic spells cast on them.

     Beautifully carved tables and chairs had once stood against the walls, giving the dancers the chance to rest their feet and enjoy a glass of wine now and again during a long night of dance and music, and a low stage had once stood at the end of the room on which the smartly dressed orchestra had played waltzes and talatas on their beautiful silver and gold instruments. None of this now remained. It had been cleared away centuries ago to leave only flaking plaster and disintegrating wood paneling to make room for the room’s new function.

     The whole room shimmered with power, like the heat haze rising from a hot road in the middle of summer, and even with his rak vision Malefactos had trouble seeing details in the pillars and alcoves that lined the room’s far wall. He had the sense of tremendous energies just barely held in check, energies so powerful that they could lay waste to half the city if released, and it was all focused inwards, towards a spot in the exact centre of the room where something insane and terrible was happening.

     “Go ahead,” said Karm. “Have a closer look.”

     Malefactos glanced at him, thinking for a moment that the other rak was mocking his evident fascination, but Karm seemed to be totally sincere and so with a shrug of his shrunken, leathery shoulders he stepped forward. He paused uncertainly for a moment as the room’s energies closed around him, making him feel as though thousands of ants were swarming all over his body, but it seemed to be harmless and so, with another look back at Karm, he continued on.

     The feeling intensified as he got closer to the centre, where the power was denser, and he noticed with interest that a crackling nimbus of rainbow colours was dancing all over his body. The phenomenon distracted his attention only for a moment, however, as he got close enough to the object at the centre of the room to get a better idea of what it was.

     It was a spinning, dancing, shimmering, vibrating area of pure chaos, pure insanity. It was impossible to look at directly. The eye seemed to keep sliding off it, or perhaps it was the object itself dancing off to the side whenever he tried to focus on it so that he could only see it out of the corner of his eye. What he could see of it, however, suggested that perhaps he was better off not being able to see it properly, as if its behaviour and properties were so crazy that a proper look at it would twist his mind.

     He didn’t need to see it to know what it was, though. It was the place where all the magical energies in the room came together, came to a focus. Pulling at a single point to prise it open against the almost unimaginable stiffness and resistance of the fabric of space itself, like the jaws of a mantrap held an inch apart against the full strength of its steel spring by a million lengths of cotton running away in all directions. It was the Puncturium. A tiny opening in the structure of space connecting Tharia’s universe with the seething nightmare that was The Pit.