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The night is far spent and the first tentative stirrings of approaching dawn have begun. Small and quiet movements are these, awkward with slumber and not yet fully awake. In a small room located in the servants’ wing of Locke Manor a pair of delicate hands reaches upward to press the sleep from eyes that greet the early hour with great reluctance. She sighs. Would that the night were but an hour or two longer – just a little more rest..... But there is work to be done and the visitor had asked for her by name. She smiles. Such a polite man and so pleasant in conversation. His strange illness and the terrible wasting slumber that nearly took his life was a hardship for all of them. She shudders at the brief recollection of how small, how very frail he seemed just two days ago – so very near dying he was. The elder Locke, Master Edward himself, passed long hours by his bedside and he it was who had told her that the visitor had asked for her. Once more Jeannette lifts her hands to her heavy eyelids, rubbing them gently. She sighs contentedly and then she rises for there is much work to be done.
There are other stirrings in the lingering darkness besides those of a single maid, however, purposeful stirrings.
A large body stirs to wakefulness upon a damp pile of skins at the discontented growling in its stomach. Fingers crusted with dirt and blood reach between the jagged rocks near the wall of the cave until they find the handle of a crudely made club. Sleep gives way to hunger, an insistent and demanding hunger, and coarse tongues moisten the lips of mouths newly accustomed to the ready feasting to be found in the forest.
Far from this land of simple homes and dense forest there stands a tower darker even than the night which hangs so persistently over the approaching light of day. And within that tower are those whose stirring is the movement of darkness itself. Locked away with the tower are those for whom the heaviness of sleep would be a great relief, and to whom such relief is denied. For there is One within the tower whose substance is the substance of shadow and this One knows not the need for sleep and the darkness itself awakens to new vigor at the malice within his voice. All lands are the object of this One’s desire, and the lives of all who dwell within them as well. For the One Who Mods will not rest until all are bent and broken under his will.
Black and foul smelling smoke pollutes the skies to the north. Great furnaces housed in a compound that was once a haven for self-styled champions of the good burn night and day for within the blackened walls of that compound is found a rival to the One Who Mods, one once a man but now simply and terribly Fallen. And the Fallen would contest the darkness of the Mage with the hatred that burns within him. Deep beneath the earth, in places long untouched by the warming light of the sun, things stir into movement beneath the strength of this hatred.
Elsewhere far from these lands is one who sits silent and still. The free and living air moves restlessly between the craggy spires of stone that jut upward into the sky and the falling of rain against the sharp stones rings brightly against the darkness. But the one who sits and watches neither moves nor speaks.
The Lord of the Forums: Awakenings
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