The light was like a visual assault. Liera felt the air in the chamber hum with a frequency that made her marrow vibrate. The rainbow prisms dancing across the jagged cavern walls were beautiful, yes, but they were also jagged, cutting through the darkness with a desperate, frantic energy. As the beam of light from the fissure above intensified, the central stone seemed to breathe.
Liera shielded her eyes with her forearm, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. "Who's there?" she cried out, her voice swallowed by the crystalline chiming that filled the room.
Slowly, the chaotic swirling of colors began to stabilize. The prisms slowed their frantic dance, drawing inward toward the black obsidian pedestal. The light thickened, becoming opaque, until a silhouette began to emerge from the core of the sapphire stone.
