Darkvision

PROLOGUE

A barren land smoldered beneath a cover of ash. The desert was still, grim in its isolation, and decorated with bleaching bones and drifts of snow white sand. Ripples across the dunes traced meandering lines under a merciless sun. The roar of a storm shattered the deathly quiet. The chalky stillness rose up to become a howling waste of breathless suffocation. Lightning etched jagged trails through clouds of airborne grit. Wind scrabbled over blasted stone. When the wind screamed, the desolation recalled the ancient mistake that birthed it, a mistake of such scope it doomed its perpetrators, burying their memory beneath centuries of sand. A blot above the storm twisted, strained, and ripped. Ruinous dark lay behind the dust-hazed sky, littered with debris. The aperture over the desert widened, and something moved within the newborn gap. Something terrible. A splinter of darkness slipped through the opening and fell-a shard of stone almost a mile in length-like a hungry predator bounding into unguarded territory. It slammed into the desert floor, and nearly three hundred feet of its razor-sharp length punched into the bedrock beneath the shifting dunes. Shock waves pounded out from the point of contact, clearing the air and overpowering the dust storm's constant shriek.

Moments later, the storm settled back, cloaking the waste in a roaring haze of stinging sand. The splinter remained upright, its head rising above the storm's roil as a lighthouse rises over a wave-racked coast.

In the full light of reality, the structure bore a faint purple translucence along its edges, though its core remained black. The time of imprisonment was finished. The time for sweet retribution was at hand.