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Prologue:
…A dark hall stretched off in one direction towards a dim blue light. Jake gulped. He felt a sense of foreboding – that and thick, viscous fear. Never before on any dig had he felt any trepidation when he first entered a burial chamber or a dark room of sorts that hadn’t been seen in ages. He had categorized them as historical sites, areas pending further investigation. This place, however, did not feel…right. What he meant, if he had to explain it, was that it just felt as if it wasn’t a dead site of a past civilization. To him it felt alive. Jake then remembered how a starfish, when dead, could be revived by sea water. This place felt exactly the same, but not in a good way.
“Headed down stairway. Entered dark hallway. Seems to be a light of some sort at the end. Going to investigate.” Jake cringed at the crack in his voice. For some reason, not keeping a stern face bothered him, as if someone would think lower of him because of it. But that’s preposterous, Jake thought. There is no one here!
“Ah, the joys of living,” he said. “Oh, scratch that from the record.”
Silently, Jake tip toed down the barren hallway towards the blue light. As he neared it he noticed it wasn’t so much a light as a door with a glowing pane of blue about an inch in front of it. He walked up to it and stared at it, curious. Symbols like the ones in the book streamed across in all directions of the blue, showing the black obsidian of the door behind.
“Found a door with a blue holographic projection in front with streaming symbols,” Jake said. “Not sure of origin or reason. Going to see if the door has any way of opening.”
He wasn’t supposed to touch it – that was bad practice, after all, but he wanted to. Jake calmed his hand as he raised it to the blue light. Very lightly, he pressed his palm towards what he thought was a holographic projection. Then suddenly he felt a cold shriek of pain travel up his arm, and in his head, he saw pictures of death and carnage, pain and misery. It felt like a tornado of bristling fire had traveled up his spine and into his cranium. It throbbed and he saw whole galaxies rise and fall and civilizations conquer one another then crumble into miserable, forgotten dust. He saw a million people tortured to death by horrible rulers and cataclysmic space battles and supernovae. Whole universes began and ended in the breadth of a second. Suddenly he regained consciousness and was thrown back.
Landing on his backside, Jake quickly regained his footing, dropping his flashlight and sprinting as fast as he could for the stairs. His heart beat like a war-drum, and his mind felt like mush.
Jake burst into the light of the planet’s morning, the heat causing him to break a sweat instantaneously as he left the building. A nearby team of soldiers moved up to intercept him.