[Game Prologue]

[mysterium_mods]

Game Prologue Being a Narrative of Events Presaging the First Arrivals

September 30, 1928:

Some realizations always come too late.

Between their discovery of the great wooden cask set into the tunnel wall, and the realization that it could, with some force, be moved aside to gain admission to the chamber beyond, only a few scant seconds passed. They hadn't wasted time wondering if they would go in. Even when they heard the voices, there'd been only the most fleeting moment of shock: the incoherent rhythm of chanting from within filtered through in syllables almost sensible as an ancient tongue found only in obscure scrolls.

But by then the cask was pushed aside, opening a gap large enough for them each to squeeze through.

What words would there have been, anyway, for such an imperfect shadow of cognizance and dread as they felt on that threshold--a knowing without knowing. And now, of course, they would never know how much worse it might have been had one of them said stop; had the pair run away in fear.

Something shifted when the cask moved. Nowhere so tangible as the surrounding stone or the moldering old wood, but something in the air. Something in the sound. Something ionic yet somehow weighty that prickled the hair at the back of the neck.

The barrier pushed aside, the pair of men stumbled into a scene which seemed to have been wrenched from ancient and sinister depths: dark-robed acolytes with hoods raised, arranged not--as the two professors suddenly in their midst might have expected--around the strangely carved oblong monolith of intricate aspect for which they’d been searching, but in a semicircle gathering before a great ornate gate set against the rough-hewn chamber wall.

The sound of the shifting cask had startled the group, by chance catching them at a sensitive moment--a moment when their chanting dared not falter, when the careful drip of candle wax had to be tipped unerringly in a fine thin stream into the intricately etched lines at their feet, when they had come so close to calling up that which would never again be put down.

The surprise of interruption sounded in the wavering of one voice, a missed syllable of intonation, the over-correction of a hand as a head turned to look, the drip-drip of stray wax hardening on the floor out of place. Each man as stunned as the next, for a moment every living thing in the room froze--the quartet of robed figures, the pair of academicians. Even the fire in the cresset which lit the chamber seemed to gasp as though the air had suddenly been pulled from around it.

And then, as one, the acolytes looked to the gate, and the flame in the cresset flickered as if pulled by a draught.

Their flight came in a flurry, candles discarded, wax pooling over the floor, powder and chalk spilling behind them. A cold wind had begun in the room, seeming to come not out of the solid stone wall where the gate was set, but somehow into it.

In the confusion of the acolytes’ flight, the two professors looked towards the gate.

In its center, where before there had been only the roughly packed soil and stone of the chamber wall, a tiny spinning pinpoint had formed, a vortex which sucked in the light, sucked in the air, sucked in the space of the wall around it as it grew steadily, now the diameter of a nickle, now of a plum.

There was one shared expression of horror and a sudden silent awareness: the pair of them probably knew more about this artifact than any sane people alive. And though they had neither seen nor read any account to explain the sight before them, they both knew of the manuscript that had accompanied the artifact’s initial discovery. They had worked on it, one of them translating from the old Aramaic, the other excavating, and both of them consulting closely as they deciphered the meanings of the stele and of the fragmentary text--Solomon’s Key, they’d called the latter: reparatives for conjurations gone awry; though it had, of course, been a find of only theoretical and historical significance until now.

What they had to do was change the circle etched on the floor. Change the circle and utter the syllables of the proper chant and hope that their memories and fragmentary knowledge held true, for there was no time to retrieve the manuscript from its place half way across the town nor to consult it for particulars.

They worked fast, the archaeologist scraping new lines into the dirt floor, changing the shape of the hieroglyphs etched underfoot, and his colleague muttering the syllables beneath his breath, testing them out on his tongue to match the obscure pronunciations with the text he’d read but never tried to say, while around them the wind whipped up like a gale and the vortex in the wall swirled and grew until it had consumed nearly the full aperture of the gate before them, until finally they were yelling desperately into the wind, completing the inscriptions they did not know with wild, panicked guesses.

It all stopped with a snap and a shudder through the chamber that knocked them off of their feet: the air was now completely still, the vortex vanished. But in its place the aperture of the gate had taken on a polished, luminous look, not so ephemeral as mist but like a viscous fluid whose aspect seemed to shift slightly depending on the angle that one looked at it.

The archaeologist, against objections, poked it with a stick. He might as well had been taping at a mirror.

At length, able to make nothing more of the strange gate which had seemingly been formed from the artifact they had tracked there--a gate which they saw now had become fused with the wall of the cavern behind it--they made their way down the far passage where the acolytes had fled.

They were, they found, in the deep sub-basement of an abandoned old mansion, the ritual chamber having been accessed by a trap door in the back corner of the house’s root cellar. The acolytes had fled leaving behind no trace but a door swinging open in their wake, and the house itself--its furniture draped carefully in sheets to protect it all from dust--had evidently been empty for some years.

But all that, in retrospect, would seem mundane and unremarkable, for when they made their way back down beneath the house and re-entered the ritual room below, they found that someone was lying on the floor.