The Shattering
With the molten metal now lapping at the edges of the lower walkway, you need to move fast if you are to avoid being engulfed in agonising pain.
The figure, now floating some 40ft in the air, takes a bone amulet of some sort from around her throat, holds it to where her ear would be and crushes it mercilessly – her head cocking to the side as she seemingly listens to something. With but a moment’s notice, her figure vanishes, and the rippling of the edge of the dome intensifies tenfold.
As you push over the edge of the rising metal you look out over the adoring crowd and as you watch, there is a rapid ripple of confusion, then panic over the faces from one side of the arena to the other. You suddenly and immediately feel an overwhelming pressure of silence hit your ears, causing them to decompress like you had plummeted hundreds of feet in a single second. The silence you know and recognise, and shocked as you are to feel it for the first time in months, you wait for it to pass.
If anything, the pressure on your ears grows once more, the silence stretching on for 15, 20 seconds. The crowd is visibly agitated now, people looking around at each other, some boxing at their ears, others turning to those around them in desperation. Just as suddenly the silence is broken and you feel your heart and stomach drop out of the bottom of your feet.
The found of the breathing of a enormous beast or god fills your mind, quickly followed by an mind-splitting roar, deafening in volume
In that moment, you see the crowd clamp their hands over their ears, seemingly in pain and fear. Some hundred or so of the crowd stand to their feet, spread throughout the stadium, mouths moving in a chant that is silent to you and raise their hands in supplication to the skies.
Your eyes turn upwards.
The great scar that has remained in the sky, a permanent fixture of the past year that has just become part of people’s lives is changing before your eyes. A pulsing bolt of light connects the top of the dome you are contained within to the sky and pulses of energy are flowing out from that point above you across the sky uniformly, only disrupted by the scar.
As you watch the pulsing light flooding the sky being disturbed by the sky rift, the dome suddenly drops, letting the lights, sounds and chaos of the outside back in. Your ears are immediately met with:
“…ing ones return for their thrones. The undying ones return for their thrones. The undying ones re…”
As confusion reigns amongst the crowd, the molten metal laps over the edge of the containing walls, splashing to the ground outside of your now unleashed arena. Some of the guards and mages who were previously holding the barrier together are splashed and fall to the ground screaming – the rest pulling those they can get to away before the metal fully overflows.
"…turn for their thrones. The undying ones return for their thrones.
SHE WILL RISE!”
At that moment, all hundred or so of the chanters take out daggers and plunge them immediately into their breast, to the shock of partners & children. For a moment, nothing seems to happen, but a sudden and loud noise can be heard from above. As you watch the great scar in the sky pulses with energy, before a slow fracturing ripples across the sky, shattering some invisible barrier. As it falls away, part of you expects to a see a city hanging upside down in a sky of fire but instead you simply see the sky as you have always known it. In a moment or two your eyes adjust to see what is there now that wasn't before - tiny winged dots, scattered across the sky all around you.