Somewhere deep beneath Holy Terra, beneath the Imperial Palace itself, is a hidden chamber. No one has entered the chamber for ten millenia.
The chamber is paved in five colours of jade to display a map of no world that the Administratium can identify, The walls are twenty five panels of precious metals, each displaying a different constellation and notation in an incomprehensible script. It is lit by hundreds of lanterns suspended from a vast and slowly spinning chandelier so that they hang at shoulder height in concentric circles. The lanterns contain glowing crystals but no light reaches high enough to reveal the ceiling.
The outermost circle of cystals glow blue, green, saffron, red and violet. They number one hundred and are evenly divided between each colour. The metal of their lanterns reflects rainbows if hit by a white light.
The second circle of lanterns are made of silver and the light of their contents has a silvery hue that flickers and shifts in unpredictable patterns. The three hundred lanterns in this circle themselves seems to change their shapes if you take your eyes of them. Twenty of these lanterns have been opened at some point. Some have been closed again, welded shut with silver wire. Those still open, about half, contain no crystals.
The innermost circle and the most closely packed, also numbers three hundred lanterns, each of gold. At first glance the light from these lanterns is also golden, but careful examination shows a dark tinge touching around a third of them. Another fifty seem to have a greenish tint to their lights. None of these lanterns have been opened, but one has cracked and the crystal within is missing.
At the back of the chamber, a man-shaped figure entirely made of golden light rants and raves in an unknown tongue, chained to the wall at the back of the chamber by both wrists. He can just barely reach the chandelier, but never the door of the chamber.
The door... ah yes, the door. The door is the height of ten men, carved of a single piece of bone. In a thousand different scripts, ten thousand different languages - from Imperial Gothic to the tongues of the Eldar and the Tau - it warns that should the door be opened, the era that follows will be one of great and terrible deeds.
For ten thousand years, the door has stood ajar.
The chamber is paved in five colours of jade to display a map of no world that the Administratium can identify, The walls are twenty five panels of precious metals, each displaying a different constellation and notation in an incomprehensible script. It is lit by hundreds of lanterns suspended from a vast and slowly spinning chandelier so that they hang at shoulder height in concentric circles. The lanterns contain glowing crystals but no light reaches high enough to reveal the ceiling.
The outermost circle of cystals glow blue, green, saffron, red and violet. They number one hundred and are evenly divided between each colour. The metal of their lanterns reflects rainbows if hit by a white light.
The second circle of lanterns are made of silver and the light of their contents has a silvery hue that flickers and shifts in unpredictable patterns. The three hundred lanterns in this circle themselves seems to change their shapes if you take your eyes of them. Twenty of these lanterns have been opened at some point. Some have been closed again, welded shut with silver wire. Those still open, about half, contain no crystals.
The innermost circle and the most closely packed, also numbers three hundred lanterns, each of gold. At first glance the light from these lanterns is also golden, but careful examination shows a dark tinge touching around a third of them. Another fifty seem to have a greenish tint to their lights. None of these lanterns have been opened, but one has cracked and the crystal within is missing.
At the back of the chamber, a man-shaped figure entirely made of golden light rants and raves in an unknown tongue, chained to the wall at the back of the chamber by both wrists. He can just barely reach the chandelier, but never the door of the chamber.
The door... ah yes, the door. The door is the height of ten men, carved of a single piece of bone. In a thousand different scripts, ten thousand different languages - from Imperial Gothic to the tongues of the Eldar and the Tau - it warns that should the door be opened, the era that follows will be one of great and terrible deeds.
For ten thousand years, the door has stood ajar.