I looked the old sword over carefully. It was a two-hander, with a leather-bound hilt and a plain round pommel. It bore no manufacturer’s marks, but it had the telltale signs of a factory-made weapon. “Forty bucks,” I offered.
The old junk dealer pushed his New York Giants ballcap backward on his grey-haired head, and squinted at me over the top of his bifocals. Stroking his whisker-studded chin, he pondered my offer critically. “Fine,” he snapped. “Take it and get out of here.”
Taking out my wallet, I flipped a couple of twenties on the counter, which he quickly scooped up and dropped into the cash register. I then turned and exited into the night with the receipt.
The sword wasn’t perfect, but it was sturdy, and would make for a nice gap-filler in my collection. The idea of fake swords was one of my pet peeves. It just seemed pointless to make a weapon that couldn’t be used except for show.
As I approached my car, I stopped. Looking closer at the front tire in the dim street light, I noted that the tread was starting to get quite worn. I gotta replace those tires, I thought. I opened the door, slid behind the wheel, and adjusted my glasses in the rear-view mirror.
As I headed towards home, I pondered the events of the last few weeks. I was seriously considering another career change, but I really didn’t know what I would do if I did. I had already left one occupation as a martial arts teacher, and I was starting to run low on careers. Neither profession seemed to have any kind of importance, though; I wanted desperately to do something that would make a difference.
A rumble of thunder broke into my thoughts, announcing the drops of rain that appeared on my windshield. I absently turned on the wipers, but then looked around in surprise as a sudden torrential downpour soaked my vehicle. I took my foot off of the accelerator and turned up the windshield wipers as a fork of lightning split the sky. A moment later, a crash of thunder answered.
I peered through the windshield, trying to get a better look at the road in front of me. Rounding a blind curve, my heart skipped a beat as a pair of tail lights loomed before me. I crammed the brake pedal to the floor, trying to avoid the stopped car, but then I felt the sickening feeling of my worn tires hydroplaning across the pavement. The other car took off, but a loud crash on the underside of the car told me that I was sliding over an embankment.
There was another loud crash, and the front end of my car whipped around, amidst a shower of glass as my vehicle struck a tree. Rain poured in through the shattered sunroof.
Shaking myself out of my shock, I checked myself over to make sure that I was not injured. In the light from the one remaining headlight, I saw a cave entrance not too far away. I grabbed my new collection piece and my cell phone, opened the door, jumped out into the full fury of the storm, and sprinted.
As I reached the cave entrance, I moved just far enough in to realize that something was amiss. A faint blue glow emanated from the cave entrance – an eerie glow that definitely didn’t look warm.
I should have turned and gone back to my car, but I didn’t. Venturing further into the cave, the light seemed to emanate from the bend in the tunnel, and it brightened as I approached, but it didn’t get any friendlier. I rounded the bend, and immediately started to think that I was dreaming.
The chamber that opened up before me was about eighty feet in diameter, and almost perfectly round. It was obvious that the chamber was not natural, as a large dais dominated the center. The unadorned walls of the chamber dropped off into a seemingly bottomless pit, which surrounded the platform upon which the dais sat. A four-foot-wide stone bridge, bearing no rails, arched from where I stood at the entrance, to the platform, which seemed to be around forty feet in diameter.
A large stone column, hanging from the domed ceiling of the chamber, was suspended about ten feet from the top of the dais. Streams of electrical energy snaked up and down the column, generating the eerie blue glow. Just beneath the column was, what appeared to be, a patch of darkness wreathed in a bluish corona of crackling energy.
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