His heart begin to beat again, and it was thunderously loud to his deprived ears. Unwanted. Repulsive. But it would not stop.
Sensation returned, and with each heartbeat, pain. The return to his body, should he ever chose it, was meant to be slower. More controlled. The sound of his heart and sharp creaking of weakly spasming muscles was soon joined by the hiss of life support systems carefully feeding blood back into his veins, laced with a cocktail to protect his body from the too-soon return of life.
His mind turned to the interloper, grasping, diffuse, re-learning focus, settling around it like a haze. He wavered, mind flickering as he heard sound, silence, sound returned, but still he had found it. What had woken him? What was it?
The cave was carved from fine-grained stone, unchanged through all the years of his hibernation--too dry to be shaped by water, too stable to crumble.
The only thing that had changed were the bodies. Desiccated and stretched taut, the mummified forms of creatures he had never seen before were scattered throughout the cave. Some were intact, locked in combat with their doomed compatriots, others were torn to pieces by those that followed. Some seemed untouched, but not peaceful.
And above them all, there was a door. The outer wall of the vault was dark and smooth, with no visible controls. It was not meant to be open from the outside.
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Sensation returned, and with each heartbeat, pain. The return to his body, should he ever chose it, was meant to be slower. More controlled. The sound of his heart and sharp creaking of weakly spasming muscles was soon joined by the hiss of life support systems carefully feeding blood back into his veins, laced with a cocktail to protect his body from the too-soon return of life.
His mind turned to the interloper, grasping, diffuse, re-learning focus, settling around it like a haze. He wavered, mind flickering as he heard sound, silence, sound returned, but still he had found it. What had woken him? What was it?
The cave was carved from fine-grained stone, unchanged through all the years of his hibernation--too dry to be shaped by water, too stable to crumble.
The only thing that had changed were the bodies. Desiccated and stretched taut, the mummified forms of creatures he had never seen before were scattered throughout the cave. Some were intact, locked in combat with their doomed compatriots, others were torn to pieces by those that followed. Some seemed untouched, but not peaceful.
And above them all, there was a door. The outer wall of the vault was dark and smooth, with no visible controls. It was not meant to be open from the outside.