The hollow stone spaces echoed with the mechanical churns, groans and hisses of steampowered machines. Rain pattered on the vaulted roof, trickled down the cracks in the walls and pooled on the rippled mossy floor. The voice sang and lilted mournfully, distant and ethereal.

[quote]Rose was absent of any witching supplies, but she was already forming a mental checklist of what she would need to find. First would come logs and kindling, supplies for a fire. Something to serve as a cauldron, then reagents. Roots, moss, plants, and much more. And then the supplies needed for the dark arts, chiefly finger bones and blood. The bones of the dead held a special power, the bones of the finger in particular.[/quote]

Trees grew just outside the open doorway of the Stone, drenched in rain -- but wood might more conveniently be found in the oldest of the coffins, brittle and cracked and filled with the dry bones of convicts who had not been so lucky. A recess in the wall behind the hot boiler was hung with shelves full of gears and machine parts, including some that might makeshift readily as pots.

[quote]She meandered towards the corridor from which the voice echoed. As she drew near she finally called out, "Hello? Who is that? A friend, I would hope."[/quote]

The singing suddenly stopped. The only sounds were the voices of the newly-awoken and the churning and hissing of machines.

[quote]It was then that Adamar heard the soft melody of a hum in the distance. Of course others would have awoken before him, and surely there will be more to awake afterwards. If he was to secure himself in this horrid place, he needed to act now. He secured his mask around his face, and made his way down the corridor.[/quote]

The corridor stretched dark and long, away from the churning crypt of the Stone, deeper into the mountain. At the far end of the corridor was a bright light, like sunlight -- though it was clear by the broken ceiling of the crypt that it was raining outside.

Halfway down the corridor sat a stone statue of one of the Old Gods: a perching winged beast that had a humanlike body, the tail of a scorpion, and seven snakelike heads that swarmed and bared their stone fangs. It was illuminated in haunting silhouette against the light from the end of the corridor.

The statue faced a heavy reinforced door, padlocked.

Another noise resounded out of the bright room at the end of the corridor: a heavy [i]crack[/i], the low huff and grunt of a large beast, and the skiff and skid of heavy footsteps and something dragging against stone.

A huge silhouette blocked out the light at the end of the corridor, and a great ugly ogre stooped to peer through the arched doorway. It sniffed noisily and growled deep in its throat; it smelled something peculiar, but its eyes were too weak to make out what it might be. The ogre was too large to squeeze through into the corridor, so it remained within the bright room, its attention fixed on the smell of flesh and the sound of foreign voices.

[quote]Thadeus thought of saying something, but was caught off guard as another voice spoke, he couldn’t quite figure out where this voice was coming from at first glance. it seemed to be coming from above, but some vines covered his view of the figure. He decided to wait a bit before making his presence known, slowly making his way closer to them, not saying anything yet.

Remembering that she was in the stone, a place full of murderers, rapists, psychopaths, and dark magic users, Genevieve regretted announcing her presence at all. She wondered if she could hide, before anybody tried to kill her. [/quote]

While Rose's voice filled the cavernous room in verbose greeting -- and while the others began to gather around her -- Genevieve might notice a quick-moving shadow along the uppermost level of coffins. Just as quickly it disappeared into one of the pigeonhole recesses in the wall.

A little girl was suddenly standing beside Thadeus.

She had short dark hair, almond eyes and sweeping horns atop her head. She was dressed in a coarse smock, and she held a squirming white rabbit in her hands. The child stared up at Thadeus absently, blinking, as if waiting for him to tell her what to do.