[center][b]Alexandra Chapter 1: Hall of Silent Marble[/b][/center]

The interior was vast, dim, white. Alexandra had heard of the Crypt before, but it was often described as much less pleasant than what faced her. Possibly the reason it was more heavily guarded, then. Pillars reached up to a curved ceiling like some chapel well over five stories high. The place was like a hallway, with a few small doors here and there leading to gods know what other underground location.

At the end, a golden door of ornate design stood shut. Somehow, the entirety of the caravan fit into the room, though it was only the people involved this time; the boxes, horses, carriages and tents all remained above the surface. Still, a number of individuals slung packed bags over their shoulders.

Anorm stood at the helm and turned to face the crowd. He cleared his throat and commanded attention with his voice.

"This is the first room of what is to be a long path. It will get very cold the lower we go, save your coats for then. I want everyone to remain attentive no matter what happens, The faster any one of you can do your job at my request, the sooner we’ll be out of here. If you see something strange, let your comrades know, then let me know. Don’t touch anything unless I say so." There was chatter among the audience as rumors of what was to come sifted through.

"We are looking to enter the bottommost chamber of the Blades Crypt, accessible only through this door. There we will find and retrieve a document long kept there, and return it to the King. Save your questions," Anorm put out a palm as if to stop them, "Use common sense and better judgement. At that, we proceed." Anorm turned towards the door at the end of the massive room and the gathering followed suit.

Anorm stopped at the foot of the door and gazed up at it for a moment, looking over its weaving golden designs. Before him, a small nook in the wall rested. It was circular in shape and no bigger than his palm. He retrieved something unseen from his sleeve and placed it in the slot, and at once the golden doors began to open slowly.

As soon as it was wide enough to fit through, Anorm walked past it. More followed suit, the flow growing larger as the doors opened fully. The hallway beyond was less tall, but just as grandiose. Alexandra could not see the end of it, as if it were infinitely long. Runes printed on the walls illuminated the path, casting an aqua-colored glow upon the white floors.

For a time, as they walked down its length, the walls appeared smooth and without markings. In an instant, however, they began to line themselves along the walls, each one bearing a different character of some unknown language. Anorm stopped, and the rest halted behind him.

He clicked his fingers and an already attentive individual shuffled to his side, a book in hand. The man hastily sifted through the papers, looking up and down between the pages and the symbol on a pillar they stood before. They whispered to one another before Anorm turned to the audience.

"I need a miner!" he shouted. The crowd looked amidst one another while someone in the back rose his hand and coursed through the gathering to the front.

"Yes?" he asked. Anorm gestured to the pillar and put a hand on the miner’s shoulder.

"You’re up. Instructions will be clear inside," Anorm stated before abruptly pushing the man towards the pillar. In a flash of blue light, the man disappeared, completely gone. The symbol upon the pillar turned a golden color, and the hallway hummed briefly.

Everyone was overcome with an astonished gasp. Many backed away, but most simply stared in surprise. Others seemed even more eager than before. Anorm turned to the crowd and crossed his arms.

"Quiet down, quiet down!" he commanded, "As you can all see, this is no ordinary hall. Each of these pillars is a portal and a lock at the same time, and each of you is a key. Beyond them are trials, which if completed, unlock the door of this room."

"There is no end to this place! What door?!" someone yelled out.
"The door will not appear until we have completed 100 tasks. Then the door will appear to us, and we can proceed," Anorm explained. "If you fail, you will appear in this hallway once more, and we will have to substitute your failure with another task that someone else might [i]hopefully[/i] complete."

"So that’s why you needed so many different professions? To maximize the probability that we will complete 100 tasks? What are these tasks?" another asked.

"They vary. The symbols before us explain what lies beyond." The crowd discussed with one another, seemingly satisfied with the explanation. Still, many were reluctant to simply fall into a portal and find themselves alone in some place they couldn’t even see.

Alexandra smiled, things were clear now. She hiked up the bag on her shoulder and turned to face a pillar. After briefly considering how much of a pain that this was, she stepped forward and reached out a hand. It was gripped mid way by another; Anorm held her wrist in his own hand, looking quite stern.

"This one isn’t your task, lass," he warned, "Unless you think yourself an intelligible miner, knowledgeable of rocks and land and such." He let go. "We’ll find your task soon enough. Until then, sit tight." The leader beckoned for his translating fellow to follow, and the next pillar was approached and summarily understood.

Cooks. Librarians. Farmers. Animal husbandry. Generals. Performers. Thieves. Murderers. The hallway seemingly never ended in its display of professions and talents, and so far it seemed as if Anorm had properly recruited the right number. Not a single task was walked by, and the one-hundred task gauntlet became less and less daunting.

"Chemist," Alexandra could hear Anorm mutter, staring at another symbol on the next pillar.

She smiled, finally getting the chance to prove her worth on this expedition. She half wondered if her bag had even been necessary, if the task would have everything needed provided. Stepping towards the pillar without the slightest hesitation, she swept her cloak out of the way and reached out to touch it.

The pillar appeared as if to stretch out to the sides of her vision, warped around it like a white blanket of stone. The symbol glowed even more fiercely before twisting around itself. Everyone around her vanished, as she had been transported into some strange shifting hallway. Then, with a distinct whooshing sound, Alexandra found herself elsewhere.

It was a relatively large room, with a domed ceiling curving above. Despite being isolated, Alexandra could hear a sort of howling wind in the room, from where she could not deduce. The walls were smooth, while the floors were patterned with hexagonal tiles. It was otherwise empty.

The howling wind stopped, and all was quiet for a brief second.

[i]Challenger. This is the Cauldron Hall. Complete the task, and further your advance towards the Inner Sanctum.[/i] A neutral voice called out from everywhere at once.

Suddenly, Alexandra felt an unbearable, sharp pain in her lower leg. It had been pierced by a golden rod, seemingly from nowhere. Before she could attempt to pull it from herself, the rod disintegrated into dust, leaving an open hole to bleed profusely.

The hexagonal panels below and around her lifted upwards, revealing scores of shelves within that bore countless materials with labels upon them. All were printed in clear English.

[i]Construct a potion of healing and live to complete the task. Failure will result in death.[/i]

Alexandra bit back a cry of pain, instead letting out a very brief laugh. It could have been poison, in fact she’d almost expected it. A dozen and more concoctions flashed through her mind. After a moment of standing still to ensure that her leg would bear her weight, she limped over to the shelves to take stock. A moment of reading labels told her that it would take far too long to find anything and she sat on the ground, one leg out in front of her. Pulling her knife from the back of her belt, she cut a long strip from her cloak and bound the wound, slowing but not entirely stopping the bleeding.

Even with such a short time not bearing her weight, the leg had stiffened painfully, requiring Alexandra to use the shelves to regain her feet. Satisfied that she would be able to finish something before she had lost too much blood, Alexandra picked a recipe that would serve her goal while requiring the shortest preparation time. 

She began to grab ingredients from the shelves, glancing at the labels before double checking that they were telling the truth. It would not surprise her to find that any of them might be lying about the contents. She mixed them in a flask with water from her bag, most of the materials foul smelling enough to wake the dead and toxic enough to kill if ingested. The result was every bit as foul and deadly as its parts as well as being totally colourless. 

With a grimace she placed the leather sheath from her knife between her teeth and bit down, seating herself again on the floor. Setting her jaw, Alexandra pulled the makeshift dressing from the wound and poured the entire contents of the flask over it. Pain like an acid burn caused her to clench her teeth so hard that she felt they might bite through the leather. She pounded her fist on the ground and threw the glass flask across the room as new skin grew.

At last the pain disappeared and was just a memory. She lay panting on the floor with a cold sweat on her forehead. After a long moment, she stood with a new respect for the soldiers and airship guards that she sold the potent brew to.

The leftovers of the jar sizzled on the tiles that remained retracted, and then all became silent. The cabinets within the hexagons began to slide quietly downwards, returning the room to its natural, featureless state. With a bell-like chime, a symbol appeared on the wall before her, glowing with a red aura about it. The howling wind returned to the room.

She exhaled heavily, slowly standing and approaching the sign on the wall. reaching out, she tapped it with a single finger.

Once again, Alexandra was pulled through a stretched space, brought into a strange elongated hallway of blurred imagery before being let go. She found herself in the same hallway as before, though everyone had seemingly vanished from before. The pillar behind her glowed green, and a line of energy coursed from it to the ceiling and down the hall.

She could only assume the group had gone further down the way. A gentle mist obscured her from seeing too far into the hallway.

Taking a few slow steps at first, Alexandra followed the green line on the ceiling, the low lighting and the mist working together to create an eerie atmosphere.

The mist retreated in the hallway, as if serving merely to obscure her distant vision. The green line continued along the way, and soon others came into vision; multiple green paths that ran parallel to her own, all leading in the same direction. Alexandra assumed they were markers denoting how many tasks had been completed. Three, six, ten… The numbers were growing, and as she kept walking, flashes of new lines surged past her and down the hallway signalling that more had completed their missions.

It had been at least fifteen minutes of walking, and the group remained unseen. Only the sound of heels clicking on the floor -not her own- broke the loneliness. Alexandra turned to find another participant rushing her from behind.

A young man, about her age if she had to guess, wearing a white trenchcoat and bearing silvery eyes and equally white hair. He waved to her as he approached, a smile of relief over his face.

"Hey! You finished your task I take it?" He slowed down and extended a hand to her and introduced himself, "Conan Hussan. I’m a participant, if it wasn’t obvious enough. Can’t imagine someone could just find their way into this place without serious help."

Alexandra nodded, not taking the hand or even giving an indication of noticing it. She continued to follow the path indicated by the green lines. "No, I don’t imagine that they would, although I have met some stupidly unlucky people. What was your task?"

Conan retracted his hand awkwardly and seemed a bit dejected. "Would you believe it if I told you I was just a tailor?" he laughed, rubbing the back of his head, "It surprised me for a bit how specific the magic in this place could get. One pillar asked for a barber, I swear!" He looked up at the green lines which had begun to appear in droves of tens every second. "We’ll reach a hundred pretty soon, seems like. Wonder what this document is that the King needs."

"It must be damn important if it’s this difficult to get to." She was immediately struck with a feeling of mistrust. She’d asked what his task was and gotten his profession. Rather than respond by asking what she’d had to do, he’d asked about their goal. "I hope there aren’t too many failures, I’d hate to have to do another task."

"Obviously. I just don’t understand why a [i]document[/i] would need a tomb like this. Maybe it’s a magic parchment with spells of some dangerous sort? Can’t imagine why the King would need that now. Unless he was up to something terrible!" Conan proposed, sounding quite vested in his own imagination. The fog revealed the back of a heel ahead, and then a body, then several. They had made it to the back of the group, finally, though they seemed rooted in place. Overhead, Alexandra could no longer count the number of lines that glowed.

Alexandra continued to walk, threading through the crowd and not taking a look back to see if her follower was falling behind. She nudged the other participants out of her path on the way to the front, curious to see what the holdup was.

Anorm once again made himself apparent at the forefront, standing before even more endless hallway, his head was tilted upwards, scanning over the beams of light on the ceiling and walls, possibly retaining an accurate count of their numbers. More than likely, he had sent out a proper number of participants into their respective tasks, and was now simply awaiting the final hundredth "key". Most of the group was silent, themselves trying their best to judge the time left till they moved on, others conversing about unrelated and commonplace topics.

Anorm’s mouth moved, counting without speaking, then picked up in voice as the counter ran up.
"Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine…" Anorm turned his gaze down the hallway as the final beam lit up down its length. The group hushed as a howling noise like intense wind rushed at them from the end of the hall.

Much like the process of entering her task’s location, a wall bled into existence, complete with a golden door akin to the entrance. It sped at them from nothingness, slamming still but a few feet from Anorm himself. The hundred beams curved into the new surface, slithering across the golden door until they hit their ends. Another howl and the door began to open slowly, revealing a staircase leading a good distance down into the earth. A wide grin spread across Anorm’s face as he beckoned the group forward.