"Summon the sorcerer," she ordered her henchman.  He bowed and turned for the great door.  As he strode off towards the exit, she headed deeper into the recesses of the room.  She pulled a dark, feathered cloak off a claw in the wall and draped it around her pale shoulders.  She spared another glance out her balcony, looking out over the lands even her eyes could not see fully.  This light on the surface, she'd captured it time and time again, but this light could prove vital.  Her domain had become more restless than she'd ever seen it.  The clamoring at the outskirts of her realm hadn't been adequately silenced.  Not even her captain of the guard had managed to completely squelch the billions of souls.  If needed, she would soon travel to the outskirts and put them down herself.

She began to follow where her servant had gone moments before, walking down the cavernous corridors, her footsteps echoing off the walls, past guard after guard bowed, until she entered the great hall.  Obsidian pillars and red glass chandeliers loomed over her head.  At the far end of the great hall, a single throne stood, made of rock laced with red opal, seemingly evaporating as the stones drifted up, further and further away.

Two figures approached her from the shadows of the pillars - her servant, striding in, carrying a chest, and a figure bent over, hobbling behind, shrouded in a robe. 

"My empress," he rasped, in a voice mostly lost to time and wear. 

"Gamigin."  She came to a stop in the center of the room.  " The end of one thousand years approaches.  A being hosting a power of pure light will soon appear on the surface." Her servant laid the chest on the ground before her as she spoke, opening it to uncover a scratched, misshapen crystal orb. "You shall locate it for me, as you have so many times before."

"It would be my honor, my liege," the sorcerer croaked, drawing his hood back from an old, graying, eyeless face and kneeling at the chest. 

She watched hungrily as he dragged his old, decrepit hands over the crystal, summoning a glow from deep within it.  The sorcerer grunted and groaned, prying at the crystal, and it began to glow fiercer and twist around in its setting with a scrape.  It spun faster and faster.  It began to spark.  Sparks fell to the floor, but they didn't singe anything in their paths. 

At his gestured command, the orb came to a complete stop.  Gamigin gazed into it, searching. "I feel the light... coming strong here, stronger than anywhere else on the surface.  I see... someplace warm... somewhere bright from the sun.... where structures climb towards the sky... such odd structures… there are beings everywhere... I've never seen so many... I cannot see it... I cannot locate the celestial light among them…"

She narrowed her eyes.  Too many beings to find the light?  Unheard of.  Why would so many gather in one place?  Unless they had found the light already.  She dug her nails into the palms of her hands.  No, they couldn't have found it already.  That was completely unacceptable.  "Never mind how many there are.  I will know it when I find it.  I [i]will[/i] find it."  She'd just have to be faster than ever.  Though the uncertainty aggravated her,  it would likely be of little consequence.  Even if the location was unusual, there was nothing up there that could impede her search or acquisition.  What?  Would the surface creatures really have the means to prevent her from taking the light?  

She whipped around to glare at her crack-faced servant. "Ronove.  Bring my wings to me.  I want to leave for the surface at once.  I will find this light and bring it where it rightfully belongs."

"Of course, my empress."

Minutes later, the first tremor shook the sands.