I can’t sleep, again. I see them all over me, figures that look like demons—human with horns of all kinds, twisted and spiraling in different directions—all of them running toward me, trying to hurt me. I have something at the ready to bring them down too. It’s not like I run through the tunnels without being prepared.
It’s the valve. That stupid moss-colored valve that continues to push forth all this through the tunnels and everywhere in general. But I can’t fully blame it. I am responsible for bringing them here too, without caring much about the consequences. Although I must admit that only very few have ever managed to achieve anything of particular value, the scoreboard still gives us more points than all of their houses combined. Also, if they weren’t breaking each other down every time they saw the opportunity, they would have achieved more. This was also done on purpose. One of the few things I am proud of them for is that they control their own population by their own means.
Back to the damned valve. It’s not the valve itself—hidden inside a temple over at a city that was swallowed by the desert twenty thousand years ago—it’s the energy it’s attached to that makes it a gateway. To be blunt, this valve belonged to the main reactor line inside the core of Atlantis. Once the valve was closed and pulled off, the reactor went into critical mass. The entire city at that point had been lost to the madness of the inhabitants. Lovecraft described it better than anyone else: a city with strange non-geometrical forms that make no sense to the human mind. Considering that the human mind was—and continues to be—in a rather primitive state compared to our Atlantean cousins, this is understandable. They went too far, too deep, too fast. In the end, the city was more of a hellish landscape than an actual city of “Peace and Prosperity” as it had once been announced. The only logical thing to do back then was to sink it—and sink it we did. By “we,” I mean I. I miscalculated the amount of time it would take for the reactor to go critical and we barely made it out. While this did not destroy the city entirely, it brought it down into the Pacific Ocean, where it will probably remain for another millennia—a couple of centuries if humanity figures out the importance of the city.
We go back to the valve, again. The energy emanated from the reactor and the inhabitants permeated everything. The world is full of this energy, which is not visible from outside Earth due to a long-standing veil created to protect humanity from what lives outside our home planet. This works both ways—so we can’t see anything and they can’t see us. But we also have to deal with our own demons, and no one is ready to face an onslaught of Atlanteans. Not yet.
All except a few are ready. One sits at the Throne of the Pillars—the throne of one of the Atlantean Lords when the city still existed. There is a gate behind the throne which connected to one of the gates inside the core. While this gate is currently not functioning due to the energy being cut off from the core, it could potentially be re-routed to be used through other gates. The danger this poses to the planet is considerable, but there are two problems.
The first problem is that there is little recollection of the existence of the pillars and their purpose. Those who know do not visit, as there is no reason to. In another plane, this is a small fortress with no visible purpose other than to watch the crossing of the Mediterranean through close proximity to Gibraltar. It is no coincidence that the British decided to keep it.
The second problem is that those who do visit and stay there have a tendency to go mad with seclusion. Since this is a small fortress, there is nothing inside of it aside from a set of barracks, a small patio, and the throne room where the pillars can be seen. The current guardian holds no objection to being there but does not stay often, citing no need to do so. I do not concur with the guardian, but it is also understandable that after one hundred thousand years it is near impossible for the gate to be used in any way or form. It is also possible that the gate is non-functional from this side too. But we go back to square one—by the time Atlantis fell, mostly everyone had forgotten how the things around them worked and everything was taken as-is. If it worked, fine. If it didn’t, it was lost. There was no way to fix it. Only the school of engineers had a slight idea of how things worked, but going through the voluminous materials available to them was an impossible task for anyone.
Even today I still have not managed to go through the entirety of the archives. I have sat for centuries, reincarnating time and time again, just to try and figure out chapters which are so esoteric that only those who wrote them would ever understand what they meant—if they even understood what they were writing about.