Comfort

 Cars thundered past on the road horns blaring. Once in awhile the sounds of a siren would pierce the babble of daily life. People roamed the streets, looking into windows of stores and cafe's. The bookstore stood between a coffee shop and an empty shop with a for rent sign hanging haphazardly on the locked door. The glass window of the bookstore was painted with sprawling blue letters spelling out Dream Spinners Books with fantastical creatures painted with thin white lines inside the letters.

The bell above the door was old and made of a dull brass and chimed every time the door opened. Inside the store was much like any other used books shop, with winding maze-like aisles of stacked books. Old oak shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling with ladders set up on a system of tracks. A single spiraling staircase stands in the back corner and leads to a second floor of even more stacks and shelves.

Posters lined what spare space on the walls there was, advertising venues long past. A solitary desk set up along the main hallway held a modern cash register and a little sign with 'we accept credit' written in small, spidery letters. Behind it was a space of cleared floor surrounded by even more stacked books. A small table held a hot plate with a kettle, and shelved below were boxes of tea and hot chocolate. The wall behind it held a cork board pinned with advertising ranging from half off book day to a festival being held in the park a mile from the store.

The only person who worked there was an old woman with short snow white hair and a warm face. She had owned the store for years and wouldn't trade it for the world. When customers came in she greeted each of them with a warmth not often found in store owners anymore. If someone looked down on their luck, or just tired, she might offer them some tea or hot chocolate.

Sometimes it was just a bookstore, but underneath it was much more. It was a safe haven for people who were down on their luck or simply having a rough time. It was a place of comfort that could not be taken away. It was a place where people were able to shut out the world and enter a new one, if only for a time. 

Silence

 Golden light spilled through the cracks in the old stone ceiling, illuminating a crumbling alter. Lines of silver raced across it's surface in bizarre patterns, forming animals and plants made of knots and curls. All around it stood pillars of dark quartz run through with veins of white and gold. The walls were heavy with vines and moss, hints of murals once bright and beautiful peeking through. Long empty, the temple stood as a monument to times past. Magic had long since abandoned the land and taken with it the places of worship that once stood tall and proud. This temple alone still stood, the cataclysm that tore magic from the land missing it. It's priests and priestesses protected it to their last breaths and hid it from mortals.

For thousands of years no living thing set foot inside the holy place. Eventually magic passed from the memory of mortals and into legend. Time passed and it became part of life to believe that magic was nothing but something imagined by people long ago, something to use as a scapegoat or to explain great deeds. And so time moved on.

Vines wormed through hairline cracks in the building, because nothing keeps earth out, and plants will thrive where magic once lay. Cracks became gaping holes that allowed light inside but still wildlife shunned the building, as buried under rock and dirt as it was. The doorway that once stood open was covered in rock and vines.

There was a crack, a spray of crumbling dirt, and a body tumbles through the weakened ceiling. For the first time in centuries the silence of the temple is broken by a human voice. And with the silence broken so is the seal that kept the residual magic in. And that one human voice heralds the beginning of dark times for the mortal realm.

“Hello?”