III: The Temple of the Sun

The night stretched into velvet infinity, sprinkled with twinkling diamond stars.  Beneath the glittering, starshot sky, the deep forest murmured to itself, whistling and cracking with life.  Under the looming lush canopy of sleeping trees, the land rippled and swirled, formed into rolling hills and sunken gullies.  Mist sighed and crept through the foliage, turning the space between ground and canopy a damp haze, laden with the scent of flourishing night flowers.

The great elk, the grandest of the grand kings of the primal lands, strode through the blurred landscape.  His great horns were an impressive thorny crown atop its mighty head.  The mist collected to droplets between the spaces on its rack, where the moon spider had spun her special web.  The glittering stars, even through the thick and dark verdure shone within the droplets of captured dew.  With the mist caught in the web, the spider's structure shone like silver, sparkling and glittering with the stars above the wild place.  It was as if the stars became her web, and her web the stars. 

This was no ordinary moon spider.  She was Mother Spider, the weaver of fates, and ever she spun them as she weaved her starry dewdrop web, tangled amongst the cosmos and its diverse inhabitants.  

A wind made the strands tremble, and Croene spun on...

---

He had walked seventeen days and seventeen nights, aimlessly in the empty desert. During his lonely trip he passed not a single living thing, and no sign of anything dead, either.  His shadow his only companion, he cursed the soulless, berating sun, and wondered at not being hungry or thirsty or tired. 

The heat was terrible.  It beat upon him in an endless fury during the day, temperatures rising past the point where his skin registered it as warmth, and only as blasting, burning heat, baking him to the core.  Distorting his vision, he had the constant daytime illusion of walking upon a still mirage of reflective water at distance.  Around noon of every day, when his shadow was small and still below him, he went delirious until the sun had disappeared below the horizon.  His mind swam with visions of bizarre places, of figures alien yet somehow familiar. 

He lay awake on the parched clay at night, the clinging warmth of the day radiating still through his body as he watched the stars twinkle into sight above him.  From a day of blinding white ground and wild blue sky, and beating golden sun, he would lay and watch well into the deep blue, purple, and silver night.  He was awed at the array of foreign stars above him, as they seemed to dip and drop close to the flat emptiness, and fill his visions with glittering jewels.  Around midnight, when the bone pale moon shone its brightest, illuminating the desert in its chilling glow, he would resume his trek. 

And so it went for every day and night of his journey.  Walk north from the time of awakening around midnight, start having visions when his shadow cowered beneath the blazing sky, pass out in late afternoon and have fever dreams, convulsing silently in the empty desert.

On the eighteenths day the terrain began to change as he trod stoically, thinking sun-twisted thoughts all the while.  The cracks in the thirsty earth grew wider and deeper, until he was leaping atop islands surrounded by worn gullies, deep from erosion and time.  By mid-morning he was weaving his way down between the islands of unstable dry clay.  He was covered in dust that stuck to his skin, and cracked after drying into a baked layer, cemented on by his apparent endless supply of sweat.

When he awoke under stars becoming increasingly familiar, he found he was stiff with dried on clay, and broke it off of himself.  He had deep red lines where the sun had tanned him, yet even in the waxing moon's pale glow, he could see that the skin that had been covered was healed of more than a fortnight's worth of torturous sunburn, and even his darkly etched lines no longer burned.

He found the temple just before dawn, when the gullies had become dusty mountains covered with a ghostly peach fuzz of dried grass.  The air chirruped every few minutes with the calls of insects, and the fine dirt had evidence of small creatures.  The air began to smell of something other than his own flesh cooking, of the creeping tendrils of life.  His spirit lifted, slightly.

It was of an eclectic design, built of several large pale blocks of stone, rising in twisting curved towers in a walled courtyard around a stepped pyramid.  The outer walls were bare, and seemed untouched by the elements.  When he passed between the tall entrance arches, a burning chill slithered up his spine, and he fell to his knees.  The sensation made his vision blur, and his stomach turn over, and he reeled for a long moment, sickened.  He did not flee from the arches.

Collecting himself, he crawled beyond them, into the courtyard, which through clearing eyesight he could see was surrounded with small gazebo buildings amongst stark pillars.  Before the grand stepped pyramid and its altar-top, a wide open area.  A long pool of water, edged by twisting feathered serpent statues, wings spread, with a row of dark and pale obelisks lined straight up to the pyramids peak.

He got to his feet, and stared in awe.  The dawn light was glinting off the zenith of the great building, showing the untarnished glow of gold.  Looking around, he saw that gold edged the feathers of the serpent statues, glittered in the glyphs upon the obelisks, shined from the intricate designs etched into the pillars and tops of buildings contained within the great block wall.  Despite himself, he reached to the nearest pillar, and felt the strangely warm metal beneath his hand. 

As he watched sunlight roll swiftly down the pyramid steps, he saw the forms of the serpents glow gold from the walls, from the pillars, graven into almost every surface.  Golden feathered serpents, eyes like sunbursts, and graceful serpentine coils.  Before long, he found that the entire temple itself was shining gold, the pyramid, its pool of water, the buildings and monuments, all of it. 

Dumbfounded and awestruck, he knelt and drank from the pool of water, soothing his throat and stomach.  Reflected in the light shining off the pool he saw himself, wrinkled, haggard, and worn.  As if he were a walking dessicated corpse of the desert.  Looking at his hands, he saw them as plump and full as ever, his skin youthful, though the reflection deceived him.  A new wave of nausea swept over him, and he vomited into the pool.

Looking past the surface of the water, pale amongst the dark bottom, he saw the bones.  Hundreds of them, cracked human skulls and great bones, the twisting curve of smashed ribcages, broken orbs of eyes crushed inward.  He leapt away from the edge of the pool, reeling with fresh sickness mixed with horror.  He heard the pattering of many feet on stone, the rustling of feathers against each other as his vision faded to bedazzled blackness. 

[[Felt like a really nice write. ]]

II: The Altar of the Vulture

He dreamt first of the rain, falling in fat drops from grumbling grey skies, falling through treetops and running down leaves to drip in fat drops to the thirsty loam below.  He dreamt of rain, and forgot his troubles, washed away in the cleansing waters from above, lost within the soft rumblings of the dim and glittering clouds.  The sound of the falling rain pattering on the ground, tapping on the leaves, splattering in puddles drowned out his own thoughts. 

For a while he floated in cloudy forgetfulness, his mind diffuse and empty.  He felt he were the rain.  Rain cleansing.  Rain washing.  Rain falling.  Rain flooding.  Storms raced across his mind, scattering lightning and shocking peals of thunder.  Mountains eroded and mudslides rolled into valley bottoms flooded with torrential flow.  Trees hung under the ever-dropping moisture.  He ebbed and flowed, pooled and evaporated.

He, the rain, the storm, the wind, the thunder, the grumbling, weeping clouds.  He raced over the landscape, galloping with the speed of the winds over vast meadows with wild grasses, and over jungle-engulfed mountains.  He swirled to hurricane force over spreading and violent oceans, and battered the shore in primal fury.

He then dreamt of the feathered woman, her plumage glittering as if it were of made of precious jewels in the light of hundreds of flickering candles.  Her colours were strange, and she shimmered with all of the hues of the rainbow, and then some.  She looked at him, imperiously through the mask of a bird-face, and spoke his name.

---

Consciousness was slow to return to him.  It seemed to slowly fill him, spreading warmth through his aching limbs.  His mind felt foggy, and he had a throbbing headache that seemed to radiate all through his body.  When he opened his eyes, the light hurt him, and he felt all crusty, as if he had been sleeping for quite some time.

The silent statue of the obsidian vulture loomed over him, its carved wings spread protectively over the stone altar he lay spread upon.  Golden desert light filtered through the gaps in the intricate figure, mottling across Vasa's skin, already tingling with the warmth of the day. 

With aching limbs he sat up, shielding his eyes from the penetrating desert sun, and squinted at his surroundings.  HE sat on a cool grey stone altar, apparently guarded by a rather large and lifelike black obsidian statue of a vulture with its wings spread and head poised and ready to feed.  Beyond the altar, a ring of standing, dark stones, worn by the trials of time and sand.  Beyond that, empty desert, stretching impossibly far in all directions, covered in a tangled spiders' web of parched cracks and etched with furrows caused by strange, standing boulders.  To and from all horizons, there was only the blue-gold sky, the beating sun, the endless desert, and nothing else.

Nothing else aside from him, and the strange shrine.  No wind ruffled the dry sands of the desert, and no birds flew in the sky.  He was completely alone.

Surveying his possessions, he found he was wearing some dirty clothing covered in crusted-on city grime, his shoes, and all of six dollars and twenty-eight cents worth of money.  He had his cell phone, however there was no reception, and the battery flickered into death after a moment.  He pocketed it, just in case.

In bewilderment, he spent some time sitting atop the altar, under the spread wings of the vulture.  The sun sank into the distant horizon, filling the sky with orange and gold.  He watched strange stars twinkle above him, in constellations completely foreign.  There was no moon, only the glittering diamond stars.  He watched, and waited, and wondered.  He had not become hungry, nor thirsty, nor too hot or cold.

After sitting for a day and a night, at the dawn, realization came to him.

"I'm dead."  The words broke the silence of the desert.  The shadows falling across the features of the stone scavenger seemed to mock him, so he repeated himself.  He repeated himself many times, and each time, it seemed to make more and more sense. 

"I'm dead and this is Hell.  This is Hell and I am damned.  I'm dead.  I was murdered!  And now I'm in Hell!" No reply came to him of course, no wind, no sound, no sudden flashes of understanding.  He cursed the sky and shook his fist in sudden anger, and paced some more. 

Reluctant to leave the safety of the vulture's spreading wings, he waited until the afternoon before he set off on foot across the desert.  He could feel the days heat radiating off of the cracked earth.  He chose the direction of what he figured to be 'North' and walked that direction, figuring it to be as good as any, given the circumstances.