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. ]]