Serial Saturday: "Prisicilla Sum" Part 29

Part 29

The mouth of the temple area just inside the wall was flanked by two huge statues of spear-wielding guards. The sun streamed down through a collapsed portion of the ceiling overhead, and as my eyes sought out the sky, I found myself looking right into the face of my mom.

Well, it was supposed to be Auraea. Same thing, at this point! The face was almost exactly the same as I always remembered it, but her hair--usually slicked back and flat-ironed to a sleek sheen--was carved as a swirling, loose mass. She looked more like a wind goddess with her chiton billowing around her body. The detail on every stray lock of hair, every fold and wrinkle of fabric, down to the toes that were roughly the size of my palm, was meticulously formed.

A brilliant light blazed from the face, and I barely heard Kayce shout “Look out!” before hands yanked on my shoulders and something went whooshing past my head. The air filled with high-pitched squeals as I ducked and covered.

“What was that?” Derrick hollered.
“Everybody okay?” asked Tony.
Kayce watched the morphing shadows clinging to the walls high above us.
“Bats,” he said with a shudder.
“Ugh!” Jordyn pulled a face and shrank off to one side. “I hope none of them decide to poop on us!”
I sighed. “Well, at least it wasn’t something worse!” I gave a nervous laugh and adjusted the straps of my backpack. I certainly hoped bats would be the worst thing we faced in this temple. “Come on, you guys. Let’s keep going in.”

"But stay close," Tony warned. "We'll be safer in a tight group, in case things spring out at us again."
We all huddled against one another and inched forward, hands on the backpack in front of us, hugging close to the pedestal supporting the statue.

Kayce and Derrick, in front of the rest of us, watched the floor for subtle cracks or indications of trip wires or uneven tiles.
Derrick pulled to a halt right alongside the statue. "Wait," he said.
I glanced around. We hadn't even made it twenty paces from the doorway. Was there a trip wire or something?
"Did anyone else hear that?" he asked.
I glanced from side to side, listening for a stray rumble or the subtle click of a booby trap releasing.
"Hear what?" Kayce asked.
Jordyn's voice came hoarse over my shoulder. "She's... watching us!"

We all looked up as carefully as we dared. Sure enough, the head on the statue had angled so the huge face loomed large, the gem-like eyes (actually, they could have been real large gemstones) fixed directly on our position.
"It's just the perspective," Tony reassured her. "We've all seen artwork that look like the eyes are following you around the room."

"The Eyes Do Not Know You...." Wasn't that what the inscription had said? Were these the eyes it referred to? What was the consequence of not being "known" by the goddess? Did it count that I was adopted by the goddess herself--or not, because none of us were of Greek descent?

Kayce sighed in the stillness and inched forward over the dusty ground. "Let's just keep moving forward--"
"Stop!" Derrick squawked, and as a whole group we stumbled backward over one another as the space in front of us disintegrated before our eyes.

I almost ate Kayce's backpack as my feet got tangled with Jordyn's ankles. Derrick was still flailing at all of us as he fought his way toward the front again. "Get back, get back, get back!"
We made it back to the front of the statue's feet just moments before the rumbling and crashing stopped. Sand, dust, and stones had fallen away to create a hole about four feet wide beside the base of the statue's pedestal.

Tony nursed his banged-up knuckles and brushed the sand out of his hair. "Well," he sighed, "I guess we're not crossing on that side."
I looked around at the massive array of mosaics and carvings around the room where we sat. "Is there anything that could give us an indication of how to get into the temple safely?"

Derrick huffed. "Why do you say that?" he gestured to the pathway on the other side. "There's plenty of room on that side."
I shot him a skeptical glare. "What makes you think the same thing won't happen?"
Derrick stood up and walked over to that side while we watched. "It's like Tony said, the perspective makes the statue's head look like it's staring toward her left side. If we cross on the right, then--"
A stone-on-stone scraping sound rumbled through the space. We all watched the massive head slowly rotate on some hidden axis, over to face Derrick as he moved. The gemstone eyes flashed, and the ground cracked right where it had on the other side.

"Derrick, look out!" Jordyn screamed, and the young mechanic jumped up onto the raised dais, alongside the statue's ankles.
"It's the eyes!" Kayce breathed. "Just like the inscription said! The eyes do not know you!"

Derrick couldn't take his eyes off the gaping drop-off right next to him. "Great! So how do we rectify that?"
The head began to turn again, and I saw that it was headed right for us. I grabbed Jordyn's hand and lunged forward. "Everybody head for the ankles!"

The floor beneath us shook and snapped, and we surged forward toward the statue's feet.
Tony got up and hauled me by my backpack onto the narrow surface. Jordyn grabbed onto the edge just as the floor under her feet gave way. I grabbed her elbow, and Tony went for her backpack to support her. Together, we hauled the slender girl onto the platform.
"Okay, important question," Derrick said as we crouched under the sculpted skirts of the goddess. "Can anybody see her eyes from here?"
I glanced straight up from my position as the rumbling fell still. "No, I think we're good."
By this point, the entire floor of the temple entrance had been reduced to one section at the front of the doorway, and a single pathway immediately behind the goddess.

Kayce crouched down in front of our last bridge to safety and studied it. "What do you want to bet her head turns all the way around, and the moment we get out there, it'll break away, too?" he murmured.
"If this whole room collapses," Jordyn squealed, "How are we going to get out?"
Derrick blew a raspberry. "The things they never show you on adventure films," He grumbled. "I bet Indiana Jones or Lara Croft never had to worry this much about backtracking!"
Kayce chuckled. "Thats true; I mean, they're always running out to escape some massive collapse, so the movie doesn't show them being as careful on the way out as they were on their way in."
"But this isn't the movies, anyway," Tony pointed out. "This is real life, so we have to think about these things."
Derrick glared at him. "Well, okay, smarty-pants--got any ideas?"

Tony rubbed the back of his neck as we all pondered over the problem. "Maybe the inscription holds the clue to how we're going to get through this?" He studied the portion of the floor that still remained. “There has to be some way we can make sure that the head doesn’t turn and the eyes don’t see us when we go across this floor, because we’ll need it to get back out again.”
Kayce slicked his dirty hair back. Streaked with dirt and clumping into sagging strands, it wasn’t the same platinum coif he’d had at the beginning of the trip. It stayed flat against his scalp. “We already tried going one at a time, and that didn’t work.”
My anxious hands searched for something to fiddle with as my brain wrestled for a solution.
“Hey, Pris,” Jordyn nudged me.
I blinked and realized that my fingers were wrapped around the locket hanging from my neck. “Got any insights?” my dark-haired friend asked.
I dropped my hands. “No—Me? I don’t... I didn’t—“ I stopped stammering as my brain caught up with my mouth. The inscription came to mind yet again. “The eyes do not know you—“
“So they’re just going to blast you into oblivion,” Derrick finished. “That part, we understand.”
I leaned forward. “But the next part...”
Kayce picked his head up. “Repent? Like a confession or something?”

Jordyn looked upwards, to where the legs met the folds of Auraea skirts. “What if this actually is the physical manifestation of the goddess?”
Derrick snorted. “Yeah, right, Jordyn! Somebody’s been reading too much Percy Jackson!”

“Just hear me out, okay?” Jordyn leaned against the massive arch of the foot behind her. “Think about everything we’ve experienced since coming here: the freak storm, the earthquakes, the discoveries—“
“The accidents and coincidences,” I supplied, thinking of my parents stirring up the Great Lakes.
Kayce shot me an accusing look, "That necklace--"
"All this stuff," Jordyn cut him off, still trying to drive her point home, without realizing the narrow scrape she nearly rescued me from. "It's gotta be leading us somewhere, doesn't it?"
"You think the organization doesn't realize what's actually going on under the surface?" Derrick asked the group.
Jordyn nodded, Kayce rolled his eyes, and Tony remained silent, so I replied carefully and with plenty of conviction, "I think there is a whole lot that we don't know about the people who were supposed to supervise us." I gestured to the room around us, and the statue standing over us. "I mean, that's why we decided to strike out on our own, isn't it?"
Kayce stiffened. "We left because they were wrong," he maintained. "We figured something out and they didn't."
"And what do we have to show for it?" Tony snapped at long last. His eyes flashed as he spoke--they might have even turned a little golden-orange around the edges again. "We're stuck under this stupid statue with only one chance of getting out of this room and no idea what we might find next!"
His voice rang off the stones around us. Since when was he so passionate about our mission?

"Back to what I was trying to say," I said. "What if repent in the inscription was intended in more of the literal sense?"
Derrick scrunched his thick brows in confusion. "Like, how literal? Do we need to say something to the goddess, some kind of pass phrase or something?"
I shook my head. "That's not what it means. The word for repent is not a verbal apology, but it carries the connotation of leaving something behind. Turning around, and walking the other way."
I watched the others carefully, gauging their reactions to my words. Tony had a small smile on his face. He nodded to me. "So if the inscription tells us to repent, we're supposed to... walk the other way?" He glanced back toward the entrance, where large portions of the floor were still missing.
Kayce studied the path ahead of us. "Now I get it!" he mused. "Every time the statue has turned, one of us looked up at it, and then the floor would collapse." He glanced at me. "What if that was our mistake?"
I shrugged. "Only one way to find out." I stood and brushed the dust off my shorts. "We're going across that pathway, and while we do," I held up my finger and pointed around the group, "nobody look back at the statue."
Jordyn pulled her elbows in close to her body, grimacing as she fought the urge to do exactly the opposite of what I said. "What if you're wrong?" she whimpered.
Then we all die and it's basically my mom's fault, I thought. I grabbed her hand and gave her a comforting smile. "Just think of it like having the faith of a real worshipper."

We all linked hands, Tony in the front, then me, Jordyn, Derrick, and Kayce at the back.
"Eyes forward everybody," Tony muttered, as much to himself as to any of us. "Here we go!"
We marched forward onto the trail, keeping our heads bowed and our eyes on the back of the person in front of us. Halfway across, we could all hear the scraping stone of the statue turning, just like we feared, and the wall in front of us was bathed in a brilliant green light.
"Don't look back!" I called as the ground beneath us started to shake. Jordyn squeezed my hand so hard that I was sure my fingertips would pop at any moment. Small pieces of silt and debris broke away from the walls, and the cliffs on either side of us--but one by one, we passed through that doorway safely.
The pathway on the other side veered sharply to the right, and Tony had to squeeze a little to get his backpack through, as did I.

"Keep going!" Derrick hollered desperately as a true earthquake built underneath us.
"I'm trying!" I called back, clinging to Tony's sweaty hand as he rounded a second corner. Back and forth the trail snaked, giving me the feeling that we might actually be traveling on a slight decline. The walls were barely further apart than my outstretched elbows--but with the backpacks it felt even more cramped.
I couldn't even reach up to brush away the dust and dirt falling on my head, but then Tony let go of my hand at the same moment I burst out from between the narrow walls into a wide, dome-shaped room. Kayce stumbled in on Derrick's heels, and the earthquake faded into absolute stillness.

The room was so quiet that I could hear my own pulse drumming in my ears.
"Everybody okay?" I heard Tony's voice coming at me from above and behind me--but it was weirdly muffled, like it was coming out of a tube or something.
"I'm fine!" I hollered, feeling my way toward somebody, anybody!
"Ow, geez!" Jordyn's voice resounded right in my ear. "Did you have to yell like that?"
I wrestled my backpack off my shoulder and dug through the pockets to remember where my flashlight was. "Sorry," I muttered.
"What?"
"I said sorry!"
"What happened to your voice?"
".... Stay close!" Kayce's voice came from behind me again, along with Derrick shouting, "Where is everybody?" but again, the sound was distorted, like listening to the radio at very low volume.

I turned on my flashlight, and I could see Jordyn standing right next to me. She squinted and shaded her eyes. "Oh, there you are," she said. "Weird, I thought you'd moved."
I shook my head. "No, I've pretty much been here the whole time."

"Hey!" Derrick's voice came from the shadows to our right, while two more lights snapped on across to the far side of the room. Kayce and Tony, maybe?
One of the lights wobbled. "You've gotta come see this....found it... toward the light..."
Jordyn took a step toward the bobbing lights. "Do you think they've found something?"
I turned back to where I heard the voice coming from. "Derrick might have. I'm going to go check it out." I shifted the beam of my flashlight so she could see where I was pointing. "Go follow them, just to stay close to someone with a light. That must be Kayce and Tony. I'm going to see if I can find Derrick."
Jordyn nodded, and we parted ways.

I panned my flashlight slowly along the wall. I could see thick crags, and the odd patch of decorative filigree.
"Derrick!" I called. "Where are you?"
"Over here!" he replied. "Where are you?"
I couldn't see him, but at one point, I saw a shadowy gap along the wall. Moving closer, I discovered that it was a small opening behind a natural cutaway in the rock wall. From one angle, you couldn't even see it because the angles were so tightly aligned. From the other side, I saw a narrow doorway, and when I shined my flashlight into it, I could see the flicker of another light in the darkness.
"Is that you, Derrick?" I asked cautiously, creeping forward.
"Check this out!" his strained whispers seemed to come from the very stones themselves.

I squeezed through the doorway, and found myself in a room--an empty, dark room. Where was Derrick?
Something glinted on the back wall. I pointed my flashlight at the thing and gasped.
A massive mural of Auraea's face dominated the entire surface. Her eyes, once again, were filled in with huge green gemstones. This depiction resembled the woman I knew as my mother even more than the statue had.
"Whispers... fate... your fate... The whispers...They whisper... destiny... They whisper your fate..."

The ominous hissing voices overlapped and repeated the same few words and phrases, blowing past me on a breeze that sent a chill down my spine. I inched forward.
"The eyes... don't know you... you don't know... don't you know... the eyes, the eyes..."
I reached up and ran my fingers lightly over the large, smooth stone in her left eye. It wasn't faceted like a cut gemstone, but smooth, like a colored pane of glass. Through this, the beam of my flashlight caught on something shiny and metallic within the eye. I stopped and focused on it closely. What was that?
The ground wobbled beneath my feet, and I immediately dropped to my knees as another earthquake began. The ceiling and walls of that little room cracked and snapped, sending pebbles and dust raining down all around me. A hollow wailing started, like wind whistling through a narrow alleyway, and I felt it wash over me. My mind immediately conjured the idea of the wind-sprites, trapped somehow behind something, but I did not dare lift my head while things were falling on it.

I squealed and tumbled back onto my butt at the sound of a larger crash right in front of me. The shaking subsided and stopped, and when I finally picked up my head, I saw that the left eye gemstone had fallen out of its recess. Inside the hole, I could see something curved and metal.
I walked toward the mural, feeling the breezes coming out at me through the empty socket. Sitting inside that rounded hole was a bracelet of some sort. It looked to be made of bronze. I held it up to put on my wrist, but one thing stopped me: a pair of wicked-looking spikes on the inside. Just wearing the thing would risk puncturing the skin. Perhaps this was not so much jewelry as some ancient torture device. I stuffed it in my pocket.

In the corner of my vision, something moved along the far wall. I pointed my flashlight at it.
A second mural, but this one was different. It appeared where there hadn't been a mural before--perhaps the earthquake revealed it? In the mural, I saw the ocean with its curling waves, and an island coastline that looked a lot like Fourtouna. Rain pelted from clouds overhead, curling and swirling with high winds--and on the shore of the island stood a large red demon with a scowling face of pure evil, fangs bared as it extended a clenched, clawed fist. The design of the figure dominating the mural looked familiar. I squinted closer; where had I seen it before?
I gasped. The demon in the picture held something in its hand: a human, tiny and pitiful in its powerful grasp. Not just any human, though.

A female.
A girl with short dark hair.
Me.

"The walls whisper your fate... This is your fate... He comes for you... Egamad awakes..."
My heart pounded and my head swam and I could barely breathe as I wriggled and wrestled my way back through that little door.

The room outside was brighter than it had been before--partially illuminated by a large cistern of something flammable. I could distinguish the four figures of my friends spread out across the room.
"Pris!" I could hear Jordyn's call happening right next to my ear, even though she stood about fifteen feet away. "There you are! We've been looking everywhere for you!"
The sense of dread wouldn't leave me. Something was coming. Our presence here had awakened it. What had the voice said?
Egamad. The spirit associated with the amulet I'd given Tony. The demon Mom's letter tried to warn me about.
I frowned as I squinted toward Jordyn. "How are you doing that?"
"What?"
I sighed and cupped my hands around my mouth. "I said how are--"
"Turn and aim your voice at the wall," Kayce's voice instructed, sounding every bit as close as Jordyn did. I squinted and scanned the room till I saw him: standing at the far side of the dome, with his back to me! "The shape of the dome projects your voice. It also deadens sound inside it. We can only hear each other if we speak at the wall."
I turned around and followed his instructions. "This is so weird."

"But awesome!" Derrick spoke from another corner. "Boy, you missed it, Pris! We found Auraea's altar! This is it! This is the temple!"

The hollow roar from the small room with the mural built with a ferocity that caught in my throat. "Guys," I prayed that everybody could hear me, "we need to get out of here now."
"Aww, but this is so cool!" Jordyn complained.
"No, I mean it!" I wanted everyone to understand how urgent the situation was--but we couldn't do that if we weren't looking at each other. "Everybody head for the doorway."
"What's your hurry?" Tony asked. "I think I want to see what else is down here."

Anything else we could have said to one another was cut off as the room began shaking more violently than it had before. The rocks groaned and cracked under the pressure, and I could feel parts of the floor shifting and lifting under us.
I turned around, flipped acoustics or not. "EVERYBODY RUN!!" I screamed.
Jordyn reached the doorway at the same time I did. The guys would have farther to run, but by the time I reached the pathway in front of Auraea's statue, I could hear Derrick and Kayce shouting at each other behind me.

Enough of the walls had collapsed that it didn't matter that most of the floor was missing--we could pick our way across the large boulders to the door with the archway. The ground rumbled and rocked, with more stones tumbling and collapsing behind us.
I threw my body in a tumbling roll onto the ground as it kept shaking. Jordyn landed behind me, and I saw three more bodies hurtle through the archway. We lay still and dared not move until the shaking stopped.
I picked my head up as silence reigned around us.
"Did we make it?" I asked.
Kayce groaned and coughed as he sat up. "Ugh, man! That was, like, the least fun obstacle course ever!"
Egamad awakens... I immediately checked on Tony as the rest of the group sat up. He was laying down still, but when I crawled over, he gave a huge sigh and sat up.
"Oh man! That was a close one," he murmured. "Good instincts, Priscilla."
I nodded to him, hiding my worry behind a smile as my eyes traveled down his arm, all the way to his bare wrist.
"Tony..." I said, the trepidation mounting in my chest again. "Where's your bracelet?"

He blinked a moment, as if he couldn't remember. "Huh? Oh, right--I think it might have fallen off while we were trying to escape the collapsing temple." He stared at his wrist, the way one does after taking off a watch. "Odd, I never noticed it."
Right on cue, a gurgling roar escaped the dark opening behind the carved archway, and a billowing black cloud of smoke belched out of it. We all climbed to our feet and watched it curve away from us and disperse into the shadows of the forest. To me, it seemed that a few of the smaller wispy plumes had bent into the large horns, round jaws, and smaller fangs matching Egamad's depiction.
"That was weird," Derrick snorted.

A series of splintering cracks split the air, and the trees began swaying against one another. The ground beneath our feet separated, and as we watched, roots and vines began slithering toward us like a nest of snakes.
Kayce staggered back as a root popped out of the ground and nearly grabbed his ankle. He took off running back the way we'd come at full tilt.
"LET'S GET OUT OF HERE!!" he screamed, sending us into a frenzy after him.

The jungle was alive, galvanized by a demon who wanted revenge on the gods who had trapped him in the gem that was no longer his prison. Egamad was free--and he was coming for us.

<><><><><><><><><><>

<<<<< Previous                Next >>>>>>>