The Underworld
Stygian night descended upon us, held at bay only by the flickering light of my torch, as we descended a wide flight of steps that were meticulously carved into the stone. The polished walls cast our images in myriad angles. The sheer scale and precision of the carving and polishing of such a place were beyond my comprehension.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, we entered another gateway beneath an arch fifteen feet above our heads. The room ahead spread out before us, its walls adorned with even more intricate carvings, and much to my surprise, hundreds of bells of different sizes and shapes dangled from the ceiling."One of the tests or traps you mentioned," I guessed as we crossed the threshold.
Amala stopped and spun in a circle, her gaze taking in all the possibilities. "All these bells..."
"We just need to ring the right bell, or the right series of bells." I said with a grin at Amala, knowing the possibilities could be endless. I pointed to the left wall where there were three murals, larger and more intricate than the other carvings. "Maybe those are the directions."
I started to walk across the room, heading toward the reliefs carved into the stone, when Amala shouted for me to stop.
I heard her warning, but a step too late.
My foot came down on a stone pressure plate that protruded from the tiles on the floor by an almost imperceptible height. A deep, thunderous reverberation assaulted us as the ground shuddered, and chips of stone and dust rained down.
I spun and ran for Amala, catching her arm and yanking her after me. Stone erupted from the base of the doorway—fast, brutal—surging upward like a living tide of rock. With every stride, it seemed to accelerate, as if the passage itself were trying to swallow us whole.
We surged forward, lungs burning, boots hammering stone.
Too late.
The sealing slab was already above my reach, sliding down with pitiless speed. I jumped anyway—one last desperate leap—my fingers scraping cold granite.
Then it slipped past my grasp and slammed home with a thunderous, bone-shaking crash.
Silence.
Sealed.
“We are trapped.” Amala moaned.
“We just need to...” Before I could finish my words, the rumble and grind of more hidden mechanisms reverberated across the chamber. With a final shudder and grinding click, narrow portholes snapped open along the walls, vomiting out rushing streams of sand. Thus, I realized our true peril. We were not just trapped; the chilling realization dawned that we were to be buried alive, the cloying, abrasive air already stealing our breath.
This would be our tomb.
I kept the torch raised, its guttering flame throwing frantic light across the wall as the first streams of sand hissed down around our boots. The murals came alive in the flickering glow—priests of Bon locked in eternal combat with twisted spirits and demons. Whatever answer we needed was carved here… if we could read it in time.
Amala stood staring at the rising sand, eyes vacant.
I grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Amala! These reliefs—what do they mean? The answer is here somewhere!”
She blinked hard, as if surfacing from a dream, and shoved past me toward the walls. Sand already surged to her knees, dragging at her legs as she fought through it.
“That’s the Drekpa… and Tonpa Shenrab Miwo,” she said, pointing at the first carving.
The demon was a tall, serpentine horror, its twisted face frozen in malice. Opposite it stood the Bon founder, Phurba raised, lips carved mid-chant. Even to my untrained eyes, the message was clear: ritual, repetition, submission.
Amala moved on, shouting above the rising hiss of sand. “The Mamo spirits—and that is the Nyen.”
The chamber filled with the frantic whisper of falling grains. We had to yell to hear each other.
“What are they doing?” I demanded.
“The first—Drekpa—it shows a bell,” she said, tracing the carving with shaking fingers. “Symbols of the Phurba. Three times.”
Sand surged to mid-thigh as I found the right bell. The air thickened with grit. Dust clung to our skin and crept into our mouths and lungs. We coughed, choked, blinked through stinging tears.
I fought through the growing drifts toward the first hanging rope. Any wrong choice would open another sand shaft. I wrapped my hand around the cord and rang the bell.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Somewhere above us, I heard hidden mechanisms shift.
Amala staggered to the next mural. The Mamos twisted across the stone—wild-haired, weaponed, feral. A priest faced them with a damaru drum, its rhythm carved into the stone: sharp… deep… sharp.
“Banishment. Two tones!” she shouted.
"But which bell?"
Amala hesitated only a moment. She clapped her hands together and yelled, "Three bells in a row marked with the weapons of the Mamos!"
I did not question her as I waded, then swam through the waist-high sand to a trio of bell ropes. The bells were marked with a dagger, a trident, and a flaming torch. I rang them in rhythm—high, low, high—my arms burning as hidden shutters slammed somewhere in the walls.
The sands kept coming.
The Nyen loomed across the final mural: an ogre-like hulking earth spirit of stone and soil, exposed by a vibrating shield carved around it. The bell beneath it bore the same glyphs.
The ceiling felt closer now. The air was choking, gritty, and alive.
I seized Amala’s arm and dragged her toward the final bell. We crawled the last stretch on our stomachs, the sand swallowing our legs, our hips, our ribs. The torch guttered, its light dimming to a smear of gold.
I clawed sand from the bell’s mouth until my fingers bled.
The glyphs matched.
I wrapped the rope around my wrist and pulled with everything I had left.
The deep, harmonious clang exploded through the shrinking chamber, the sound vibrating through bone and stone alike. I held it there with my weight, keep the note alive as the mural depicted the barrier around the Nyen.
For a heartbeat, the world hung in darkness and dust.
Then the temple answered.
True to its purpose of protection, the final bell awakened something buried deep within the stone. The wall ahead fractured, hairline cracks racing outward before splitting wide under the crushing pressure of the rising sand.
Then it gave way.
The chamber exploded—a floodgate torn open. Sand blasted through the rupture, a roaring, grinding wave that seized us and tore us from our feet.
We were powerless as the torrent hurled us through the collapsing threshold, tumbling end over end, stone and grit battering us like shrapnel. When it finally spat us out into the next passage, I was plunged into absolute darkness. How long I lay buried, I do not know, but consciousness eventually clawed its way back. My body felt hollowed out—every bone a vessel of gritty sand, my lungs burning with the desperate need for air.
I instinctively felt with my hands and pushed with my legs, scrabbling at the loose earth until I broke through and sucked in the first foul mouthful of damp cave air.
I choked, spitting sand and clawing it from my eyes and tongue as I fought to see.
“Amala!”
My voice cracked raw in the dark.
Panic, cold and sharp, burned through me as I clawed blindly through the mound, the horrifying images of her buried alive—crushed, suffocating, silent—driving my frantic movements.
Then I heard it.
A faint groan.
I crawled toward the sound, my hands sweeping through the cool, damp darkness until my fingers brushed against something unnervingly soft and warm.
Her hand.
Half-buried, her weak fingers twitched against mine.
'No—no, no,' I rasped, digging.
I tore into the sand until my nails split and bled anew, ripping her free inch by agonizing inch until her weight collapsed into my arms.
She came back with a violent gasp, dragging in the foul cave air like she'd broken the surface of deep, suffocating water. Her hands clawed at my chest, eyes wide and wild, before slowly unfocusing as recognition dawned.
“Amala,” I said, my voice breaking. “You’re free. You’re out.”
Slowly, the panic left her body as her breathing evened and the tremors faded.
"I thought… I was still drowning," she whispered, the lingering fear evident in her voice.
"No," I said, pulling her closer as the heavy, expectant silence of the cave pressed in around us. “We made it.”
I looked ahead into the black throat of the passage.
“But this isn’t over.”
Comments
Post a Comment