The long stone hallway held the sound of the footfalls like dry ground drinking spilled water, the walls of silence sipped the sounds.

A dry torch guttered in this darkened place. There was light in the cell with its thick wooden doors. The lock on the latch was opened and the visitor was allowed to see the prisoner. Then the hunched and shadowy jailor skipped away and vanished, keys jangling like a sound from everywhere.

His visitor, a nun, said a prayer and tried to give him some water before she was asked to leave by the shadowy figure in the door.

"Will you rot in here? Don't you wish to again see your home?" The torturer who worked for the powerful local deacon asked. The deacon's rank in The Church was disproportionately low to indicate the man's wealth and subsequent power. He owned four mines and two villages: Nerohall and Shalen, where the ore was made into weapons and armor and tools. He also had a torturer on the payroll.

"I know what kind of man you are. I will never make an agreement with you." The beaten villager spoke, finally. It earned him the gauntlet's kiss and he spat out a tooth and drooled blood.

"If that is true then maybe it is time to carve you into fishbait while you are still squirming and alive. But the deacon wants to see you. He has a deal for you. He plans to set you free. I said 'what for?' but the man is just too compassionate I guess." The torturer summoned the mean-old, one-eyed, hunchbacked jailer; who nimbly bounced into the jailcell and promptly unshackled the prisoner.

Despite having a mean reputation, the jailor was very enthusiastic and always complimented the prisoners:

"That was very brave: I can tell you that few are." The jailor stroked the hair of the beaten prisoner with meanness in his eye. Then he helped him up without damaging him further, but still with a mean attitude about it. Then, glaring meanly he let the prisoner have a few sips of water, chilled to make it more mean.

"Are you finished coddling the prisoner, jailor?" The torturer complained about the mean treatment.

The two of them took the prisoner to two of Deacon's Cathedral Guard, paid soldiers in archer's uniforms with some chainmail. They also wore tunics with crosses on them. Hired thugs.

They took the pulverized prisoner to the deacon, mostly having to help him along and making brown stains from his lips onto their white tunics. They resented this but couldn't rough him up without killing him so they simply dragged him the rest of the way amid grunts and undignified hugging and limping along.

There he sat on a clerical throne in a study where a massive fireplace was warming the great room to a comfortable temperature.

"I am the deacon." An ogre of a man spoke from the table. He wanted something and then took his time asking for it.

A butler served him a meal that he ate in front of the prisoner. He offered the man some food that was met with a desolate stare. The wine was not so blatantly declined. The prisoner sipped this with trembling hands and difficulty through his split lip, bleeding gums and swollen cheeks. Much of it spilled instead.

"Tell me what I want to know. Where is the cave full-of-treasure? My men have searched everywhere. When Sir Jeren arrived they were fine and spoke of a cave where they found jewels and gemstones, silver coins minted from Roman times. They found a wealth of treasure in a cave. They had Merlis with them and that is a man I greatly trusted. They brought you from those people they found living in hovels near the cave entrance. Dwarves you people are, they said. So who are you? You are no dwarf. And you won't talk: so there is something that you are hiding. People, most likely. I doubt you value the treasure or else you would have spent it and bought an entire kingdom. No, you are a simpleton; but you know something I do not. Give me the words that tell me where to go."

Then the deacon added. "I won't blame you that all of them died of some poison. I don't know that you caused that. I need you to talk." He said. Then the prisoner talked:

"Af Sha Aye. Af Sha Aye. You will die on the same day. Go to the sea and cast a feather. It will lead you no matter the weather. Away, away and then comes Af Ah Say, Af Ah Say." The man seemed drunk or mad, smiling and speaking in a busted voicebox, then he coughed.

The deacon's guest kept coughing until blood came out of his mouth. Then he started choking and eventually fell over dead. The deacon gestured for the body to be removed and it was.

Alone, he pondered the words of the dead man who had tried to protect his dwarven kin, although the man was clearly not a dwarf. Why Sir Jeren and Merlis had insisted they be dwarves, and this was not, must be irrelevant. So dwarves lived there in poverty and had raised a man as tall as any. The deacon planned to have them removed from his path, one way, or the other.

He went to the kitchen where he found the cook and the scullery maid. "I want some feathers from the chicken I just ate."

"Here my lord." The scullery maid provided the feathers.

The deacon took the feathers then gathered all twenty of his soldiers, his own private army. They rode from the cathedral's stables all the way to the sea.

There the deacon tossed the feathers from a cliff and watched them scatter uselessly. He growled when he realized that no indication was made of where to go. Cheated by a dead man: "How unfair!"

They started to ride back when he felt as though something stood beneath. He looked down at the sand dunes on the other side of the cliffs, also meeting the shore. A single black feather stood there where the dunes were.

He went to it as his men rode their horses behind. The sand was deep and hard to climb and they had to leave their horses: to graze and frolick on their own near the slope that led to the earlier bluffs. On foot the men trudged the bridge of packed sand as it soaked up the tide, dissolving eerily behind them.

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Upon the other side they stood at its base ready for a climb to its top under marbled storm clouds. The ascent revealed that they stood on an old stone structure, indeed it was a small step pyramid, half in-ruins and sunken on the sands. From the top the cascading sands revealed a golden crown atop the pyramid. This certainly meant great treasure would be near!

But instead the structure was no tomb, it was a beacon, shining only in daytime and across the water where the waves left. Under their dark clouds only light from above spilling in shafts through the clouds could show the way. From here, at low tide, a rocky island could be seen, and a path could be seen in the bright shaft of daylight, just under the water.

The deacon led his men wading through this. And as they clambered over the sharp mussels and slippery kelp and jagged stones they came to the other side of the rocky island. They stood in dripping chainmail and seaweed, the proud Deacon's Cathedral Guard. Thousands of tiny flies as vast clouds made the men feel small in their numerous relentlessness.

They went on, gradually wishing for rest and finding the rocks to be a sanctuary from The Fly's bite.

Here the afternoon sunlight shone into a grotto where small cooking pots clung over fires and ragged hovels stood miserably repaired from the last raid. A colony of small people living otherwise unmolested by the medieval world nearby.

"Drive them away. Beyond them, in that cave, we shall find our treasure!" The deacon bellowed. They looked up at the second intrusion to their home in recent moons. They offered no fight, but instead The Seapeople took to their rafts and retreated, leaving their unexplored caves for the soldiers of The Church.

The deacon had the torches they had brought lit from their smoldering campfires and cruelly, some of their hovels set fire to.

Then they started down the untouched stone steps, seeing the glitter of treasure below and crossing the threshold that the first to encounter this place had not. They had come by boat and said nothing of the pyramid.

Air was being forced out of the cave as some massive cycle of seawater roared below.

They reached the bottom of the stone steps and found no treasure, only a deep darkened cavern beneath the waves. Great salty stalactites glimmered all around and the roar of seawater falling as a massive undersea waterfall continued perpetually from some ancient time.

The physics of such a place seemed unearthly, impossible. The Deacon's Cathedral Guard had a great uneasiness. "Could this be Hell?"

They turned back then found only the branching paths, stone walkways that stood above bottomless cold winds from below. And so for miles in the darkness the way twisted around until they were descending ever deeper below.

Icicles of frozen seawater heralded the cold as they descended ever deeper into the catacombs and caverns, both carved and full of bones. These were great and empty and formed by some twisted force of nature.

A frozen, sunken temple.

None of this was the description of Merlis and the others. This place was darker and colder than any Hell. The cool breath of the frozen temple glimmering in sheets of ice before them, the cool breath burned their cheeks with frostbite.

The carcass of a massive insect-like thing lay folded on its back nearby. It was larger than a man, a wasp of some kind, the size of a horse, its sting like a dagger.

"What on Earth is that?" A soldier asked. The lights of the torches shone on its red body with white stripes. It had died of arrows and lay there dead and undecayed, preserved in the frozen realm of death.

"What are we doing here? There is no treasure. It's so cold we will soon freeze to death." The captain of the deacon's men complained. "We are going back."

"You would mutiny? Go then, no treasure shall be yours. You will be lucky if I do not cast the lot of you out for leaving me in this darkness, alone." The deacon was begging his men to stay, afraid they really would abandon him.

They did.

Their torches began to climb back the way they had come. They then disappeared back where the sea was falling from above in some impossible terrain. Up there was a cavern so vast and terrible that it was swallowing the ocean one gulp at a time as the tide reached some height. And all the way down had seemed like miles in the darkness.

The deacon was alone and then he heard the shrieks and chilling cries of his men where they had gone. When the noises ended he went his way towards them slowly and trembling in sheer terror.

Something had come and gotten them. Some demons of this frozen pit. Some horror of the cold and darkness that guarded this forbidden place.

Then he found them. All their bodies lay severed into chopped up bits and among them were the heads of ants the size of the skulls of dogs. Among his severed men were severed ants. But one body of a dead ant shone that the ones his men had killed were mere worker-drones. Soldier ants of even greater size and ferocity had come and battled his men. Some of them were mutated and their bodies lay with the arms of men instead of mandibles. Myrmidons or something from myth. Insects with the hands of men, and the power of speech.

"Affa Shay, Affa Shay..." The insect-thing chittered ridiculously. The deacon drew forth his sword and drove the point of the blade into the unholy, speaking devil. All dead now, all of his men and all of the ants. He followed the way they had come, hoping to find the real treasure: sunlight.

But the path led deeper and the place smelled of the dead. A catacombs and more cold greeted him. Worse he had found the larder of the ants and had to fight two of their workers alone in the dark. By shouting and swinging his sword and torch he drove them away, severing one antennae from one of them.

The deacon tried to go back the way he had come and again took a wrong turn.

The sweet smell of wine greeted him: ahead was a great face, a great human face like some kind of sphinx. The deacon stood in awe, unable to look away. He dropped the torch and sword, his hands ready to receive Communion.

It grinned with wisdom and from its lips was mead of honey. The deacon tasted it and was delighted by the tincture. He drank of it and became a reveler, drunk and merry by the flickering light of his discarded torch and it began to gutter out.

The glow of the honeycomb all around, dripping thick sweet resin as the man below danced naked. He howled and sang hymns with the words in ad-lib with profanity and the names of insect gods buzzing in his skull.

Thousands of eyes watched him spinning and laughing below.

Then with a golden mask of the face of Man: their god came forth. Sweet something before it, to preserve and to savor for a very long time. It caused an echoing silence, vibrating the gaze of so many millions of almost-still insects. A praying, laughing and mad sweet part inside the god's digesting belly is what the deacon expected to become.

The creature was like a queen bee of massive, gargantuan, elephantine size. Its sage, old design never forgot anything and it was eternal. The gold-ringed antennae moved in slow silence above and its mask glimmered in the honeycomb glow.

"Aph-shai, Aphshai!" The deacon laughed hilariously. He stood naked before the god. Then he fell to his knees and began to vomit. Then he wept miserably.

It lifted its mask and shown its hunger to him. Then it took him inside to become a part of it, its jaws closing around the deacon and engulfing him. Alive he was swallowed into it, still breathing and praying. Its fleshy insides conveyed him snugly and hotly into its horde chamber. There its young awaited this sacrament.

He could feel them crawling onto him in the wet blanket of darkness. They were speaking to their mother in their insect language. Having digested the honey of their wisdom, he knew what they were saying, before they began to feed:

"Thank you."