She was so cold. She shivered awake in the dark. She could make out shapes with the scant refracted sunlight from above, faintly glimmering off the frozen cave walls. She wished it was dark, for then she wouldn't see the people around her. Their blood had frozen dark and icy where they fell. Their faces perfect and untouched by decay, still twisted into a rictus of pain and betrayal, only obscured by the ice crystals beginning to spread across their bodies. She stumbled to her feet, unable to stomach looking at their faces any longer. The beating of her heart was loud in her ears, and it felt as though the cave itself shook with each beat, a rhythm that only got louder until she scrambled forward, eyes fixed on those distant shafts of sunlight as she tried to escape what lay around her.

###

Warm sunlight lit the low stone overhang she sheltered in. She woke with a yawn, stretching her arms out and banging them on the stone walls with a yelp. She rolled out from under the overhang, staring up at the sheer stone walls, and up above, the dense and noisy greenery of the jungle lit by the morning sun.

She rose with a sigh. Her first stop was by a rocky pool further reinforced by fresh green leaves, past her failure of a ladder of now broken twigs and vines. She grabbed a bundle of sticks from nearby to skim out the bits of leaf litter that had fallen into her pool during the night, before plunging her head in to take a big gulp. Water dripped down her chin as she raised herself back up, taking a wary look at the cave that opened up at the end of the ravine.

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"No use delaying, I suppose." Her voice raspy with disuse.

She plodded down, barely having to duck down into the narrow cave as it meandered downwards. The humid heat of the jungle above began to fade. The air cooled, and the walls began to sparkle with ice. She picked up a lantern from a stone shelf, just as the sunlight began to fade from above as she went deeper. It got colder, until the cave opened up into a wider chamber, marked by wooden supports in good condition and the marks of picks on the wall. She set down her lantern nearby on a rock, picking up a cleaver from the ground, and strode over to the neat line of bodies at the back of the chamber, rimmed with frost and ice. Time to get to work.

On the surface the tinder caught again, and the kindling finally began to burn, so she stopped flicking sparks from her hands into her firepit. Skewers of meat on green wood rested on the stone nearby, and she washed blood and soot from her hands in rainwater while the fire caught. Soon the smell of roasting meat filled the ravine, filling her with the usual mix of hunger and shame. Her feelings were muted though, and her disgust at this point practically locked away. She'd grappled with it greatly in the first days, but at this point she acknowledged that she'd simply gotten used to it. It was horrible how easy it was for the unimaginable to become mundane.

Once she had finished her grisly meal, her attention turned to the books she’d laid down on a slanted rock, as her fingers dipped into the clay bowl of blood leftover from her cooking. The bones had been laid out into the ritual already, and she traced the symbols from the pages in blood directly onto the bones themselves, ending it with a jagged symbol painted across the top of the skull itself. She scribbled a few notes on her log book with her unbloodied hand, under the heading ‘Attempt 7’. Her handiwork complete, she surveyed for a moment.

“I’m sorry father, but I hope you can help me one last time. I won’t die here.”

So she began the chant, and this time, the grasping, hungry magic took hold.