The torches, rough things made out of branches wrapped with rags rubbed with cooking grease, smoked dreadfully as they walked down the corridor, but lit the way well enough for Cara to see what came ahead.
The walls were solid stone, carefully bricked out of what Cara recognized was the local granite and fit together like an ornate puzzle without the help of mortar.
This tunnel—this pyramid—was a work of art, born of love, she realized with something close to awe. To dig this passage into marshland, and line it with rock to keep the waterlogged soil at bay… This place was a marvel of time and resources.
Age had eroded what had once been flawless joins and connections, however, and the further they traveled down the tunnel, the more moisture seeped from the floor and the walls.
Cara’s once clean braid glittered with the ceiling’s offerings of water droplets and other bits she refused to identify.
The torches sputtered each time a water droplet hit the head, and Cara almost called the whole trip to a halt when her torch was all but extinguished from an especially thick drop.
“I have extras!” Dayton showed her a long, unlit object that Cara assumed was a spare torch that he’d made up when she wasn’t looking. “And I can relight it if it goes out. Let’s keep going! These hieroglyphics are gorgeous.”
They were certainly ornate, Cara had to admit. The symbols and characters kept their color despite the damp, almost glowing underneath their veil of moisture in the light of the torches.
Cara reached out with one hand to trace the curves of one figure, clearly pregnant with the child she held in the next panel.
“Okay. But behind me.”
An hour into the tunnel, and Cara wondered where it might end. But she felt a breath of fresh air on her cheek, on the back of her neck, and knew that an opening must be in front of them.
A grand doorway yawned open in the darkness.
Before she’d had time to appreciate the gleam of cut gems or the cedar paneling, she’d already stepped through. Her boots scuffed against the floor’s flagstone, throwing echoes into the nearest corners of what must have been a grand feast hall, once and long ago.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The banquet table was draped in cobwebs.
The webs fluttered in the slight breeze from the open doorway, catching nothing but stone dust and breath. The dry threads caught and swallowed their torchlight.
Branching mounds rose like a miniature mountain range down the tabletop’s center, capped in snowy piles. Cara realized they were—had been—candelabra. Some even still held smooth tapers, which had long since turned musty gray.
Dozens of empty chairs were drawn up to the table’s edge, marching on into darkness, as if ghosts were eager to eat from a long-dead feast.
However, Cara could see that one chair—there, at the end of the table closest to the door, its back to the threshold—wasn’t empty.
It was more of a throne, really, magnificently decrepit and draped in webs. One of two great wooden finials had snapped off and leaned drunkenly against the base.
Cara couldn’t see anything through the webbing but a vague shape of slumped, emaciated shoulders…
…and a pair of great antlers arching from his head, dancing in the shadows of the torch.
Cara’s blood chilled. Numb fingers shook, dropped her torch.
It bounced against the flagstones and rolled toward the table, making the yellowed ivory tines stutter, fade, grow in the shadows.
“Cara?” Dayton’s torch approached from behind, its light making Cara a giant in the darkness. She watched her shadow-self flicker before her, leaning against the antlered lord’s great seat. “Is everything—by the gods above and below.”
The light lowered, clattered to the floor as Dayton threw himself down in supplication to the figure before them, confirming Cara’s suspicion.
“So it’s Him.”
Dayton only shifted behind her. Cara imagined he was grinding himself closer to the ground, in the presence of the deity who had protected him this entire trip.
“It’s the Feast of Thanksgiving, then,” she said conversationally, as cold sweat dripped down her back to soak her shirt. “Which would mean…”
Cara looked down the length of the festival table, its opposing end swallowed in the darkness. Raising her torch, swallowing her fear, she took a step forward—
—and the room went black.
But not dark.
Purple-blue light dimmed, flared, replaced that lost from the torches. It traced the shape of things beneath the coats of dust and cobwebs.
Cara could suddenly see the bones of a great bird, beautifully presented in a crown of feathers two feet tall, its meat outlined in a faded violet glow.
Goblets flushed, filled with mead, ale, wine.
Candle flames quivered above the broken candelabra and the wall sconces they couldn’t have seen before with hearts of ice-white.
Chairs filled with the whispers of residents past—not truly present, save for an echo of occasions long since celebrated and mourned.
Dayton whimpered behind Cara, but made no other sound. Cara herself was frozen in shock, in awe, in terror at the feast that had suddenly been reborn before them.
And from the opposite end of the table, now lit in negative darkness, their hostess stirred.