Eli POV
__________________
The next sight that greeted me was a wall of stone as I slammed into it. After a second of disorientation, my sense of direction asserted itself and I found that the stone wall was actually the floor. Breathing in as much air as my lungs could hold occupied me for almost a solid minute.
" What the fuck, What the fuck was, What the fucking shit" This unfiltered stream of consciousness continued unabated from my mouth for a little while longer in between my ragged gasps for air.
When I finally managed to calm down to the point where I was only shaking, I could finally take in my surroundings. The sense of pain from my skinned knees was the first thing I noticed. The other was the fact that I was on some kind of an altar. It was a plain circular structure with steps emanating outwards. The stones used to make it were pitch black, while the cave that held it was of a more drab brown.
The other noticeable feature was the two corpses on the right and left. They were both men, one bald and the other with long red hair, and both were left completely nude. The freshness of the blood made me think I might be able to save them but I saw that their bodies were deathly pale from the slashes across their throat.
This was all lit up by small bowls with flames in them scattered around the place but one of them seems to have caught a robe laying on the floor aflame.
Actually, looking around I noticed it was more than one black robe strewn about. I went to pick one up to cover my nudity, but the skull symbol on them made me reconsider this decision. I wasn't necessarily opposed to such fashion choices but the faded stains of what I suspected to be blood told me they were of a purpose more sinister than any clothing sense, their close proximity to the men who I assumed were murdered only further entrenched this decision.
But I was not too embarrassed about my nude state. I have often got many compliments about my short silver hair, strong chin, and purple eyes. I had a weaker build with some baby fat on my current features, a consequence of abandoning the old body for the clone of my 16-year-old self, now near 17 after the months-long chase. At least I wouldn't suffer the horrors of puberty this time around, the only enhancement I'd managed to get into the body before I had to mind jump into it to make my escape. I could have gotten a few other gifts into it but having to hack your way through the body grower to allow more mind chips than what was supposed to be allowed takes a lot of time.
The cave was a long corridor with rows of stone pews on each side. I went through each row of them until I found a pair of pants, a grey loose shirt, and a pair of sandals. They were slightly odd though, being made of a rough wool and the sandals were made of wood and leather. I thought briefly on the considerable wealth the owner of these items must have had to afford real wool and actual wood for his clothing.
I then headed out to the back of the cave which led me to the right. Walking a little further along this corridor I eventually arrived at a giant iron door. The door was askew with two more black robes laying in the doorway. On top of one of them laid a small silver crown, which I was tempted to take but my apprehension about this whole place, and anything associated with it, was stronger than the mix of greed and curiosity running through my mind right now.
After taking a quick scan with my mind chip I quickly accepted the expected prompt from my AI vision sensors for confirmation without looking and stepped over the pile of robes. I noticed then that the prompt didn't actually show up. As I was fiddling with it I heard some footsteps behind me. Looking down the hall only a few steps from me was the bald murdered man. His dead eyes having a hunger I assumed was only found in life as he looked at me.
I quickly slammed the door behind me as I heard his soft moans slowly approaching. As he began beating on the door, I threw down the bolt to hold the door in place.
Turning around and taking off with a brisk walk I then came into a hall that gave off the vibes of being a temple, but without any natural lighting. The floor had long white marble tiles. The walls were made up of more bare cave walls but the roof had sharp lines gouged into it that pulsed with a green energy. These lines would start at the meeting of the wall and the roof then gradually sloped towards the bare iron doors of the temple at the opposing side of the hall. To the left and right of me were a set of railed stairs which led up to the balcony hanging a few feet above my head. The two fire bowls hanging above the two other passage ways on both sides of the hall were the only illumination for my eyes.
Not wanting to wait for the owners of this temple to find me I immediately bee lined for the dual iron doors,which I assumed was the exit. The sight that greeted me as I cracked open the door was that of a small girl with long brown hair, green eyes, and half a face. Her hungry eyes and and quick attempt to bite my arm left me in no doubt of her intentions for me. Before slamming the door shut I got a quick glimpse at the teeming masses behind her. They were barely illuminated by faint blue light strewn on the floor but they seemed to be packed reasonably tight, which bode ill for any force assaulting them as the cavern that held them was so vast the walls couldn't be seen as this sea of dead stretched on without end.
Feeling the faint slams against the door, I quickly pulled down the bolt between the two doors.
Taking a moment to collect myself, I listened intently for a few seconds. "Odd, I slammed that door loud enough to wake the.... dead" I allowed himself a slight grin at my own pun " I would expect a guard to come see what the ruckus was".
But the temple was unnervingly silent, the constant banging on the iron doors aside, and remained so for the few seconds until I heard a hissing and popping sound with a strong odor coming from the side entrance to my left.
After a few seconds I realized what it was I was hearing and smelling. It was food burning. Since this might be the most mundane encounter so far I decided to carefully tip-toe over to the entrance and look inside.
It looked like a cafeteria with wooden tables and more of the grim brickwork but with even more of the robes everywhere. The source of the sound and noise was coming to my right from what looked like the kitchen area.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I still carefully made my way there and what I saw was a long row of black pots and grills hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room in various stages of burning various soups and meats. As I tried to turn off the stoves to prevent a fire I noticed something odd. None of them had a dial or a button so I looked down near the burner to see if it was closer.
"What the fuck!" I said involuntarily.
My eyes were telling me something that had to be a lie. The flat stone underneath the pot was wrapped in leather. But on top of the leather was a flame seemingly coming out of it with no mechanical parts.
My hand came down to by the block as I tried to move a stray piece of leather connected to the rest of the main block. But when I touched it the flame went out. Perplexed I tried touching it again and sure enough the flame came back. I turned them all off then looked one over closely.
"Nanites, probably. Although having its trigger on the stray leather strap would be a poor design choice. A simple remote would suffice for such a simple function. But where does it store its fuel?" I thought idly to myself.
Come to think of it, where is the rest of the tech in this building? I hadn't seen a single wire, data port, or auto vacuum. Were they really so dedicated to that rustic sense of fashion they used cleaning clouds of micro machines and ran everything over wireless? Expensive but if you got the money who am I to argue?
Then I wanted to slap my self for stupidly fiddling with a murderous cults kitchenware. On the other hand if they haven't found me now, then they aren't here.
Deciding to take the risk that no one else was around, I went back out to the main entrance area and went up the curved stairs up to the balcony. On reaching the top I saw a wooden door towards the back end of the balcony. The entire balcony area was bare as it only had the smooth stone of the half circle floor and chest high rail leaning over the entrance below. To my thinking this was probably an area for inspiring the troops with speeches, so that door hopefully led to the head honchos room.
The room was more like a small cell with no bars. There was a simple bed, a table with a candle burning on it, a chair, and one chest which was open. But when I touched the table I noticed that it was made of real wood and supposing that the other items were also of genuine make I supposed that these were enough of a status symbol. Stepping over the red robe laying on the floor on my way to the chest, I found a small leather bound book and a small dagger.
Sitting down on the chair, I just stared at the book while still shivering in the seat. My hands had been shaking this whole time, being only temporarily stilled when going over the impossibility I found in the kitchen, and now I noticed how my teeth were too tightly clenched. I idly ran my hands through my hair for a few seconds. After facing certain death I had a sense of calm, but after that stellar journey, cosmic horror and the disorientation of being ripped into two different, unknown environments my nerves were showing their limits.
"1,2,3,4,...." I recited, which calmed me down around the 35 mark. I opened up the book and began reading the text of the first passage, which was done in a handwritten style.
" I don't know exactly what day it is, I've been slinking through this glorified cave for what feels like weeks. When I was offered this job I thought my talents as a dual wind and water mage would be for healing, not this abominable Necromancy filth. But when people who could afford to dish out the kind of gold I jokingly put down as my demands for pay, start showing you something this illegal after you accept, well I don't fancy they would let a loose end like me go if I re---".
'Wait, how am I reading this?'
I looked at the whole of the text and I could understand it just fine. But when I tried looking at the individual characters all I saw was a bunch of worms that a cat had mistaken for a scratching post. I took a photo of this page with my mind chip to compare it with known languages back in my home galaxy. The odd thing was that no matter how hard I tried the chip wouldn't come back up with a prompt. ' maybe its still trying to reset after this long trip' I thought somewhat idly.
"--fused their generosity. Their ability to find me in the first place despite my best efforts helped suppress any thoughts of escape I may have had. Damn greed was going to get the better of me one of these day's and I guess that day had come. But they paid up front and in full, so in the end I stored the gold with my folks and headed out with them. The trip here wasn't too long but when it's taken in the back of a bumpy carriage with a black sack on your head, 10 minutes would be too long."
I skimmed through until I got to the part talking about this temple. I wanted to know what fresh hell he had helped dump me into, not this guy's auto biography/bitching.
"First day here and I am already getting a damn dress code. This fucking robes so itchy, but keeping the zombies from trying to bash down the door to get a bite out of you is a worthy trade off, I guess. Still doesn't make walking through all of them with supplies less vomit-inducing."
Sensing the importance of this information, I immediately went to put on the red robe and looked out over the smooth stone lisp of the balcony. The now dead silence told me I had made the correct decision, the dent sticking out in the left iron door that I could swear wasn't there before was just further confirmation. I then got back to reading the book.
"This necromancy business is weird. Typically you use the circle to summon the spirit of the deceased. Then route it back into the intent triangle on the skull, BAM!, you got a fresh undead slave. Which is what I assumed we'd be doing considering the zombie army not a fucking ball throw away from my bed. No, these rituals are different. Instead the circles are being used for some type of interaction with the souls from some poor sods but half of the mana output is to the bigger summoning circle made of black stone the other half is to a massive power healing circle directly above the black circle altar on the ground."
'Here we go, we are finally getting to the meat of the meat of the matter' I thought with some impatience. I skimmed through a few pages seeing various diagrams of circles, squares and triangles. But I couldn't figure out the meaning of it if my life depended on it. Towards the last page came some scribbling that bespoke of the writers fear with its jaggedness and uneven style.
"It's been a few days since my last writing, I was too afraid to put my thoughts down to paper but now is the time. This isn't a new cavern and I am not the first to work on this project. They cleaned the whole site spotless of any work my predecessors did. But I guess they cant afford to get rid of the circular altar because the stones show the tiny distortions of repeated use that only a caster mage with a water affinity could distinguish, and the 'assistants' seemed a little too familiar with the supplies I would need and the procedures I would have to perform. My unknown employers are also becoming impatient, not in so many words but the tone is gradually turning aggressive in our various correspondence. I am going to have some of the safety controls overruled. If any essence of power is detected the lure will bring it in and if it detects the special essence we have been targeting it will bring it in at full speed. If I...die, this book will open and allow anyone to read it. I don't know what good it will do but maybe I can bribe one of the laborers in the caravan that drops off our supplies to get it somewhere important after our first test with the new parameters and the crew comes by to pick up the sample".
The sample.
Their coming to pick me up.