https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2Fx2Z0USi.jpg [https://i.imgur.com/x2Z0USi.jpg]

  In case the reader has never seen the sun explode, here's what that’s like:

  First, there’s a bone-vibrating crack that rolls across the land, echoing over the hills in the distance. The clouds thicken until you feel like ducking, and then they split apart like an eye opening in the sky. Right in the center of that split, you see the sphere of the sun go dark and rupture into black chunks that drift apart, and the sky floods with darkness deeper than any night you’ve ever known. The ground shakes up and down and cracks snake across its surface, and from each crack bursts leaping flames of all sorts of colors — pink, green, blue, yellow, red, any color you can think of.

  People screamed and ran every which-way, trying to avoid becoming human steak on the underworld’s rainbow barbecue. I threw myself back against the wall of a house, partly to keep my balance with the ground shaking and partly to keep away from the mad rush. The ground under my foot split, and I jumped away right before a jet of startlingly purple flames burst out. The priests dropped to their knees and raised their hands high, calling up in a language I didn't understand. Flashing lights and hard shadows made masks of people’s faces and turned their panicked scramble into a jumbled, macabre puppet dance.

  Mothers and fathers grabbed their children and dragged them out of the square. I thought I spotted one man who scooped his family into the wheelbarrow and ran off with them. In a surprisingly brief mayhem of screaming, dust, and flames, the square was deserted. The only people left were the priests, who stood screaming after the people, and me, who had no idea where to go or what to do. I stayed clinging to the wall of the cabin. Most of me was terrified and couldn’t decide whether to run or find a place to hide, but there was a tiny part that was weirdly excited. I didn’t know what kind of cosmic catastrophe was unfolding, but whatever it was, it was significant. I wasn’t about to miss it.

  The earthquake settled down to a low rattle, and the multicolored flames steadied into lapping, fluttering seams across the ground. The priests gave up calling after the people and ran for the crusty fountain pool. One lifted up a giant tile, and they both disappeared under it like roaches.

  Now that was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. The excited part of me won out, and I left the safety of the cabin wall to dodge dying spurts of rainbow fire on my way to the fountain. Working my fingers under the tile and hoisting it up, I found myself peering down a short drop to a white stone floor. Maybe an entrance room to a larger compound buried beneath the town? Finally, we were getting somewhere!

  In hindsight, I probably should have been more careful about venturing underground while the earth was rattling sporadically, but I might have been a tad over-enthusiastic.

  I left the tile lying off to the side and hopped down the hole, boots landing with a scuffly tap. The ceiling was held up by ancient wooden beams and just low enough that I had to stoop. In the corner were a stack of old crates that I presumed the priests would use to climb out again, and against the far wall, the tile floor fell away as a staircase that led down a tunnel shaft. Distant mutters and thumps came from the shaft, the sound of the priests feeling their way in the darkness.

  I crept to the mouth of the stairwell, but all I could see with the dim light from the entrance hole behind me was the outline of the first few stairs. The rest of the staircase fed into a deep pit of blackness. Then the blackness at the bottom flickered, and golden lamplight flared across the bottom steps. The light streaked along the walls of the stairwell, weakening as it went, but it was enough to see where to put my feet.

  I made the first step carefully, the tile stairs almost slippery with a fine layer of dust. While the stairs were made of that imported stone I’d been seeing around, the walls were splintery wood and packed dirt, like the walls of a mineshaft. I’d have guessed that the white stone was part of the original compound, but the mineshaft walls were built after it was buried. I didn’t know enough about the architecture to speculate whether the compound had sunk or if it had been buried by other means.

  The stairs were steep, and I didn’t see how the priests could have gone down so fast without falling. By this point I was close enough to hear the priests in whatever chamber was at the bottom, clacking back and forth like flustered ants in wooden-soled sandals and casting shadows across the floor as they moved. I stopped about two-thirds of the way down so I wouldn’t be seen or heard.

  “Do they come? Has the time arrived? Shall they be reborn?” one of them was saying.

  That didn’t sound good. Call me paranoid, but creepy temple guys muttering about rebirth in an underground lair always gives me a little shiver down my spine.

  “We have made no collection. The gods will have no offering. We shall be punished severely!”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “We must flee!”

  “Can one hide from the gods?”

  “One can certainly try!”

  The other priest didn’t say anything for a second. “…I am with you, my brother.”

  I eased down a couple more steps so I could peer into the chamber. I only dared to go far enough to see a sliver of the floor, but that sliver was enough to see their feet and ankles as they hustled about, grabbing knick-knacks, pouches, and holy articles and dumping them unceremoniously into bags. Once they had everything they wanted, they took up the lantern and clumped down another tunnel that led out of my line of sight. I think one of them slipped, because there was a clatter and some grunting.

  The light gradually disappeared from the bottom steps, and then the stairwell was pitch dark again. I waited until I couldn’t hear them anymore, then picked my way down the rest of the stairs. From the way the sound of my boots traveled around the room, it was considerably sizable and mostly empty. I dug around in my pocket for a matchbook and struck a light, the little flame highlighting the planes of the room.

  It was a surprisingly grand lair. The ceiling rose nearly two stories high, supported by elegant stone-carved buttresses dangling with cobwebs, and stone walls circled the room. No piles of jewels and gold, unfortunately. The priests had probably just made off with anything of value. I spotted a tin lantern on the ground nearby, and as my match went out, I knelt and pored over it with my fingers, finding the little door and a stump of a candle inside. I struck another match to light it, and golden pinpoints of light streamed from the hole-punched designs on the lantern, dotting the floor and the wall near me.

  I raised the lamp to get a better look around. The priests’ footsteps had made criss-crossing scrapes in the dust that coated the floor, and the few articles of wooden furniture were termite-riddled and splintering. A broken table lay overturned, and a ramshackle cupboard had been thrown open, one of its doors hanging from a single hinge. Broken dishes and old, rusty priestly instruments --tongs, some kind of waving stick with beads, a ceremonial poker-- had been pushed to the edges of the room. The thing that caught my attention, though, was an elaborately crafted grating bracketed to the wall. It looked to be made of bronze or iron, running in a half-circle around the perimeter of the room, and was designed into eleven squares interconnected by twisting, vine-ing arms.

  The earth rumbled with another aftershock, and I skittered back to the mouth of the staircase in case the architecture didn’t hold up. Sprays of dust sifted down from the ceiling, but everything held.

  Easing out into the open, I moved to get a closer look at the grating. I had never seen a crafting style like that. So many small filaments of metal carefully twined together in interlinking designs. It was artwork, and uncharacteristic for the practical, down-to-earth Muir I was familiar with. Most likely, it was very, very old. It looked like there was something carved into the wall above it, so I wiped off the grunge with my sleeve. Words had been etched into the stone face, but it was in some ancient script I couldn’t read.

  The ground lurched under my feet, and I stumbled and caught myself on the grating. All at once, the dirt exploded off the grating and blasted my face, and I staggered back, blinking and spitting. I sneezed about five times in a row, and blobs of vivid color glowed through my watery vision. My vision cleared, and my mouth fell open when I saw the source of the glowing colors.

  Each square in the grating was now blazing with a colored light, streaking the walls and ceiling with panels of each color. The dust still swirling in the air made a rainbow haze between them all, and as it settled, the different squares became more distinct. The yellow light fizzed and sparked behind the grating, the green gently kaleidoscoped, the brown roiled impatiently, and the red shuddered and flared up like an angry flame. The black seemed to suck in the light, instead of shine it. The metal grate that blocked them off was miraculously polished, gleaming in the multi-hued light coming from the squares. I could tell now that behind each square was a cavity, and that the metal latticework of the grating served to lock in whatever they contained.

  I edged just a teensy smidge closer to the nearest square, the orange one, squinting to see what the source of its light was. The light seared my face like glowering pavement in summer, but I could just make out a brilliantly orange shape that I thought looked like an earring with a dangling gemstone. I shimmied over and squinted into the yellow square, and inside that was a bracelet of braided gold. All of the cavities I checked had some kind of gemstone or jewelry -- pink and purple necklaces, a red armband, a blue ring.

  Magic jewelry. A treasure hunter’s dream.

  Before the reader condemns me for total idiocy after reading the following events, I feel that I should clarify: I do in fact have a sense of self-preservation. It’s locked in bitter rivalry with my incessant desire for something interesting to happen. I could easily have walked away then and left the magic jewelry where it was and avoided all consequences of that imminent decision. But fate hadn’t handed me too many golden opportunities, much less dangled them in front of my face, so I followed fate’s cue and proceeded to meddle.

  I picked up a rusty sword from the floor and ran to the end of the grating, wiggling the blade under the edge and trying to pry it outward. It didn’t want to budge, so I placed my foot against the wall and pulled harder.

  With a sudden clang, the end of the grating detached from the wall. The color-square behind it exploded, blowing the rest of the grating off. Cracks and booms echoed around the chamber as colors blasted from each hollow like fireworks, bouncing around wildly and flying up the stairs. I ducked and tried to run, calling myself every derogatory name I could think of. I saw a blazing streak of blue coming right at me, something whopped me in the stomach, and the next thing I remembered I was cracking my head on the ground with considerable force.

  I think I was only down for a few seconds, but I couldn’t be sure. It was suddenly much darker in the lair room, and much quieter. As my senses sorted themselves out, I realized that someone was sitting right on top of me.