Descendants

**Short Disclaimer -**

Based on a dream, I wrote this immediately after waking up from said dream at around 0600 hours.

Our town was never really all that popular, but that all changed when I awoke to a knock on my door.  It was from the so-called “God on Earth”, our town Lord.  I remember the days of scandals being drawn out that we had done it in with each other as a conflict of interest, as I was the head of our town’s royal guard.  We do have an Emperor who lives in a golden castle opposite way from the central Ziggurat from I, that I built for him, but if you know anything about Japanese history he’s the Emperor while the Lord is like the Shogun.  Regardless the Lord frantically spouted out that the Emperor had dug out a part of the ocean in spite of the temple above it, which had always been rumored to have held satanic rituals and occultist whatever in it, and the water’s clearing revealed two sarcophagi and an occultist tomb or ritual chamber deep below the surface.

I personally had always avoided that temple as most rumors have to start from somewhere, and rumors around here about that kind of nature aren’t so easily able to be brushed off.  Science is prevalent where we live, yes, but mysticism, religion, especially paganism, and fantasy are just as valid.  The Lord explained how people have already been sneaking in with fake identification qualification sheets to see this discovery, as no prior criminal records ban you from entry like it would a job or the like.  I knew that the Lord, the Emperor, and a couple of our mutual friends in town leadership have had our fair share of spelunking into creepy places.  We founded this town, and I had the most involvement in terminating all colossal abominations who have stood in our way.

“Have you been down there yet?” I asked.

‘No, and I’ve banned us prominent figures from going down there until this mess is sorted out, we need historians, not more controversy or ties to the occult.”

“That’s bullshit!  You know what?  Whatever, I’ll just go for an extra round on the training regiment to pass the time or whatever.” I replied, hiding my tone of defeat as to not draw more suspicion to my curiosity.

“We’ll catch you if you try, Katya.  I know we both understand the risks of the occult.”

I sought out answers in secret on the rituals practiced for such a place as this forbidden tomb to be met with great satisfaction from one strong and reliable source.  Much to my dismay, I couldn’t get a hold of this person for their works but maybe that was for the best.  To avoid my identity being tied to this as the Lord worried about, I too forged fake identifications and tampered with our records so it would be less likely to tie to me.  I changed my attire from being the Celestial Nighthawk, or Birb for short, to instead a hood to completely shadow my face.  Even with the same cloak, as long as it covered any bit of skin that I’d usually show, it would work fine.  So long as the active camouflage was working, I was set.

I arrived at the checkpoint put on the border wall all around the dig site, which was on some really low-levelled land with civilization in either direction on much higher land.  I had noticed from afar that the Lord had ordered construction workers to continue on the site while all the neighboring apartments and businesses seemed to resume as normal.  At that point, I had assumed that everyone knew that the dig was of occultist nature and not something more mundane.  The large man at a desk towards the door to the exclusion zone asked for my identification, and as I provided the folded up sheet a thinner woman began searching my criminal record based on the ID sheet.

“It seems here you were involved in a parliamentary scandal?  I don’t see how that’s possible, unless-” she began, but was cut off abruptly by the larger man.

“Doesn’t matter, so long as the ID is clean and you don’t use your phone in there you should be fine.”

“Oh, that’s it, huh?” I replied, indulging their authority.

“Yeah, just don’t use your phone, it’s good, it’s fine.” they said almost in unison.  I took my papers back and entered the zone, turning around to say thanks as they both loudly replied, “You’re welcome”.

I was in, and as I got closer to the site itself I activated the camo and became invisible for the time being on the surface.

“Vortex power never fails me.” I whispered to myself.  I crept past many construction workers and hopped down a long stone shaft in the dark of night.  Lux levels weren’t too good inside as I fell at incredible speed.  The pitch black levels I descended past and the nature of what I was going to investigate filled me with a herculean amount of dread, I was almost too frightened to continue.  “Odd.” I thought to myself, “If those workers were really working down here, then it wouldn’t be so fucking dark.  I can barely see that typical gear and work stations even exist down here”.  After thinking that, it hit me: how these workers were equipped and how the checkpoint was handled seemed almost like it was a cover, like no one in our town but the Lord and the Emperor knew what exactly was down this shaft.  Thinking this didn’t help ease my fear as I eventually reached the bottom.

I landed hard, but unscathed, at what seemed to be the bottom of the shaft: at least several kilometers into the ground.  The pitch black was able to help better see a faint red glow from the left, and it slightly illuminated the room I had landed before.  No sign of construction work of any kind, just stone walls and a low ceiling.  I became frightened at what I was seeing, or rather the lack thereof, and continued towards the dim red glowing.  I shortly came to a small opening, almost like a doorway, to a large room with the two mentioned sarcophagi laying side by side at the left side of the room.  There were broken columns in the way, but advancing into the room revealed a circular table-like tablet with carvings in some manner that I could not understand directly in the center.  This tablet was about the size of a large table, like a round table to gather at.  I had noticed a small room towards the back with a smaller table-like version of this tablet and a booth-like seat all around it in at least 270 degrees around.

At this point, I held my fear back and pushed forward towards the small room repeating the steps of the ritual in my head over and over.  The room was just large enough to hold four people and filling every inch of the “booth”, and I had trouble situating myself in the small room momentarily.  The deafening silence and absolute solitude sent chills down my spine for what I was about to do.  I placed the candle in the center of the tablet and lit it, closed my eyes tight, and waited for the cue to continue.  I sat still for minutes on end, waiting, until I could hear faint voices.  These voices were like whispers, almost ethereal, and they were coming from directly behind me.  Quickly reacting to the voices, I began the chant and repeated it the appropriate number of times again waiting for the next cue to continue.

After barely being able to handle the voices as they began to sound violent and sporadic, they ceased as a new sense came to my attention: a presence I could feel breathing down my neck.  At that moment, I panicked and began to flee, running out of the small room.  As I attempted to fix my gaze upon the opening while entering back into the larger room, I froze on what I saw.  The large tablet’s alphabetic-like carvings were glowing a vibrant red, and looking up I saw the two sarcophagi standing upright on either side almost as if to face me.  I ran for the opening and never looked back, not even bothering to take photos as I had planned to.  Once I reached the shaft I maintained my gaze only upward and jumped to initiate my flight, blasting upward to the surface.  Before reaching the top, I reactivated the camouflage and landed softly back on the grass.

At this point, I couldn’t even function and I rolled around on the ground all balled up and began to cry hysterically.  There was no one in sight anywhere, and I just shuddered in place as I lay trying to recall everything that had just happened.  I hoped that somewhere in there I could convince myself that I was just overtaken by fear, or that I was hallucinating, to disprove what I witnessed.  After laying on the ground lost in thought, I froze as one final thought crossed my mind: why was the man at the checkpoint so eager to let me in?