WIP excerpt 1 - What the Sands Hide

This is an early version of a longer, albeit overall short, story I am working on. I will post further excerpts over time, but will also be sharing the completed work when (if) the time comes. Any thoughts and feedback is greatly appreciated :)

I stood for a moment and attempted to take in the sight before me, the sheer cavernous expanse leaving me confounded for a moment. The dark was overwhelming, but a remarkable beam of light burst forth from a point a considerable depth within. It almost surveyed the space, like a lighthouse casting out a lifeline of iridescent white. It’s movements, however, were somewhat more erratic. The enigmatic beam changed it’s heading and speed at its own behest, sending a searchlight glancing over some new surface of this forgotten place. A number of times it would cleave down pass over me, blasting my insignificant form with a pure and blinding white, forcing my arm to flinch to my eyes in reaction. It was like a second sun, albeit a focal, aloof one, confined to this subterranean ruin. It’s movements, casting itself across a different surface with every new moment, reminded me of an octopus I had observed on one expedition a number of years back. We observed the creature, small and strange, in a tide pool on some tropic island yet to receive a name in our books. We dropped a number of detritus before it, small pebbles and the such, curious at its responses. Each new item it cast a tentacle over, scanning its details with a number of protuberances. The way it danced over the pebbles, the limb moving in a manner that seemed both chaotic and controlled, found its way back into my mind as I observed the beam intently, and the validity of such a comparison unnerved me deeply.

I remained rooted for a moment, desperately trying to squint into the shadows and will my eyesight to reveal what was before me. The gloom slowly relented, as I kept vainly attempting to avert myself from the arbitrary swings of the light source, and the location I found myself within began to take shape. At first, the apparent size of the recess had me believing this area was more simplistic, perhaps natural, cavern, unlike the unearthly, titanic hallways from before. The pit in my stomach redoubled, however, when I realized how wrong this assumption was. I found myself in a cyclopean amphitheatre, hewn from the same deep, oceanic green from the rest of the vault. Vast, lithic shelves orbited a central platform in a crescent, with each roughly concentric sill raised up from the prior. The bow of the cavern looped and made touch with a wall across the central platform, the rough recesses and outcroppings casting shadows along itself that kept catching my eye. Each one remaining titanic in comparison to my humble human height, and my mind still danced around the potential realities of who constructed such marvels to their size - both in awe and anxiety. The steps, closer to periodic plateaus that dropped in excess of 10 feet, gave way into the darkness and approached a central, lower platform that the entire room stood in audience of.

The pinpoint of light took the centre of the stage, casting its eye towards its ancient audience of stone. The glances of light illuminated slivers of the curved platform it was placed upon, forming dull doppelgängers of its brilliance trapped within a stone gaol. The floor was not only impressive in magnitude, but with a brilliant surface that I could ascertain even from a great distance. Unlike the walls and ceiling, mired with geometric outcroppings and depressions, the stage impressed a smoothness that at first led me to mistake it for a murky, still water. With no small amount of trepidation, I began to skulk further into the yawning nothing, forced to awkwardly sit on the edge of each lip and lower myself over.

I grew exhausted not even halfway into what I imagined was the journey to the centre, with the sheer physical incompatibility of this world I experienced spiralling my mind into even more frantic imaginations. What was such an awful space used for? What grand purpose could justify and fulfil a place of such…weight? But it did not take much consideration to realize my folly with such ideals; who is to say this is grand in the eyes of its makers? The almost unfathomable ceiling, as close to me grasp as the skies themselves, could well be a simple mundanity to the hands that grasped the hammer and chisel, or whatever infernal tools, that crafted it. I stole a moment from my own anticipation, pausing to regain breath and strength, and glanced down at my now impossibly small hands. They were already weathered and worn, with the debris of time leaving them marred and slightly bloodied. Such a short time, now only amounting to a half hour of travel and wonder, was taking a small but already visible toll upon my form. A place that I can only imagine was attended with ease by its presumed inhabitants. Was ease even the word for such actions? I could not presume this place’s purpose, but the reverence I could not help but hold for it conjured only the image of a cathedral of kind. Would I describe walking into a church as “easy”? Is it not such an ideal of inaction, a motion I would not even require consideration, to achieve? I feel existing in such a space is an exercise that can hardly fall within a spectrum of difficulty. Such an artificial land would be difficult, however, to a mouse, perhaps. Nay, something even more trivial. Is that what I was to this place?

I turned from the little star’s gaze once more, looking back into the sympathy the dark afforded my sight, but stumbled across another troubling truth; how was I to scale my way back from these depths? I confess, in my morbid eagerness, I had found myself ill-prepared and entirely disconnected from the strength the total expedition could muster. The surface of the step I had descended, and I imagined those prior too, yielded no assistant ledges nor crevices upon which to leverage myself. Each step spread away into another layer of the great hall, and I thought that, even if no purchase could be found, the gnarled walls where the pew-like structures terminated would allow some greater degree of traversal, albeit still troublesome. Those walls, however, stood what I could only imagine being a matter of hours away minimum, and the retracing of the great many heights I had so carelessly slipped down could take almost half a day. It was unimaginable how much the sands above would have churned and changed, and how much longer it would require for the expeditionary forces to uncover a path back into this sepulchral world. Was quitting now truly the best course of action? These logical calculations were of course occurring within my mind, but I must confess, they were almost performative, representing only the exterior of my consciousness. Deeper inside, there was a deeply unsettling draw to plunge deeper into this lair. It began as a gentle tug at the proverbial sleeve, but gained intensity with each minute footstep. It was a whispering curiosity, perhaps fuelling the terrifying wonder of this place’s inhabitants - and rooting my foot forward before such mental imaginations could drive my progress backwards in hasted fear. My mind had, truthfully and somewhat shamefully, already been made up. The logistical justifications were just the symptom of my final apprehension withering away from baring my fearful excitement, as coaxed by some unknown as it was. I turned back to the harshly distant pinprick of light, the leaden ball in my gut corkscrewed deeper into me as I knew that I did not possibly know what this decision would culminate in. The first step onwards lurched forwards, continuing the dreadful descent.