THE BURIED GOD
Chapter 5: The First Tunnel
The entrance to the mountain was a wound.
The stone was black and jagged, the edges sharp as broken glass. The air that breathed from the opening was cold and damp, thick with the smell of rot and rust and something else. Something old. Something hungry.
Damon stepped inside.
The darkness swallowed him.
Vespera followed, her bare feet silent on the stone. Lyssa came last, her hand on the knife in her boot, her green eyes scanning the shadows.
” torches,” Lyssa said.
“On the walls,” Vespera replied. “The priests keep them lit. For the guards. For the sacrifices. For the god.”
Damon looked at the walls.
The torches were there, their flames low and blue, casting pale light on the stone. The shadows they cast were long and thin, reaching for him like fingers.
He took a torch.
The warmth was small.
It was better than nothing.
The tunnel sloped downward.
The walls grew closer, the ceiling lower, the air heavier. The silence pressed against Damon’s ears, thick and suffocating.
He could feel them.
The sacrifices.
Buried in the walls. Buried in the floor. Buried in the darkness.
“They’re everywhere,” he whispered.
“They are part of the mountain now,” Vespera said. “Part of the god. Part of the hunger. They have been here for centuries. They will be here for centuries more.”
“Can we free them?”
Vespera was silent for a long moment.
“Only if we bury the god.”
The tunnel opened into a chamber.
Large and circular, the walls carved with symbols — eyes and mouths and hands and things that looked like words in a language that had never been spoken aloud. The floor was smooth, worn by centuries of feet.
And in the center of the chamber, a door.
Not a door of wood or stone or iron.
A door of bone.
“The door to the heart,” Lyssa said. “The door that only the priestesses could open.”
“Can you open it?”
Lyssa shook her head.
“I was not a priestess. Not like her. I was a novice. I knew the words, but I did not speak them. I did not have the power.”
“The power?”
“The power of the buried. The power of the dead. The power of the god.”
Vespera walked to the door.
She placed her hands on the bone.
The symbols blazed.
The door groaned.
And then—
A voice.
Who comes?
“The priestess,” Vespera said. “The one who was buried. The one who has returned.”
The priestess is dead.
“I was. I am not. The god has work for me. The god has need of me. The god has called me.”
Prove it.
Vespera closed her eyes.
She raised her hands.
The symbols blazed brighter.
The door groaned louder.
And then—
She spoke.
The words were old. Ancient. Older than the mountain. Older than the god. Older than the world.
The door opened.