The glowing patterns on the cliff face began to weep pinpricks of emerald light. They spread fast, blooming into a thin, breathing layer of moss.
"Ghostsight Moss," Bill whispered, his voice thick with anticipation. "It reflects the most intense obsession tied to a place."
The emerald glow didn't coalesce into the grand spectacle of a priestly ritual. Instead, it formed a flowing, silent, and oppressive image.
Inside it, a gaunt man, heavy bronze shackles on his wrists and ankles, was pinned against a stone wall by two towering, jackal-headed guards.
His face was smeared with dust and blood. His eyes didn't burn with a priest's authority, but with a prisoner's rage and bitter defiance.
A chisel was shoved into his hand.
"Engrave it, Ankh-Ka."A disembodied voice, cold as stone, issued the command."The Pharaoh's will is absolute. Your name will be erased. Your power will become a cursed legend. Engrave the Words of Forgetting. Make any who seek your secrets pay."
In the vision, Ankh-Ka looked up. His gaze seemed to pierce millennia, staring directly toward the well shaft. His eyes held utter despair, and a flicker of pleading so weak it was nearly snuffed out.
Then, he raised the chisel. In endless humiliation, he began carving the first twisted symbol into the rock.
The image vanished.
The emerald moss receded. The light on the cliff face dimmed.
Silence. Thick and heavy.
Bill turned. He looked at Douglas. The fanatical excitement had drained from his face, replaced by a grim, seeking certainty.
"I stood there for a long time too, the first time I saw this."His voice was gravelly."The powerful, mysterious Shadow-Domain Priest we've been chasing. The legendary guardian who sealed himself away in silence…"
He shook his head, mocking his own past naivete."He wasn't a Silencer. He was a prisoner. He wasn't a guardian. He was a poor bastard forced to curse his own tomb."
"Legends," Douglas's voice cut the quiet. He was staring at the now-plain rock, his gaze sharp, "are just stories someone wrote."He paused, turning his knowing look on Bill."Seems our little fairy tale book isn't a treasure map after all."He paused again."This surprise party, old man… maybe it's not an invitation."He let the words hang. "It's a distress call."
The moment the words left his mouth, the giant wind-carved rock changed.
It didn't split open. It didn't rise.
It bloomed. Like a stone flower, it began to spiral open from the center, layer after layer folding inward in utter silence. Each "petal" was massively thick, yet its edges were paper-thin. The motion was seamless, a display of mechanical precision that felt out of its time.
When the rock finished its silent bloom, a vertical shaft, black and bottomless, yawned before them.
Faint traces of the Ghostsight Moss's emerald glow clung to the shaft walls, trailing down into the darkness.
A low, almost-subsonic hum rose from the depths.
It was deep. Resonant. Like a chorus of ceramic vessels vibrating together.
Or like the endless, soundless lament of seven souls, imprisoned for millennia.
The noise was a whale's dream in a deep-sea trench, a million beetles thrumming under the sand. It wasn't heard through the ears. It vibrated directly against the inside of the skull.
Bill moved first. He pulled a slender probe, its tip set with a crystal, from his kit and cautiously extended it into the shaft.
The crystal didn't glow. No warning flashed."No immediate curses on the trigger," Bill's voice echoed slightly in the shaft, gaining a hollow quality. "The entrance is clean, at least."
He uncoiled a rope from his belt, securing one end to the Land Rover's chassis with a sticking charm."I'll go first."Bill was all business, stowing the probe on his hip with the efficiency of a muggle rock climber.
"Hold on."Douglas stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. From his pocket, he produced two tiny earplugs, handing one to Bill."Modified Muffliato variant. Mixed with gentian powder. Filters out specific sonic frequencies.""That hum's not right," Douglas explained.
Bill's eyebrow quirked up. He took the plug and fitted it. A brief, approving grin flashed."I knew bringing you was the right call."
Douglas fitted his own plug. The maddening drone immediately dulled, fading into a tolerable background bass note.
"Lumos."A soft light bloomed at the tip of Bill's wand. He gripped the rope, braced his feet against the shaft wall, and slid smoothly into the swallowing dark.
Douglas followed.
The shaft walls weren't smooth rock. They were made of a black, basalt-like material, riddled with fine, honeycombed pores, like the cross-section of a giant ant colony. The endless whispering hum was the wind forcing its way through those holes.
The descent was long. Monotonous. The full moon above shrank from a silver coin to a distant star.
Finally, his toes found solid ground.
A narrow passageway. Just wide enough for two men side-by-side.
The air was stagnant. Dry. It carried the scent of millennia sealed away: minerals and the ghost of long-dead plants.
Bill's wand-light probed forward, illuminating the passage walls.
The murals appeared.
They weren't carved. They were painted directly onto the rock with some strange, plant-based pigment. The colors were faded, the lines crude, depicting blurred humanoid shapes.
Every single one of them was faceless.
"Careful."Bill's voice was a low murmur. He raised an old, brass-cased magical camera.
The instant his finger pressed the shutter release, the wand-light and the camera's magical flash converged.
The walls came alive.
The faceless spirits in the paint began to writhe. The pigment seemed to turn semi-liquid, a swamp where human shapes struggled and twisted—insects trapped in dying amber.
Where their faces should have been, the paint sank inward, forming silent, screaming black vortices.
"Merlin's beard…"
Bill's lens tracked one spirit actively bulging out from the wall, his voice a hushed exclamation of awe."It's a memory echo, but it's bound to the pigment! Ankh-Ka fused the curse with the painting medium itself!"
His words were cut short.
The spirit fully detached from the two-dimensional plane.
A pale, semi-transparent arm composed of ashen-green pigment shot out from the mural. It lunged, grasping for the nearest target: Douglas.
~~~~❃❃~~~~~~~~❃❃~~~~
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