CHAPTER 4 - ARRIVAL

  Do I want it to be real?

  His eyes were shut.

  His senses returned as if from a dream.

  The sound, the noise—the roar. The rushing rivers of light, gold, and red, and all the different colors. Being carried away on the current, on the torrent—do I want it all to be true?

  He was running out of time to decide—because his senses were starting to return. His skin began to feel pressure and sensation, smells, sights, and sounds came drifting into his experience. Time in superposition was at an end. Time to decide, for whatever internal record-keeping reason, he wanted to wake up in a new world, or wake up in his dorm room, after the strangest dream.

  Of his five senses, it was his skin that spoiled the illusion and confirmed his impossibly strange reality.

  It was cold stone.

  An unmistakable feeling.

  Naked, lying on his side, on smooth, cold stone.

  No bed.

  No dorm.

  No dream.

  Slowly, silently, propped himself up onto his elbow as his eyes adjusted to the dim light. Then his breath escaped in a soft sound of fear and wonder.

  It’s a cathedral, he realized, tracing high pillars of marble upward, holding up a massive, high ceiling, built to be arched with strength and solidity, high and faithful. Unlike the cathedrals he was familiar with, this one was more geometric, with a greater emphasis on the pillars themselves than on the ceiling.

  No, not a cathedral…he revised. That’s not quite the right word.

  He felt chills crawl across his torso and arms.

  Not a cathedral.

  This is a temple.

  The temple stretched out like a bar of dark sunlight through the blades of window shades. The stone floor was patterned with a well-worn design of grey and tan squares. A carpet, crimson and once-regal, although now frayed and stained, reached like scraping fingers down the long stretch of the temple, reaching from Levan to a pair of high double doors of reinforced wood at the entrance.

  Levan himself was on a raised dais at the end of the temple, raised three broad steps higher than the rest of the temple. On the dais was a stone circle, made from a different stone than both the floor and walls, and it was on that stone circle that Levan shivered and blinked.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Cold sensation pierced him, like a splash of ice water, and he was finally awake.

  It was then that he saw the bodies.

  Once he noticed one, he noticed more, shadowy shapes that Levan had filed away—maybe because he was overwhelmed and couldn’t handle it.

  Now he could, and the scene began to take further shape.

  One horrifying body after the other, he saw.

  They lay strewn about the temple in chitons of white cloth stained red with blood.

  They had stab wounds, discolored skin from blunt trauma, cracked and bleeding skulls, and other similar signs of terrible violence.

  Are these the priests or the congregants?

  I think they’re priests, he thought, his eyes resting on one. It was an older man, with a balding pale scalp, crested with white hair. He’d been stabbed in the stomach and was sagging against one of the marble columns.

  A vertical streak of crimson blood on the white marble told the story of the mortally wounded priest sinking to the ground, his back pressed against the column during his fatal, slumping descent.

  Levan’s stomach began to turn, and the only reason he didn’t empty its contents on the floor of the temple was because there wasn’t a bit of food or a drop of water in him.

  Levan had seen some disturbing things.

  But he’d never seen anything like this.

  Not this type of disturbing.

  One of the priests, this one younger, maybe even Levan’s own age, had been killed trying to run. He’d stumbled into one of the iron-wrought braziers that lit the temple near the columns. He had dragged the brazier, which looked to be at least a hundred pounds, and not small, to the ground.

  Ember and ash spilled from the bowl of the overturned brazier, coals still slightly glowing.

  Smoke rose from where the priest had died face-first in the burning embers, as the remnants slowly cooked his face.

  Thankfully, he’s dead, Levan thought. A part of his brain cried out, shocked and horrified at the circumstances that could create such a thought.

  [ Welcome, Chosen Soul ], the external voice filled his head.

  As the voice said the words, a seven-sided section of the ceiling glowed with text, shining light blue with its own inner light.

  He couldn’t read any language save one.

  Welcome, Chosen Soul, the text read, in English, before the letters shifted before his eyes. A new language, one he’d never seen before, but he could still read it.

  One wall wasn’t glowing, and had no text—instead, when Levan focused on that section of wall, a chorus of clacking sounds rang out hauntingly from the massacred temple.

  It wasn’t the only noise.

  There was yelling out in the distance, coming from beyond the walls.

  I can’t worry about that right now, he thought. I’m naked, somewhere strange, and clearly, something has gone wrong.

  An eerie sense ran down his spine, and Levan turned.

  His stomach twisted, and he threw up on his stone ritual circle.

  He hadn’t come alone.

  The other six had come with him.

  The spider-crab was enormous. Its legs, curled up like any dead spider from earth, still stretched fifteen feet into the sky. Its shell was cracked, and its jelly-like blood fumed in the air.

  The mermaid was there, too, eyes sightless. She was smaller than he’d expected, only three and a half feet or so.

  In the tunnel, they’d all seemed like equals. They’d all felt like…friends.

  I’m so sorry, Levan thought.

  [ Chosen Soul, ] the voice said in his mind, coming from all places at once.

  [ The circumstances of your arrival are irregular. Safe passage and secure arrival have not been granted. You are in danger. ]

  More information came, almost, but not quite, as if from the same source:

  [ Codex Entry Unlocked ]

  [ Codex Entry: Chosen Soul Arrival | Optional Task ]

  Optional task?

  [ Codex > Chosen Soul Arrival > Optional Task: Escape the Temple ]

  > Objective: Choose Ability Core, 0/1

  > Objective: Choose Elemental Affinity, 0/1

  > Objective: Gather Supplies, 0/?

  > Objective: Survive, ?/?