by Rick Jones
“We can’t rush this,” she returned. “The given clue says we must choose wisely, which means we have only one chance at this.”
“And if we don’t choose wisely?”
“Then forever darkness it will be. Obviously, a deadly surprise waits behind the two doorways that are incorrect.”
“When you say ’deadly surprise,’ do you mean certain death?”
“According to the indications written on this stone, yes. We have to pick the right door.”
She examined the writing once again. Turn the circle for the Kings of Self; the sands begin to flow; should you solve the riddle before time runs low, then the way to the Primaries shall you go. Choose your gate wisely, the Light you shall see; choose your gate poorly, forever darkness it will be.”
The Kings of Self were right in front of them.
. . . Turn the circle . . .
Turn the circle? She looked at the bone dial. Obviously it was there to serve a purpose. With a trembling hand she grabbed it.
“Careful, Ms. Moore.”
Slowly, she turned the dial in a clockwise direction; the bone handle grinding against the stone wall it was mounted on. After she made a full revolution, she stood back.
Nothing happened as everyone looked about, expecting the place to reshape itself.
But then it came in the form of tiny cracks and fissures that stretched across the slate the first riddle was etched on, until the slab fell away, revealing a second riddle underneath.
“There it is!” Savage pointed. “The second rid—”
Suddenly the earth began to shake. The walls were beginning to move.
. . . Turn the circle for the Kings of Self; the sands begin to flow . . .
The dial was a tripwire. Once activated, then the balances and weights begin to alter and change their surroundings. The sand was the force and weight pushing walls into place, but also the measure of time like an hour glass. Once the sand had completed its task, then what?
The temple trembled as Alyssa read the new riddle.
“Do hurry, Ms. Moore,” egged Hall. “Who knows what it is that is about to befall us.”
ейшых паэтаўфілёзафаў
палкаводцаў, অবশ্যই вялікіх цহেলে
নীয় ароўяк цтва дыцыйны ы যুজনপ্রিয় গেই грэцкай эліністычнаথেকে й паэзіі і йооду пথেকে
It read: I am right, never wrong, and everyone that’s alive has me. What am I?
“Ms. Moore!”
“Shutup, Hall! You’re not helping!”
The earth continued to shake.
Time was running low.
. . . I am right, never wrong, and everyone that’s alive has me. What am I? . . .
I am . . . right. She turned and looked up at the Sculptured King sitting on the right throne: The King of Truth. He never lies.
Her mind began to fog over.
. . . Everyone alive has me . . .
. . . What am I? . . .
“Ms. Moore!”
And then the shaking stopped. Silence reigned, which was even more terrifying.
After a moment, there was a slight rumble as a ceiling panel at the chamber’s top entry pulled back. From the ceiling something long slid down the vertical tracks of both walls and extended across the room like an axle, from wall to wall, and settled into the tracks that followed the angle of the incline. Slowly, and since the incline was at 45 degrees, the axle began to roll downward, picking up speed with every turn, the crystal blades attached to the axle turning with the deadly spin of a tiller, to chop and mince.
Death spanning from wall to wall was rolling right at them with nowhere for them to go.
“Ms. Moore!”
She turned. The axle was picking up speed. The blades could no longer be seen because they were now moving in blinding revolutions.
She looked at the riddle. Her heart felt heavy in her throat. “I am right, never wrong, and everyone that’s alive has me. What am I?”
Nobody noticed Harika turn and begin to take the incline, one slow step at a time.
“Is that the riddle?” asked Savage.
“Yes!”
“A right side!” he yelled. “Everyone alive has a right side!”
They all looked at the right doorway—at the King of Truth, who never lies.
“Everyone, get to the right gateway!”
The axle was rolling very quickly and spinning madly.
Harika’s mind registered something, but her detachment was so great that it left her sense of awareness somewhat crippled.
The doorway beneath the King of Truth opened and everyone ducked inside. When Alyssa realized that Harika was not beside her, she turned to see her standing in the direct path of the ancient tiller.
“Harika!” She wanted to run to her, to pull her back to safety, but Savage held her back.
“It’s too late,” he told her sorrowfully. “I’m sorry.”
Harika turned on the incline, smiled, and then waved to her. Alyssa didn’t know whether she was waving to acknowledge that she heard her, or if she was simply waving good-bye.
The axle hit so fast, the blades so hard, pieces of body and tissue and blood and gore were diced until there was nothing left of Harika that was larger than a few centimeters.
Alyssa screamed as Savage pulled her inside the doorway.
A moment later the axle hit the gateway, stopping its momentum.
They had passed the trial of another riddle.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Savage was silent, Alyssa was sobbing, Hall was pacing, and Butcher Boy and Aussie were catching their breath.
And then there were five.
As Alyssa began to collect her wits, as Obsidian Hall roamed back and forth complaining and raking his fingers through his hair, while John Savage remained stoically quiet, Butcher Boy and Aussie got to their feet. Aussie had his knife and Savage’s Glock. And Butcher Boy had his assault weapon and what was left of his ammo.
Now dust laden and dirty, they looked like a rag-tag unit fatigued beyond imagination.
“Up, people,” said Butcher Boy. “Ms. Moore, you said we have now earned the right to move forward to the Chamber of the Primaries?”
“That’s what the scripture said.”
“Does that mean that there are no more tricks waiting for us up ahead?”
“I can’t guarantee that,” she said, wiping away the grime from her tear-smudged cheeks.
“Then we take our chances.” He pointed his weapon at Savage. “Point, Mr. Savage. You have now moved up the list as being the most expendable. You should feel good about yourself.”
“I’m very proud,” he said sarcastically.
“Move.”
The incline did not end at the gateway. It continued on for another three hundred feet before flattening out to an even landing.
With his lamp held high, John Savage led the way to the Chamber of the Primaries.
#
The alpha predator was frustrated. Its quarry was on the level below. And the walls seemed to be in a constant shift. Apertures that were once at one location were there no longer.
With unprecedented speed and agility it moved through old warrens and new, searching.
And stopped at a setting where the scent was strongest on the level. The whiff of its prey was marginal; the floor between them acting as a buffer, but the scent was still there.
It circled the area of the floor, trying to establish the exact point of its prey beneath it. With its frill in full expansion and its olfactory senses in full play, the Prisca was able to pinpoint an exact location. After circling a few more times, it raised its tail and brought it down against the floor. The full impact of its log-like tail created a star-point crack against the floor, a breach. And then it followed through with another devastating blow, the crack now growing into fissures that started to race across the floor.
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Another blow of its mighty tail—up, then down, the floor shaking, the cracks growing deeper, longer, the black silica starting to give. As it continued to pound its way through, the beast roared its guttural cry of triumph as the floor gave way to shards and chunks that looked like lumps of black coal. The hide on its tail was becoming red and raw from the continuous strikes, the flesh giving way to open wounds.
But this was an alpha predator that was not going to be denied or turned away.
This time it would feed. So again . . . and again . . . and again, the Prisca’s tail came down against the floor.
#
“How are we moving along?” asked Leviticus.
Nehemiah offered a shrug and a harrumph. The sun was blazingly hot, which hampered the team’s actions somewhat. “We’re moving,” he said. “But not as fast as I hoped. It’s too hot.”
Leviticus looked along the horizon and watched it shimmer as a battery of heat rose from the earth. “We still have plenty of time until nightfall,” he said. “The optimum thing is to be safe. Make sure everyone has plenty of water.” Nehemiah nodded. “So what do we have so far?”
Nehemiah pointed to the middle of the squared structure. “We have charges set up at the middle point, situated to go off first. We have other charges branching out from that point and working toward the perimeter. These will be the second volley to go off. The perimeter charges will be last. Right now, the perimeter is all that’s left to load. But it’s going to take time given the size of it.”
“How much longer?”
Nehemiah looked skyward as if the answer was written against the blue canopy. “Six, maybe seven hours,” he finally said. “We should have this baby done with by dusk.”
Leviticus looked at his watch. “I’ll have the choppers here just after sunset, then.”
Nehemiah shot him a thumbs-up. “Works for me.” And he walked away.
Leviticus glimpsed the length of the shimmering horizon: Seven hours.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“Hold up,” Butcher Boy said with his hand raised. Everyone stood still, listening. “Anybody hear that?” It was a repetitive pounding noise. It wasn’t close, but it wasn’t too far, either. “Another tripwire somewhere?” he threw out. They listened further.
“I doubt it,” said Alyssa. “Who would set it off?”
“Maybe one of those things,” said Hall.
She shook her head. “There has to be some type of catalyst to manually set it off. They don’t have the physical capabilities like we do to initiate a temple shift.”
“Then perhaps we’re not alone.”
“We’re alone.”
“Then what’s causing that racket?”
. . . Bang . . . Bang . . . Bang . . .
“Ms. Moore?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.” They moved onward with Savage in the lead.
The level appeared without challenges, without death-determining riddles, the corridor as inky black as all the rest. But there was an indescribable calm here, the type that drives a person into a false sense of complacency. The molasses-like weight of a pall was gone.
But not everything was serene. The banging continued, causing Alyssa to sneak a peek over her shoulder. What is that?
“What’s the matter, Ms. Moore? Getting concerned, are you?” asked Butcher Boy.
She shook her head and lied. “No.”
In return he gave her a wry grin. The type that said, I know better.
Savage also felt a personal calm—an inexpressible feeling of peace that had eluded him for years. He looked at Alyssa and smiled. What lifted him even more was that she returned his smile with a grin of her own. They were getting close to something wonderful. Whether it was driven by anticipation or by something else not understood, they didn’t know.
They finally came upon a chamber doorway with no riddles or obstructions. Above the opening were characters that read: The Chamber of the Primaries. Alyssa’s heart skipped, a hand unknowingly going to her breast. “The Chamber of the Primaries,” she whispered in awe.
Savage stood aside to give her room to enter. “The privilege should be yours,” he said, gesturing like a matador allowing a bull to pass.
She stepped inside an incredibly massive room, much larger than the ballroom-sized chamber above. The ceiling was domed and sparkled with star-point glitters of light from the glow of the lanterns. The ceiling was encrusted with chips of pure crystal marking the constellations in perfect facsimile, the entire ceiling a planetarium.
Every square-inch of the black silica walls had been used as tablets with characters in pre-Sumerian script, pictograms, cuneiforms, pre-history shapes, and hieroglyphics. In the central part of the arena was a rise with wraparound steps that led up to the main level.
They were in awe, the crystal against the pitch-black ceiling as real as a universe could be.
Aussie and Butcher Boy lowered their weapons, feeling oddly content.
Obsidian Hall raced around like a little boy in a candy shop, throwing caution to the wind.
Savage stayed close to Alyssa, who for the moment seemed to forget that people around her existed. “It is something . . . else,” he said.
Alyssa shrugged off her backpack, grabbed her father’s crumpled paperwork, and pressed it close to her. For you, Daddy. We do this together. She took the steps to the main level.
The top of the rise was even more magnificent. It was perfectly circular and acted as a platform to hold the incredible sculptures they discovered at the temple level, the carvings of the bull and the bear and the lizard, as well as other creatures discovered as bas-relief carvings on the Göbekli Tepe pillars. She looked above each sculpture and immediately understood. They were representations of certain constellations: the bull, Taurus; the bear, Ursa Major; and the lizard, Scorpio—the forepaws and curving tail of the Megalania Prisca mistakenly considered to be the celestial shape of a scorpion over time. There was a correlation between the Heaven and Earth, the stars and the indigenous creatures within the fauna of Eden, a single concept of uniform existence.
“This is amazing,” she whispered to no one in particular. “Absolutely . . . amazing.”
“There’s no gold!” shouted Aussie. “No bloody gold at all!”
Within the circle of sculptures, the center point of the landing, two pods were standing approximately four-feet tall. They were egg-shaped, and their casings appeared to be fashioned from veined marble. But they weren’t. They were crafted from the non-porous composite.
Carefully, she slid a hand over surfaces that were completely unblemished, not a single mark, scratch or chip marred the smooth and silky exterior of the pods. She then looked straight up at the cluster of conjoined crystals that made up the image of the sun, the Giver of life. Then back to the egg-shaped pods.
They were on the center of the platform, the eggs symbolic of the beginning of life, the central part of all existence that matures to all living things: the bull, the boar, the lizard—all the creatures provided by the Heavens and the sun, a unity of one acting in perfect harmony.
This was truly the cradle of mankind, she considered, where life began as the simple tool of an egg, a single celled organism, which grew beneath the watchful eyes of heavenly gods.
She was ecstatic.
Here were the first indications of religion. The planetariums, the placement of the pods, the sculptures beneath their respective constellations, were symbolic but primitive suggestions. But Alyssa quickly realized that it was like children taking their first baby steps away from the cradle.
Mankind was learning.
#
Obsidian Hall stood in front of a wall of pictograms.
On a fifty-foot stretch, the wall depicted images of people with elongated skulls. Other depictions showed men riding in chariot-like vehicles with long trails of fire blowing out from the aft end.
“The Chariots of the Gods,” he commented. “How . . . quaint.”
Neverthel
ess, the depictions upon this wall were key recordings of Man’s first images of his place in the universe about eight thousand years before the Egyptian pyramids where even a consideration. Such a priceless artifact of recorded history, even by the pieces, would hang well in one of the rooms aboard the Seafarer. He placed his palms against the wall. There were so many priceless artifacts to choose from.
He stood back and re-examined the wall in its entirety, a pictogram story of pagan gods with bulbous heads trekking across the sky in fire-fueled chariots.
Eden, he thought, held many wonders.
#
John Savage stood behind Alyssa with his hands clasped behind the small of his back. It was wonderful, he thought, to see her so enthused and so happy. It was like a father watching his child enjoy an event, the happiness of someone else also his own and something shared.
He took up beside her. And then he rubbed his hands over the surface of one of the pods. It’s like glass,” he said. “It’s so smooth.”
“They pose as the center of life,” she said. “The miracle of birth from a single cell. The concept of life from the moment of conception. The true beginning of mankind.”
“Are you happy?” he asked her.
When she faced him, he saw the gleam in her eyes, the fascination of a new world written all over her face by the expressions she wore. “You have no idea what this means to me,” she said.
“Maybe I do,” he answered.
And then: “Ms. Moore!” She took a step away from the pods. It was Butcher Boy.
“There are several holes along the floor. Is it something we need to be concerned about?”
She nodded. “What you’re looking at are drainage holes,” she told him. “They’re common in pyramids established in areas known for flash-flooding and are most common with pyramids in Mesoamerica. To see something like that suggests that the area had huge amounts of rainfall at one time.”
“So it’s nothing to worry about then? No shifting of walls or flying daggers?”
