CHAPTER THREE

Finally landing in a strange new world, Thera finds that all is not well on this side of reality.

Thera walked, braiding the white locks of her hair. 

The sky was the colour of a dead man’s eye three days after he’d taken his last breath. 

The skyline was pierced by questing spires with dead windows. 

The ash never stopped falling. But it was not deep on the ground. It fell, settled and then…fell more?

She could see the ornate patterns in the stonework of the buildings. Many of the inlaid geometrical shapes were formed from the same wire she had nearly fallen on. She brushed her fingers along the cold wire as she walked the shadows of the buildings.

Buildings with blocks so smooth and fitting they seemed to have been not hewn, but grown from stone. 

The road was covered in detailed, life-like marble statues. In a city of symmetry they were glaringly out of place. Almost…sad. 

Odd glimmers hung in the air. Beams of light, frozen on their travel and just perceptible from precisely the right position. 

Only the falling ash disturbed the silent streets.

As Thera explored she found wide streets that curved and flowed like a formal dance or a logician’s argument. The same inlaid geometries repeated everywhere. In the stained glass of hushed windows. On the shadowed mosaics on walls. On well used installations that looked almost like musical instruments.

This was a dead city whose people, in life, had been obsessed with pattern. 

Thera could see why.

The pattern…itched. Entered via her pupil, got under her skin and seemed to lodge in her mind. 

She wasn’t alarmed by this intellectual squatter. In fact, the pattern seemed to bring with it a resonating peace.

She found that alarming. 

Patterns did not, in her experience, resonate with sensations of peace. Patterns, in her experience, looked pretty. 

She tried to keep her eye slightly unfocused. A precaution.

In the dark alleys of her mind the almost voice of her intuition whispered. There was something about the patterns. 

Some anomaly…

She hadn’t realised she had a destination until she arrived. 

She had been shepherded while lost in thought and found herself standing at the entrance of a large, underground room. Wrapping the walls, two staggered lines stacked with skulls. The sense of power in the room was palpable. 

The gravitas of the ossuary grabbed her mind in the similar way that a library stole her voice; respectfully. 

She walked. 

Each skull was on a pedestal. Each framed by a picture. 

No two skulls were identical. No two pictures the same. 

It was serene there. Something brushed the core of her soul like a forgotten kiss from an old love, newly remembered. Like memories of rainbows over water.

The near silence was punctured by her soft footfall and her slow rhythm paid homage to the remarkable artefacts. 

She was in a distant world with no food, water or direction and only the broken arm of a pair of dark glasses as her sole possession.

She should have been mapping the terrain. Setting up fall-back routes with simple traps in case of pursuit. Finding sustenance and searching for inhabitants. 

Instead, she drank in beauty. 

She feasted on fantastic form. 

She found shelter in the Skulls. 

They told stories in a language she didn’t know. Yet even in her ignorance, she was an enrapt audience. It was enough to experience the cadence and tone of their tale. She didn't need to know the words to marvel at the music. 

Hours were invested. 

Coming back to herself she found a quietness in her soul. 

Her needs and worries were a mountain range of ridges and slopes and now they were all deep, deep beneath a clear lake of peace. 

She could see them. They had not gone. 

But now she floated, far above them with no concern but how best to listen to the whispering voice inside her soul. 

Then…

Despite her calm mind her heartbeat was strong. 

When she was a girl she learnt to hear each voice in the choir of her mind. The prickling voice of conscience that let her know the tyranny was wrong. The husky suggestions of lust as she mingled in a bar. The heady roar of pride at an improbable job completed. The cold, reptilian commands of survival. Her mind was a choir and she knew each singer well.

Some voices were powerful.

None more so than the shy whispers which gave voice to the body of her unconscious mind; of intuition.

There was something broken here. Thera stared at skulls as her mind ran over the map of the city. 

Skulls, still beneath the earth. The geometry, broken in one place. Glimmers, a whisper of movement. 

The doors of opportunity would not stay open forever. It was time to act.

Choices always mattered. 

She feared, for a moment, what might befall her now if she chose wrong. 

The city was lovely, old and sacred. But she had not seen a living thing in her travels and thirst was creeping closer.

 It was time to act.

1) There was something about the metal wire that ran through the buildings. It was broken, at the place of her arrival. She had studied the sacred geometries and knew it to be constructed with uncommon metal. The broken arm of the obscura glasses seemed to weigh heavy in her pocket. Was it the exhaustion catching up with her?

2) The skulls in the catacombs seemed to hum with power. She hadn’t dared to touch them. Should she?  Some of the skulls reminded her of different marble statues she had seen. Dared she disturb the sacred space? 

3) There was something that seemed to draw her to the glimmering lights. How many years had they hung there? For a moment, a brief flicker, she felt like she was a walking conduit, strumming with power. What would happen if she strode to them now?

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