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As I tried to understand yet another whisper from the creature before me, I sensed a spike of cold at my back. I ducked and rolled just as a tendril of shadow speared into the space where I'd been.
The darkness exploded into motion. A group of shadow people rushed from my right. I knew if I hesitated, I'd be surrounded. Another dark tentacle lashed at my chest. My panic turned into pure adrenalin. I leapt far over the shadow in front of me and almost collided with another group of them as they shambled from the trees at the border of the ancient building.
At least they're slow, I thought.
Then the insidious figures blurred with speed.
Despite all the scary crap I'd been through in the past few weeks, I shrieked at the top of my lungs and ran for all I was worth. Even with my night vision and my supernaturally acute reflexes, branches whipped into my face and I stumbled over branches, rotten logs, stones, and just about anything else in my path. After nearly colliding with a tree—a move that would've knocked me senseless long enough for the shadows to catch me—I decided it might be smarter to dodge back into the crumbling city. At least it had pathways for the tourists.
I zipped to my left just as a shadow blurred from the dark and smashed into the trunk of the tree I'd narrowly avoided. Bark and splinters exploded, but the creature merely ricocheted like a pinball and veered straight at me. It was then I noticed the lack of ambient background noises in the jungle. It was as if every animal had fled or hidden. Now all I could hear were the whispers of the shadows.
A chain sectioning off the tourist pathways took my legs out from beneath me. I tumbled through the air for a helpless moment before bouncing off the ancient stones of a nearby building and rolling several yards. I scrambled to my feet and raced down the path, dodging around buildings and hoping, eventually, the blasted thing would lead me to a road or some way out of this haunted maze.
Instead, I stumbled into an open square surrounded by tall stone slabs. It reminded me, for a fleeting moment, of the massive square in the middle of the Grotto. Except, in the place of statues of the founders, this one had engravings on the slabs. On one, a grinning male looked down from a pyramid at a woman wreathed in flames, her mouth wide in agony. Another intricately detailed a woman perched atop another pyramid as a priest sacrificed an infant. Each slab bore horrendous images of human sacrifice in grisly detail and vivid colors. It took me only a split second to take in my surroundings, but I sensed death closing in with every passing nanosecond.
I couldn't stand around gawking at mosaics. I had to find a way out. Paths branched out in all directions from the square, each one leading to its own gargantuan pyramid at the terminus. I might be able to reach the top of one and spy the exit. Before I could launch myself down a path, however, shadows melted out of the night. The whispering grew louder and before I could bolt away, they surrounded me.
I jetted toward a crack in the circle. The shadows closed the gap just before I reached it. I jumped, hoping I could escape this circle of darkness with another feat of athleticism. A shadowy wisp lashed out and gripped my foot as I sailed over their heads. A familiar, cold sensation bit straight through my flesh and into bone. My forward progress stopped. The tentacle slammed me back onto the hard stone of the square. A shout of pain tore past my lips, momentarily drowning out the whispers.
Screams echoed in my mind. A man cried out as a crude knife ripped into his stomach. A woman wailed as a priest ripped a child from her arms and presented it to one of their gods. Frenzied shrieks of pure agony tore from the throat of a burning woman. More scenes of horror piled upon the first, each more brutal and terrible than the last, and I realized I had joined my screams with theirs.
The dark tendril still had me by the ankle. It had to be the reason I was seeing this, some rational part of my mind realized. Something orange had fallen from a pocket on the side of my backpack after the shadow had slammed me to the ground. A flare. Using every last ounce of control left to me, I grabbed the slender rod. At the very least, I could light it and hold it against the smoky tentacle, possibly burning it loose. My desperation made any action—no matter how feeble—preferable to dying at the hands of these beings.
My leg felt numb with cold. An icy sensation crept up my calf, my thigh, and started for my chest. My limbs barely moved no matter how hard I pushed them. Another wave of savage images washed over me and the flare faded from my view. Somehow, my numb fingers found a plastic cap.
I snapped it off.
A brilliant orange light exploded against my closed eyelids. The whispers turned into high-pitched shrieks, like violins in the hands of morbidly depressed, candy-fueled five year olds. The cold grip on my foot vanished. These things couldn't handle light, I realized, watching their forms retreat.
I tried to run, but my legs wouldn't move. They were as unresponsive as slabs of meat. I couldn't even drag myself more than an inch. The flare burned bright, but it wouldn't last long. And even so, I didn't know if it'd be enough to hold off the shadows for long.
I jammed my hand into the backpack, searching desperately for something, anything that might save me. Elyssa, the OCD planner she was, had crammed in a load of stuff before we'd dived into the icy depths of the lake at the center of Thunder Rock. I thought back to the oily black shadow, which had dragged me away from her as we tried to swim to an underground river beneath the caves. The sensation had felt very much like this one. Except I hadn't seen any visions and the cold hadn't progressed past the point of contact.
Either these things were not quite the same, or they were even darker and more twisted than the underwater monster. My hand found a rounded shape, dusty and dry against my skin. I pulled out a thick piece of chalk and suppressed a crazed laugh of hopelessness. Chalk? Seriously? What in the world was I going to use this for? Maybe I could draw some stick figures illustrating my horrific demise should any other fool come across this place. I uttered a prayer to karma and dug deeper into the pack.
In a side pocket of the waterproof backpack, I found two more flares. Nothing else. The only thing standing between dark insanity and me were these last beacons of light in a pitch-black world.
The first flare burned on but it had dimmed considerably, giving me only a small circle of radiance. Outside this circle, the shadows tightened around me, slim tendrils drifting from their darkly shimmering figures like cold nooses poised to drag me into eternal night. Were these things anything like the tiny wailing cherubs? I thought back again to the ones from Thunder Rock. They might have killed me if I hadn't—
"You moron!" I said to myself, foregoing a face-palm only because I needed to grab the chalk, which I'd stuffed into my pocket.
As the circle of light grew dangerously small, I struck another flare and held it above my head. My legs had regained feeling but it was all I could do to stagger to my feet. At the center of the square was a chest-high platform of stone, possibly a podium. I didn't know what its purpose was, but it suited my immediate needs. I grabbed the backpack, took the original flare in the other hand, and hobbled the several yards to the center of the open area. The shadowy figures followed, staying precisely outside the cone of light given off by the flare. I threw the original flare at a group of them. Several didn't react in time. The smoky shadows drifting from their bodies blazed like gunpowder as they shrieked and blurred away from it.
I balanced the new flare atop the platform. Pulled the chalk from my pocket and traced a circle several feet in diameter around the base of the structure, thanking whoever built the place for using such smooth massive tiles. Smaller tiles would have had spaces between them and I might not have been able to draw a circle without breaks in it. I thought back to all the little things Shelton had told me about circles. He hadn't told me much, but I remembered him saying certain ones could act as barriers against specific entities. The silvery rings surrounding the arches at Thunder Rock had kept out terrifying cherubs. I had to hope a c
ircle would keep these things out as well.
Just in case, I thought extra hard about my extreme desire to keep these creeps out of my safe place.
Circle close and keep these shadows out. Keep them out!
A familiar crackle in the air told me the circle had indeed closed, and the static pressure of magic washed over me in an intense wave.
The incredible concentration of magic made me realize this place was directly over ley lines as powerful as those at Thunder Rock.
As the flare died down over the next few minutes, I tried to force back the fear that my pitiful chalk circle wouldn't work. "Moment of truth," I said, trying to comfort myself as the flare dimmed enough to allow the shadows past the edges of the circle if it didn't work as desired.
They flowed inward like a sea of black malevolence. And broke against my circle.
"Yes!" I shouted, pumping a fist in the air. "Go back to hell, you shadowy ass wipes. "
Some screeched. Some whispered. One of them whirled like a black tornado.
"You mad bro?" I said, taunting and giving them the finger.
As the flare died down, so did my exuberance. After my night vision kicked back on a moment later, I leaned against the stone column and slid to the ground. My hands shook and my teeth chattered. Half the shaking was probably from fear, the other from fatigue and hunger. After the challenging swim through the lake at Thunder Rock and the extreme fear and adrenalin I'd burned through from tonight's activities, I had not been ready to deal with this kind of garbage.
Why couldn't the forces of darkness leave me alone?
Bunch of inconsiderate jerks.
I stared at the massive engravings throughout the square. Each was poised before one of eight paths leading to a particular deity's pyramid. I strained to make out the engravings from my position at the center, but the range of my night vision wasn't quite strong enough to reach across the expanse.
One of the pyramids appeared larger than the others, from what I could make of the hulking shadows in the darkness, lit only by a tapestry of stars and a nearly full moon. It seemed to be the north-most pyramid, if my limited knowledge of the North Star was actually paying a dividend.