by Ronan Frost
He struggled to stand, reaching out for the support of a wall he couldn’t see, and like the drum up in the temple itself, felt the slight vibration hum through the wall when he came into contact with it. That contact brought a low-level phosphorescent light to life, too. It spread out down the tunnel from where his hand touched the wall, more and more of the passage lighting the way ahead of him. It had to be a trick of the light, surely, but in that moment he could have sworn the tunnel wasn’t merely humming, but was visibly contracting and expanding, the breathing effect all the more obvious in the strange light.
He took his hand away from the wall.
Mercifully, the light didn’t go out.
He looked around him.
He appeared to have landed in some sort of nexus of tunnels, with choices leading in several directions. The problem was that they looked virtually identical. None of them looked any more inviting than the others.
Rye took a first step, the ground absorbing the sound his footsteps should have made, and walked deeper into the light.
There were markings on the wall in a language he didn’t understand.
He lingered to study them, expecting to hear the cries of Carter or Vic as they fell. There were no cries. The symbols could have been a mix of the brushstroke sweeps of Sumerian or Akkadian, or some sort of proto-Tibetic language lost to antiquity. Without some kind of key to unlock their hidden meanings, the symbols were indecipherable. This wasn’t what he was good at. He felt out of his depth.
He walked on, reaching a branch in the tunnel.
Again, there seemed to be little to distinguish one choice from another, but while he deliberated the alternatives and mourned the loss of his ice ax and crampons to score out a metaphorical trail of bread crumbs, the quality of the light up ahead darkened, taking on an almost rosy hue.
He chose that path.
Again, the walls were carved with more symbols from the peculiar language, though now Rye noticed that beside one of the string of symbols there was a panel with the three blazing spheres of the Jing, Chi, and Shen.
He placed his hand on it, and the symbols flared to life, answering the warmth of his touch.
A door he hadn’t realized was there opened.
He heard a soft hiss and sigh as though a vacuum seal had been broken, and then the door was open, recessing into the wall beside him.
Inside was obviously some form of chamber.
On the far side he saw frosted glass panels.
He moved closer to investigate, trying to brush away the frosting, but the glass was no more transparent for it. It wasn’t a crust of ice. A soft light pulsed behind one glass, barely bright enough to notice. There were seven such panels in the chamber, though only one was lit with that inner glow.
There was more writing on the wall, though this text flickered and changed as he looked at it. The change was barely noticeable, a single brush stroke of the larger letters changing, but change it did.
Rye didn’t like it.
He wished he wasn’t alone down here.
But almost as soon as that half prayer flickered through his mind, he reframed the thought in case a particularly warped god heard his prayer and gave him something else to worry about: he wished the others were here with him.
Rye moved back out into the tunnel and noticed for the first time large bubbling tubes running along the ceiling.
He couldn’t tell what, if anything, was causing them to bubble, but closer inspection suggested there was some form of algae inside.
This wasn’t like any sort of cave or tunnel he’d ever been in, with its gentle pulsing—breathing—walls and its bubbling intestinal tubes of algae.
It was like being inside a living thing.
The thought offered him no comfort.
He rested his good hand against the wall again, trying to tell by touch if it might truly be some sort of organic matter, but it wasn’t until he reached the next diverging tunnel and saw the haunting construction holding it together—a cage of bones—that he knew he was right, however insane being right actually was.
The walls ahead of him were an intricate lattice of bone-white stanchions and braces, with thin membranous skin stretched between them. The skin was stretched so thin blue veins were clearly visible within it. Like the walls where he had fallen into the belly of the beast, the taut membranes pulsed with life. It was the blood within the walls that altered the quality of the light, lending it that pinkish tinge.
Heart racing, Rye continued to explore, dreading what he might find around the next corner.
More peculiar symbols indicated more chambers; beneath each he saw the same three burning spheres of the Jing, Chi, and Shen, and each time he put his hand to them, hidden doors opened. Most of the chambers seemingly served no purpose other than to give access to other chambers and tunnels beyond them, but after what felt like hours of walking alone in the oppressive gloom, he opened a door on the impossible.
The vast chamber within the very heart of the bone and blood passageways was filled with an explosion of foliage: all manner of flora and brightly colored plant life grew in vibrant profusion. It was like walking into a rain forest beneath the mountains, though there was a membranous ceiling rather than a sky, where moisture gathered and fell like rain to nourish the leaves and trees within this strange, strange place.
Rye reached out to touch a leaf, which felt waxy and unreal to his fingers. He saw tiny black flecks moving across the surface of the leaf, and assumed it was some sort of mite. The tiny black spots moved onto the palm of his hand. He brushed them off with the bandage of his injured hand and saw several of them disappear beneath the wrap of the makeshift bandage.
The last thing he wanted was the burned skin getting infected from whatever bacteria or parasites the mites might be carrying, so he unwrapped the bandage carefully, intending to clean out the wound.
What he saw stopped him dead.
Several of the tiny black mites had gathered around the raw red slash of exposed dermis and were already burrowing down into it.
A wave of sickness surged up, threatening to purge his guts, as more of the black mites swarmed from the vegetation, drawn to his wounded flesh.
Hundreds upon hundreds of them gathered until his upturned palm was completely black with them, like a glove across the wound, and no matter how frantically he tried to brush them away they would not be moved.
There was nothing natural about the mites’ behavior.
Rye wrapped his good hand around the wrist of his injured one and tried to peel away the mites like a glove, but there was no moving them.
The first stirrings of panic stole into his heart as he felt the creeping itch of the tiny black bugs eating into the flesh of his palm.
No amount of shaking or panicked clawing at his hand could scrape them away.
The wound burned.
They—whatever they were—burrowed into the exposed layers of skin, eating away at the wound until the damaged flesh was devoured, and then it felt as though they continued with their voracious appetites consuming all that remained of his hand beneath the black glove of their vile existence.
Rye screamed.
His cries echoed through all of the membranous tunnels, causing the translucent skin to shrink back away from the bones supporting it.
And he felt the walls around him scream back.
He recoiled, staggering back away from the creeping vines and trailing vegetation, and stumbled out of the vast arboretum as the flora itself echoed his screams, shrieking out in deafening, soul-searing panic so much more desperate than his own.
He collided with the membranous wall and slumped down, staring through the open doorway toward the impossible rain forest before him.
He couldn’t go back in there.
He wouldn’t.
Not while the plants shrieked out their own spiraling fear.
The screams were everywhere.
Rye clamped his hands across his ears, but the shrill scre
ams still found a way through to torment him. He rocked back against the wall, willing the screams out of his head. His breaths came harder and harder, echoing the fear driving his first frightened scream, and then he pulled his hands away from his head realizing what he’d done and imagining the mites moving from his hand into his ear and burrowing deep down inside his skull and into the soft stuff of his brain.
He was going to puke.
He lurched forward onto his hands and knees, bile spilling from his mouth as he gagged, trying to bring up his last meal.
With it all up, he collapsed and rolled onto his side, and somewhere in that moment realized what was missing: the pain.
He’d put all his weight on his wounded hand, and despite the creeping sensation of the flesh-eating mites working all over it, it hadn’t hurt.
Rye looked down at his hand, trying to understand what was happening to him.
He could flex his fingers, make a fist, stretch them so far apart the webbing between them strained, turn his hand left and right, and not feel a single stinging sensation. Not so much as a paper-cut burn, never mind the damage the nylon rope had inflicted.
The mites had healed him—or more accurately were still healing him.
Would they fall away when they were done, waiting for some fresh wound to heal? Or would they remain there now, a Michael Jackson–like single glove on his right hand for the rest of his life? The thought made Rye want to puke all over again, but he swallowed down the impulse.
He pushed himself back to his feet and just stood there in the middle of the strange tunnel staring at his black hand.
He felt the faintest caress of cold air against his cheek and looked up.
There was no way for a wind to blow down here.
It was impossible.
Like the forest was impossible.
Like everything else was impossible.
He started to walk toward the source of that faint breeze.
“Carter? Is that you? Vic? Ice? Can you hear me?”
His words echoed the names back to him.
There was no answer.
He followed the twists and turns of the living tunnel, each new turn heightening the feeling he was walking deeper into the belly of the beast.
He listened for the others, but he was alone down here.
He was absolutely sure of it.
For whatever reason, the combination of the star chart on the drum of the prayer wheel hadn’t opened again, meaning they couldn’t get to him.
His first instinct was to turn back: the legends were true, there was healing to be found down here, but Rask was right, it wasn’t some magical stone. How could he gather up enough of these black mites and carry them back to Rask in Kathmandu?
Not easily.
Unless he could somehow graft the ones from his hand onto Rask’s dying flesh?
Could that work?
He didn’t even know if they were healing him, or if they had simply consumed the nerves and left everything under the black glove dead.
Dead flesh didn’t feel pain, did it?
But he couldn’t go back, not without seeing exactly what was here—and more specifically what people like Cressida Mohr and Tenzin Dawa were willing to kill to ensure remained hidden, because there was a secret here people had been killing to protect for the best part of a hundred years, at least. And it couldn’t just be the weird living tunnels and the weirder black healing mites. He knew that beyond any sort of doubt. And that kernel of knowledge was enough to spark his curiosity. He was in this to the end. No turning back.
More tunnels, more bubbling tubes strung across their ceilings, and more and more of that rich rank reek of death.
He walked through the tunnels, listening to the ever-present dubdub-dubdub of the blood in his ears, which matched the pulse of the walls around him as they expanded and contracted with the pumping of biomass through their arteries.
The rot was all-pervasive.
It got into his nose and cloyed down his throat.
There was no escaping it.
It was only as he reached the very heart of the labyrinth that he finally understood why.
Rye stood face-to-face with a vast muscled wall that was the organic heart of the strange new world he walked within.
The heartbeat was weakening, every now and then missing a beat, or faltering enough that the ventricular walls spasmed rather than pulsed.
The heart of Shambhala was wet to the touch, slick with a mucusoid coating that ran like tears down the layers of thin muscle.
Whatever it really was, the only way his mind could cope with or process what he was looking at was to consider it as a living heart, and it was clinging to life as sickness ate away at the rest of its organic body—hence the stench.
Shambhala was decomposing.
That meant it really was alive.
And that sent his mind racing in all sorts of directions as he wrestled with the implications of some great organism dying across the centuries down here.
Was this god?
Or at least something that more primitive minds might make pilgrimages to and worship?
The answer was in the buildings above him, carved into the heart of Gangkhar Puensum.
Yes, yes they would.
And they’d kill to preserve that secret.
Stories of starry wisdom pervaded cultures and faiths, the idea of heaven and deities existing out there somewhere in the distance, out of sight but not mind. Every culture and faith had them. Something we could pray to and somehow imagine as great creators.
Rye placed both of his hands against the beating heart and felt its pain.
“What secrets you must have to tell,” he breathed, trying to imagine.
He felt the thrill of static charge through his hands but didn’t break the contact.
The organism was trying to communicate with him.
But there were no words they could share. No common language. He couldn’t see the organism’s pain and it couldn’t feel his compassion.
“How long have you been down here? How long have you been lost and dying?”
Millennia. Surely.
Three thousand years at least.
Wasn’t that what the legends Rask had told them about had said? Three thousand years since the wisdom had fallen from the sky into the hands of the Tibetan king? A thousand years before Christ.
As a concept, three thousand years was vast enough to be longer than his mind could realistically conceive.
It went beyond any concrete understanding of the world into a pantheistic culture where worshiping eight-armed elephant gods was not only reasonable, it was the norm, and the concept of space was aligned strongly with the divine, with sun gods and moon gods, with the constellations of heroes and more.
The Vril.
Rye felt the tears running down his cheek and realized he was crying.
The idea of dying alone had always terrified him and had only become worse after being forced to listen to Hannah’s murder. But this was so far beyond that.
“Are you afraid?”
The heart beat faster beneath his hands, answering him in the most visceral way the organism knew how.
The intimacy of it was intense.
There was no mistaking that the heart had quickened in response to his words; even if the organism didn’t understand, it heard.
Rye had his hands on a sentient being.
It was, quite literally and physically, first contact.
It was everything Rask had hoped for and so much more.
It was an answer to the question that had plagued mankind for as long as the species had looked to the stars and wondered if there was life out there.
“Where did you call home?” Rye asked, knowing the doomed creature could never tell him. “You poor, poor bastard.” He leaned forward, pressing his forehead against the walls of the heaving heart, and in that moment a bond was formed between them. A blinding swirl of a spiral galaxy formed like a sunburst across hi
s mind’s eye, bright enough to send him reeling backward, gasping in shock.
He had glimpsed the Vril homeworld.
A tendril of organic matter, like a giant umbilicus, looped across the floor and up the side of his head to where it burrowed into his temple.
The sheer agony of it as the organism’s flesh joined him was unbearable.
Rye’s screams tore through the tunnels and vaulted cathedral of bone that had formed around the heart and must surely have echoed across all of the Seven White Brothers, so desperate, so terrified, were they.
He clawed at the umbilicus, trying to tear it free of his skull, but it lashed and writhed in his grasp without giving an inch.
And then the images poured into his mind, faster and faster, drowning his consciousness in the wisdom of a dying god.
He saw galaxies unfurl.
He witnessed the death of stars, a supermassive black hole burning up the gas and dust as it ripped the unstable stars apart with the sheer unrelenting force of its gravity, the particle jet spewing out of its maw enough to light the whole galaxy. It was an incredible sight, and it lasted barely a second as it burned brightly across Rye’s mind.
But it was important.
Fundamental.
It was why the Vril had fled their dying galaxy to find a new home one hundred and fifty million light-years from that death.
He lost the will to fight, surrendering to the mothership’s invasion of his mind, begging over and over for it to spare him, but the pain didn’t cease.
And still the images flooded through him, but with no understanding of them beyond the most visceral, all he felt was despair for the suffering the Vril had undergone.
And then he saw the face.
Tenzin Dawa.
And it named him Kaustubh, the Guardian of the Stone.
Only it wasn’t the hunter that had chased them halfway around the world. It was a simpler version of the same man who had stumbled into these caves centuries ago. Rye saw that true first contact, the monk’s face imprinting itself upon the mothership’s great intelligence, the first man it had encountered in the deeps.
And then, when it gave him the name again, Kaustubh, Rye knew that the title had been conferred on him.