"I don't know Kyle, I'm thinking this is a bad idea." "Angie's the one who lost the map Dina, so don't blame me." "Usually when you lose the map while hiking, you go back the way you came instead of forging off into the scenery to get yourself lost like an idiot. And she didn't lose it, the wind blew it out of her hands, so don't you blame her either." He didn't answer, only kept pressing on through the brush. Dina turned and shrugged to the rest of the group, five other of their friends in various different states of looking uncomfortable. The hiking trip was not going they way they had planned- the backpacks were too heavy, the scenery was mostly an uninspiring dry brown this time of year, and there were more bugs than should be legally allowed to run free. Most worrying of all, what they had come to call 'Kyle's weirdness' in asides and whispers was getting worse. All the week before while they planned the trip they kept catching him staring off into space as if he was listening to something else, and now that they were out and in the hills he kept alternately spacing out and taking off like a shot in random directions. A tall, slightly freckly young man in the back sighed through his teeth. "This isn't cool anymore. He's going to get us all lost. I say we either put him on a leash or call it off and go home. My feet are killing me anyway." He sat down right in the dirt with huff, three others following suit and looking equally tired. "Yeah, Kyle's acting too weird. We should make him go home and see a doctor or something," added a thin mousy girl through chewing on a lock of her brown-blond hair. "Think maybe he's having like a, like a hallucinatiphobia or something?" The group gave a collective "..." at that but seemed at a loss for a response and just let it go. With a friend like that you learned pretty quickly not to think about it too hard lest a stray phrase stick in your head for years and cause you an aneurysm later. "I agree. That we should call this quits I mean." Dina sighed and tied her short black hair up into a ponytail. "You guys wait here, I'll go chase him down again and we'll just go home." They nodded and wished her luck, and she jogged off through the dry brush after Kyle. While walking along she heard a strange crunch underfoot. She paused and looked down to find, of all things, their trail map. You could hardly tell it had been blowing around all day. That's luck for you, Dina thought dismissively as she re-folded and pocketed the paper. Just a few more minutes of jogging and she found Kyle, staring at a large flat stone surface in the side of a rocky hill. "Alright, captain space case, I hope you had enough fresh air, because everyone else is calling the day quits. C'mon." She put a hand on his shoulder and tugged, but he wouldn't budge, and she realized with a flutter in her stomach that he had that creepy distant look on his face again. "Look at these marks, Dina." He ran the fingers of his free hand slowly over the completely blank stone. This is bad. He's seeing things now? Dina swallowed hard and pulled Kyle's water bottle out of the side pocket of his backpack. "I don't see anything. Here, man, you haven't been drinking enough water. Don't get dehydrated and go funny in the head on me." Without looking over he suddenly raised his walking stick over his head, making Dina jump back in surprise, and swung it down hard to strike the stone. It exploded with a crash and left her blind and coughing on a giant dust cloud. "What the hell, Ky!?" No answer. Dina fanned at the air with her hand for a minute, still coughing, and when the air cleared enough she could see a door-sized hole in the hillside where the flat stone used to be. And no Kyle. She spat a few times to get the dust out of her mouth and stood blinking in disbelief. But really, what was there to do but chase him down? And give him a black eye? And pray that the old mine or whatever it was didn't cave in on their heads? She pulled a flashlight out of her pack and then ran in after him. Inside a rough walled tunnel continued on for a while, Dina couldn't have guessed how long since she was only paying attention to not running into anything in the pitch dark around her flashlight beam. She opened her mouth to yell and had a flash of a million cartoons and bad movies in which yelling caused avalanches and cave ins and various other 'you idiot' disasters. She swallowed and hissed a stage whisper instead. "Kyle! You moron, where did you go? Is this a prank or something?" The sound of her footsteps, which she had barely noticed before, suddenly changed from muted thuds to a long echo. She froze, flashlight beam trembling, and then cleared her throat experimentally. The sound trailed off for a long time into the darkness, making the hair on her arms stand up with a chill. She lifted her light up from the floor in front of her and swung it around to find out where she had ended up. She gasped. The place they had found, just from the little she could see of it, was enormous. Dina had to walk a few yards toward the nearest wall just to be able to see it clearly and even then she had to come right up close to it to believe what she was seeing. The walls were lined with ornate paintings, faded and broken by cracks in the old stone. It was very 'History Channel Goes To Egypt' except instead of Egyptian style sideways people and animal headed gods there were... scenes? What was this, some kind of temple? She edged close to the wall and shone her light along it curiously. The murals were... events. Bad ones. Dina had that feeling you get after seeing something disturbing, the one that tells you it's going to do its best to stick in the back of your mind and give you nightmares later. Like the painting of screaming people running from the swarm of insects. Or maybe the screaming people and the fire-rain. Or the screaming people and the lizard-lion things. She would have liked to un-see quite a bit of that. Could we change the channel on this theme please? A jagged shadow fell across the wall, breaking Dina's awestruck stare and making her jump so much that she dropped her flashlight with a clatter. She scrambled to pick it back up and turned it to what she had seen. The light fell across statues of- -oh, crap. This Meant Something, didn't it. "Kyle? Kyle, if you can hear me, don't touch ANYTHING!" She moved quickly away toward the center of the cavern-temple, walking as fast as she dared and sweeping the light back and forth on the ground until she found the pathway of white marble running straight from the entrance through into the dark. Now that she knew what she was looking for she saw them everywhere. Apparent stone statues of people, strange... things you could probably get away with calling animals if you used the term loosely, and humanoid things that definitely were not actually human. All caught in various states of running, fighting, or laying dead on the floor. It was a frozen battlefield. Statues. Sure. She broke into a jog along the path into the darkness, having to skirt around more of the 'statues' every now and again where they stood or fell across the road. Then there were stairs, and she bolted up those, to find at the top- The floor was raised in a circle, and at the edges of the space she could dimly see what were probably stone columns. In the center of the dais stood Kyle, staring glaze eyed at a sword with its blade stuck deep into something strange on the ground. She turned her light down onto the uneven shape and shuddered. Another stone 'statue', air quotes very intentional. Some long, twisted creature that should never be allowed to exist, all scales and spines and claws, writhing in agony. The blade pierced into the flat of the top of its reptilian head, pinning it to the ground. Its eyes seemed to burn. She couldn't even really see the thing in this dark and she could tell the eyes weren't right. "Look, Dina..." Kyle wavered drunkenly. "I found it." "Step back from that thing. You don't know what-" Slowly, dreamily, he reached for the hilt. Dina ran, dropped her flashlight and flat out tackled him to the floor. He groaned and gave a weak push at her hands pinning his shoulders. "What are you doing? Let... let me up." "You IDIOT did you NOT hear me say DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING?" "But I... I need to...." She was all but screaming at him through the darkness now despite the fact that she was right there on top of him. "BIG OMINOUS TEMPLE UNDERGROUND! PAINTINGS! SWORD-IN-STONE! Have you never owned a television or a video game system? WE LEAVE SWORDS WHERE THEY ARE WHEN WE FIND THEM ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE HOLDING DEMONS PINNED DOWN!" "But I have to...." Dina punched him in the face as hard as she could. "OW! WHAT THE F-" His hands flew up to cover his face. "I think you broke my nose!" "GOOD!" "What's your problem!?" She picked her flashlight back up with one hand, hauled Kyle to his feet by the collar of his shirt with the other, and shone the light around so he could see. She just about heard his jaw drop. "Holy... where are we?" "Oh, now you don't know, King Arthur? You don't remember?" "Remember wha- Oh. Oooh. Ow. Yeah, I remember. I remember everything. I don't know what was wrong with me. Why.... What is all this?" Dina decided that he sounded sane enough and let him go, listened as he spat- probably blood- and dug his own flashlight out of his backpack. A second beam of light clicked on and swung around to look at the walls, the 'statues', and the sword. His light ran down the blade to the thing on the floor. The entire circular area they stood on was covered with the the massive twisted... thing. It looked capable of crushing a double decker bus in its coils like a python with an empty soda can. Both of them fidgeted uncomfortably from foot to foot, wishing there was some rubble for them to stand on. The sole of a shoe was not enough distance from touching this thing. "Jeez. Jeez, I mean, what do we do now? This is crazy." Kyle's eyes started flicking around frantically, the shadows full of twisted demon-things to his mind's eye now. "I tell you what we do. We walk out of here, mark this place on our map. Go find the others, pretend nothing happened, leave and get everyone home. And then when its just you and me we go buy some cement, borrow my dad's truck and a wheelbarrow and shovels or whatever else we need, drive back out here and cover this whole... thing in a slab as thick as we can manage." "Even the sword?" "Especially the sword." "But why? Isn't this some kind of awesome archaeological find or something?" She pointed sharply down at the monstrosity on the floor. "What part of 'pull here to release terrible monster' do you not understand?! Are you not fluent in this language? Can you not read cliche?" Kyle ran his hand over the back of his neck thoughtfully. "...Go back and pretend nothing happened, huh?" "Yep." "You already forgot that you punched me. The others will kind of notice blood running down my face." "Oh jeez, I did didn't I." She realized that her knuckles were sore and massaged her hand. "Yeah, sorry. Totally had to do it. We'll just say you fell down." "On my face." "Well you are kinda klutzy? Or maybe you fainted from dehydration?" He thought it over. "...I'll have fallen down, but you pushed me." And that was their story, and every one believed it. And that was their plan, and it's exactly what they did. ~End Page One~