8.

 

He pushed the stone, felt it give and heard it hit the water. A cascade of smaller stones followed, sounding in hollow splashes that tore a jagged line down the side of the Temple of Ger.

The building was rotten, both in appearance and smell. Made from brick and wood, the latter having turned black, decay leaving its grasp like a handprint on the stone where the two met. In a crack not wide enough for him to drop through, Zaifyr saw that the tall windows had broken inward, the discolored glass shattering across the ground on impact.

“You are about to violate something very holy, Qian.”

“A haunt does not learn.” Zaifyr settled his gaze on her. “Once, I wanted to explain to the dead what was happening to them. I thought it would be easier to do so. But the truth is your kind will take in no more after you have died. Every idea, every belief, every moral is trapped in you, like a bug caught in amber. You will not remember this conversation, just as you will not remember the one before.”

“I remember all that is important.”

He hooked his hand around a sharp edge of stone. “Look inside and tell me that Ger is alive.”

She did not move. “Your kind has always lied.”

“If you were capable of learning you would ask why it is that you barely felt Ger, why he was so faint, here in his mountain.” The stone broke, fell into the water. “You have more ability now to know that than you ever did in life.”

“I have faith.”

“Faith is a very subjective emotion.”

Standing, Zaifyr picked up the hammer. It felt heavy in his hands. He was tired, but he brought the end down on the weakening edge of the stone. After another two blows enough of the rotting window was revealed that he could carefully drop into the building, a prospect that did not excite him. He felt no threat from within, either from Ger or from anything else that might live within the darkness, and it was exactly that absence which troubled him.

He lowered himself from the ledge slowly, using his wedges as handholds as his bare feet searched for a perch on the window and finding none until his toes touched glass-covered stone. Wet, slippery. He dislodged the shards before letting it take his weight, his tired arms trembling from the effort.

The haunt drew closer to him, the red from her chest rising and diminishing as she stepped out of the ceiling’s crude light. She did not make a move to speak and Zaifyr, his hands searching for holds that were not crumbling, did not try. Once he had secured himself, he used her light to stare into the darkness of the temple.

There were rotting pews and, to the left, a broken dais. He could make out only the edges of other items, shapes hinted at in the dark that teased the imagination.

Pushing himself forward, Zaifyr dropped to the ground, the momentum carrying him to his knees. His hands pressed deep into cold, slippery mud.

There was glass beneath his feet and he tried to avoid it, but did not succeed. Within two steps, his left foot had two shallow cuts. Ignoring the wounds he stared ahead at the dark that, with the faint light of the haunt no longer being blocked by his body, revealed more to him than it had previously done.

“You are not welcome.”

From the dark: guttural, barely understandable.

“You are not welcome.”

He approached the voice, the mud sliding between his toes, the edges of glass threatening to cut him again. He passed the outline of a rotting pew. Before him, a figure began to take shape. He saw a bestial head that could have once belonged to any canine creature, but which was defined by the length of a wolf’s nose and the dull, bared teeth of the same animal. It was made from steel, however, a suit of armor cast for a figure much larger than human.

“You are not—”

Zaifyr’s hand touch the cold metal mid-sentence and the helmet toppled, landing to his left with a clatter. The suit followed, sprawling across the ground. Whoever—whatever—had owned the ancient armor was gone, dead. Perhaps. Perhaps it had fled, leaving once it realized that Ger had no power over it, that the binds that once held it in place as a guardian were broken, that after servitude for millions of years it was free.