Upon Temple Steppe

Fiction: An alchemist recounts his horrifying journey to a cursed ruin.

— First Scroll —

I, Archimell the Southerner, commit ocherous ink to papyrus in order to make record of this account on assurance its contents shall remain solely in the confidence of you and your master, a being whose name I am unworthy of speaking. Should the rightful vizier of this desert jewel be so moved by my words as to grant me an audience, I would be moved beyond gratitude.

What I share is truth unadorned, its candor both a gesture of atonement and an act of prostration before your master’s eye, under which even the most calculated falsehoods of man are as transparent as common glass.

These events occurred in the spring, three years after my banishment from the verdant shores of Sakynthos for the study of occult ritual in service of deities excluded from the world’s more well-considered pantheons. My results in Sakynthos had garnered a following which included some of the city’s most influential citizens and freemen, and the accompanying scrutiny was in the end my undoing. On a eupatridae patriarch's orders, the city guard carried me from my bed one cursed midnight, dragging me by bound wrists beyond the city’s limits and through fetid heath, throwing me then down a narrow gulch to die. Nursing a broken right hand, which was never to mend itself fully straight, I fled into darkness and survived for months as a vagrant upon death's door until coming into the care of Druuz the Boor.

An outlaw by temperament as well as fortune, Druuz was as hateful as he was superstitious Due to this latter excess, he favored my craft nearly as much as he did my droll company, which he treasured as only the world’s most ostracized may. Ours was an impoverished life, eked out in a knotted pine valley so remote that no law saw profit in bothering to tread there. By our natures we made inattentive farmers and absent shepherds to those few ewes we’d taken by midnight's grace from the neighboring hilltribes, and what little wealth we could press from the rare peddler foolish enough to cross our small fiefdom was just as soon transmuted into kumis or palm wine by the next eastbound caravan, it being our preference to follow our hearts toward such simple pleasures.

It is during one such robbery that my tale begins. Under the seething tongue of my iron firebrand, a writhing young troubadour had confessed to sewing a delusory patch on the underside of his sabretache. Removed, the patch revealed a cache which served as home to a trinket that he himself had pilfered from his former patron. The fool called it an ouroboros relic, and it perhaps appeared so to the untrained eye, but all breath left me as I wrested it free for at once I saw its true nature.

An amphisbaena. Its bronze serpentine neck glistened in vernal sunlight as though wet with dew, as the beast's foremost head snapped back with fury at its hindmost.

I shook the amphisbaena at the boy, who still sat chained against our shed wall. “How did your master come by this?”

“He sends his best man into the ruins of Chyzanchorum for such things. That’s all I know.”

“Impossible. No man goes there and leaves alive.”

My excited voice had roused Druuz from the nearby stump he had rested upon. His dull eyes took on that rare glint which came only when great pain or profit was about to be extracted from a victim.

"Talk, boy. Or me get hammer."

The troubadour wilted. “I knew the man, as well as his wife unfortunately, and he was only too fit and honest a character. I did ask my master about it once, and he said that all the souls haunting that ruin had at long last retired. I can learn more, were you to let me go. I can lead you—”

His prattle fell on deaf ears, for my mind raced at the prospect that the flesh-devouring spirits of legend, those who for all the centuries since their massacre by the Scarlet Khan’s horde had haunted Chyzanchorum, had been dispelled.

---

That night, after we had retired into our ragged shack, I attempted to explain the opportunity to Druuz—that an entire city’s riches lay at our fingertips if we had but the courage to enter. Druuz, who despite his bravado, paled at the thought of encountering a wight, protested. “Chyzanchorum is the river ruins, no? As boy, I hear spirits there eat all kin of allies that abandoned them.” He palmed his tangled beard. “Shaman say those spirits no fall to ax, chew through iron to bone.”

“True,” I said, “but you forget that my craft may guard us. Even more critically, the rage which binds any lost soul to our plane is a finite thing. If what the boy said is true, then the souls of Chyzanchorum now dwindle, drained away like so much rain into their sacred river. It’s only a matter of weeks before every pickpocket, larcener, and graverobber in the land is making expeditions to plunder the ruins. Just imagine the sealed mausoleums of the river kings before us, ruby crowned skulls on abandoned thrones, the gold plated sepulchers of treasure-burdened temples untouched since a time beyond living memory! It could be ours, but only if we act with haste, I fear.”

We argued this matter for some time. He confessed to a desperation to improve our circumstances, but it was not until we were deeper in our cups that I succeeded in finding him his courage. We made a pact then and there to loot the ruins. The following morning we disposed of the boy, opened the sheep pen, and packed what few belongings we had into haversacks before setting out east towards the city of the dead.

— Second Scroll —

We slept under the stars and steered wide around those few yurts we sighted on the plains, preferring a course along the narrow streams and waterways by whose descent we would ultimately be led to blighted ruins of Chyzanchorum. For sustenance we had hard cheese enough, and a few moldered rye cakes from our piteous garden besides, so that no requisition from the natives was necessary. This was to our benefit, much as Druuz may under usual circumstances have enjoyed the act of spoil, for at present I did not wish to draw attention to our movements.

My crooked right hand ached horribly when exposed to the cool night air, waking me frequently but causing no delay as the pine glades faded into a reedy bog. The water's breadth pushed us ever farther onto sorbefacient soil that squelched underfoot and whose bloated surface bristled with the chlorotic leaves of plants whose roots had grown for ages in their own putrid rot.

While the creeping damp was a source of fatigue, it was of a natural and open-skied variety that presented no immediate cause for dread. Druuz even made sport of my dourness, asking if the relative luxury of our life in the valley had once again acclimated me to the habits of an urban dandy.

“If I'm soft,” I chided, “then it's your doing by being so generous with your mutton and cheese to a strange southerner. It's only fitting that you suffer now the consequences of your indulgence.”

He snorted. “A true southerner! Always passing on his debt.”

Privately, I worried that I led us to our doom. The humidity, a steaming foulness, brought to mind my final summer days in Sakynthos, the feeling of personal liberation under a growing cloud of the oppressive tyranny of smaller minds. I dreamt sometimes in that wretched bog of the many hands taking me again.

 On the eighth day we reached the river proper and passed under a stone totem bearing the ivory face of a woman swathed in a golden kalyptra. A rusted chain ran from the rung at her feet to her sister across that placid river. Wiser men would have chiseled off her golden sheen and withdrawn to civilization, but Chyzanchorum rose just beyond, her white-stone towers now stained with age and creeping vines. Her lower ramparts and docks had sunken into the wet soil, half submerged and splayed open before us like a flushed doxy. Men in the heat of such passions can know no retreat unless struck down by some greater force.

We rested fitfully beneath the veiled face that night. At dawn, we scouted the city’s crumbling walls, tentatively at first and not daring to speak above a whisper. No beasts had returned to that place, leaving the air deadly still, as nary a birdsong nor toad croak eased the its stifling warmth. We scaled the outermost parapet in prenatural silence when suddenly a single fish splashed below, startling Druuz such that he loosed the rope I gripped for my life below. I felt weightless as I drifted backwards, breath escaping me as I barely caught myself. My bad hand struck and clasped a half emerged brick. An inferno of pain roared up my forearm, but with all my grit I kept grasp of the wall until Druuz collected his wits enough to save me.

I wondered again whether the troubadour had spun a tall tale for us, hoping to either earn his freedom or damn us with his lies.

The streets below, where once the khan’s horde had ridden screaming with fire and flashing steel over what desperate few hypaspists had dared to stand in their way, were now flooded by the intervening centuries to form stilled channels that glistened with an oily coating of algal blooms under the sun's glare. They showed no sign of ill will beyond the sulfurous stink of ungrazed decay. The oleiferous flora seemed entirely unaffected by whatever curse still lingered, and if anything, grew with even more wild abandon than the surrounding wilderness. Piths burst forth from stem tips, spilling their unbound guts to rot at the bottom of the pool or upon weathered pavement; the inexplicably viscid walls of each house were gripped by skeletal vines, and in what few narrow scraps of bare earth remained there grew ugly, dwarflike trees with overlarge heads of massed brambles.

We walked across the rooftops of the lower quarter, our heads twisting about for fear of sighting movement in some alley or under the shadowed ruins of a doorframe. But it was all for nothing. Only dead air greeted us in that strange, silent city, and we climbed from roof to roof until we reached a dryer quarter and descended onto paved stone walkways.

As my feet touched the ground I was overwhelmed by a vertigo. My vision darkened, and the blood in my ears grew hot. I heard ringing, like the manacles of countless enslaved being marched to their death through streets strewn with their own dead, it was the funeral dirge welled with a thousand hateful voices that was almost instantly silenced. I halted to collect myself, the haunting paroxysm concluding before I could blink. Surely it was but the tremulous ripple of several lingering memories, which only someone as attuned to the spiritual plane as I was would be sensitive to. I shook my head and followed Druuz without comment, not wishing to rob him of his already failing nerve on account of such a triviality.

The stink of algae clung to us as we rounded a verdigris-covered sundial, which stood between the broken bodies of several statues whose fallen limbs lay about their pockmarked pedestals; the surrounding marble walls were shadowed with reliefs of the river god Chyzanchor mounted atop his amphisbaena, his visage that of a wide-lipped, beardless man with overlarge rings for eyes. All this and more marked it as the temple district.

Druuz's voice trembled behind me. “Me feel eyes watching.”

“They’re only statues.”

“Not them, the dead.”

I looked around and saw only the lengthening shadows of afternoon.

“We go now. Not safe!”

“For a cold-blooded killer you squawk like a chicken,” I said with a smirk, suppressing my own discomfort. “Let me prove myself.”

I took a pinch of crushed moth wings from my pack (the very sabretache I had acquired from the troubadour) and threw them into the air while bidding they seek wayward spirits. They floated oddly for a moment, still even for the breezeless air, before drifting off down the empty thoroughfare towards an open plaza.

Druuz and I crept after them at a distance, cowering behind a fallen columnade as the bodiless cloud fluttered into the city’s heart. It must have been a great bazaar once: enormous bays in the masonry outlined where stalls had once stood, open walkways splashed with mosaics of fish and fowl and vigorous men wielding tridents. Once-brilliant sapphire tiles now lay muted by time at the bazaar’s heart, and a great structure stood on a pyramidal stairstep base, positioned so that from all sides it could be scaled and its summit patronized.

The horror that had drawn us paced at its base. The crushed wings fell, laying themselves at the feet of a hunched crone in black mourning dress. She had yet to notice them, and paced slowly with her back to us, hair wrapped and face obscured as her hands worked minute changes in a chest-high wall of bones stacked against the base of the temple steps. The skulls atop it were perfectly ordered, vacant sockets all staring outward. The largest formed the base, and the smallest—those of infants—made for it a roof with nary a thumb-width gap between any of them. 

Druuz wiped at the sheen of sweat greasing his forehead. “She real?”

“Not the way we are.”

“And building? Looks important.”

“The great temple of Chyzanchor himself, perhaps… and our best bet for a fine fortune.”

“You lose mind.”

I chuckled. “You forget who you’re dealing with, my friend.”

I rose, ignoring Druuz’s hissed pleas as I strode towards the woman. She continued on, oblivious to everything beyond her ministrations, until I passed some unseen border of her existence. She rounded on me; her face had been beautiful, and was torn between the eternal waking memory of her brutal death—a cheek bashed in so that an eye squinted closed as blood ran down her nose—and her life as a handsome woman of middle years with neatly-drawn fair hair and pink blush still on her high cheeks. She was somehow both things at once before me, living and dead. I could feel her desire like a finger wriggling through my belly button; she wanted to be inside me, to have me between her teeth and claws to tear with an animal rage. I only managed to hold her in place with a concentration of my own practiced will.

She began to scream, entirely human sounding but unbearable nonetheless. Druuz scrambled to his feet, begging me to run and yet making no move himself. 

I shook my head. “Sorry, old bitch, but we really must pass through.”

I forced my will like a cudgel against her center, hard, and her memory simply scattered beyond sight. I stood alone in the plaza.

Druuz jogged up beside, shaking his head.

“You killed her?”

“She was already dead. A single wight is no threat to me, but I sensed a great deal of rage still within her. She’ll likely reform. Let’s fill our sacks and be gone before sunfall.”

Druuz needed no further convincing. We circled wide around the skeletal wall before climbing the stairs, then halted at the precipice beneath pillars graven with oculiforms, staring dumbly at the fortune awaiting us within: a partially transparent throne of pure amethyst atop a long altar laden with coins, crowns, and gilded chests spilling over with unknowable treasures beneath dragon pearl chandeliers. It was unbelievable that such an obvious bounty would have been passed up by the great horde that had left the city in such ruin. Yet, plain as day, it stood before us.

We crossed the threshold of the pillars, and at once I doubled over with immeasurable pain. My heart seized within my chest. A hot pulse of sickness pressed up against my throat, until my face struck the cool tiles of the temple floor. Head swimming against the darkness, I was distantly aware of Druuz’s groaning beside me. I felt no fear, surprise, or even any urge to rationalize my sudden death—my senses were overwhelmed in totality by the cleansing strike of complete obliteration.

— Final Scroll —

My weight was suspended as though I’d dived once more into the icy surf off of fair Sakynthos, yet my skin felt no touch, and it neither shivered nor goosepimpled against the biting cold. Empty lungs forced wide my mouth, but were greeted not by brine or rushing air, but instead by a staleness on which my throat sucked fruitlessly, unable to draw anything meaningful into my suffocating chest.

My body ached as my taut veins strained against the inner flesh of my neck. I endured the pain, helpless in the face of my coming asphyxiation, until finally all feeling faded. Yet, I lingered on, unable to die, or die again perhaps. Instead, I writhed in a suspended agony until my senses slowly returned. Opening my eyes once more, I saw that my body floated above a gray plain of translucent grass that extended endlessly in all directions, shallow hills repeating until they met a moribund sky that knew no stars. 

Instinctively I put forward my hands and attempted to swim, and noted my right hand to be straight once more. I struggled to produce any movement with this waving, and halted when suddenly Druuz appeared standing naked on the ground just below. He now possessed a curious simianforme tail that glowed against the darkness.

“Clear your mind, Southerner. Only fear holds you up.”

He coached me for a moment in the excogitative process he had devised to move himself in this strange world. Gratefully upon the ground once more, the translucent grass stiff against my bare calves, I thanked him for coming to find me.

“You not see? Was beside you whole time.” He stared into the distance. “We dead now, yes?”

“I don’t know. And you have a tail now? That fits no theology or known hells I’m aware of.”

Druuz chuckled, an oddly comforting sound. He pointed towards my exposed buttocks. “Point out no stye in my eye when you have one too.”

“I do?” I looked back and saw nothing, and even ran a hand over the smoothness of my spine's terminus.

He shrugged. “Me no feel dead. Felt like we fall very far, so maybe we can climb out? That tower must be our best chance.” He pointed to the horizon where I saw nothing but more of the endless steppe, but I readily agreed for lack of suitable alternatives. Despite my restored body, I had not felt so small and frail since the night of my banishment.

Fortunately, once on the ground in that realm, one could move with simple strides again, although the pull of the earth seemed different. Steps were more propulsively forward, and little strength was necessary to hold one's body up, so that walking was done primarily on the toes with the grass breezing loosely past our ankles.

Silence oppressed us, broken only by a brief storm of ashes carried by no wind. It fell like warm snow against our chests and faces. A sort of trance came over us until the screaming began.

I was beginning to doubt Druuz’s vision of the tower when the ziggurat somehow materialized only an arm’s length before us, obsidian blocks stacked so that only by craning my neck could I see its crooked apex. This sudden vision was accompanied by the charged smell of an imminent storm, and the torrid howls of a man being flayed alive.

"Get down," hissed Druuz, dragging me behind a fallen stone.

He was too slow. Several loathsome creatures had manifested, as if emerging from some fog that granted translucence. These dark apparitions in the shapes of men, their cursed features blurred as they ambled on four limbs past us, and then scrambled up the ziggurat's face like beasts to their master's call. One brushed against my calf, and its surface (for it could be called neither cloth nor flesh) was coarse as sailcloth. The touch sent an agonizing shock up my limb, causing me to moan involuntarily as my throat seized. Lingering static pain followed up the thigh as I looked on aghast at the sight before us.

Once our courage returned and knowing nowhere else to search for an escape, we followed the horrors, climbing the ziggurat's face for an indeterminable length of time as the screams raged above unabated. Nearing the apex we saw their source: a writhing mound of the dark monstrosities, piled atop one another like maggots on wasted carrion. A man hung suspended by chains, trapped between kerasine totems with bare-breasted succubi perched atop their fanged peaks.

The horrors worked viciously upon the chained figure. Hair ripped from his puckered skin. Felicitous teeth clenched morsels of ruby red flesh. Fingers relished the pressing of exposed capillaries into ruin, as below so many overlong tongues worked the obsidian steps, leaving no sop of blood unclaimed.

Druuz and I stood transfixed by the wanton horror of it, daring not to move for fear of drawing the horde's wrath upon ourselves.

It raged on until the chained figure went limp. All the writhing horrors evaporated. Driven on by desperation and foolish curiosity, we approached the limp figure on the summit.

The body quivered as some unknowable enchantment clogged the last ebb of life from draining from its almost-skeletal form, and bloated it unnaturally back to consciousness. Clinging straps of muscles pulsed between shards of exposed bone. A pair of thumbed-in sockets, blacked with dried blood, faced me as I trembled upon the ziggurat's top.

"What's happening?" I asked.

It groaned in such agony that I wondered if it heard me or was any longer capable of speech. Then, its mouth began to work, producing first a gravelous moan and then to our amazement, speach.

"Your future," it sneered, drool spilled forth from its lipless mouth. "You who come here, know this: I was once king of kings, khan of all ‘neath blue sky, wielder of one hundred scepters, bloodier of one thousand virgins, judge of all men whether they admitted it or not! And yet here I am, just as you are—”

"The Scarlet Khan," whispered Druuz beside me.

“—and it was all for nothing. In this place, a hell saved for those of us who have sinned most wickedly against our fellow man, we must suffer an inversion of the ways of the world. Here the lawgivers wait for their sentencing. Here the rapist awaits his sodomy, the executioner his own axe upon his neck—again and again. Here the meek rule, and at their hands we each endure a lifetime of anguish for every moment we inflicted upon them.”

Druuz began to stagger about as though struck. “Me see them now. More towers, they are everywhere. More than can be counted.”

I saw nothing on the horizon but more of the same lunar wastes we had already crossed.

“They will come for you when you sleep,” growled the khan, shaking the chains binding his skeletal wrists. “And then find a tower just for you. But I can smell something foreign on you, there is still some life tethering you to the old world…”

At his words I sighted Druuz’s pulsing tail, and reached back unconsciously to feel my own smoothness—the deadly nothing at my spine’s terminus. Without thinking I reached out and grabbed his tail, and at my touch a shockwave went up its length and I saw it extended into the sky like a great rope or umbilical cord, heretofore concealed from me by that realm’s strange glamour.

Druuz turned, either from the feeling of the tug or from sensing my ill intent, and began yelling my name. It was too late for him. I had already begun my ascent, animal terror driving me forward up the lifeline cord. I kicked backward at him, striking him in the face and then continuing upward, hand over hand, through the icy stillness of that atmosphere. I climbed for my life, away from the ziggurat of the tortured khan and into an unending darkness.

I awoke alone upon the temple step Chyzanchorum. My right hand was straight, but no longer my own, and running it over my face I felt a tangled beard. Nothing of my old body remained beside me.

---

So ends my tale. Great Vizier, since fleeing those spirited ruins I have been haunted by the fate that I now know awaits me and all of us who have taken the reins of fortune over another, for since that time circumstances have again forced my hand towards the creation of more would-be torturers.

In this time, I have dedicated myself to the study of the death realm I saw, and have theorized a manner by which entrance to it may be averted by those with the proper means. I believe we can transfer the guilty portion of our essence into another being (whether man or beast I am still unsure) to cleanse ourselves of all the necessary wrongs we have committed. This process will require a great sacrifice in both blood slaves and precious reagents, and require the acquisition and training of alchemists to properly oversee the necessary rituals. Few could afford such a service, but in our living world we are fortunate that those with the means to do so are also those most likely to have need of it.

It is for this purpose I have sought you out, your reputation as a patron of all productive and clear minded sorcerous arts preceding you. You, Great Vizier, are a being I would be honored to call master, in exchange only for the privilege of joining you in this prudent sacrament.

---

David Herod is an author of varied fiction and one of the creators of Tooky’s Mag. For more work like this, consider subscribing there and to Futurist Letters.