It was a mountain made of flesh, and its body had begun to slowly envelop this ancient temple. The great stone trunks Elias had been admiring for their workmanship, had been covered by it, as the body had grown around and through them.
Elias did not know why he found the thought funny that what had once been a place of worship was now a place where the worshipped thing had eaten the architecture.
It rose maybe four hundred feet at its highest swell, a glistening hill of layered, ridged, pulsating flesh, covered with the same scar-tissue stone Elias had been climbing through. Its colour was the dim grey of a corpse left in standing water, marbled with veins of dark red that pulsed in slow rhythm. Mucus ran in steady streams down its sides, and pooled in the troughs between its ridges, dripping off its surface into the sea of bodies below.
There were openings on its surface. Thousands of them, scattered across the body in no pattern he could detect, and each opening was the size of a man.
Each opening was closed, and as Elias watched, the openings began to open. They opened the way a snake unhinged its jaw, slowly, one at a time, with a wet stretching sound that should not have carried across the chamber but did.
The pit's sound-eating quality, which had absorbed every word the candidates spoke during the descent, apparently failed here; the temple let the sound through, almost as if the temple wanted the sound through.
Each opening, as it stretched, revealed teeth, and the teeth were arranged in three rings. Inside the teeth was darkness, and inside that darkness was an eye.
Eyes, plural. Each opening was a mouth. Inside each mouth was an eye.
Behind Elias, Theron made a small sound as his understanding of the world had just been amended in a way his mouth could not keep up with. These genius Siphons were used to seeing horror, but there was something fundamentally wrong with what they were seeing here that it almost felt unreal, and if not for the fact that they had spent hours fighting to reach this place, then they would have thought they were dreaming.
Sera said, "What sort of abomination is this?" The rest were silent, as whatever they were seeing defied any sense of meaning, and what made it was the countless bodies before them… why did they ever think they could make a difference here?
This thing… whatever benefit it could bring was too much for them to swallow.
Suddenly, the eyes inside the mouths of this creature turned, as the whole body of the mountain seemed to gather its attention, and the five young Siphons felt the weight of that gaze as if a hand was reaching behind their eyes and squeezing their brain.
Every one of the thousand eyes was blazing red, as if they were burning coals plucked from the fire and shoved into the mouths of this being.
The mountain of flesh made a sound, and it was a thousand voices layered into one. Old, layered into young. Male, layered into female. The voice of a child speaking, layered into the voice of something that had never been a child, and the layering was deliberately harmonized, the way a choir was harmonized.
The sound of the voice did something physical to the air, and the candidates felt it on their teeth. Elias shivered, not from the effect of the voice, because it could not touch his flesh made of stone, but because it was a language that Elias half-knew.
This was the same language he had heard from the mad goddess who shattered his Lumina Space, the same language that the void inside of him spoke with, and now it was coming from this creature.
The voice said,
"You came."
"What is that?" Theron said, his voice sounding small and lost. "What language is that. What is that?"
"It is not Trionic," Sera said.
"I know it is not Trionic—"
"Quiet," Tarian said, the mask of goodwill he had been wearing all this time suddenly slipping as the face of the prince was white as a sheet. They may not understand what this creature had just said, but something inside them recognized it for what it was… it was the feeling that went bump in the night, it was the weight of fear and evil.
The voice continued, and now some of its voices began speaking in Trionic, enabling the Siphons here to understand what it was speaking.
"I have been holding the door for you. It has been heavy. It is good of you to come at last."
Theron's hand spasmed on the wall. "Holding the door. Holding the door for whom? Is it talking to us? Is that thing talking to us?"
"It is talking to one of us," Sera said. Her voice had gone quieter than Elias had ever heard it. "Listen to the cadence. It is addressing… one."
"Then which one?" Theron said.
Nobody answered. Elias stood still, and he did not turn to look at the others, because if he turned, the question they were not yet asking would land on him, and if it landed on him, he would have to choose what to do with it.
He could feel Tarian's gaze on the back of his helm, but he kept his face toward the temple.
The mountain's voice continued. The mouths shifted as the eyes inside those mouths fixed on a point on the wall. The point was Elias's outcrop.
The voice slipped back into that old language, and none of the candidates could understand it now, but Elias could. It was almost as if this creature wanted them to know that it was speaking to Elias alone, and the next words it said nearly made Elias to lose his cool.
"Brother."
Then the red eyes suddenly turned yellow, and the voice shifted, the multilayered tone becoming singular, until it reached a pitch that Elias recognized.
"Brother. You have grown. You have filled. You smell of what we were before we were broken. I had not thought you would come down to me so soon. I was going to come to you… I am pleased."
Behind him, very quietly, Theron said, "It is talking to him. It is talking to Elias."
The rest of them would be fools if they did not realize this, and unconsciously, the five began to pull back from Elias.
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