The canyon wall had been transformed into something that defied comprehension—not built upon the rock but carved from it, as though some ancient god-king had commanded the stone itself to reshape, to transcend its fundamental nature and become art made manifest. The entrance soared three stories high, its surface rippling with the natural stratification of sandstone—bands of rose-red and salmon-pink, burnt orange and cream, deep burgundy and pale ochre layered like the pages of some cosmic chronicle, each stratum telling the story of millennia compressed and petrified into stone.
Elliot's legs nearly gave out beneath him. His hand shot forward, bracing against the canyon wall for support, and came away trembling.
Impossible. The word circled through his mind like a carrion bird. Impossible.
Massive columns flanked the entrance, rising from the canyon floor with the organic inevitability of ancient trees. Their capitals exploded into intricate detail so fine that Elliot could distinguish individual flower petals, each one no larger than his thumbnail—the delicate venation of leaves rendered in stone, the overlapping scales on serpents that coiled around the massive shafts with sinuous grace. But these columns weren't separate structures mortared into place. They were the cliff itself, the living rock simply convinced—or commanded—to assume a different shape entirely. Where chisel marks and tool gouges should have scarred the surface, the stone flowed smooth as silk, as water frozen mid-pour, as though it had melted like wax and reformed rather than submitted to any crude human implement.
His fingers traced the nearest column, and the stone was cool despite the day's accumulated heat. Smooth. Too smooth. The texture felt more like polished glass than sandstone.
Above the columns, an ornate pediment stretched across the facade's full width, its surface adorned with figures carved in such dramatic high relief they seemed ready to tear free from their stone prison. Warriors astride rearing horses, their manes and tails streaming behind them in captured wind. Women draped in flowing robes that rippled with such realistic movement Elliot half-expected them to billow in the next breeze. Creatures that might have been lions or dragons or hybrid beasts that possessed no names in any human tongue prowled between the human figures, their eyes watching with stone intensity.
Between these figures, geometric patterns interlocked in dizzying, hypnotic complexity—triangles nested within circles nested within squares, each shape contained perfectly within the next, each line straight as a blade's edge despite being carved into the curved face of living rock. The patterns hurt to look at too long, creating optical illusions of depth where none should exist, of movement in absolute stillness.
Elliot's breath caught in his throat. His pulse hammered at his temples.
Enormous urns crowned the pediment's corners—vessels as tall as a grown man, carved from the same continuous piece of stone as everything else, their handles formed from the canyon wall itself in defiance of physical possibility. Water seemed to pour from their wide mouths, frozen forever in that singular moment of offering—the precious, life-giving water that meant survival or death in this merciless wasteland.
The entrance itself gaped like the mouth of some colossal creature, a perfect rectangle of absolute darkness framed by rose-red stone. The threshold had been worn smooth by countless feet traversing it across countless centuries, polished to such a high gloss that it caught the dying sunlight and threw it back in shades of molten copper and dark wine.
But it was the color that truly stole the breath from his lungs—the way the setting sun ignited the facade, transforming mere stone into something that pulsed with inner fire, something that seemed more alive than dead. The rose-red sandstone glowed as though lit from within by banked coals, warm and rich as fresh blood spilled on altar stone, as the split flesh of pomegranates, as the incandescent heart of flame. The varying bands shifted and deepened with each passing moment as the light changed, creating the visceral illusion of movement, of breath rising and falling, as though the shrine itself was some vast sleeping creature temporarily roused by his presence.
Behind him, too close now, a war hound's triumphant howl split the evening air. They'd found his scent trail.
Time collapsed back into urgency.
Cool air breathed outward from that darkness—blessed and impossible in this baked hellscape, carrying the scent of something ancient and mineral and utterly foreign to the sun-scorched world above. It smelled of deep earth and secrets buried far beneath the sand, of the sacred water-stone that kept their scattered people barely alive. The air tasted clean on his tongue, free of dust, flavored with moisture that shouldn't exist.
Elliot didn't allow himself to think. Thinking meant questioning, and questioning meant hesitation, and hesitation meant the hounds would tear him apart.
He plunged through the ornate entrance, his fingers trailing along the carved jamb—smooth as glass, cool as evening despite absorbing a full day's murderous heat—and into the shrine's welcoming shadow. The darkness swallowed him whole.
The passage beyond was narrow, barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast without their shoulders brushing the walls. Those walls pressed close on either side, creating the sensation of being slowly compressed, of the earth closing around him like a fist. But even here, in this purely functional space designed for transit rather than worship, the artistry continued unabated.
Niches had been carved at precise intervals along the corridor's length, each one large enough to accommodate a standing man, their interiors adorned with elaborate scenes of ritual and devotion. Elliot's eyes adjusted to the dimness slowly, and the carvings emerged from shadow like memories surfacing: figures kneeling in supplication before water-pits, priests with raised hands blessing the precious liquid, solemn processions bearing vessels of the life-giving water that seeped from the rock She—whoever She was—had supposedly created.
Each niche was a window into a lost world, a civilization that had understood things his people had forgotten.
The temperature plummeted with each step deeper into the earth—not the killing cold of mountain peaks or northern winters that froze blood in veins, but the deep, eternal coolness of caves and underground rivers, of spaces the sun had never touched and never would. His sweat-drenched tunic clung to his skin, and within moments gooseflesh erupted across his arms and back. He suppressed a violent shiver. The air tasted fundamentally different here—clean and strange and mineral-sharp, utterly free of the omnipresent dust that permeated every breath in the world above, that infiltrated every crevice of human habitation.
His lungs expanded gratefully, drawing in that pure air like wine.
The passage walls revealed the stone's natural stratification even more dramatically in the dimness—horizontal bands running the corridor's full length like growth rings in impossibly ancient wood, each layer a subtly different shade of rose or red or burnt orange, each one representing not mere centuries but thousands upon thousands of years of patient, geological accumulation. Sediment and time and pressure transforming into something permanent.
The stone itself seemed to possess its own faint luminescence, as though absorbing and reflecting some phantom light source he couldn't identify. It created a perpetual twilight that existed in the space between full darkness and proper illumination—enough to navigate by, not enough to feel truly safe.
His boots scuffed against the floor with each step, the sound echoing strangely in the narrow space. The floor had been worn smooth by millennia of pilgrim feet, polished to such mirror-like perfection that he could see his own distorted reflection in the stone—a hunched, desperate creature fleeing into the earth's embrace.
Or its jaws.
Behind him, from the entrance he'd just passed through, came the sounds of confusion. The war hounds barking, but the pitch had changed—no longer the triumphant baying of a successful hunt, but something uncertain. Fearful. Their handlers shouted commands that went ignored or misunderstood. The animals refused to enter.
Elliot didn't slow down. Whatever force or presence had invited him inside clearly didn't extend that invitation to his pursuers. He would take that mercy and ask no questions.
The passage began to descend, the angle subtle at first, then more pronounced. His damaged shoulder protested with each jarring step. Blood from his split tongue had dried on his chin in a tacky crust. But he was alive. For this moment, in this impossible place, he was alive.
And something—someone—had called him here.
Come deeper, that voice whispered through his thoughts, carrying the warmth of welcome. You are safe now. Come deeper, and I will show you what you need to see.
The passage curved ahead, disappearing into darkness that seemed to pulse with patient expectation.
Elliot followed, because there was nothing else left to do, and nowhere else left to go.