With the sudden opening of the stone door, fine sand whirled through the air and the ground trembled one last time. Arsh was shocked. He wasn't sure what had happened or how he had managed to open the gate. Even though his torchlight struggled against the vast darkness, it wasn't enough to show him what was inside, beyond the gate.
Arsh stood frozen at the sight before him. He only came to his senses when he heard the voices coming from outside.
Because of the rumbling, his father and the others, fearing a collapse, kept shouting Arsh's name.
Arsh pulled his gaze away from the darkness and walked back to the tunnel entrance. He shouted as loudly as his aching lungs could manage.
"I'm fine. I found a gate here. I'll wait at there until you come down."
This time he stepped inside the gate and saw the vast space that had opened before him, he felt a wave of astonishment once again. There was an immense darkness stretching out ahead of him. Yet, within the reach of his torch's light, he could see the colossal half moon shaped stairs in front of him and the massive pillars rising up to the ceiling.
In the excavations he had joined with his father before, they had discovered burial chambers. But none of them were larger than their own small, two-room house.
He had never seen a place like this in his life. Slowly, he began to go down the stairs. The staircase opened into a wide area. This chamber was probably beneath the hill next to the site where they had been excavating. Its ceiling was too high and had the shape of a dome. Everything looked so magnificent yet so simple under the dim light. Arsh thought it must be one of the palaces from his grandfather's stories.
When he used to listen to those tales, he had imagined splendid, grand places—where every object was covered in gold, silver, and various jewels, and where curtains woven from precious fabrics hung from the walls.
But now, the vast darkness stretching before him was different from those imaginary palaces; its sheer scale filled him with both terror and excitement.
He continued walking slowly inside, examining his surroundings as he moved forward. On the pillars were symbols that featured various circular patterns. They looked similar to the ones on the gate. The floor was relatively clean. There were no dry branches or reptile bones scattered around. This place had been well preserved, even though no one had entered here for who knows how many hundreds of years.
As he moved forward, lost in thought, he noticed another staircase a little ahead. He find it a bit odd. It was standing right in the middle of the chamber.
He walked around it. It had a circular shape, with carvings on the sides. It was about five and a half meters wide and two and a half meters high, with a platform on top.
When he climbed up to see what was on the platform, he saw a sarcophagus in the center. Like everything else he had seen that day, its shape was different from the ones he had seen before.
'So, in the end, this place is also a burial chamber. But it seems there's no treasure at all.' he thought.
Still, the size of this place and how different it was from other burial chambers made him think that the person buried here must have been someone important.
'Could it be a king? A poor king... or a great scholar who didn't care about wealth'
He tilted his torch and began examining the carvings on the sarcophagus. When the others came down into the well, they would carry the sarcophagus outside. He wanted to study it a little before they took it away.
He knew they would take this sarcophagus and display it in places they called museums. People would come and gaze in admiration at the vases, stones, and tombs unearthed from these lands.
Who would want to admire a tomb? Standing before something that held a decayed body and gazing at it in awe—wasn't that a bit crazy?
He shivered a little at the thought. Right now, the sarcophagus in front of him also held a decayed body, yet he was looking at it with admiration. That wasn't normal either.
When he thought about the body, his curiosity grew. He had heard that these tombs sometimes contained jewelry, gold, and other valuable items—the deceased were buried wearing their most precious belongings.
Perhaps this person wasn't as poor as he had thought. He wouldn't take anything, so it wouldn't be theft. Besides, even if he did take something, the real thieves were the Symrans, who constantly took what belonged to this land.
With that thought, he decided to open the sarcophagus
Then he placed the torch on the stairs. He went to the far end of the sarcophagus and braced his feet against the ground, using his whole body to push the lid. But the lid was heavier than he had expected. It didn't budge an inch.
He still had time before the others came down. He tried pushing from different sides of the sarcophagus. Veins stood out on his forehead, and sweat ran down his face. But no matter how hard he pushed, it wouldn't move.
Finally, he stopped trying and sat down on the platform. In the dim light, he stared at the carvings again. As he thought about how the others would soon come to take this sarcophagus from its resting place of who knows how many years, he noticed something about the carvings.
Carvings looked like they were telling a story. They weren't repeating same scenes. rather, there was a flow between them.
When he realized this, he picked up the torch again and walked around the tomb, examining the carvings.
It was starting with a picture of a woman wearing a dress that barely covered her most private parts. She looked young. Behind her stood several people. In the next scene, a man kissed her on the forehead. Then, he plunged a dagger into his own hand. In the carvings, Arsh could see the blood dripping from his hand. After that, the man used the same dagger to stab the woman in the chest. At least, that was how it looked. But the woman didn't look like she had died.
The other scenes repeated the same thing. Different people came in turn and plunged the dagger into the woman's body. Sometimes into her arms or hands, and sometimes into her legs or even her face.
It looked like some kind of sacrificial ceremony. After all the stabbing scenes, carvings depicted the woman kneeling on the ground, hugging her own body. Water was poured over her. Apparently, they were cleansing her. They washed her body with water and dressed her in a long gown. Finally, they knelt before the girl, placing their hands on their heads, as if showing a kind of respect.
The woman entered the sarcophagus, and the lid was closed.
'A living sacrifice?'
Arsh thought about that. He had read about similar traditions, but they weren't practiced in these lands.
'Maybe I found something even older than the history we know.' He was excited by the thought.
When he turned toward the last edge of the sarcophagus, he saw the final scene. This time, the theme seemed to have changed. There was a figure, and he couldn't tell whether it was a man or a woman. The figure approached the sarcophagus, took a dagger, and cut their own hand. Blood poured from the figure's hand into the sarcophagus.
And that was the end.
'So, what happened after that?' he wondered.
Arsh stopped walking around the sarcophagus and looked at its lid. On the lid, there were also circles filled with various patterns, similar to those on the columns and the door. He had no idea what they meant. In the center of the sarcophagus was a relief of a dagger, resembling the one depicted in the scenes carved on its sides.
When he touched the dagger relief, it moved.
'Oh... It wasn't a carving after all.'
Arsh picked up the dagger. It was made of stone, placed on the lid of the sarcophagus just like that. The tip was darker than the rest of it.
'Is it…? Is it blood? Did they really stab the girl with this?'
It was thrilling to discover something like that. Now he began to understand why archaeologists talked about their discoveries with such excitement.
After turning the dagger over in his hands, he looked again at the scene where the figure had stabbed the dagger into his own hand. He felt an impulse.
'Should I give it a try? One drop of blood won't kill me, right?'
He was still excited by the discovery. He wanted to reenact the ceremony. Without thinking much, he held his hand over the sarcophagus and pressed the tip of the dagger into the wound he had gotten when he fell. The dagger wasn't sharp, but after he pressed it down, a drop of blood fell onto the sarcophagus.
The drop of blood fell onto the stone surface with a soft plop. The sound echoed through the enormous chamber, as if hundreds of drops were falling like rain.
At that moment, Arsh felt as if an ancient silence had been broken.
A second later, he was on the floor with a pain in his heart, as if he hadn't plunged the dagger into his hand, but into his chest.
He couldn't make sense of it, nor did he try to. The pain was overwhelming. It was difficult to breathe, and his chest burned with an intense heat.
While he was gasping for breath, he realized the drop of blood on the sarcophagus was growing, spreading and seeping into every carving.
This time, the excitement in his heart had been replaced by terror. It was like as if a single drop of blood suddenly turned into a river, flowing beneath his feet.
Crimson lights began to emanate from the carvings filled with blood. Then, the lid of the sarcophagus slowly started to rise.
The terror Arsh felt was growing by the second. He had no idea what was happening. Everything was completely silent, yet it felt as if everything around him was so loud that his head might explode. He wanted to scream, but no sound came from his throat. Fear had frozen him.
He slowly rose from the ground and, taking his eyes off the rising sarcophagus lid, turned his gaze inside. He wasn't sure what he was seeing, because what he saw was too beautiful to be real.
It wasn't a human.
He was certain that the girl inside the sarcophagus was the same one from the carvings. Yet, she didn't look dead. It was as if she had just lain down inside it. Moreover, silver light emanated from her entire body. Delicate, lace-like beams of light covered her completely. The girl's entire being seemed like a delicate, intricate lace woven by the hands of the gods.
This time, the terror Arsh felt transformed into a different emotion—one still as intense as the fear he had felt before, but now caused by awe.
He was mesmerized by the sight before him.
'She must be a goddess.'
His voice echoed just like the sound of the drop of blood, before slowly fading into the silence. But he seemed to quickly forget the horror of the moment before. Arsh hesitantly stepped a little closer to the sarcophagus. He wanted to see the girl more clearly.
'Is it possible for a dead body to be preserved this well?'
He looked to examine the lace-like symbols on the girl's body. He slowly raised his gaze from her hands to her arms, then to her face.
But when he turned his gaze to her face, he saw a pair of eyes looking back at him, as if radiating silver light.
Like something that cannot be real. Like not one, but two moons in the night sky.