An Ashen Temple

It looked like the mountain itself was consuming the temple. Bulbous undulations of charcoal-black stone had swelled and subsumed the dirty red pillars and at their peaks blistered with luminous veins of orange. The heartbeat of the mountain swelled beneath them.

The heat was intense. Tomb dry and suffused with drifting motes of ash and the shrapnel of punctured rock. The grey sky hung close.

Saki felt the sweat against the fibrous underlayers of her armour, and dirty smudges lined her face where she’d futilely tried to wipe away the ashfall.

“You sure this is where we need to be?” she asked out loud. A melodious tinkle of brass rings preceded a silent answer.

Yes. Though I do not want to be here any more than you.

The old mage’s hands moved swiftly and purposefully in the mountain monk’s signed language. Saki had learned it long before taking this job though she often pretended not to have, the ears of the Inner Council reached far. This one though didn’t use any spoken language, and she would have gone feral weeks ago crossing the Endless Plains in absolute silence. She also kind of liked this weird, wisened man in his crisply laundered yamabushi robes, gripping his imposing looking staff topped with a cluster of brass rings.

From the outside, the perfectly square temple looked largely in tact with only one corner of it partially eaten by the encroaching lava flow. How had the thick old wood and deep roof thatch not sparked and kindled in the heat? Whether the floors below ground were so lucky would mark whether this was a wasted trip or not.

Overtaking Saki, the mage’s staff tapped the ground before every step and he headed towards the temple. The crackle of distant fire was the only other sound, if you ignored the low subsonic rumble of molten rock shifting beneath them. Saki thought of her younger days, clasping her hands over her ears and listening to the rumble of her own circulation.

Striding past the old man and up the well-worn steps, Saki pushed open the main temple doors. The black lacquer altar was still present and shiny-new against the far wall, golden trinkets and clutches of paper enshrined within. Sacred rope and calligraphed characters circled the walls close to the ceiling, only some of them had charred and blackened. Talismans were placed in spiritually correct positions but were conspicuously absent from the corner that the mountain had claimed.

Nothing moved. It smelled like sulphur and burnt wood.

“I’m assuming what we came for is in the lower floors?” The mage had ascended the stairs and didn’t stop to answer, moving straight to and then behind the ornate altar.

A click and then a sigh. Cool air wheezed out of the freshly revealed hatch, the altar trundling to the side on its own mechanism. The man waited, grey eyes patient.

Saki took a final look around the silent temple before snapping on an LED torch and heading down the steep stairs. It was cooler down below, but only in the way that a fire is to an oven. Dust and paper rasped the inside of her nose. The blue-white torch beam showed immense shelves of thick paper scrolls, all neatly stacked and stretching far down the corridor ahead. The ceiling was only a short hop from Saki’s head. The mountain was louder down here. It hadn’t yet begun to consume this place; it was patient.

“Ready when you are.” The metallic strike of a brass point hitting wooden steps.

It took several minutes to travel the length of the library, and at no point did the imposing wall of scrolls cease. At its terminus, the stone corridor opened out onto a vast cavern with uneven steps carved into the rock face leading down. The beam of the torch barely touched the limits of the space. Instead of the mountain’s heartbeat, all Saki heard was a low murmur: like a whisper half-heard. She waited at the head of the stairs for the tap of metal to stop behind her.

Two sharp raps of brass on stone and a cacophonous rattle of metal rings and the cavern awoke. Tiny yellow-green spots of light winked on, wrapped around and seemingly fixed in to the jagged surfaces of the cavern. In aggregate, they softly illuminated the little shrine in the exact centre, fifty metres down and surrounded by imposingly huge torii gates. It was still hot, and air felt stagnant.

Saki clicked off the torch and descended the steps, her eyes adjusting to the bioluminescent glow, and followed determinedly by the familiar metal rhythm. Despite the treacherous descent, her eyes never left the shrine.

When her boot touched the ground at the bottom, Saki felt her world tip. Gone were the torii gates, the shrine, even the obedient little lightning bugs embedded in the rock, just suffocating darkness. Where the shrine had been, a woman stood instead. Saki let out a long breath, like she’d just broken the surface after a dive.

The woman was impossibly illuminated. Her hair was short and black, a sad, distant expression on her face. She wore the traditional shrine maiden garb: fire-red trousers, tabi socks and woven sandals and a pure white hakama gown. White except for the splashes of deep red across it, still glistening in the the not-light. Her fists were clenched and from the knuckles protruded metal spikes, barely a thumb’s width long.

Saki took several steps closer, now just a couple of arm lengths away. A few more and she could touch her. She knew the pressure behind her eyes would go if she did. She missed her sister so much. Yomi was staring at something far away, invisible in the darkness, but she held out her hand regardless, her gauntlets gone now, just tiny pale hands. Saki reached out as well, so close.

Brass on stone, a gunshot across her senses. There was a shout as well, like a bellowed war cry. Yomi disappeared, splintering and falling apart like dust in the wind. Saki’s hand was a fingertip away from the shrine, innocuous painted red wood. Somehow she had navigated between the great round butresses of the torii gates.

“That looked like my sister.” Saki said dumbly stepping back from the holy place. The soft light of the cavern had returned. A shiver rippled across her back and cold sweat gathered uncomfortably.

Looked like or was?

“Looked like. The… proportions were wrong.”

A test from the mountain. A pause in the hand movements. I expected better from you.

Saki held up the palm of her hand, the one she had nearly touched the shrine with. Sown in to her glove was a cluster of symbols, much like the ones that had been on the talismans in the temple above. They glowed a fierce emerald green. The mage seemed to still.

“We all break, we all have weaknesses.” She clenched her fist until the leather protested and her knuckles cracked. The old man shifted the grip on his staff as if to say something but Saki interrupted. “I suggest you collect your artifact and we be done of this place.” Clapping her hands, and bowing to the shrine, she took two steps backwards, before bowing again a final time.