The air within the Temple of Aethel didn’t move; it hung with the damp weight of centuries and broken vows. For Dr. Aris Thorne, the silence was the first lie. His team had found the fabled structure not on any map, buried deep within the jungle, its obsidian stones weeping moss. They’d ignored the warnings from the local villagers—tales of a god scorned, whose final breath became a curse of eternal repetition. To Aris, it was superstition. Now, standing in the grand hall, he understood. The silence was broken not by sound, but by echoes that didn’t belong to them. His assistant, Lena, brushed dust from a bas-relief depicting a priest-king offering a heart to a faceless deity. “The inscriptions,” she whispered, her voice swallowed by the gloom. “They’re not prayers. They’re… apologies.”
A cold draft snaked through the hall, extinguishing their lanterns. The emergency flares cast a hellish red glow. And then the echoes came. Not of their own footsteps, but of others. Phantom figures shimmered into existence, repeating their final, desperate moments from a millennia ago. A guard lunged at an unseen foe, his scream a silent ripple in the air. A priest chanted, clawing at his own eyes. The curse wasn’t a disease or a monster. It was a recording, a prison of soul-deep memory. And the temple was playing it back, forcing them to witness its final day on an endless loop.
Lena pointed a trembling hand. Among the phantoms, a newer ghost stood—Miller, their lead excavator who had vanished yesterday. His face was a mask of terror as he mindlessly repeated digging at a wall, over and over, trapped in his own arrival. The stone floor beneath Aris’s feet began to feel less solid, more like a moment in time. He felt a compulsion to draw his knife, to mimic the offering on the wall. The echo was trying to write him into its story. The temple’s curse was assimilation. Their discovery was not of a dead ruin, but of a hungry, timeless grief that demanded an audience forever. Their only escape was a door that had sealed itself shut centuries ago.
To Be Continued.............................
