In the Shadow of Falcon's Wings

PROLOGUE DISCOVERY

The explorer paused a moment to brush the crust of ice from his goggles. It was actually much warmer here, deep below the surface, but still cold enough to freeze the water vapor in his exhalations. A beard of icicles had grown over the wool scarf covering his mouth and nose, but he no longer felt the chill. His discovery, a prehistoric ruin in this unforgiving landscape, filled him with a new purpose that burned within him like a fire.

He had not come to the end of the world to find this ancient place; in fact, there had been no tangible motivation at all. The object of his quest was much harder to define; was it absolution he sought? Solace? He didn’t really know. The weight of the world had become a burden he could no longer bear, yet like Atlas, he couldn’t put it down. So, in the tradition of prophets and messiahs, he had fled into the wilderness. If deprivation and hardship did not kill him, then it would be the crucible in which the last of his weaknesses would evaporate away, leaving only the unadulterated metal of his soul.

He had secretly been pleased when the expedition leader had grudgingly admitted that they were lost. By that time, the pack animals had already dropped in their tracks and been subsequently butchered for meat in order to supplement their dwindling supplies. Two of the men had likewise perished; one lay in a shallow grave chiseled into the icepack, and another had been swallowed alive by a crevasse which had closed over him as quickly as it had appeared. The remaining members of the team had gathered to discuss their options, only to learn the dire reality of their situation. Lost and low on provisions, they could either continue to wander, or establish a semi-permanent base camp and await the unlikely appearance of a rescue party. The majority had elected the latter course of action and hunkered down in tents and hasty igloos to weather the almost constant storms. One by one, cabin fever and the angry gods of the ice had claimed them, until only the explorer remained alive.

Hardier than the rest, he had endured because he did not fear death. When there was no longer anyone to check his hand, he gathered what supplies he could carry and struck out on his own, looking for a good place to make his final stand. Yet it seemed the Grim Reaper had now lost interest in his fate. For a week he wandered, blinded by stinging needles of ice borne on the devil wind, until the gods determined that he was worthy of their gift. On the seventh day, found the cave.

As he roamed the cramped throat that plunged deep into the blue pack ice, he did not immediately grasp its significance. Nature often behaved in unpredictable ways, leaving wormholes through solid matter without cause or reason; this one seemed no different. However, the tunnel soon opened into a passage so smooth and perfectly symmetrical that he could no longer dismiss it as a fluke of weather or geography; this was the work of hands.

Of human hands? He thought not.

His explorations soon uncovered marvelous things; artifacts of a civilization remembered only in myths, abandoned even by the ghosts of those who had built this place. He kept looking, kept descending, filled with the certain knowledge that greater secrets must lay in the deepest reaches of the cavern. He was not disappointed.

Time had ceased to mean anything to the explorer, but the cavern metered the diurnal rhythms of the surface world, giving him periods of daylight in the form of a pale blue illumination — light without heat — from the smooth walls of the passages. Had he cared to notice, he would have observed that the duration of the subterranean days was almost exactly twelve hours, whereas the sun’s journey through the sky on the surface world, where it was late summer, lasted nearly eighteen hours, but he neither noticed nor cared. When the sapphire gleam dimmed to nothing he would stop and sleep. When its brightness was such that it interrupted his peaceful repose, he would resume his trek. He meandered through arterial branches, sometimes finding only an inexplicable dead end, but more often than not, uncovering mysteries beyond comprehension. In this manner, he came at last to the furthest recesses of the ice cave. What he found there beggared belief.

In the course of his wandering, he had never found anything that was not utilitarian. Every object was a tool, even if its operation eluded his grasp. There had been no ornamentation, no inscriptions or artwork to adorn the various relics or the chambers in which they were situated. This place was different.

The long descending passage opened into an anteroom of staggering proportions. It was as if a vast domed amphitheater had been bisected vertically by a slab of ice, and upon that surface, a sculptor possessed by a demon had wrought images almost too hideous for his gaze to bear. Were he a lesser man, the explorer certainly would have fled in terror at the sight, but weeks of privation had purged him of fear. Instead, he gazed in wonderment, reading the strange hieroglyphs and runes as if he understood them, pondering the bas-relief of cavorting gargoyles and chimeras, and letting his consciousness wander through the maze of razor-like protrusions that scrolled in every direction along the upright surface, until at last he found the door.

With an alacrity that belied his emaciated and exhausted physical condition, he scrambled onto the vertical ice, finding holds in the intricate designs and using frozen thorns as ladder rungs, until he was at last face to face with the only section of ice in the tableau that was neither decorated with macabre designs nor emanating the ethereal blue luminosity.

That it was a door, he knew only on an intuitive level. It resembled nothing ever devised by man to block a threshold; there were no hinges, nor was it equipped with any obvious latching mechanism. Yet, the explorer correctly recognized it for what it was, and did what any explorer will do when finding a blocked portal.

He opened it….