text: The weight of the key that’s laying flat in your palm is surprisingly light. You don’t know what you expected. It’s just a key, to unlock just a door. The old man who gave it to you didn’t question you too bad before he handed it to you. He just made sure you knew what lied behind the door, made certain that you were ready for what the key would unlock. You told him you do know, and you are ready. On the big steel door, placed into the mountain, there is an advertisement for car tire storage. It’s been withered as seasons have come and passed over the years. It’s been there for as long as you can remember, for all of your life really. You push the key into the lock, lingering there as you listen. In the distance you can hear the life of the town coming to an end. Happy drunks stumbling their way home. And some, you suppose, not so happy. Drowning in their sorrows as they try to suppress it. You can hear your pulse thumping in your ears. The closer you get to opening the door, the less certain you are. You don’t know what exactly is behind the door, your mother's old notes didn’t explain the details. You hadn’t lied to the man, he hadn’t asked for details. But your mother’s notes made certain of one thing: At the end of the road, lay hell. For the willing, lay profit. For the sleeper, lay eternal damnation. For the awoken, lay power. You don’t care about power or profit. You aren’t even sure what any of it means. You just hope you're not a sleeper. Eternal damnation never sounds like fun. But you care about your mother. After she went missing you had rummaged through everything that could be a clue. Years of albums and diaries you didn’t want to leave had been neatly placed in boxes in the attic. In the very back you had found a box. Heavily taped to ensure that it was perfectly sealed from the outside world. You had sliced open the tape with a kitchen knife to find notebooks just as neatly stacked as any of the others. On the black notebooks, a symbol in red had been drawn. A triangle, with circles at each corner, all within a larger circle. The texts within were at best nightmare inducing. The worst ones you couldn’t finish. But what you gathered was a delusion of grandeur where humans had been gods, and their domains had been under your very feet. You take a quick look around you. In the dark, on the street down the slope, the old man is still standing. Waiting to see if you’ll do it. No one else is around. So, you turn the key. You have to use your leg drive, and put much of your weight into pulling the thick steel door open. You’re met with a cold gust of air. At any other given time you would have welcomed the fresh breeze to combat the heat. Cherized it fully before it passed. Now, the air sends a chill down your spine. Maybe you should’ve brought a sweater. Maybe you don’t believe that you are a god forced into an illusion by hellspawn. But your mother did - and she believed that the road to power was here. She had been gone for two years. Whatever you would find wouldn't be pleasant, as much as you want to force yourself into a mindset of a reality where there could be a happy ever after. With care you take small steps into the darkness. You pull the steel door to a close before taking out your flashlight from your pocket and turning it on. Just as the old man had told you to do. The room you’re in isn’t huge, but it’s clear that you should’ve brought a bigger, and better, flashlight. It’s dim light isn’t doing much to help you see what’s in front of you. However, what you do see - and you can almost not believe your eyes - is car tires. You walk up to them, in a way almost glad that the advertisement wasn’t a bad lie to hide what lay beneath, and drag your fingers across one of them. You’re not an expert on tires, but these don’t seem to have been used. Much of the dirt you see on your fingers seems to be dust. Your hope dies. Perhaps it is just a bad lie after all. You shine around the room until you find the staircase you’re looking for. You approach it with careful steps, the sound of your steps against the wet floor echoes in your mind. You shine down the staircase. It goes in circles, and your flashlight doesn’t seem to be bright enough to shine all the way down to the bottom. You take a step down, and another, and another. Letting the dull sound of the rubber sole against the metal echo in your mind too. You scan the room a last time to see if there’s anything else. But this is it. This is the way down. The way you’re looking for. You keep going down, carefully placing your feet on the next step, for what must be at least 50 metres down into the ground, just going around and around in a circle. Never ending circles. The further down you get, the colder you get. You definitely should’ve brought a sweater. Until the end does come, waking you from the haze you’ve been in. The room you are in is like nothing you’ve ever seen. It resembles some sort of bomb shelter that you wouldn’t be surprised to see in a mountain like this. But the proportions are off. The scale is massive. Just looking at it you’re guessing you could fit at least a six story building before hitting the ceiling. The width, well, that had to be at least four or five of them next to each other, but you’re not entirely sure, the light isn’t strong enough to reach all the way to the mountain wall. When the awe sets, you notice a dim light on the other side of the massive room. You walk towards it. Every step is wet - amplified by the echoes not in your mind but in the room. As you push forward through the room, you hear a scattering around you. Metal against concrete, closing in on you. You shine around the room as you keep walking and see absolutely nothing - nothing is there, but neither is the wall. You pick up your pace, and so does the scattering. The closer the scattering gets, the faster you go, until you find yourself running towards the dim light. You feel as if the light is getting further and further away. When the concrete turns to gravel, the light almost hits an invisible wall. Unwilling to touch the wet concrete. As soon as you step on the gravel, the scattering stops. You turn around and shine out into the monstrous room. Yet again you see nothing. You take a deep breath and let it out slowly. When you look around you, you see that the light is the beginning of a path. The path is all gravel, declining, and slim enough that you doubt two people would fit walking side by side. In the distance, where the path is so dim you can only barely see it from where you stand, you recognize another door. You walk for a minute or two, looking over your shoulder every once in a while. Nothing is ever there, but the burning in your neck from the eyes of the old man staring at you is still there. Just as the chill down your spine never left you either. The decline in the path makes it almost impossible to not notice the deep marks in the ceiling. Five deep and broad marks going from the beginning of the path, to the end of it. You reach for them. You feel the difference in texture between the rough rocky insides of the marks, and the smoothness of the rest of the ceiling. Perhaps they meant to put some sort of electrical wiring there. The tools must not have been right for the job though, the marks are all over the place. The depths vary over seconds of walking and so does the alignment, curving left and right quickly. At the end of the path, another steel door is blocking your path. You take out the key from your pocket, put it into the lock, and try to turn it. You try and you try, in different ways, at different speeds, and it won’t budge. You try to use brute force but it’s a heavy steel door. How could you possibly budge that? You try to see if there’s anything in the lock blocking the key to be used properly but you can’t see anything. Eventually, you have to consider yourself defeated. A deep sigh leaves you as you stare at the door. The old man should’ve mentioned this. Should’ve said what to do when you got here. A last idea comes to you. It’s dumb, it’s mental, but you have nothing to lose. “Fuck it.” you whisper to yourself, as you knock on the door. Three distinct knocks. *CLANK. CLANK CLANK.* When you knock the third and last time, you almost hold your breath, not sure if you want an answer, not sure if you want the door to open. Of course, you think after a couple seconds, there isn’t an answer. Why would there be? ‘ But there has to be *something*. You know it, you feel it. Maybe you missed something on the way down but you’re reluctant to go into the dark room again. And another, more alien, feeling in your gut is making you reluctant to leave the door at all. Like you *have* to continue. Not just for your mother, but because you can’t not. Like a dog tugged on a leash -- you will choke yourself on the leash if you try to stray too far. Eventually, you consider yourself defeated by the steel door. You turn around to return to the surface. The second you turn around and start walking, you stop mid-step. On the other end of the path, just where the concrete meets the gravel, you see a slender figure. You can barely breathe as you stare at each other. It’s tall, and where its head ends, shiny spikes of metal begin, pushing into the ceiling. Your pulse begins to thump loudly in your ears, and you feel as if your heart is trying to beat itself out of your ribcage. You back into the door. For the first time you realize *exactly* where you are - in a dead end. The icy cold metal stings against the bare skin of your neck. The figure starts to walk towards you. Heavy steps echo thundersley down the path. The spikes scraping against the concrete ceiling with every long stride it takes. You turn around and try to yank the door open again. Brute force doesn’t work this time either. You look over your shoulder to see the being closing in. You try the key again and it refuses to work. You try, and you try, and you - *fuck*. You break the key. Most of it is stuck in the keyhole, while you’re stuck holding the small handle of it. The heavy steps stop. You drop what little is left of the key to the ground as you force yourself to turn around and look up towards its face. The humanoid features do not fit with anything in this world. Half of its face is covered by what looks like a gasmask. The airtube goes from the mask and straight into its chest. You’re not sure if it is even looking at you. Its eyes aren’t eyes, they’re golden rocks. Its hands, not hands, but claws of rusted metal as sharp as the spikes on its head and shoulders. You soon realize that its entire body is just rock and metal. As it stares at you, you feel how the door pushes against your body towards the creature. The stench coming from the otherside of the door creeps up into your nose and you’re having trouble not gagging. You can’t describe it, it’s a stench you’ve never experienced before. You pull your shirt over your mouth and face even though you know it doesn’t help. As the being pushes past you, into the black behind the door, you realize that it doesn’t seem to care about you. With careful steps you follow it. All around you a low humming echoes, you can’t decide if it’s external or internal. You can barely see your hand in front of you before you remember to turn your flashlight on again. As you do, you gasp for air, gagging on what little you could get. All around you people line the walls, all at various stages of decomposing. You realize what the stench is, and you understand why you haven’t ever encountered it before. It is death in its true form. For a morbid second you look around. You jolt back when the beam of the flashlight lands on eyes staring back at you. They blink, and the mouth opens and close trying to tell you something. They aren’t stuck to the wall by outer force, but rather their own chest opened, ribcage pinned to the side. You are stuck staring, your breathing going into hyperventilation. Their eyes stare beyond you. Before you can force yourself back to reality and to walk away the tall slender being comes from behind you and towards the person on the wall. It sticks one of its metal claws into what is left of their opened chest. Your pace quickens to a run until you find yourself on the other end of the room. You pass through a narrow gap in the mountain wall. On the other end of the gap you find yourself staring out from a cliff. You close your eyes for a second, breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth. At least that was the plan, but as soon as you fill your lungs up with the death filled air you push it out and everything that is left in your guts on the ground in front of you. You crouch down, holding yourself to the rocky mountainside beside you. The cold sweat running down your forehead comes in waves before you eventually push yourself back to your feet and forward closer towards the edge. The second you comprehend what you see, you are reminded of your mother's notes. *“Over depths, they shall see; In valley below, the price to be free.”* A passage you had written off as mere poetry. In context it made sense to be just that - poetry. In this context though, in which you are standing on the edge of a cliff staring into the abyss below, the sense made different. No. They made different. The words. They different. You shut your eyes hard, and try even harder to gather your thoughts and your words. All the images are etched into your mind, almost as clear behind shut eyes. Your senses all start to seem blurry. Like a light mist over a dewy meadow. But even a light mist can turn into thick fog. It’s not a valley. That much must have been poetry. But it is a cave, and somehow, it’s well lit. You can’t see any lights or fires. On the other end of the cave, staring straight at you, is a giant face carved into the cave wall. Like one of those famous founding fathers. Only it seems to be a woman's face. All around the giant open cave red waterfalls crash into the red rivers, spaced by thin slices of rock. The smell of iron mingles with the stench of death that refuses to leave your nose. In the middle of it all, the rivers turn into a lake with a single, miniature, island in it. It’s less of a lake than it is a moat for the island. A lone person stands on it facing away from you. At least you think they are. You *hope* they are. “Erothoth!” They shout. The shout jolts you back to the now. The deep bass of the voice makes you instantly read it as a man’s voice. “Goddess of many, goddess of all! Divine above all! Countess of the labyrinth! She--” “--who waits below.” you whisper to yourself as the man says it. The words fall effortlessly from your lips. At first you think you must have read it in one of your mother’s old diaries. “At dawn, at dusk. Under bright moon, under dark sun. Mother on earth, mother in abyss. I call upon thee Gaia! Upon thee Erothoth!” You continue to whisper to yourself, speaking the words exactly as the person below does. No, you haven’t *read* it. You’ve *heard* it. It’s an old memory, pushed back so far that it plays in your mind as if from another life. You weren’t allowed in the tiny room with black door except for once. She had told you she needed your help to do something. As she sat down on her knees in front of an old bedside table, the two of you were the same height. You studied her as she said the words, her eyes shut. As she called upon Gaia and called upon Erothoth she opened them, took the knife that lay on the table and asked for your hand. When you hesitated, she grabbed it. She forced you to open your hand, and made a large cut from one end of your palm to the other. You cried for two hours straight, and your mother didn’t care. No matter how hard you cried, or how little air you could get in between sobs. You look down at your palm. It’s faint but you can still see it if you try. The scar running from one end of your palm to the other. Once a passing lover had asked about it, and you replied reluctantly, that you didn’t know, you couldn’t remember. *‘How you could possibly not remember such a big wound?’* They had asked. You replied again that you didn’t know. You weren’t sure why you lied. You could just say the truth, it was a cut. But you lied. You didn’t want to know. You wish you didn’t know. You stare at the man in the middle. He’s still, and after a few seconds he holds a knife raised up and towards the face in the wall. As if he’s waiting for Gaia and Erothoth to hear him. And as if it had read your mind, you see the being from before walk towards the middle from straight beneath the cliff. It crosses the little lake/moat hybrid onto the island with just a step. It blocks the man from your view, but you’re sure, it’s towering over him as it did you. You hear talking but you can’t distinguish the words. A few seconds of talking pass until you hear a crack. You suppose it must be loud, but at this distance it’s no louder than stepping on a crusty leaf. The being walks over the man that has fallen to the ground where he stood. It turns around, and you know perfectly well that it’s looking at you. With every bone in your body you know it. It turns back around and walks towards the face. The closer it gets, the wider the face in the cave wall’s mouth opens. It walks into the darkness of it. You look around you and on the side of the cliff you find a ladder going straight down to the thin slice of cave floor. You climb down it, and make your way to the mouth. You have to jump over the moat onto the island. You kneel down to feel the pulse of the man but it’s gone. He’s gone. You tilt your head to get a better look at his face. He doesn’t look like he’s older than forty. You stand back up and jump over the moat again. The old man had asked you if you knew what was waiting for you down here. You had lied and said yes. You ask yourself the same question again as you approach the opening in the wall, the mouth of the face. You answer yourself honestly, no. And you answer yourself honestly again, yes. Step by step you are being pulled further and further down into the earth. In the back of your mind you know that even if you want to stop, give up and go back home, the feeling that you were being tugged by a leash would live in you forever. Until the day that the thing calling for you, tugging on your leash harder and harder, finds you instead. (A/N: First time posting! read all the rules, but i'm sorry if i missed something.