Chapter 84: Long Awaited
The black doors groaned behind him as they shut, drowning out the wind and his team’s voices.
Inside, the world fell into silence.
Lucy stood still momentarily, letting his eyes adjust to the glow. The air here was heavy, stagnant, damp, and thick with a sour-sweet scent like rotting incense. It choked at the back of his throat, clinging to his lungs like smoke. Every breath tasted old.
Shadows clung to every surface, writhing like half-living things just beyond the reach of flame. The silence pressed down on him, too dense to be natural, as if sound had been exiled from this place. His heartbeat felt intrusive, echoing too loudly in a space that wasn’t meant for the living.
The temple’s vast interior stretched out before him in solemn grandeur. A wide, grey stone hall unfurled beneath his boots, lit only by rows of flickering candles set into iron sconces along the side walls. Their flames danced low, dim, and eerily steady, as if wind and time didn’t dare touch them. Despite their warmth, the room felt cold, unnaturally so.
The stone floor was smooth and clean, too pristine for a ruin. Time hadn’t eroded it; something else had preserved it or claimed it.
Along both sides of the hall were arched doorways, tall and narrow, each sealed shut. Lucy couldn’t tell where they led—each was cloaked in deeper shadow than the rest of the temple, as if they led inward rather than forward. He didn’t stop to test them.
His eyes were drawn to the far end of the chamber.
There, rising like a monument to dread, stood a massive statue.
Nyxaris.
She loomed in solemn silence at the top of a short, wide staircase carved from the same grey stone as the temple. Her form was elegant, terrible, and divine. She bore the body of a woman with many arms—twelve in total—each posed in symbolic gestures that Lucy couldn’t decipher. She held a book cloaked in eternal shadow in two of her hands, its surface shifting like oil in moonlight.