Chapter Text
The opening was smaller than Charles Lennox had imagined.
Not the mountain - that was immense, rising in jagged, darkened tiers against the washed-out sky - but the entrance itself. A narrow cleft in the stone, half-swallowed by centuries of moss and trailing vines, as though the mountain had attempted to heal over an old wound and failed.
The expedition members all stood before it in uneasy silence.
Wind threaded its way down the slopes, carrying with it the faint scent of damp earth and something else Charles could not immediately place - metallic, almost, like old coins left too long in the rain. He shifted his weight, boots crunching against loose gravel, and felt a prickle of anticipation crawl up his spine.
“This is it,” someone murmured behind him.
“It has to be,” responded the man next to him.
Lord Hector Lennox, the head of this expeditionary force, did not respond.
Charles glanced at his father. Hector stood slightly apart from the others, gloved hands clasped behind his back, his gaze fixed on the opening with an intensity Charles had seen only rarely before. There was no triumph in his expression. No satisfaction. Only calculation.
They had been travelling towards this mountain for weeks, and his father had spent years and dedicated hundreds of hours of research and exploration, shed blood sweat and tears just to get to this moment. He should have, Charles thought, been more excited than this.
But this time, it was different.
“We proceed carefully,” Hector said at last. His voice carried easily, firm enough to quiet the low murmur of the group. “No one enters until the site is fully documented. Photographs first. Measurements. We record everything.”
“That’s not like you,” Charles said lightly, sounding more jovial than he felt in an attempt to ease the tension. “You usually can’t wait to get your hands dirty.”
Hector turned to him then, and something in his deep brown eyes made Charles fall silent.
“This is not a typical site,” Hector said. “And this is not a typical discovery.”
They had been chasing fragments of the myth for years - references buried in marginalia, half-destroyed tablets, a name that appeared and vanished across cultures like a shared fever dream. The Sun Queen. A ruler without a dynasty, a necropolis without a city, a burial place said to be constructed not to honour the dead, but to contain them. Most scholars dismissed it as allegory. Hector Lennox had not.
“The accounts contradict one another,” Hector continued, lowering his voice as though the mountain itself might be listening. “Dates don’t align. Cultures separated by thousands of miles describe the same symbols. The same warnings.”
“Warnings?” one of the junior archaeologists asked.
They all looked at each other. In all their years of working on this project with Lord Hector Lennox, none of them had ever heard him mention anything of warnings.
Hector hesitated. Just for a moment.
“Superstition,” he said finally. “But superstition often has its roots in something real.”
Charles frowned. “Father...”
Hector placed a hand on his arm, fingers tightening briefly through the fabric of his sleeve.
“Listen to me,” he said quietly. “If anything about this place feels wrong—anything—you leave. Immediately. You do not investigate. You do not document. You run.”
The word struck harder than Charles expected.
“Run?” he repeated, incredulous. “From what?”
Hector did not answer him directly.
“Curiosity has killed better men than us,” he said instead. “And I will not have it kill my son.”
The group shifted uneasily. A few exchanged glances, half-amused, half-unsettled. This was not the Hector Lennox they knew - the celebrated archaeologist, the man whose confidence was legendary, whose lectures filled halls to capacity.
This Hector looked older.
Worn.
Charles forced a grin, even though he felt his hands trembling. He balled them into fists by his side. “You’re being dramatic.”
Hector met his gaze steadily. “I am being cautious.”
The wind rose suddenly, rushing down from the mountain’s heights with enough force to set the vines at the entrance swaying, brushing against one another with a dry, whispering sound. For a fleeting, irrational moment, Charles thought it sounded like voices.
He shook the thought away.
“Photographs,” Hector ordered. “Now.”
As the cameras were assembled and notebooks opened, Charles found his attention drifting back to the entrance. Darkness pooled just beyond the threshold, thick and impenetrable, swallowing the light rather than reflecting it.
A chill crept through him that had nothing to do with the altitude and he tugged the collar of his jacket closer.
Whatever lay beyond that opening, it was old.
And it had been waiting.
-
The camp had settled into an uneasy quiet.
Most of the other archaeologists had retreated to their tents, the day’s excitement dulled by altitude and exhaustion. The mountain loomed above them, its silhouette cutting sharply against the stars, as if the night itself bent around it.
Charles found his father sitting alone by a lantern, its light shuttered low. Hector had spread several papers across his knees - maps, notes, fragments copied from older sources - but he gathered them quickly when Charles approached.
“You should be sleeping,” Hector said.
“So should you.”
Hector gave a thin smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I’ve never slept well on the first night.”
Charles hesitated, then sat opposite him, the firelight flickering between them. In the orange glow, his father’s face looked lined, more careworn, the shadows deepening the creases in his stubbled chin. On the road, one’s appearance tended to suffer a little, although Charles always marvelled at how Hector Lennox’s grey-speckled black hair was always perfectly styled, waves teased into place with pomade, moustache neatly curled.
The silence between them felt heavy, deliberate.
“You frightened them today,” Charles said at last. “Telling people to run isn’t exactly standard procedure.”
Hector studied him carefully. “Did I frighten you?”
Charles looked at the backs of his hands, still covered in sediment from the day’s work and considered lying. “No,” he said instead. “But I don’t understand what has you so spooked.”
“That’s fair.” Hector exhaled slowly. “I hadn’t intended to tell you this yet.”
He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and withdrew an envelope, its edges soft with age. The paper had yellowed, the ink faded in places, but the handwriting remained precise.
“I received this when I was your age,” Hector said. “From a man named Alastair Crowe. He was my mentor. Brilliant. Careless. Convinced, like most scholars, that history rewarded persistence.”
Charles leaned forward, his eyes fixed on the letter in his father’s hand.
“I’ve never heard you mention him.”
“No,” Hector said quietly. “I never meant to.”
He unfolded the letter carefully and passed it across. Charles scanned the lines, brow furrowing.
Crowe wrote of the Sun Queen not as a myth, but as a convergence point—a name applied to something older than any one civilisation. He referenced travellers who vanished in the surrounding region, expeditions abandoned without explanation, villages that warned outsiders away from the mountain without being able—or willing—to say why.
One passage was underlined in a shaking hand:
It is not the necropolis that concerns me, but the land that remembers it.
“Crowe disappeared,” Hector said, watching Charles read. “No body. No trace. His last correspondence came from less than a hundred miles from here.”
Charles looked up sharply. “Disappeared? Didn’t anybody look for him?”
Hector shook his head.
“I was told by the University that it was a hazard of the job,” Hector replied. “That men disappear in remote places all the time. Over the years I convinced myself that his disappearance was only a coincidence, and nothing to do with his research.”
He took the letter back, folding it with practiced care.
“But the myth has teeth, Charles. It changes depending on who tells it, but certain elements persist. A ruler who was entombed alive. A burial meant not to honour, but to bind. And always the same warning, buried in the margins.”
Hector had mentioned warnings earlier, when they had first found that opening carved into the rock.
“What warning?” he pressed.
Hector’s jaw tightened. “That the dead do not rest willingly.”
The wind stirred, rattling the lantern’s glass. Somewhere higher up the mountain, stone shifted, the sound faint but distinct.
Charles swallowed. “Then why are we here at all? If your hunch is right then what are we doing within a hundred miles of this mountain?”
Hector met his gaze steadily. “Because if Crowe was right - if any of this is right - then pretending it doesn’t exist won’t make it safer. Knowledge is the only thing that’s ever saved us from the past repeating itself. And we need to know what lies beyond that gateway and if it’s as dangerous as I think it is.”
He placed a hand on Charles’s shoulder, the weight of it grounding.
“But listen to me now,” Hector said. “If anything begins to match what’s in that letter—if you hear things that don’t make sense, if people start behaving strangely, if the mountain feels… attentive—you leave. You don’t wait for orders. You don’t look back.”
This sounded insane. His father had been chasing the myth of the Sun Queen his whole life. Charles had grown up knowing the fragments of stories, had eventually followed in his father’s footsteps and joined him in his search for knowledge.
But this was a myth. It was stories.
Except…weren’t all myths based in some kind of truth?
Charles forced a laugh. “You make the mountain sound alive.”
Hector Lennox did not smile.
“Not alive. But it remembers...”
He stood then, extinguishing the lantern. The darkness was instant and enveloping.
“Go,” Hector said. “Sleep while you can.”
As Charles retreated to his tent, the mountain remained, vast and unmoving beneath the stars. But for the first time since their arrival, he had the unsettling sense that it was not empty.
-
Morning arrived thin and grey, the light slow to reach the mountain’s face.
Mist clung to the lower slopes, retreating only reluctantly as the camp stirred. Breakfast was subdued, conversation muted, as though the night had left something behind it. Charles caught his father watching the entrance into the rock repeatedly, his attention snapping back to it no matter what task he set himself.
To Charles, the opening looked unchanged.
Still narrow. Still half-hidden beneath roots and creeping growth. Still too deliberate to be natural.
They cleared the vines with careful hands, revealing smooth stone beneath - worked stone, its surface worn but unmistakably shaped. The cleft narrowed as it receded inward, no more than a shoulder’s width at its tightest point.
“Well,” someone muttered, attempting levity, “that rules most of us out.”
There was a smattering of muted chuckling. Charles was already measuring it with his eyes.
“I can fit,” he said.
Charles was barely twenty, tall in stature but slim in build. Most of the other archaeologists were older, broader. Stouter. It would be easier for him than anyone else.
His words however, landed heavier than he’d intended.
Several heads turned. Hector’s expression hardened immediately.
“No,” he said. “We wait until…”
“There is no until,” Charles interrupted, gentler than his earlier tone, but no less firm. “You said it yourself, it needs documenting. We can’t see anything from here and it’ll take too much work to widen the gap by hand. We can’t use dynamite for risk of damaging potential finds, and hammer and chisel will take days or even weeks to attain an opening we can all fit through. You need somebody on the other side now. I can fit.”
Hector studied him for a long moment, then looked to the others. They were watching with thinly veiled relief.
Of course they were.
Hector exhaled through his nose. “Fifty feet,” he said finally. “No further. You don’t force anything. You don’t touch anything unnecessarily.”
“Understood.”
Hector’s voice dropped. “And if anything feels wrong…”
“I run,” Charles finished quietly.
Hector gripped his shoulder once, hard enough to hurt, then released him.
“Only take your lamp, and I want a tether around your waist so we can pull you back if we need to. Call out every thirty seconds.”
The passage swallowed sound almost immediately.
Charles eased himself forward, the cotton of his shirt scraping softly against stone as the walls closed in. The air changed at once - cooler, drier, carrying the faint, mineral scent of age. He raised his lamp, its beam cutting a narrow path ahead.
The stone was carved.
Not roughly, not hastily, but with precision softened by time. Lines emerged from shadow as the light passed over them - figures etched in shallow relief, their edges smoothed by centuries. Charles paused, breath caught, and angled the lamp more deliberately.
Murals.
Painted stone unfurled ahead of him, the colours muted by age but unmistakably deliberate. This was no decoration. The figures were not stylised, not idealised. They were drawn with blunt clarity, lines cut deep and filled with pigment meant to endure.
A history.
They stretched along the walls in a continuous band, telling a story that unfolded as he moved. The first panels showed a land in upheaval — crops withering, rivers flooding their banks, people fleeing before something unseen. At their centre stood a woman crowned in light, her presence alone forcing order into chaos. Where she walked, the earth steadied. Where she raised her hand, enemies fell.
Processions of figures walked in careful order, bearing offerings of grain, metalwork, vessels too ornate for daily use. At their head stood a crowned figure, taller than the rest, marked unmistakably by the radiance carved around her form.
The Sun Queen.
“Charles?” Hector’s voice echoed faintly from behind him. "What do you see?"
Charles forced himself to breathe.
“It’s…”
His voice sounded too loud in the confined space.
“There's a mural. Several of them, all over the walls. It depicts…ritual. Sequential. Like a record.”
“Anything else?” Hector asked.
Charles lifted his lamp and the next panels shifted.
The crown grew heavier. The light sharpened. The woman no longer walked among her people = she stood above them. Figures knelt. Offerings piled high. Faces turned upward not in gratitude, but in need.
The paint darkened.
The people grew thinner. The offerings became bodies.
Charles swallowed.
“It's the Queen," he called. "The mural is a history."
Further along, the imagery shifted again. The Queen was no longer standing. She was reclining, surrounded by priests whose hands were raised not in reverence, but in warning. Their mouths were open, frozen mid-chant.
And then…
The next sequence was carved more deeply, the stone scored and reworked as if the artists had returned to it more than once.
It showed the woman unchanged while everything around her aged and broke. It showed scholars and priests gathered in council, their heads bowed not in reverence but in despair. Their hands were raised = not in praise, but in warning.
The accompanying glyphs were stark.
What was given could not be returned.
What was taken could not be replaced.
Further on, the tone hardened. There was no flourish here, no ceremony.
Only process.
The land itself was shown closing around the woman = stone folding inward, layers of earth pressing down. The figures carving this part had taken care to show the distinction: this was not burial.
This was containment.
The glyphs were precise, repetitive.
Stone was chosen because nothing else would hold.
The binding was made complete.
It must not be undone.
The final panels were smaller, almost cramped, as if space — or time — had run out. They showed the mountain sealed. Paths collapsing. Tools abandoned. The people turning away.
No celebration.
No triumph.
Only a single line repeated three times, carved deeper with each iteration:
Do not come further.
Do not seek what sleeps.
Let the Crown remain closed.
Charles lowered the lamp slowly with a realisation - this was not a tomb. This was a confession.
He shifted his weight, intending to turn back…and felt with sudden, unwelcome certainty, that the passage extended further than it should have.
As though the mountain had not finished telling its story.
Charles knew he should turn back.
The thought came unbidden, sharp and insistent, cutting through his fascination like a blade. He had seen enough. More than enough. Whatever lay beyond this point could wait for careful study, for daylight and distance and the reassuring presence of others.
He did not move.
The passage extended ahead of him, the darkness thickening as though it were something more than the absence of light. His lamp cast long, wavering shadows across the carved walls, the figures seeming to shift as the flame trembled.
The temperature dropped.
Not gradually, but all at once, the air turning cold and close, pressing against his skin as though the mountain were drawing a slow breath. Charles exhaled, and the sound of it seemed swallowed immediately, leaving the silence heavier than before.
“I’m coming back,” he called.
His voice echoed oddly, distorted, stretched thin.
There was no answer.
“Father?” he tried again, louder now.
Nothing.
Charles frowned. He waited for the ordinary sounds of the world to assert themselves - the wind combing through the trees outside, the distant call of birds, the low murmur of the expedition group as they worked.
There was only silence. Not quiet. Silence.
It pressed in on him, absolute and complete, as though the passage had been sealed at both ends. His heartbeat thudded in his ears, suddenly the only sound he could hear.
It’s wrong.
The thought came with a jolt of certainty.
He remembered his father’s hand on his shoulder. The weight of it. The words spoken with quiet urgency.
If anything feels wrong, you run.
Adrenaline surged through him, sharp and metallic. His mouth filled with the taste of iron as his pulse raced, every instinct screaming at him to move.
Charles shifted his weight, placing one foot carefully behind the other, ready to flee…
The flame in his lamp flickered.
Once.
Twice.
And then it went out.