The darkness from which he had come loomed ominously behind him like a malevolent phantom; the eerie reddish light into which he stepped seemed to pulse with an intense evil which choked his breath and smothered the heartbeats within the tight cage of his ribs.
Crystalline drops of cold sweat stood out on his skin, the white shirt cool and clammy against his broad back. A shudder rippled across his strong shoulders, the hard plates of bone flexing with panther-like alertness. His face was calm, tempered only by a slight downward curvature of the long, full lips, and a barely noticeable twitch in the flesh of his left temple. His eyes glittered darkly shining in the bizarre half-light like the silent, watching, all-perceiving orbs of some omnipotent night-owl; flicking this way and that, trying to find the mysterious creature or entity which seemed to be haunting his footsteps.
He had first felt the presence in the antechamber, but it was stronger here, far stronger. The further down the corridor he progressed, the more potent the feeling of dread which assailed him, and the more certain he became that someone, something, was watching his movements. Perhaps waiting for a moment to strike...
Vaguely he wondered why the light held such a red tinge. Was there fire ahead? Red meant danger, that much was certain. Deep inside his brain, something whispered the answer to his sense of deja-vu. This place, something with animal energy and pulsing with an almost heartbeat regularity, was like a mother's womb
a womb of earth and rock, but still a womb. A place of creation and eventually perhaps soon, he thought with another quivering shudder a place of birth. But what would such a place give birth to?
His breath caught in his throat, for a moment his heart failed him. A voice, electric, hypnotic and sibilant, had whispered something through his bewildered and ecstatic thoughts. "Shirazz..." The echo of the voice reverberated through the earth beneath his feet and the thick, primal air he breathed, though Harrn could not clearly recall the words being spoken, and he could not tell from whence the voice had come. Had it been from outside at all? What if the thing was inside his brain surreptitiously drawing his thoughts into some perverted form of silent speech impossible to hear yet impossible also to ignore.
No! This time he was certain. As the voice spoke again, he knew it had not come from inside him. The air stirred as of a deep sigh as the sibilant voice again uttered the dreadful word: "Shirazz..."
Holding the dagger ever tighter in his mighty fist, Harrn set off toward the apparent source of the light in this tunnel. As he walked, the voice seemed to hiss in his ear, strange words, intoned in some alien tongue which meant nothing to Harrn, and yet which he seemed to recognise: "Mal han shirazz. Enkar samus'ii. Nang mal pers'an. Soi han shirazz, Harrn..." That last word struck icicles of terror across the fabric of his fevered brain. His stomach knotted with a sense of hopeless desperation; the bitter fluid of despair rose in his throat. He wanted to scream, but the sound was strangled deep inside his chest, trapped as his heart was trapped, held as he was in this underground womb/tomb.
His head pounded with terrified confusion as he strove to regain his composure and his strength. The leather binding on the dagger's hilt was wet with his perspiration, as was his shirt, which clung uncomfortably to his shoulders now.
"Who are you?" he whispered hoarsely, his eyes straining wildly into the blood-soaked darkness ahead. "What do you want of me?"
Silence closed around his words. The thing, whatever it was, appeared to be listening, considering his speech. The wait for a response was, so Harrn imagined, the worst kind of torture in this livid, living darkness.
"Ebni solass'ar, Harrn. Soi han shirazz. Enkar'a?"
Harrn could recognise a question in the tone, but he could not discover its meaning. "I'll follow where you lead me, if that's what you want."
"Za'hara." The thing seemed satisfied, and Harrn felt compelled to reach the source of the light. No active resistance met him as he set off, so he assumed that was the thing's wish also.
The corridor opened out into a huge chamber, hewn from the granite of the mountain, and directly opposite the doorway where Harrn stood, his eyes streaming before the sudden explosion of light on his unprepared retinas, stood a huge figurehead of some hideous beast: two serpentine heads with forked tongues, whose eyes glowed red from the gigantic inland stones and whose fangs seemed to drip blood, though the effect, like the statue, was merely an elaborate stone carving.
Harrn shivered nervously, and balked before the horrific sight. Finding his voice from the raw pit of his churning stomach, he averted his eyes from the serpentine heads and whispered: "Is this Han Shirazz?"
"Za'hara. Han shirazz."
"Why did you bring me to see this? What does it mean?" His gaze returned to the revolting figurines. "What is Han Shirazz?"
The thing did not reply, but Harrn felt a mysterious force pushing him forward, closer to the stone beast. He knew resistance was useless, so surrendered to the power of the being and soon found himself at the foot of the mighty statue. He sank to his knees and closed his eyes, re-enacting some kind of religious obeisance which he failed to understand. When he opened his eyes again he saw...
A girl.
The last thing he would have expected to see in this god-forsaken place.
She was tall, slender, curvaceous in a middle-puberty sort of way, and
strangely familiar. She was fabulously beautiful, with her soft ivory skin and large, almond-shaped, violet-coloured eyes, her long tresses of fine, silky, red-brown hair. With such fine beauty, it should have been easy to recall meeting her before, and yet Harrn could not do so.
And then it struck him. Her familiarity: those violet eyes, that red-brown hair... Suddenly it came as no surprise when she stepped towards him and whispered the word: "Father..."
Born of the temple-goddess to whom he had made that bizarre offering thirteen suns before, that deity who had become human flesh for only one night, in order to conceive of a mortal. That beautiful goddess-queen who had been snatched from his bed for her crime by the Lord of the Underworld, the King of Darkness himself, and dragged away to become his Handmaiden. The divine creature he had seen in his dreams ever since, torn and ripped apart by the punishment which had rendered her forever, eternally, inhuman. The reason he had returned to this mountain in the first place. Something of her remained he had always known it and he had felt compelled to return, to see for himself what had become of her.
Suddenly the voice returned, this time speaking in a tongue he could comprehend, though whether the words, or Harrn's own understanding of them, had changed, it was impossible for him to be sure. And it was the voice of his beautiful, long-lost goddess-lover, speaking from the hideous stone tongues of the serpents on the statue before him. "My Harrn, you have searched for so long, sure that a part of me remained. Now you have found it in our daughter. Guard her well, for she will be everything that I once was. Let her not become what I have become the dreadful thing you see before you. The price of my sin was high, but I do not regret that night spent in your arms. You must weep no more for me, for I am past redemption. Look to our child, and protect her from the cruelties of this life. You are strong, and she will make you stronger. Together you may right my wrongs. Love her as you loved me, and she will bear you strong sons and beautiful daughters to carry on our noble line. Never forget me, but recognise that I am the past, and she is the future. Whatever I am now, know that I have ever loved you, and that I ever shall. We will never share that sinful touch again, but when you hold our daughter to you, you will remember, and she will become as me in your mind. I will always be with you, through her. Remember that, my Harrn. Remember..."
The voice faded away into the stony depths of the monstrous figurehead, leaving Harrn with tears streaming down his handsome face. The girl approached him silently, took his huge hand in her delicate grip and led him wordlessly past the statue, out a newly-opened portal and into the cold, amethyst light of the starlit night of the desert plains.
Behind them, the great silhouette of Han Shirazz loomed serpentine and impassive against the globe of the moon. It was as it had always been. Time passed once more as it always had, and Harrn Shirazz and his beautiful new daughter-bride walked hand in hand away from the shadows and into the pale light of the endless future goddess and prince together again at last.
[29th August 1993]
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