"Light has always been the fine line between life and death and humanity first harnessing it became our greatest ally against everything that lurked in the dark. A well made fire of decent size is a guarantee that you will survive the night." the tour guide droned on, trying to put on a show in the harshly lit cave that attracted hundreds of tourists a year.
Their big selling point was the ancient human jawbone that had been found by the mining company who originally purchased the land, not expecting to find several hollow chambers forming an interconnected citadel. After that the local council demanded that they hand the site over to an archaeological team to scour the place for any further items of interest.
It didn't take long for the site to be named "The Cavern of Lost Souls" upon the discovery of a mass grave at the centre of the citadel. Few tour groups made it that far though, with the chambers being so vast and the hallways between them creating a complex grid that never seemed to end, it cast the illusion that just out of sight, they was something waiting.
Everyone who went in there experienced the same feeling that they were being hunted by an unseen creature. Nobody could explain or describe it and most went online to say that the feeling persisted weeks, even months later.
What none of them knew was that it wasn't a single creature that followed them, it was the dead whose bones had long since crumbled to the dust they all walked on. The dust they dragged home with them on their shoes, their clothes, their breath.
Every inch of the caverns was gently dusted with the debris of the dead who weren't buried by choice. The sudden influx of life unsettled them, reminded them of their own former lives and instilled in them all a harsh jealousy for all that they'd never experience again.
Several thousand years without seeing anything living makes it easy to forget basic what being human is like. Being dead is so very different, so much colder and distant than any living being can comprehend and now there were tens of thousands of departed souls all wide awake and being dragged out of their resting grounds by unthinking, trampling feet.
In a sense, the tourists were being hunted just not by anything they could stop.
Their big selling point was the ancient human jawbone that had been found by the mining company who originally purchased the land, not expecting to find several hollow chambers forming an interconnected citadel. After that the local council demanded that they hand the site over to an archaeological team to scour the place for any further items of interest.
It didn't take long for the site to be named "The Cavern of Lost Souls" upon the discovery of a mass grave at the centre of the citadel. Few tour groups made it that far though, with the chambers being so vast and the hallways between them creating a complex grid that never seemed to end, it cast the illusion that just out of sight, they was something waiting.
Everyone who went in there experienced the same feeling that they were being hunted by an unseen creature. Nobody could explain or describe it and most went online to say that the feeling persisted weeks, even months later.
What none of them knew was that it wasn't a single creature that followed them, it was the dead whose bones had long since crumbled to the dust they all walked on. The dust they dragged home with them on their shoes, their clothes, their breath.
Every inch of the caverns was gently dusted with the debris of the dead who weren't buried by choice. The sudden influx of life unsettled them, reminded them of their own former lives and instilled in them all a harsh jealousy for all that they'd never experience again.
Several thousand years without seeing anything living makes it easy to forget basic what being human is like. Being dead is so very different, so much colder and distant than any living being can comprehend and now there were tens of thousands of departed souls all wide awake and being dragged out of their resting grounds by unthinking, trampling feet.
In a sense, the tourists were being hunted just not by anything they could stop.
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