TIME August 13th, morning to midday (Day 37) LOCATION The Borthanza plateau ascent, and the ruined temple beyond, the Indegee
BACKGROUND:
Bor-Thoodell’s hospitality came with strings attached, and by morning the Agents had paid every one of them – a grimlock raid fought off in the village tunnels, and a lizardman’s death delivered by Krusha’s own hand as the price of the chief’s goodwill.
What the village owed them in return was passage: two guides, and the mountain itself.
WHAT HAPPENED
The feast that followed was clearly built around the Agents’ presence, and the chief made good on it with an offer of his own: two guides to walk them through the sword-grass traps to the foot of the plateau, and safe passage up the switchback path his people had cut for outsiders generations ago.
Beloq, uncharacteristically, wanted no part of climbing it himself.
True to the chief’s word, the guides saw them past every trap in the grass field and left them at the base of the mountain.
What followed was a 4 hour climb up a path that narrowed from four feet wide to barely one at its most exposed turns, ending in a view over the Indegee that not one of them had words ready for – jungle canopy, wrapped in mist, running to the horizon in every direction.
A stomped trail through the undergrowth led them on to the collapsed remains of an ancient temple complex – and, inside it, a research camp that had gone very wrong.
Whoever had been digging here had cleared enough of the ruin to work with – carved reliefs picked bare of moss and lichen, one panel showing what looked unmistakably like an ape with four arms.
The camp itself was abandoned mid-use – bedrolls, food packs burst open, dark stains on the flagstones.
A severed arm, a woman’s by Krusha’s reckoning, still clutched a Shigga wire recording box; a trail of blood led over a ten-foot wall into the jungle beyond.
Before anyone could follow it, the birds in the canopy scattered skyward with a chorus of alarm calls as a troop of baboons swarmed over the ruin’s wall.
Ash answered with a fireball that caught half a dozen of them in the open, the blast incinerating the front rank outright; Raven waded into what was left in a whirling blur of blades, cutting down three more with Krusha’s mace backing her up, and between the three of them the troop barely landed a scratch before the last of it broke and fled.
It wasn’t quite over. A full-grown ape stomped over the same stretch of wall a moment later, visibly furious at the drift of dead baboons scattered in front of it – and got no further than that.
A second fireball caught it before it managed a single charge, and Krusha finished what the fire started with a smiting blow carried on KemerLexi’s own strength, dropping it before it ever closed the distance.
Getting anything usable off the recovered Shigga wire took care – the recordings don’t survive tampering well, and this reel had clearly been through worse than careless handling. What did play back was pieced together from more than one session, recorded across what sounded like several days.
The earliest of it was almost mundane.
’Yeah, Jaren the monkey whisperer really told them off. Aggressive little things, though – odd. Anyway, we ran several digs, nothing too unusual. B7’s got some pottery fragments, but they look fairly contemporary. Up above’s a different story – quite the firework display tonight. Beautiful, actually.’
’Interesting – the wall around the ziggurat, it’s living plant growth, vines the whole way up. Too dangerous to climb… whoosh – was that KemerLexi’s own light? Did you see that? Jaren! That one was close.’
Recovered Shigga wire recording, research camp, Borthanza
Whatever came after the meteor shower didn’t stay mundane for long. A later entry, clipped and hurried, read more like a log than a conversation:
’Something’s here. Noises, missing kit. Jaren’s gone – just disappeared. Feels like something’s watching us. Ichra’s ill, can barely move, can’t keep food down. And there’s something wrong with Saul – he won’t talk. Saw him cutting his own arm this morning. Tried to stop him. He just… ran. Into the jungle.’
Recovered Shigga wire recording, research camp, Borthanza
The last usable recording ran only a few seconds before it cut out entirely.
’Testing, testing. Thank you, monkeys – you can hear them singing back there. Wait – no. Jaren, watch out -’ [a short, high scream] ’- feck, feck, I’m coming -’ [the ring of a sword drawn, then a single clunk. Nothing further.]
Recovered Shigga wire recording, research camp, Borthanza
A second reel ran on past that same point – heavy, ragged breathing, someone praying to KemerLexi under it, the scrape of stone against stone and a rising click-click-click closing in from every side before it cut to screaming, then silence, then the wet, unmistakable sound of something being torn apart.
They broke camp the next morning and followed the trail on, the old temple ruin falling behind them as the jungle pressed in again toward whatever waited next.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- A research team’s recordings describe a colleague vanishing and another going mad and self-harming – before something got in among them.
- An ancient wall, more recently repaired than the ruin they just left, blocks the way ahead – something is still guarding whatever lies beyond it.