Forgotten Shrine

Link to article: Forgotten Shrine.

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[[=]]
**March 13th, 593 A.A.R.**

**Nova Temple, Worship Chamber**

**7:17 PM**
[[/=]]

Louis closed his eyes as he emerged from the portal. A sudden heat wave rippled through his skin, gently infusing him with warmth. The air was dusty and smelled lightly of sulfur. Louis embraced this otherworldly atmosphere for a moment before he opened his eyes.

The Worship Chamber was carved out of a cave system. A stone arch as tall as a building held up the ceiling of the temple’s antechamber. Weathered stone bricks formed a partial dome that shaped the rest of the room. The limestone brick pattern on the floor was cut with mortars of gold and steel, which seemed to glow. Magma fell from the ceiling through specially cut channels, forming lava rivers across the floor. These artificial rivers all congregated into a central pool, which emitted the light that illuminated the chamber. Jutting out of the lava pool were three carved granite pillars, one of which was taller than the other two. They represented the important deities in the Gerouru religion. Louis could still name all of them by heart. Medila, Thoth, Proxyon.

Louis walked over an arching bridge crossing one of the magma rivers. The sound of his combat boots created a deep echo, and the only other noise in the temple was the churning of the magma. The silence in between his footsteps was deafening. He walked over to a glass balcony, with an orange sun symbol engraved into the glass floor, and stared out into the abyss.

Right now, he was about 20 miles under sea level. He was so deep, that the magma came from //above// him. The temple was situated at the center of an abnormal cave formation, so wide that Louis could barely see the edge. The temple served as the sole source of light in the gaping void. From hundreds of feet away, crystal formations reflected this light, creating the illusion of a starry void.

At this point, the emptiness of the temple started to get to Louis. Every time he'd been down here, it had been packed with people. Friends and family coming down to celebrate a coming of age or to mourn for a funeral. The chatter and murmur of conversation was noticably absent down here. This was the first time he'd seen it abandoned. That's when he came to a sobering realization, the realization he'd spent 20 years trying to stave off: he was the last Gerouru.

He slunk down against the steel railing and stared at the magnificent magma waterfall behind the three pillars. He still remembered the invasion and the resulting gunfire as clear as day. The survivors had been taken to prison sites where they would never see the light of day again. If they were still alive, years of torture and interrogation would have driven them insane. Louis was the only one left.

Louis sat there quietly for five minutes, trying not to let the void he'd found himself in consume him. After wallowing in despair for an indeterminate amount of time, a more rational voice in his head began to shout over the others. The Foundation was after him now. He'd given Diane the slip, but now it was only a matter of time before she caught up with him. She wouldn't go after him herself; she was crazy, but not "run into an anomaly without knowing what's there" crazy. She wouldn't admit that she'd lost him; it would hurt her pride and her career too much to do that. She'd probably make up an excuse for reinforcements and send a team after him. It would take her at least a few hours to get personnel together.

The Foundation moved fast. He couldn't afford to waste
any time.

He pulled himself together, got up, and walked towards one of the open hallways. A slab of bricks stuck out of the wall; with some effort, Louis managed to push them in. An ancient mechanical machine sprang to life, gears and pulleys rotating into position. Slowly, pieces of the wall were extruding out into position, forming a rudimentary staircase.

It had been decades since Louis had been to the top of that staircase. He was petrified to think of to what he'd find.

----

[[=]]
**October 10th, 568 A.A.R.**

**Nova Temple, Rooftop Crucible**

**12:03 PM**
[[/=]]

Louis, age 8, stared at the altar in perfect silence. His guardian's hand rested on his left shoulder; half as assurance, half to remind him to behave. There was a forlorn possibility that this ceremony would go awry. Louis tried not to think about it.

Jacob was Louis' best friend. Even though there was a six year age difference between them, they were inseparable. They sat next to each other in school. During quiet periods, they’d go to the surface to play. Parents throughout the castle referred to them as the cutest, most tragic little kids they’d ever seen.

The head priest had just finished a long speech that Louis didn’t have the attention span for. He’d been focused on Jacob’s face. Even from across the room, buried in a crowd, Louis could tell Jacob was petrified with fear. In his position, even the strongest adults would be quivering in their boots.

The altar consisted of an extruded metal ridge surrounding a cast metal tub. The tub was filled with a glowing yellow fluid. The adults described it as "liquid sunlight", but Louis was astute enough to know sunlight didn’t need to be piped up from underground. It bubbled and popped like magma and looked like it would be hot to the touch, but Louis had heard it was rather pleasant to be submerged in.

The priest finally finished his rites, and walked towards Jacob. Louis clenched his fists in anticipation as the priest led Jacob over to the tub. A touch of relief entered Jacob’s expression as he waded into the liquid, implying that it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

Then the priest grabbed Jacob by the back of his head and, in one motion, forced him under the surface.

Louis held his breath out of anticipation. The priest began speaking in an ancient dialect known only as French. The bubbling of the liquid subsided, and a silence seemed to take hold of the entire crowd. Had Jacob passed the test?

Then Jacob began struggling. An arm burst from the pool, covered in feathers. Louis' heart dropped into his stomach. He’d failed.

How could he have failed? He’d passed all the test, and he had a true and determined heart, and he was *such a good person, damn it!* Louis screamed. Whether it was rage or helplessness, he didn’t know. He tried to run forward, to help, to do anything!

Louis' guardian grabbed him, stopping him from running forward. Another adult pinned him to the ground. A second later, his tantrum was contained, and he was being carried out back down the staircase.

The last thing Louis saw was the priest barking orders to the acolytes. They carried the avian monstrosity they’d created to the honeycomb in the wall, to be sealed away forever.

----

[[=]]
**March 13th, 593 A.A.R.**

**Nova Temple, Rooftop Crucible**

**8:22 PM**
[[/=]]

After an eternity of climbing, Louis finally reached the top of the
stairs. In his childhood, he'd climbed these stairs; Louis could still feel the pangs of intimidation he felt then.

At the roof of the temple was an altar situated in the center. The floor
was made of ages-old stone brick; Louis worried that the floor would
collapse below him. The rooftop provided a fantastic vantage point to the rest of the cavern. Louis had to admit that it was powerfully serene up here. No wonder they had all of their ceremonies up here.

Louis gasped when he saw the altar. It was built to last; there was hardly spot of rust after all these years. The fluid still filled the internal tub. Ancient people had built the pumping mechanism a long, long time ago. Twenty years of disuse had barely impeded it.

Louis played back that horrible memory of Jacob being taken away. He remembered Jacob being stuffed into the wall. The wall was about thirty feet high, made out of small tubes stacked upon each other in a honeycomb pattern. Some of the tubes were bricked up. It was a brutal but effective containment method for the monsters that the final test rejected.

Louis stared at one particular honeycomb with loose bricks. He unholstered his rifle and slammed the butt into the wall. The bricks budged inwards. Again and again he struck the wall with his makeshift battering ram, putting more and more of his weight into each push. The sound of impact and crumbling resonated across the rooftop, punctuated only by Louis' grunts. After ten strikes, the wall finally gave in, breaking into a dusty pile of bricks.

The light from the temple revealed the avian corpse contained inside the honeycomb. Louis walked inside to examine the body. It was covered head to toe in dirty brown downy, and an orange beak protruded from where his mouth used to be. Despite that, the cheekbone shape and confident chin made the corpse distinctly identifiable as his old friend Jacob. Louis found a calming sensation coming over his body, which came as some surprise. Seeing the corpse after all this time put him at peace.

Suddenly, Jacob jolted back to life. Louis jumped with shock.

Jacob tilted his head up, opening eyes that hadn’t been opened in years. He talked in a gravelly voice, as if he hadn’t spoken in decades.

"Louis…" he exerted himself into saying. "Louis, is that you?"

"Jacob…" The word escapes Louis' mouth. All of a sudden, the dam that Louis had spent 25 years building broke. A flood of emotions overcame him. He dashed down and embraced Jacob.

"I’m here, Jacob," Louis said. He realized he’d started to cry. “I’m here. I won’t let you go again. I promise."

"Why…" Jacob managed to say. Louis was helping him to his feet. It was obvious that Jacob hadn't used his legs in some time.

"I came back," Louis replied. "I thought you died alone, Jacob. I’m ending this. I’m on my way to destroy Proxyon."

"They…" Jacob coughed. "…wake up…"

Louis suddenly became aware that the temple was no longer silent. The silence had been replaced with a cacophony of slamming of flesh against brick and, disconcertingly, the cawing of birds.

If Jacob had managed to last this long, without food or water, then the rest of them, //all// of them…

Louis snatched up the rifle he’d dropped on the floor and ran back out onto the rooftop. The honeycombs were beginning to bulge open. Some of the bricks had fallen out, revealing their contents: an army of mindless birdmen, some of them having been locked away for thousands of years. There had to be dozens of them.

Louis' agent training kicked in. He aimed and fired at a few of the emerging monsters. His shots landed true and disabled the beasts, but only a few of them. They began to form a horde.

He had to escape. He turned around to the staircase behind him. No good. The horde behind him had moved much faster, and had already cut him off. They were closing in quickly.

Louis felt a sharp pain in his right shoulder. One of the birdmen had dug his talons into Louis' shoulder. With a loud grunt, he shoved the birdman away, and fired a shot into its stomach. The birdman screeched in pain, which only angered the rest of the horde.

The horde was close, only a few dozen meters away from Louis. He frantically fired his rifle into the crowd, but the birdmen remained committed to their assault, despite their fallen numbers.

Louis held his gun close to his chest and ran straight to the right, trying to dodge the flock. He narrowly dodged the beaks and talons being swung at him. There wasn’t any way out, and his magazine was already drained of its ammo. He’d brought two magazines with him. There were ten more lying in the back seat of the car. Two hours ago, he thought he didn’t need them.

*The altar…* The fluid was piped from somewhere down below, and Louis knew the pipes were large enough for a person to swim through.

It was either that or jump off the roof. Sink or swim. Besides, Louis had the desire to hop into that altar twenty years ago.

The opposition in the direction of the altar was thin. Louis swiftly detached the magazine from his rifle and loaded in a fresh one. He held down the trigger and fired in the direction of the horde, killing ten of the birdmen in the process. After he’d expended his magazine, he broke into a mad dash. One of the birdmen rushed towards him, and he shoved them aside. Louis was going into that altar.

He took a deep breath and jumped right in. The liquid sunshine embraced him almost immediately. Then, all Louis could feel was searing pain. Every atom in his body felt like it was being torn apart and burned to a crisp in the heat of the sun. He was being disassembled like a clock. If he could have, Louis would’ve screamed as his soul unweaved.

----

[[=]]
**March 13th, 593 A.A.R.**

**{{S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Error: Unknown Location}}**

**8:42 PM**
[[/=]]

A long, long time ago, the universe was created. It was not perfect and it collapsed. We fixed it, but now when you closed your eyes you could see the seams. Out of sight, out of mind was our policy, and that is what we did with it.

The seam is inside of a giant meat worm that eats planets. It was not supposed to be that way at first. Unsavory people have

Oh, shut up! I can’t take any more of this incessant babbling.

//1428 2857 4285 5714 7142 8571//

Things were better before the Migration. Why did the Foundation need to get their dirty mitts involved?

Is this the part where I come in? There is something fundamentally wrong here. Humans have spent 20,000 years trying to fix it.

Xaler ot deen i. Rof seman evah neve tno'd ew taht snagro era ereht taht wonk uoy did. Ereh revo selbram gnikcuf ym gnisol m’i.

----

[[=]]
**March 13th, 593 A.A.R.**

**Nova Temple, Processing Center**

**9:53 PM**
[[/=]]

The air was silent in the Processing Center. The clockworks silently churned as ancient pipes continued to pump liquid sunshine throughout the temple. That fluid emitted a light that gave the room a darkly yellow glisten.

Suddenly, one of the pipes bulged outwards, into a dent. Then another. In a moment, a hole had been torn into the pipe. Liquid sunshine began pouring out. Along with it was a new man. Louis Myers has been reborn.

Louis felt better than he ever felt in his life. Power coursed through his veins like blood. It was like he could’ve shot lightning from his fingers. He felt alive for the first time in years.

Just from looking at himself in the reflection, Louis could tell that he had changed. His Foundation issue agent gear had been partially dissolved during the process. Underneath, he could tell that he’d packed on a substantial amount of muscle mass. The test had taken what was previously Louis Myers and reshaped him, moulding him like clay into his ideal form, filtering out everything else.

Louis checked him arms. Nope, no feathers. He’d passed the test. That piece of unfinished business was finally finished.

Speaking of which, he started to hear to cawing resume from above. The birds heard him break out of the pipe. They'd be here shortly. He needed to find a weapon.

The assault rifle wasn’t strapped to him anymore. He remembered throwing it aside before he jumped into the altar. Even if he'd remembered to bring it, it probably would not have survived being submerged in the liquid sunlight.

Louis noticed a heavily modified shotgun mounted on the wall next to him. Likely to defend this room in the event of instrusion. The front was sawed off, and it was modified to be lever action. Most strangely, the traditional magazine had been replaced with a banana clip. Mental math told Louis it could hold 15 shells.

He counted nine more magazines in the room, either scattered across the floor like the pipes or mounted to the wall like the shotgun. That was 150 shots. Easily enough to take out all of those birds. He also found a few sticks of dynamite. He could use these as a weapon.

Louis realized that he hadn’t fully processed his new transformation yet. He shoved that note aside in his mind. He didn’t have the luxury to soul search right now.

Louis took the shotgun off of the wall and examined it, becoming familiar with its mechanism. The door was sealed with a deadbolt. He pressed himself against the door and took a deep breath. Somehow, this task didn’t feel as daunting anymore. Did the test also enhance his confidence?

Louis undid the deadbolt and burst into a decaying stone brick bodega. A glass floor revealed the channel of liquid sunshine running underneath. One birdman stood in front of him, two to each side.

Louis snapped into action. He aimed at the one in front and fired. The shotgun took the birdman's head right off. Yet, it didn’t have much recoil. Was that the shotgun, or was that him?

The birdman to the left began to charge. Louis pushed down on the shotgun lever, loading another shell into the chamber. He snapped to the left and fired again into the birdman’s chest, leaving a sizable hole and sending them to the ground. The third birdman began to swipe his talons at Louis. His newly grown instincts kicked in. Louis rotated in place towards the attacker and brought the butt of his shotgun down on their skull. It caved in with an awful crunch. The blow knocked the birdman to the ground. Louis loaded a shell and fired a shot at their head to make sure they stayed dead.

The gunshots alerted the rest of the horde. A deafening array of caws resounded throughout the temple. It didn’t scare Louis at all. He ran towards a vantage point; a cavern set into the stone wall of the dirt chamber the bodega was in. Each step seemed to carry him farther than it did an hour ago. Even while he was climbing up to the cave, it felt like it barely exhausted him.

The back of the dirt chamber was open to the outside cavern. Birdmen began to flood in, from the rooftop above and the temple below. Louis raised the shotgun against his shoulder into sniping position and began firing into the horde. He could think faster now. Taking aim and neutralizing the abominations from afar came more naturally. Shot, push, shot, push. One by one, the horde fell apart.

Louis was suddenly alerted to movement behind him. He turned around; in the dark tunnel behind him, he could make out five or six birdmen. He fired rapidly at the monsters. He fired, then pushed his hand down on the lever to reload, then brought it back up to fire, like a well-oiled machine gun, or fanning a revolver’s hammer. By the time he got to the bottom of his clip, the ambush laid dead on the gray stone floor.

Louis ran to the other side of the tunnel. By now, the avian horde had begun to climb into the tunnel as well. He took one of the sticks of dynamite, lit it, and threw it behind him. Then he ran like hell. The explosion opened one of the lava channels from earlier, flooding the entire tunnel with hot magma. He heard the screams of the birdmen being immolated.

The tunnel led to a balcony overlooking the Worship Chamber that he'd entered earlier. The birdmen had entirely infested this room, climbing over all of the pillars, altars and other objects of worship. They noticed his presence and began to swarm towards him.

After changing his magazine, Louis took a running jump through the air. He landed on the tallest of the three pillars. Six birdmen were climbing the pillar. Spinning around, Louis shot downwards in a conic pattern, cleaning off the pillar.

Three birdmen flew up to attack Louis. In one motion, Louis fired three shotgun rounds, knocking them out of the air. Louis was no longer consciously thinking of firing, loading and reloading. It was all happening on reflex. Adrenaline ran like blood through his veins as he mowed down the avian horde that surrounded himself like a scythe through wheat. The sounds of the shotgun firing and the birdmen cawing became the music of the frantic dance he performed.

Suddenly, the temple went silent again. Louis was still panting from the adrenaline rush. No more cawing. The temple was no longer disturbed. The avian horde laid inert on the ground.

A footstep behind him. Louis pivoted around, breath held, gun ready for fire. A human part of him stopped him at the last second. That birdman was Jacob. Louis lowered the shotgun.

Louis dropped down from the pillar and looked Jacob in the eye. Was that awe or terror?

"Wow…" Jacob muttered.

Louis grabbed him by the shoulders. His grab appeared to hurt Jacob; Louis was much stronger now. Louis seethed and let go.

"I’m here," Louis said. He began to laugh out of sheer happiness. "I’m here, and it’s now. I passed the test!"

"Congratulations," Jacob replied. Louis couldn’t tell whether Jacob was smiling or not; his beak his hid emotions. His eyes, however, told the entire story. He was exhausted, but through that Louis could see he was ecstatic.

"There’s so much that you need to know," Louis said, barely hiding his excitement. "Everything’s happened in the past 20 years."

"Stand over-" Jacob interrupted, before hacking. He hadn’t used his voice for the past quarter of a decade. "…on that circle."

Jacob pointed towards a circle engraved in the floor. The top half of a birdman corpse covered it up. Stepping over a few other bodies, Louis kicked aside the corpse and stood in the circle.

The pillars started to glow orange. Louis heard voices, ancient voices, speak into his mind as the pillars radiated glyphs. The lava drained from the pool underneath the pillars, revealing a hidden tunnel underneath.

"I heard the priests talking," Jacob said. It seemed that he’d finally massaged his voice into a manageable shape. "When someone who passed stands there, that’s how you get to the city."

"There’s a city?"

"I don’t know, it was hard to hear from in there." Jacob smiled. "The way to Proxyon is at the bottom of the city."

"Looks like we're going down," Louis said, before looking back at the frail state Jacob was in. He’d have to reconsider that "we". "Are you okay to keep going?"

"I can handle myself," Jacob said. "When we were kids, you said you were with me to the end. Now, here you are. I’d be an awful friend if I didn't do the same for you."

Louis smiled. He jumped down into the tunnel, and helped Jacob down with him.

Louis never expected what was at the end of the tunnel. A neon lighting system flared to life, illuminating a massive elevator shaft. An elephant-sized platform made of some kind of composite metal levitated up from below, bordered by an orange and blue light border. Instead of looking like it was built 200 years in the past, like the rest of the temple, it looked like it came from 200 years in the future.

Louis and Jacob boarded the elevator. It rumbled, and began to lower them down into the city below.

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