A World Gone Mad

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Author's Note: The cover image was produced using AI.

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You are Henry Davids, an archeologist's assistant and someone who’s been exhausted by his college experience for the past two years. You’re twenty four years old, and thankfully you're very close to finishing your bachelor’s degree. You started college a couple years behind most people but you haven’t let that stop you. In fact it’s motivated you to work even harder towards your goal of becoming a fully fledged archaeologist. Unfortunately, three and a half years of high course loads and part time jobs have left you feeling burnt out and exhausted, to the point where it’s starting to affect your grades. You’re incredibly thankful that you’re so close to being done with your degree, as after you finish the archeology trip you’re on it’ll be time to take your last semester. But first you have to actually finish the dig.

You arrive early in the morning at the dig site, a remote location just south of Giatto, West Virginia where just a few months ago the locals found the corner of an ancient stone ruin poking out a section of ground that had been loosened by recent thunderstorming. After the initial excavations had begun it was found that the structure was far bigger than initial assumptions would lead to believe, the floor that was currently accessible was over five-thousand square feet and that was just the floor they had excavated. The most surprising thing about the dig to you was the fact that the structure, despite cracking and sinking at least thirty feet into the ground, remained stable enough to walk in. The walls didn’t fully hold together, there are cracks here and there but for the very most part the structure is stable and safe, it boggles the mind. You walk through the imposing arch carved with images of many limbed deity figures in the center of the room, past a few scientists wearing lab coats and hard hats, talking over an ancient dais theorized to have been a sacrificial altar of some sort. You yourself are dressed in your usual digsite attire of overalls and a button down Wrangler with the sleeves rolled up. You aren’t a huge fan of the look but the overalls are incredibly helpful for holding all your tools, and practically necessary since you don’t like using a toolbelt and need to be in fairly tight spaces where you couldn’t just bring a toolbox easily. That last part reminds you, today’s the day they lower you into the next floor of the structure.

As you walk through the twisting hallway to the current excavation site you can’t help but feel a sense of unease as the long still gazes of the great serpents carved into the columns and walls meet your own. This place is old, older than you thought was possible considering the location. Initial carbon dating tests place it as being at least five thousand years old, a fact that’s currently being confirmed by a group of unbelieving scientists flown in from Oxford. You don’t doubt that the results will come back positive, with everything else extraordinary about this place the matter of it potentially revealing a new chapter of previously unknown human history doesn’t seem that unlikely. The entire dig has been wrapped up in layer after layer of red tape and you have been sworn to secrecy more times than you can count, to the point where your emails, chats and calls are being screened. As much of a privacy invasion as that is, you almost don’t blame the excavation leaders for it, considering what’s been found here. You’ve only caught glimpses so far, being the low ranking intern you are, but what you’ve seen is enough to make you understand the need for secrecy. There are signs here of a society that has a level of technology advanced far beyond what should have been capable at the time. You’ve seen some of the finds already, machines of unknown purpose linked up with ancient copper wiring, insulated by some sort of fleshy material which no one has yet been able to identify, crystalline orbs that hold a strange light in them that the experts can’t make head or tail of. Everything about this place seems like it’s out of a dream. As you consider all of this you realize you’ve arrived at your destination, and you take a look at the outside of the room, steeling yourself for what’s to come.

Before you is a room with grander carvings than in the rooms prior. Massive stone figures, looking both reptilian and amphibian in their appearance, stare down at all those who enter the room. You try to pay them little mind and walk past them, pushing aside the white plastic curtain that’s been hung on a rolling door frame to cordon off the area. Inside you meet your teacher, Dr. Benello in the main hall, right next to the pit you’re soon going to be lowered into. She doesn’t look up from her phone at first, but as you near her position she does acknowledge you.

“Hello Henry,” she says, her eyes not leaving her phone. You suppress a sigh.

“Hello Dr. Benello.” Silence follows the interaction for a long few moments. You’ve never particularly gotten along with Dr. Benello, as she’s the sort of person that tends to show very little interest in discussion unless it’s a topic she’s specifically interested in. This combined with her often absentminded nature makes her difficult to deal with in research situations, and even though you don’t really like her you have to admit she’s one of the best in her field when it comes to the actual scientific side of things. Another long moment passes, the great serpentine fish creatures stare at you from the wall. You attempt to ignore them and try to think of a way forward here, as once the other researchers and technicians arrive you can begin actually exploring the lower floor, and so you buckle down and wait occasionally trying to make awkward conversation with Dr. Benello in the meantime.

Eventually the rest of the crew arrives and you begin preparations for the assignment. You listen to the head researcher’s briefing as Dr. Benello fastens your harness and then you’re ready to go in. You stand at the precipice to the next level, nervous but ready to descend. The researchers begin lowering you, you tense up as you feel the harness constrict your chest, and then the discomfort kicks in as you hang there in the air, with only the harness to support you. You steel yourself, ready to go down into the inky blackness below, and then without warning you hear a snap behind your back and you fall into the darkness below with no time to scream before your head hits the rock below.

XXX

In the deep blackness you lay, with nothing and no one to find you as you bleed, your consciousness fading into nothingness, alone to drift away. But then there is light, a raw red ambience makes itself known to your senses, illuminating your surroundings from a point you can’t discern. You feel a vitality in your bones that wasn’t there before, and a terrible heat, unlike anything you’ve felt before. The room around you is made up of six grand pillars and a ceremonial altar, and all of it is bathed in an intense red light, as the room extends you see dark shapelessness further out in the room, and then slowly you see figures begin to emerge from within the darkness.

Bodies are outlined in a red glow, your eyes hurt as you try to take in the features but you see voluptuous feminine forms start to emerge all around you, and then they come closer, crowding you, as their hands reach out to touch your arm, your chest, your neck and all around you. As they do, you realize there’s nothing getting in the way of your bare flesh and their probing hands.

“Wh-what?”You stammer a bit, confused, but they keep touching, moving deeper down your body, and as they do you see around you so many varieties of bodies. Feminine forms of all kinds, with every shade of skin your eyes have beheld and so many more, some of them unnatural shades. There are women of all body types here, and even some masculine figures amongst the crowd, all moving closer to you, some are muscled, some are thin, some have skin that seems brighter or darker than any human shade you’ve ever seen, some don’t look human, and all of them converge on you as you feel a maelstrom of hands and bodies whirl around you. The bodies pulse and shift, seeming more a collective than individual entities and as they do your vision starts to shake, you can’t tell if you're moving with the room or the crowd is moving around you. And it all keeps going, the touching and rubbing and movement continues, the lights beginning to strobe in your vision as the crowd contracts around you, the sensations rising higher and higher. You feel your sense build, every informational feed to your brain becoming sensitized toward the rapturous ecstatic energy of the room, and as you come close to climax the crowd seems to roil around you expanding and contracting in and out, becoming one entity made up of a hundred, all of them seeking your pleasure, and in the last moments before you explode you hear a deep rolling voice inside your mind.

“They are yours, and you are mine,” and as the words come into your consciousness you climax into sweet oblivion, and the world goes black.

XXX

You awaken with a splitting headache and a feeling of your body held up by cold wet stone, as you hear the gentle cacophony of civilization behind you. You open your eyes, seeing an alleyway ahead of you and a groan escapes your lips. You breathe in, the smell of saltwater hits your senses, and you cough a little as you push yourself up and turn around, you are unprepared for the vision that awaits you.

Before you lies a city block unlike any you’ve ever seen. You can see people here dressed up in Victorian era clothing, with men in long black coats and tophats and women in long flowing gowns and bodices, their hats often crowned with flowery adornments. Beyond that you see technologies you’ve never seen before, cars that look more like steam powered coaches with their canvas and leather carriages giving way to ornate brass chimneys inlaid with the shapes of serpents and lithe humanoid forms, some with heads of fish or bodies with otherworldly proportions; and then there are others here. Creatures inhuman that looked to be often in similar dress to the rest of the crowd. There are great hulking men with scales and teeth, their heads looking mostly human or totally fishlike. There are beings that look like cephalopods walking upright like men and women with their faces adorned by beards of tentacles and their limbs a little too long and their gait a little too alien; and further above all of it you see titanic figures, monstrous giants easily thirty feet tall walking amongst the rest of the crowd, their feet seeming spectral outlines as they pass through the people below, and above them are great alien squids and monsters looking like gargantuan creatures of the depths flying through the air, with grand zeppelins passing them by and all of it dwarfed by a great tower made of black stone stretching further into the sky than you can see, and covered with green glowing runes, placed in patterns or scattered around the large circumference all of it wider and taller than any other tower you’ve seen. You take it all in for a moment, stunned by the display before you.

This is no world you know, one that’s beyond any concept of understanding you currently have; and here you stand naked and alone before it, unsure of where to go or what to do. But in all of it a point of information emerges. Somehow this is all linked to the ruins you were excavating, and somehow those same ruins saved you from a fall that should have killed you; and as you stand there stunned by the spectacle before you, you become determined to figure it out.

So, what’s next?