Why does the ground refuse to grow anything where the circle was drawn? What words were spoken that still hang in the air like whispers? Which attendees left but never truly departed? And why do photographs of the space reveal figures that weren't visible to the naked eye?
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Is everybody in? Is everybody in? Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin. The entertainment for this evening is not new, you’ve seen this entertainment through and through you have seen your birth, your life, your death…you may recall all the rest. Did you have a good world when you died? -enough to base a movie on??
― Jim Morrison, An American Prayer
The archaeology team had expected to find remnants of ancient wedding ceremonies, perhaps fertility rites from a forgotten culture. What they uncovered in the clearing was far more disturbing than any textbook had prepared them for.
The stone arrangements formed no pattern recognizable to conventional scholarship. Nine obsidian pillars stood in a perfect circle around a central dais, their surfaces carved with symbols that seemed to writhe when viewed peripherally. Dr. Sarah Chen’s attempts to photograph the markings consistently failed---every image emerged as an incomprehensible blur of shadows.
“The carbon dating doesn’t make sense,” whispered her research assistant, Marcus, his voice barely audible above the wind that never seemed to stop howling through the ceremony area. “These stones predate human civilization in this region by millennia, yet the tool marks are fresh. Almost as if they were carved yesterday.”
As night fell, the team made their most disturbing discovery. The ground around the altar stone was soft---not with earth, but with what felt like flesh barely concealed beneath a thin layer of soil. When Sarah pressed her ear to the central dais, she could swear she heard something vast breathing far below.
The local indigenous elder who visited their camp the next morning spoke in grave tones about the place they had disturbed. “Some grounds are made sacred by love and celebration,” he said, studying their photographs with growing alarm. “Others are made sacred by sacrifice and summoning. You have awakened something that should have remained buried.”
The team fled that very night, leaving behind their equipment and research. Sarah still dreams of that ceremony area, and in her nightmares, she sees figures in dark robes completing a ritual that began long before humanity walked the earth---a ritual that she fears her archaeological dig may have finally allowed to reach its terrible conclusion.
