The Ancient Code by Falk T. S

Author:Falk, T. S. [Falk, T. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Adventure, thriller, Mystery, Fantasy
Amazon: B09MPS1F7V
Goodreads: 60149138
Published: 2022-01-15T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

It took Ashra almost two hours to return to the cave. Kinski was with her, carrying two large bags of equipment—he’d come prepared. Pashar was with them, along with five more young monks.

“Had to wake them up,” Ashra said with an apologetic smile. Elliot nodded and smiled back. They hadn’t kept their promise to not disturb the peace of the monastery; he would have to apologize to the eldest when all was done.

Teller sat near the skeleton, making sure nobody got too close. The young men looked at it as if they expected it to get up and eat them at any second. It looked spooky, no doubt. Elliot hadn’t recognized it at first, too excited about the gravity of this finding, but now that he’d spent some hours with it, he realized how eerie it looked, cowering there, turned to stone. It died in the sitting position as if it had simply sat down and stopped moving. Like a gargoyle of Notre Dame, it guarded the entrance to the underworld.

Elliot knew why, of course. The corpse was most likely frozen quickly, which is why it maintained such an unnatural position after all tension had left the muscles—they had hardened by then. Frozen to death millennia ago. The thought was no less creepy. The man accepted his death, and no survival instinct had kicked in to make him leave his post. Maybe they had no survival instinct. Maybe humanity had formed that only in the later years, out in the wilderness where humans had come from.

Ashra waited in a corner, occasionally serving as a translator when Pashar was too busy doing the lifting. Elliot coordinated the inexperienced men, directing them on how to take off the large stone plate, and they tried their best to follow his instructions. It broke into several pieces in the process, but neither Teller nor he really cared anymore. If there had been any ornaments or signs on it, the elements had taken them long ago.

When they were done, Elliot looked down into the darkness of the large black hole in front of them. It was a perfect circle. Not a hole in the ground like a natural cave, but something once made by someone.

“A perfect circle,” Teller said.

Elliot only nodded, attached a rope to Teller’s lantern, then let it down and watched it slowly descend. It touched the ground about three meters down. The walls were smooth. They looked almost polished as if to keep there from being any chance of someone climbing them.

“We need ropes longer than three meters,” Elliot said.

“All climbing ropes are longer than three meters,” Ashra said, and she finally became active. She took safety hooks from her backpack and drove them into the stony ground with quick hits from a hammer. Then she made knots in the ropes and pushed them through the rings; she tugged hard at them and seemed satisfied with the result. Elliot turned to the monks and pressed the palms of his hands together, bowing in gratitude.

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