The Hall of Heroes

6. - True sight

Right after safely sealing the passageway, the three villagers backed up to the wall and slid down to the floor, shaken to the state of complete apathy. Breathing heavily, all of them could do little more than stare into the darkness.

Alois, noticing the torch in his hand, looked into the flame and tried to gather his wits as much as he could. He stood up and looked at his two companions.

„Alright, you two. We can't waste time just sitting around. Time to move on."

Tereza pierced him with a madly angry look.

„You stupid ass!" She stood up and pointed a finger at him. „Don't you even see what's going on?! We lost Honza back there! There's a giant monster spider barring our way out of here and once that torch runs out, we'll be completely in the dark! We'll starve in here or maybe there's more monsters up ahead that we don't know about, all hungry and ready to gobble us up! Can't you just see already how much over our heads we are?!"

Alois, who was quite used to fighting off discouragements over a beer with his friends at the pub, was suddenly out of words. He looked at Fanda for some support, but the youth was still shaking and his eyes were fixed at the wall in front of him. Not getting any encouragement there, Alois backed up to the wall and lowered his head. The memory of Honza's horrified face as he was dragged away into the darkness by an unseen monster reverberated in his mind and upon hearing Tereza's accusations he suddenly felt guilty for all of it.

Tereza was breathing heavily, her eyes still fixed on Alois. He really was just a loudmouth, she said to herself. For several long minutes they all stood still, the light of the torch flickering in the stone corridor around them. Their feelings overwhelming their senses, they could do little else than breathe.

It was Fanda who got up first. He neglected to see the questioning gazes of his companions and without a word started walking into the corridor ahead. When he realized they were not following him, he stopped and said without turning, "There's one monster down in the hills, but another one here. Now we need the heroes double. We need to wake them up to even get out of here alive. If we can't wake them up, we won't survive." Then he walked on.

Alois, realizing he was the one holding the torch, got up and followed him, glancing at Tereza and nodding to let her know she should follow. Reluctantly, she got up as well and started walking.

The inner part of the temple seemed even more worn and ravaged by time. The floor was practically covered by dirt and pieces of fallen-off reliefs that lined the walls of the corridor. At one point, the villagers reached a crack in the wall that ran all around the corridor and shifted it by some half a metre. It spoke of a settling of rock that must have happened in some distant moment in the long existence of this place and though it shook and rattled the tomb, it had not destroyed it.

They didn't go far before they reached another entrance to a new space.

A wooden door that had rotted away almost into nothing lay before them on the floor and behind it, two statues stood each at one side of the entrance to this new room. They were statues of beautiful maidens, but they had armor on like knights and one of them was holding a strange spear that had a circular hole in its blade. The hand of the other statue was missing completely, it had probably fallen off some time in the past. Tereza shrugged disapprovingly at the sight of these female knights.

In the light of their torch they saw what was hidden behind these statues and again, they all gasped in admiration. The room was circular, perhaps 70 feet in diameter. The ceiling here was a bit higher than in the corridor, though still quite low and much more decorated with broken up ornamentation carved in rock. They couldn't even see what the floor was made of, because it was completely covered by rubble and dust. There was a strange small post in the very center of the room that was quite thin and only about half a meter tall. But the thing that captured the villagers' eyes more than anything else were the alcoves running all around the room. There were maybe twenty of them and in each one, there stood a statue.