Bells
by @ethanaphex______
A finite but continually advancing space. The only sense available now is sound - the sound of many bells. Some of these bells are deep and low, resounding within the finite space. Others are thin, receding as quickly as they appear. The passing sounds provide a sense of movement. We are progressing forward. That is what our senses tell us.
Now, here it is. The full sensorium is returning. First is the smell. Tombs, crypts, catacombs. The smell of hermetically sealed underground caverns. We are indeed moving. Our sense of smell confirms this, for we occasionally pass sections of the space where the hermetic sealing has failed and the smell of rot and mold intrudes upon the cavern of bells. This smell, rather than offending us, is pleasant. It reminds us of the world. The world is organic, and the smell of decay is an inherent part of life's recursive cycle.
Light, now. We had almost forgotten it. A new primordium is born, and we are held aloft in its wake. Such resplendence, this liquid fire. Its luminance now reveals the passing cavern. Brass bells hang from alcoves inset in the raw rock of the walls. Our body levitates, moving through the air as if on rails or clouds. Hair coils in front of us: long, delicate and flowing, like a maiden's locks submerged in the clear water of a deep cool lake.
This is some kind of temple. What was formerly shrouded in darkness is now revealed by the umber glow of hidden censors. Strange glyphs are scrawled on walls and floor. Unusual depictions of curved saturnine bodies accompany them, lending a further air of unreality to the scene.
Our body continues to hover forward, conveyed upon a floating slab of rough-hewn stone. We peer over the edge in hopes of glimpsing the mechanism beneath, but the slab is too thick, and we are rewarded only with a vertigo-inducing view of the distant trough of the temple cavern.
Hours ago, I stood with the expedition team in front of the vine-strewn pile. Heaps of stone exploded from the surrounding vegetation like Venusian eidolons out of some science fantasy of the 1920s. I marveled at the primordial tenacity of the tropical foliage, which steamed and embraced and asphyxiated all things within its reach. In a quarter of an hour, I watched as the the ubiquitous ground cover of weeds, vines and creeping phlox advanced upon a bit of exposed stone, swallowing it within an expanding green maw.
In this manner, the temple had been fully engulfed. It was our goal to reach into this verdant breach and wrest it forth from the inexorable hands of time. Little did we know what lay inside the strangulated ruins. If we had, I'm certain my team and I would have left it wrapped in its veil of green viscera - left it for the next foolhardy explorer to uncover. Instead, we were brash enough to enter into its occultation of horror.
And what was the price of this intrusion? Only time will reveal the full truth, but what is clear is this: we have passed on to another plane of existence. Some wholesale dissolution of our egos has occurred, and our individual memories - all the things that are human in us - have evaporated. Though the Self remains, we are bereft of identity and have been reduced to wandering amnesiacs.
This account I have pieced together from the scribbled notes left in my pockets. They are nearly unrecognizable; Only a dull genetic memory of language allows me to decipher them. The notes end before we entered the ruins, so I have no knowledge of what befell us in the intervening hours, days, months or years. Neither do I know the whereabouts of my team, although I am immersed in a dimly perceptible shared sensorium with them and know that they wander as do I. I am alone, and all that is left is the susurration of hovering stones and the incessant ringing of temple bells.
Images generated with Midjourney by @d-pend
and edited with Adobe Lightroom