The Temple

The Temple: Chapter 2

Hoefflin turned around and looked towards the factory. His first instinct was to look for someone to help, hopefully someone who could speak English and had a telephone. It would appear the factory would be a good bet but under closer inspection it was clearly derelict. There was hardly any windows that weren't shattered and the whole thing was caked in a thick layer of beige dust.

Only darkness could be seen inside. He scanned the landscape for any signs of life. All around him there was wilderness and no signs of civilisation. The basin around the factory was flat and light grey, littered with sharp looking flints and aeolian hillocks, cut with shallow streams long since frozen into fractal beziers. The ground was all regolith; unliving granules sheered from the bedrock itself, and it clustered into unnatural looking barchan, sculptured upwards by the wind that cleaved through the mountains cons and crashed like waves of some invisible and bitter tide across the crater. What moisture there had been in the atmosphere had frozen into foot wide patches of snow that crested the tops of every colluvium. The dark fault-block mountains surrounded the plain on all sides like cracked and jagged teeth of a vast bear trap.

To the south-east, Hoefflin spotted a number of dark red specks moving along a mountain pass cut by a frozen river. He guessed that they were passengers of the train heading towards a village or town that must be situated just beyond the foreboding mountains. He was glad he had purchased a pair of sturdy hiking boots as he picked up his speed to crunch through the grit and dust towards the trekking party.

As he got closer he could see they did indeed seem to be of the same variety as those on the train in their features and red-robed attire, but could not have been from the actual train Hoefflin was on as they were accompanied by two brutish yaks, and were carrying between them what appeared to be a stretcher or luggage carrier that he would have recognised had he seen it before. They appeared to be lost in reverie or perhaps mourning as they trekked up the footpath is a sombre procession. Hoefflin didn't feel it would be appropriate to holler out after them, so followed after at a respectful distance hoping for an opportune moment to make his presence known.

He followed after them in this manner for a good ten minutes.

Eventually the native trekkers seemed to reach a place they felt was satisfactory and come to a stop. But as Hoefflin was about to make his approach proper he was distracted by a large vulture swooping down and landing on a ridge not two metres away from him. He was immediately struck by its size; with a standing height of around four feet and a wing span that almost seemed two metres wide it was the largest bird that Hoefflin had ever seen. It regarded him with mild disinterest, its white lids slipping over its shark-black eyes. He was also struck by the baldness of it, most of it was covered in a sagging grey-white leather rather than feathers and Hoefflin would have been surprised that such a creature could fly at all had it not just dropped from they sky in front of him. As he looked around he noticed there were quite a few vultures in the area, perhaps five or six, and what at first looked like a leprosy like disease they were afflicted with became in its number clear as a trait of species rather than sickness.

At which point the trekkers laid the stretcher-like bundle down and whisked a cloth from it. Revealing the naked body of a young girl.

Her nakedness in the cold combined with the death-pallour on her cheeks clearly showed this was a corpse, and the fine features of her face revealed she was Han.

Hoefflin froze in his tracks; the seriousness of the situation had just ramped up a notch. Clearly the body they were carting with them was not one of their own, and so what could the possible reason be for their having it? He slipped sideways behind a small rocky outcrop and crouched, hoping that the vultures would not give him away.