Eden's Gate

Chapter 33: Eliza's Mission

The cold of the forest may have been bad, but there was something about the deep, terrible bite of the arctic chill that Kaitlyn could feel even as she watched the memory. Seeing a memory like this was interesting - you could only see what the person could, know what they knew, but your experience could happen anywhere you imagined it happening.

In this case, Kaitlyn was behind Eliza, watching her climb up a cliff at an 85 degree angle, using an ice pick. She could feel the weight of this moment. She had come here with a team of 12, 6 of whom had died and 5 of whom had abandoned the mission. She was all that was left of the expedition.

She jammed her pick ax into the mountain wall, as she decided that this was fine. The brats could have their safety. Bless those who died for this great task, but those who left would get nothing.

This had cost her everything, and she would not falter now.

She finally rounded the hill, emerging onto the flat top of the mountain, her eyes going wide at what she saw. At first it looked like a series of hoodoos, towering stones protruding from the ground in pentagonal shapes, most supported by other, shorter pentagons. The pentagons were regular, but somehow, impossibly, interlocked with each other in such a way that they could go on forever. The towers went on for miles, some attached by bridges and all of them encircled by the mountains on which she now stood. The realization that these were not natural took only seconds to come. No natural process could form structures this size, this perfect, this large that could last this long in this environment. She had also never seen the material they had been made of, a strange black stone.

She looked down at her feet, kicking away some of the snow, seeing a scratch of black at the deepest part of where she had kicked.

The very mountains themselves were also these structures. The Elder Things had build literal honest to god mountains to hide their city from whatever dangerous threat might have been after them.

And yet not a single thing moved here without the assistance of the wind. The corpse of a city sat undisturbed, as it probably had been for tens of thousands of years, maybe even hundreds. Her heart sank - her fears had been confirmed. The Elder Things had abandoned the planet, probably a very long time ago. Her only hope now was to explore the city.

She had managed to get into the city, interconnected via catacombs underneath the pillars. She had learned much through her explorations, but the most pleasant surprise was that somehow, the structures were somehow heated and livable. She still needed a jacket, but no longer were her fingers at risk of turning black and blue from hypothermic shock.

She walked down the halls, her eyes probing around. Kaitlyn attempted to follow her eyes, but the things they were looking at were sort of maddening. Shapes that didn't make sense, images of things that should not be, horrific celebrations of terrifying things. She didn't understand much of any of it, and what she did made her want to dump it all from her mind.

She finally reached something. A swirling, terrifying vortex of inky black. It bubbled and swayed, and as soon as Eliza came close to it, it snapped in her direction. Eliza recognized this as a psionic node - a note left behind and preserved for others to find. She lifted her hand to it, and as she got closer it brought itself closer to her. They touched, and as as soon as it did it engulfed began to swallow her, crawling all over her body in a second and filling her mind with images.

A horrible shambling mass of terrifying things that appeared and disappeared so quickly Kaitlyn couldn't process it. They were swallowing the Elder Things, with any of their million mouths, ripping others apart. Monsters killing monsters. An image of them leaving for the home planet. A thousand other images of monstrous and incomprehensible things flooded the world, telling the full story.