Legends of Amacia Heart of Darkness
Chapter 15: The Cursed City of Acheron

In Acheron, Harry led his team into the city a half hour after Nathanael closed the portal from Kaal Bek. As they approached the ruined, burned walls and gates, they marveled at the cyclopean architecture. The burned-out gates loomed three hundred feet high and eighty feet wide. The walls spanned sixty feet thick. While approaching the city, they immediately noticed human skeletons and bones lay scattered everywhere. Skeletons were seen in such positions that one thought they were feasting upon one another when they weren’t completely disjointed. As they slowly made their way through the city toward the citadel, the bony remains became so numerous that they tread them underfoot. “By the gods,” Vergil breathed as they moved through the deserted streets of Acheron. “Look at this! These people slaughtered each other. It’s just like Argus said. It’s unreal.”

Harry kept his eagle eyes open as they picked their way through the streets. “Yes, it is. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like a bad horror story. I’m kind of half expecting at any moment for these bones to rise up and attack us,” Harry said cautiously.

“Don’t talk like that, Harry!” Arabella rebuked nervously. “You know things can happen when you say them, so don’t. I do not wish to see the dead around us rise like in the movies.”

An eerie howl suddenly echoed through the streets accompanied by a light breeze. It was faint, but noticeable and it shook the confidence of the recon team. “What’s that?” Timothy asked fearfully.

“It’s the ghosts of this place,” Carver returned with as much fear as Timothy. “They cry out for blood. This place is cursed. We should not be here. The gods will punish us for our desecration of this place.”

“There’s one thing I’ve learned from Hannibal,” Harry said over his shoulder in a soft but stern voice. “The so-called gods of myth were nothing but men and women from the time before what your people call the Kragonar. We on the surface called it the Great Flood. There’s one God and one only. All the rest are counterfeits. They’re nothing more than men and women, great men and women of the past. This howling we’re hearing is nothing more than the wind blowing through the streets and buildings, so buck up. From what I’m seeing, this place has been deserted for several millennia. There hasn’t been a living soul here in a long, long time, but that doesn’t mean we can lower our guard. Undoubtedly, someone left behind some killer calling cards here somewhere, so we must be wary and very careful.” His word seemed to encourage the team and they pressed on to the citadel. It took them two and a half hours to reach the fortress.

As they approached the massive edifice, the recon team could clearly see from the ancient dead around them how the mutating madness that Argus spoke of spread through the city. Bones and skulls were cleaved in two. Skeletons and bones were dismembered and gnawed upon. From their skeletal remains, a good portion of the dead they trod upon looked like they had begun to change physically. Many had long fangs and sharp teeth. Others had long bony claws that seemed to extend from the ends of their fingers while still others seemed to have started growing extra limbs, had grotesque distortions of their skeletal structure, or had just grown to enormous size. Everywhere they looked was desolation. Giant buildings lay toppled in the streets with the dead. Massive hundred-foot statues lay crumbled upon the ground, shattered by some mind-bogglingly catastrophic event. A couple of times, Harry stopped the group to examine some of the more bizarre skeletal remains, and then moved on.

Upon reaching the citadel’s wall, they looked up and its top could not be seen. “Whoa. This place is beyond enormous!” Harry exclaimed as they stood there looking up the wall. “This portion of the wall seems to be intact, but from what we’ve seen so far, there has to be an entrance somewhere. Buddy up and fan out. Be careful. This is still a very dangerous place.” They fanned out and a few minutes later, Vergil and a courier named Ian found the main gate.

“We found a way in!” Vergil shouted loudly to anyone in earshot. Within two minutes, the entire recon team stood at the gates of the citadel and marveled. The gateway stood three hundred feet in height and fifty feet across rising in an arch to its peak with an obvious keystone in the top of the arch. The stone of the walls consisted of a mix of white granite blocks twenty feet thick ranging from forty to eighty feet in length put together with such precision that a piece of paper couldn’t be put between them. They saw no evidence of mortar usage between the wall blocks. Large pockmarks, craters, and scorch marks covered the walls indicating a cataclysmic battle had taken place there, though the damage was only superficial on the mammoth stonework.

The gates themselves lay wide open. One was partially broken, as if it had been blown open by some explosive force of unimaginable magnitude, dangling by one giant hinge that was nearly ten feet in height. The gates themselves actually attracted the most attention. They spanned six feet thick and consisted of an alloy that appeared to be an odd gold, platinum, titanium mixture. Thousands of years of dust were caked upon the door, dulling its luster. Enormous carvings filled the door from the top to the street level.

“Lord, have mercy!” Morrison exclaimed as Arabella put her arm around him as they looked upon the megalithic doors and walls. “I thought giants were just a fairy tale, but now I’m a believer. This place had to have been made by giants! No human could have made this. It’s just too big.”

There was a rumble of agreement with his supposition and Carver added very nervously, “We shouldn’t be here. We’ll awaken the evil spirits haunting this cursed place.”

Harry ignored the comments of the team as he seemed to be captured by the immensity of the doors and, in particular, the carving on the one that was still intact. The carving consisted of a chimera monster: a combination of a great cat, draken, and bird. It had seven heads...draken heads and necks that sprouted from the body of a gigantic leopard. On the leopard’s back sprouted two giant feathered wings and instead of a leopard’s tail, a scaly draken’s tail with a sharp, bony end on the tail took its place. The beast’s rear legs were very large and feline in nature with bared, birdlike talons in place of claws. The front legs looked more arm-like, starting out feline in nature, slowly becoming more reptilian toward the ends of the limbs. On the ends of these legs were two giant reptilian hands with colossal claws longer than the talons on the back legs. In one hand, there appeared to be a book and the other hand held a strange orb of some kind. In the carving, the chimera was breathing fire out of four of its draken heads in the cardinal directions. In the heads, giant gemstones the size of basketballs resembling rubies set in place of the eyes. The way the carving was created, it made the sculpture look as if it was looking directly at whoever stood in front of the gates.

On the other gate, which had considerable damage done to it, was another giant carving. This one depicted a reptilian Hydra monster every bit as large as the chimera. The Hydra carving showed thirteen heads on a colossal snake’s body that lay coiled around a giant with six arms. The giant in the carving seemed to be losing the fight with the Hydra as it struggled with the coils wrapped around him. The Hydra’s heads sat in a serpentine striking position like a cobra, ready to finish off the giant from every direction. The team looked around and saw massive twenty-foot tall grotesque gargoyles carved into the stone gateway outlining the gates all the way to the keystone in the top of the arch. Each individual gargoyle was carved with uncanny realism, and seemed to be staring at the spot where Harry’s team had gathered before the gate.

As Harry saw these depictions, his spirit fell within him and a very uneasy feeling began to rise in him. “I don’t like this place,” he said sourly. “Very bad things happened here. I can feel it.” He glanced at his watch and saw two and a half hours had passed. “Thomas, Jonathan; go back to the hill and report,” he ordered. “Tell them what we’ve found so far. The rest of us are going to explore the citadel.”

Thomas and Jonathan were delighted to go because they were very uneasy about where they were. “Yes, sir,” Thomas said with delight. “Come on, Jonathan.” The two of them raced away, heading back to the mountain outside of the city.

“Be careful not to get lost!” Harry called out after them.

Jonathan called back, saying, “We won’t. Thomas is the best tracker around. He can replace his way back.”

Harry turned to the rest of the group and said as he looked upon the giant doors and their evil carvings, “Be on your guard and don’t get separated from one another. This is a very evil place. There may be older and fouler things than Zarukar and Xenians roaming these wastes. All right, let’s go. We have a job to do.”

Harry took the plunge first, stepping through the gateway into the citadel. He glanced over his shoulder at the rest of his team and noticed their fear, as they were holding back, hesitating on crossing the threshold. “Come on, people,” he insisted. “Don’t let your fear stop us from doing the job we have to do. We’re more than ready for whatever is in here.”

At that, they followed him into the citadel. The first thing they laid eyes upon inside the citadel was a giant courtyard that was large enough to hold a hundred thousand people. There were destroyed fountains and toppled statues everywhere along with the greatest number of the ancient dead they had yet encountered. The dead were so numerous and disjointed that all they could see was a field of gleaming bones. There wasn’t one single spot in the entire square that the ground was seen. The square was cratered greatly and in places, the walls had fallen in heaps. Almost a half mile across the square sat the keep that rose like an obscenity to the sky. It too was cratered and damaged significantly, but because of its stupendous size, the keep remained intact.

They all looked across the field of bones, and then up the keep. Deep violent chills raced down every spine as fear crawled into everyone’s heart. Upon seeing the bone field and the keep looming menacingly over the ancient dead in the courtyard, Arabella rushed out the gate with a terrified cry of panic, unable to deal with the carnage before her. “Arabella, wait!” Morrison called out as she bolted, running after her. This drew everyone’s attention and Harry quickly went out the gate, followed by the rest of the team. Morrison and Arabella were nowhere to be seen.

Fear rose in Harry as he began to look around frantically for them, calling out, “Arabella! John! Where are you?” They received no reply.

Instantly, the team began to call out, spreading out in a search for them. A few seconds later, Ian found them just around the corner. Arabella was hiding behind some fallen rubble like a frightened little girl, crying uncontrollably. Morrison was there trying to get her to calm down. Ian called out to the rest of the team and they joined them. Arabella bawled hysterically, with her arms wrapped around Morrison while he cooed in her ear. As Harry and the rest of the team arrived, Morrison had managed to calm her, coaxing her out of the corner, getting her to sit on a fallen block of broken marble forty inches thick and ten foot long. He wiped the tears out of her eyes as Harry rushed forward. “What’s wrong?” he asked with great concern.

“She just got severely spooked by what we just saw,” Morrison said calmly as he looked into her eyes. “She’s never seen this level of carnage before. I doubt any of us has seen the likes of this before.”

“I must agree,” Vergil concurred solemnly. “I’m beginning to side with Carver on this place being cursed. That courtyard is a slaughterhouse. It’s hard to tell who or what they were, but it’s obvious they tore each other to pieces in an orgy of mass insanity. I didn’t see a single bone connected to another anywhere.”

Harry ignored Vergil’s comments, moving in close and sitting down next to Arabella, laying his hammer at his side. Arabella looked at Harry and cried, “I should have stayed with the others! I had no idea that it was going to be this bad! This place is a nightmare, so many dead! All dead; this place is dead. We must leave it now or we may join them!”

Harry sighed and put his hand on her knee saying, “I know. I’m having a hard time with it too. I wish Hannibal were here doing this instead of me, but you must understand, Arabella. There hasn’t been any activity here for tens of thousands of years, maybe not even since the Flood.”

“How do you know that?” Arabella snapped back fearfully.

Harry shook his head and reluctantly agreed, “I don’t. But we can’t let that stop us. Our friends are counting on us to make sure this place is safe. We can’t let them down.”

Arabella slowly nodded as she looked into Harry’s eyes. The terror was evident on her face. “I know,” she replied, trying to control her emotions. “I just can’t go any farther. I can’t.”

Harry nodded and said, “All right. You and John can stay here and wait for Thomas and Jonathan. Someone was going to have to wait for them anyway.”

Arabella began to weep again, throwing her arms around Harry’s neck. “Thank you, Harry,” she cried gratefully.

Harry hugged her and said, “It’s okay. Are you going to be all right out here with John?”

Arabella nodded and Harry rose, picking up his hammer. Instinctively, her arm shot out to restrain him, saying with great fear and concern, “Don’t go in there, Harry! You won’t come back! It’s not worth it!”

Harry looked down at her and grasped her hand, saying confidently, “We’ll come back. I promise. The Lord leads us. He’ll not lead us into a pit. Trust Him. I do.”

“Don’t be long,” Arabella whimpered as she tried to get a handle on her fear.

Harry looked at Morrison, who said, “Go. We’ll be all right. When you’re finished in there, we’ll be here.”

Harry nodded, saying, “All right, people. We have a job to do. Let’s move out.” Harry took up the lead, followed by the rest of the team.

Arabella reached out like a frightened girl and moaned softly, “No, please don’t go!” She was convinced they weren’t coming back. As they disappeared into the giant gates, she wept softly as the terrors that caused her initial outburst resurfaced.

Morrison put his arm around her and treated her like a frighten child. “Shhh; they’ll be all right. You’ll see,” he said confidently. She took some courage from his confidence and calmed herself as she kept a very wary, terrified eye on her surroundings.