Throne of Sin

The Fall

The portal did not open gently. It did not part like a curtain or bloom like a flower. It did not behave according to any of the metaphors that would later be used by people who had not been there. It seized her.

It was a violent wrench. A pressure that came from everywhere at once. She felt her body pulled through something that was not space, not time, not anything she had a name for. Her ears popped. Her vision went white, then black, then a color she had never seen before and would never be able to describe. She had no time to scream. She had no time to think.

She had time only to register, in the last rational corner of her brain, that her hand was no longer on the stone. The stone was no longer on the altar. The altar was no longer in the chamber. The chamber was no longer anywhere at all.

Then she was falling.

She fell through light and pressure. She fell through a sound like the inside of a thunderclap. She fell through something that smelled of ozone, through something that smelled of wet earth, through something that smelled, impossibly, of flowers. She fell. She did not know how long. Time had stopped behaving the way time was supposed to behave.

When she finally hit the ground, she hit it hard.

Her shoulder slammed against a root. The impact drove the air from her lungs. She rolled, or the ground rolled her. She came to a stop with her face pressed into a mat of damp leaves and her left arm pinned beneath her body at an angle that was, for the moment, too painful to correct. Her headlamp was gone. She did not know when she had lost it. She did not know if she had lost it in the fall or if it had been torn from her head during the passage through the portal. In those first few seconds, she did not even know that the passage had been a portal at all.

She knew only that she was on the ground. The ground was not the temple floor. The air in her lungs was not the air she had been breathing.

She lay still. She listened.

The jungle breathed around her. It was a sound she knew—the sound of a rainforest at dusk, the chorus of insects, the rustle of leaves, the distant call of something that might have been a bird or might have been a monkey. But the pitch was wrong. The insects were higher, thinner. A frequency that set something buzzing at the base of her skull. The leaves moved with a weight that suggested larger bodies than the canopy she had spent six weeks cataloguing.

The air itself was different. It was thick with pollen, with a sweetness that coated the back of her throat and made her want to cough. Beneath the sweetness was something else: the smell of wet fur and hot stone and the faint, metallic tang of a storm that had not yet broken.

She pushed herself up onto her elbows. Her shoulder screamed. She ignored it.

Her cargo pants were torn at the knee, a long rent that exposed the skin beneath. Blood welled in the scrape, dark against the bronze of her leg. She looked at it. She looked at her hands. Her right palm was scraped raw. There was a smear of something across her knuckles—mud, or perhaps the residue of the stone's surface. She could not tell which.

Her field notebook was still in her left pocket. She could feel its weight against her hip. She did not know why that was the thing that made her want to cry.

Behind her, the light flickered.

She turned. The movement was too fast, and her shoulder protested. She had to brace herself against the root she had landed on to keep from collapsing. But she turned. She saw it.

A tear in the air. A rip in the fabric of the jungle, hanging about three meters above the ground. Through it, she could see the temple chamber. She could see the altar. She could see the vines and the dust and the sliver of sky through the collapsed ceiling. The tear was not a door. It was not a window. It was a wound, and it was already closing.

The edges flickered. Pulsed. The light that spilled through it was the same light that had come from the jade stone—the same deep-water green, the same impossible, shifting, living light. As she watched, the light dimmed. It stuttered once. Twice. Then it was gone.

The jungle was just the jungle. The air where the portal had been was empty.

Mariana sat in the mud of a world she did not recognize. A torn knee. A shattered headlamp. A field notebook that was still, somehow, in her pocket. She did not know that she had crossed between worlds. She did not know that the stone was no longer in her hand—that it would never be in her hand again. She did not know that the temple she had spent six hours cataloguing was now on the other side of a door that had just closed.

She knew only that the jungle around her was not the sss she had fallen asleep in. The air was too sweet. The insects were too loud. The light had been the wrong color.

She was, for the first time in her career, in a place she could not explain.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out the notebook. The pages were damp. The ink had smeared. The sketch she had made of the glyph was still there. Still wrong. She looked at it for a long moment before she closed the cover and put it back.

Then she pushed herself to her feet. She began to walk, and then she passed out.