The Sands of Stone

Folk Horror Writing Competition Submission

Submission to Meg’s Milk & Honey June Horror Writing Challenge week 3 prompt.

Every year on the autumn solstice, one of us disappears, and we act like they never existed. This year, it was my mother. The heat radiated through my sandals as I wandered through the desert as though I were barefoot, but I pressed on through the onslaught of sands that assaulted my body, fighting against the hurricane winds that threatened to knock me to the ground. But I had to keep going. I had to find her.

For as long as I could remember, every year on the autumn solstice, the King would hold a grand ceremony for the people, providing what seemed like endless food and wine throughout the city. The revelry would last long into the night until people picked themselves up off the earth the next day, their headaches nursed well into the next week. Only then would they realize that someone from our town had vanished. Yet no one said a word.

It was as though their very existence had been expunged. The first time I noticed I was but a child. My favorite vendor, a young woman of about 30 who always gave me her sweetest fruit and ruffled my hair when the hunger had become too much, vanished after the feasting. I ran to her stall to find someone else in her stead. An older, gruff man who snapped at me, striking me across the face with the back of his hand and sending me to the packed earth when I asked where Fiona had gone. I cried and ran home to ask my mother, who shot her piercing gaze at me with such wild shock I thought she might strike me too. But she didn’t. She pressed a cool rag to my face as she merely said, “I have no idea who you’re talking about Krista. There’s never been any woman named Fiona running that stall.”

“But mom!” I pleaded as my tears threatened to spill from my eyes. “She was your FRIEND! How could you not know her? She would give us extra food when we had no money to buy it!” I countered, but she just stared vacantly at me before her visage shifted to one of utter seriousness.

“Krista. There was never anyone in this town named Fiona.”

For the longest time, I thought I had gone mad. Maybe I had just imagined the beautiful woman who would give me treats when I could afford none. Maybe I had been so hungry that delirium had overtaken my body, and I invented the idea of a kind person in this brutal world.

Then, it happened again. The next autumn solstice took the butcher. And again, and again, each year taking someone else, but when I raised my concerns to my mother, she simply stared vacantly at me as always before denying my claims and dismissing them outright.

Until my 18th year.

I woke with a cold sweat on the day of the autumn solstice and dressed, the usual foreboding wracking my body as I wondered, who would it be today? I walked into the common area where my mother, instead of cooking our usual simple breakfast of rice cakes, sat staring into nothingness.

“Mother?”

My voice trembled as I approached her, but she didn’t look up. Didn’t even acknowledge me.

“Mother, what’s wrong?” I asked, reaching out with trembling hands, before her head shot up in surprise.

“Oh! Krista…” She said, her tone somber as she looked at me with the most expression I’ve ever seen from her before she returned her gaze to the floor.

“Nothing, I’m fine.” She finished, standing and moving to absentmindedly clean the already spotless table.

My eyes flickered to the door and back.

“I have to go…” I mustered, not wanting to leave her, but I had a job to do.

“I know, darling.” She replied with a hint of melancholy.

“…But…I’ll see you tonight at the feast,” I added as I slowly opened the door to our hovel. “We’ll drink and eat so much we won’t have to worry about food for a week!” I laughed, trying to coax a smile from her as she continued wiping down the table. At that, she looked up, some light filling her eyes as she nodded.

“I love you, my darling girl.” She stated, and I replied,

“I love you, too, my dearest mother.” Flashing one last smile over my shoulder before I closed the door behind me. That was the last time I saw her.

The sandstorm had picked up now, the granules hitting my clothing with such force I was sure I had bruises all over my body, but I pressed on. It was foolish to wander through a sandstorm I knew. People died in them in the best cases, but this one had lasted two days, and I dared not wait any longer. I tightened the scarf around my face, shielding my eyes from the elements and making my way blind and deaf onwards. The roaring winds that surrounded me began to sound like spirits of the damned, as though they were trying to keep me from my endeavor but there was no stopping me now. I had to find her. And there was only one place I could start.

It was forbidden, and entering would surely bind my soul to the underworld. The stories told of evil spirits that dwelt there, sealed within the confines of the temple long ago by the first king of our age. They had to be quelled every year, lest they become restless and break free of their shackles to wreak havoc upon our world, but superstitions were meant for children. Something I was no longer.

I felt something grab my cloak, yanking me backwards and sending me flying, disoriented, until my face collided with the rough sands. I cried out in anguish, digging my fingers in until they bled as my heart raced in my chest before I slowly picked myself up and shuffled my feet forward. Finally, I peeked through my eyelashes to see enormous pillars and opened my eyes fully.

The storm raged around me, but left this space untouched. I was on a circular platform of stone, surrounded by enormous granite pillars that seemed to stretch endlessly into the sky. In the center, a monolith rose, depicting a horrifying creature of nightmares, its maw agape and riddled with enormous, sharp teeth.

My body began to shake uncontrollably as I took in the scene. At the monster’s feet lay the bones and rotting corpses of thousands of bodies. They surrounded it on all sides, with one clear path to a stone table below the beast’s mouth. There, my mother’s body lay. Broken and beaten. Her blood was somehow still draining from her wounds, pooling into the cracks and crevices that made up a circular pattern around the slab. Horrified, I stepped forward, my feet scuffing on the blocks below my feet.

Then, her face snapped to mine, the last of the light in her eyes fading as she breathed out one word before the darkness of death claimed her.

“Run.”

As her spirit left her body, I felt the earth jolt, then crack, as the stone monster began to vibrate, and cracks began to appear. Eyes wide, I turned, running to leave this place of nightmares and demons, but was rebounded by an invisible force where the sand met stone. Mortified, my head shot back towards the statue in the center, but, to my complete terror, it was gone.

I stumbled, ducking behind a large pile of bodies, fighting the bile that was rising in my throat at the putrid smell of rotting flesh as my eyes darted around, searching desperately for any glimpse of the spirit that wandered here, and praying with everything inside of me that this was all just a bad dream.

Then I heard it. A deep rumbling came from above me. I looked up just as a drop of saliva graced my cheek and burned as I brushed it off with my sleeve, to see blood. I let out a blood-curdling scream that pierced the air as the monster came raining down from above, but I dove just in time into another pile of bodies, their skeletons grasping onto me as though they were alive. I wretched myself from their grasp and ran, trying not to think about the sickening crunch beneath my feet or the roar that resounded where I had just been.

I skirted around the mounds of rotting flesh and bones and spotted something gleaming in what little light there was to be had. My eyes went wide as I dove for it, grasping the pommel of a broken blade. It was better than nothing.

I raged against my exhausted muscles, making for the opposite side of the circle, as I heard the monsters cry and kept moving, as silently as I could, hoping beyond hope it wouldn’t find me.

Listening, I could hear its claws crunch the skulls of those who came before. To fight or be sacrificed, it didn’t seem to matter. No one escapes this hell.

I crept to the stone table where my mother’s lifeless body lay in an effort to see her one last time. To say goodbye to the one person who had loved me, in her own way, if nothing more. I crept on my belly, clawing my way forward to lean over her the tears spilling from my eyes with abandon. She had been tortured. Cut open, and left to die. Consumed by a monster as old as time itself.

As I gazed at her face, I knew. I wasn’t going to make it out of this alive.

I felt the beast before I saw it. Heard its low growl behind me. I turned to look up into its red eyes as it towered above me, its jaw set to devour me whole. Then I heard it. My mother’s voice echoed in my mind as though it were coming from the beast itself.

“Kill me. There isn’t much time.”

I looked at it in horror. In disbelief. My mother had become this monster. How many others had taken up this form, year after year? Each becoming death and destruction. To be bound here, and to go mad in the process, killing any and all who would enter its domain.

The beast lowered its neck within striking distance, and without thinking, I plunged my blade into it, cutting it open before it fell to the stone with a sickening thud as the screams of all those who had embodied it over the centuries shrieked, building into a deafening roar.

All at once, it stopped, and I looked down, but the body of the beast was no more. Gone with the sands of time, and with it, all those who had been sacrificed here.