The slope turned out to be a round valley, or rather an amphitheater carved out of the ground, easily a hundred meters wide. The boy could see separate rows of massive steps leading down to its center—far too long and tall for a normal human to design them.
And on the other side of the amphitheater, located around the intricate ascending staircase leading up to a giant black doorway on the other side of the arena, were four egg-shaped semi-transparent structures, which were illuminated from within with a strange light, the color of which the boy couldn’t recognize. It took him a few seconds to figure out what exactly those bizarre structures were and what was so familiar and off-putting about them.
The structures hadn’t been built—they were cocoons, with a thick, leathery surface, and at the center of each of them curled up the same figure he had seen immortalized in the statues of black stone. Each of them occupied almost the entirety of their respective cocoon and, taking into account that those were around ten meters tall, the boy found it hard to imagine how high they would be were they to wake up and rise to their feet.
Once every few seconds, the cocoons would emit a humming noise that eclipsed and muffled all other sounds. It wasn’t that it was so loud—rather, whenever the boy heard the sound it was all his mind could focus on, ignoring all other noises and even making his vision slightly blurry. The slumbering giants were calling out to them in their sleep, but it wasn’t in a language they could fathom.
The cocoons, despite looking like something from the animal kingdom, had roots that were only identified as such due to how they resembled them. In reality they could just as well be someone’s organs, weaving across the ground. And at the very center of the arena, where they were digging into the ground, breaking through the stone of the small round platform, no more than five meters in radius, sprung the red herb with long thin leaves—the Blood of the Giants.
“Here they are… the Giants. The Guardians of Infinity,” the old man loudly whispered, fearing to desecrate the holy ground with his voice.
His withered finger was pointing to something on the far side of the arena, and the boy glanced in that direction—the point towards which the staircase led.
The furthest slope of the arena lead to the wall—the first edge of the Underworld the boy had seen. The wall was covered in ancient murals, depicting the giants performing some deeds, the meaning of which Tsetse could not understand. They could be some menial tasks, or they could be rituals, but in most of them, the giants were stretching their limbs to the stars, warding off—or greeting—something above, something that the boy couldn’t recognize. In any case, the true meaning of the murals was lost on the boy. Whatever process they were displaying was beyond his comprehension.
And in the middle of the wall, so black that the boy had taken it for one of the inky monoliths, was the giant doorway. Only when he looked at it he was sure—the darkness beyond it wasn’t simply a lightless tunnel. It was a pure void, stretching for billions of miles against all logic and reason.
Tsetse couldn’t even tell how tall the doorway was. It was messing with his perspective, and the boy struggled to grasp its real size. One second it seemed some ten or twenty or thirty meters in height, and the other it appeared to be a thousand miles tall—and a thousand miles away. It lured him in, promising to reveal something that he’d never forget. The mystical secrets from the very foundation of the universe which he’d never find in any book.
“If I somehow survive what’s to come, I’m taking a glimpse of what’s on the other side,” Tsetse promised himself, enchanted by the portal’s mystery.
“All right, stop gawking and start moving! Grab the generator and carry it down there—I can see our target!” The General’s voice boomed across the eerie silence of the place, snapping everyone back to reality. Tsetse didn’t follow the instructions—instead he stood aside, waiting for the others to decide that the order was aimed at them and to start moving.
The soldiers carefully grabbed the puffing and coughing machine and carried it downstairs, watching their steps. Tsetse tensed up: his time to act was near.
It took the adults a good five minutes to bring the generator to the middle of the arena down the giant stairs. All the way down the General was rushing them to move faster, but the boy noticed that the closer he got to the giants the quieter his words became. By the time they were at their destination he was conversing in whispers, which were constantly drowned out by the humming.
Standing closer to the sleeping giants, the boy could see them more clearly—and he understood that even upon close inspection they remained completely alien to him. Their flesh was not the doing of the boy’s creator—he was sure of as much. It seemed almost impossible that something so big could exist on land without collapsing under its own weight—and yet there they were, with solid forms and thoughts so defined Tsetse could almost hear them.
He could see that the villagers, revived by the power of the herb, were nothing but a mere symptom, a twisted and muddy reflection of what the actual masters of the Keep were—both in form and essence. And as the General was carefully approaching the platform where the herb grew, the boy squeezed his weapon: he couldn’t allow something so terrible fall into the man’s hands. Who knew what other properties he’d be able to unlock.
But he didn’t get a chance to raise his gun and take a shot—someone beat him to it.
A shot thundered across the arena, its shape perfectly capturing the sound and reproducing it a hundred times, until it was impossible to tell where it originated from. One of the soldiers fell to the ground, quickly losing blood from the wound on his head. Before anyone realized what had happened, a second one fired, and another soldier grabbed his shoulder.
“Stop shooting!” the General shouted, thinking that it was the work of one of his men. But his soldiers were as confused as he was—taking into account where they were, they expected anything else but shooting.
More shots followed, and although the soldiers had nowhere to hide not all of the bullets found their target. Two more soldiers fell to the ground with fatal wounds, but the next shot only scratched its target, and the shot after it missed completely.
Turning around, Tsetse noticed the short bursts of gunpowder igniting at the top of the slope. He didn’t see the shooter, but he suspected that it was one of the survivors of the General’s onslaught who wanted his revenge. The villagers had never shown a tendency to use firearms.
The boy kept his mouth shut regarding the whereabouts of the attacker; whoever he was, even if he was after Tsetse too, as long as he was trying to kill the General, Tsetse wouldn’t get in his way.
“There!” Billy the Man-Eater screamed, pointing at the top of the slope, and Tsetse almost let out a sigh of disappointment. He had forgotten how loyal and dumb some of the kids could be.
Finding their target, the soldiers instantly turned their weapons in that direction and started shooting. Tsetse didn’t bother to pretend to follow their example, instead circling around the platform in the middle of the arena to assume a position better fit for what he had in mind.
But as soon as he found a spot behind the platform where he would be protected from the incoming fire, the last bullet hit the generator, putting the ancient struggling machine out of its misery and making the arena marginally darker.
The boy silently cursed and kneeled, hiding from the others. He needed time to readjust to the darkness, and he didn’t want the soldiers or the General to suspect him of anything.
“Do you think we got him?” he heard one of the soldiers ask.
“Why don’t you go up there and check?” the General sarcastically replied. After a few seconds, the man must’ve come to a conclusion that it wasn’t such a bad idea, because he added: “Go! We’ll cover you from here!”