Content Note:
Ingredients include non-consensual sex and a pinch of incest
Preamble:
This story exists within the universe of Xanadu, a shared creation of several Lit authors.
*
Teri: The Cathedral
"It's not fair," Princess an'Terim-lanka muttered under her breath, and not for the first time. She'd planned to spend the day with friends in Kalmera City - shopping, mainly, but they'd promised to give her a tour of the city's more adult entertainments, now that she was an adult herself. Instead, the queen had her traipsing through mud and shadows, and now into a cold, dark space beneath the mountain.
And then the lights flickered on.
"What is this place?" Teri whispered, gazing in awe at the immense stone columns. Great floodlights lit up the subterranean cathedral around her, the impossibly high ceiling almost lost in darkness far above. The brightly coloured and exquisitely detailed carvings on the columns and walls depicted scenes of alien life in amongst passages of hieroglyphic writing entirely unlike anything she had seen before.
"Humans were not the first to colonise Kalmera," the queen answered. "This planet was once home to a great civilisation."
"The Netisti," Teri guessed.
"Yes."
"But they died out millions of years ago. I never heard of anything like this."
"No," the queen agreed. "If other places like this have been found, they too have been kept secret, just like this place has been kept secret by our family for generations."
"But why?" The princess craned her neck, almost dizzy from staring up at the flood of images cascading around her. "Why not share this with the galaxy?" Laughing, she added, "The tourism alone would bring us a fortune."
"Come along, Teri. All your questions will be answered." The queen strode off, following a winding path between the immense columns. Teri hurried after, and the third in their small party followed at an unhurried pace.
There was rare familial intimacy in this strange adventure. It was almost possible for Teri to feel she was alone with her parents. The queen: tall, dark-skinned, her black hair cut short; beautiful in an androgynous way. Bell: blue-eyed and fair-skinned, her blonde hair falling like a curtain; more conventionally beautiful but a little too flawlessly perfect to be real. Teri herself: a blend of her parents' features, her brown skin paler than the queen's, but her long hair just as black.
Bell - the original Bell - had been assassinated ten years before. The queen, after a full year of mourning, had had this replica made. Teri had always hated it. It had the appearance of her mother, but none of the warmth. It was a thing pretending to be a woman. A thing that the queen kept for company, in public and in private.
Here and there, water dripped from the high roof, and had done so for so long that stalagmites had formed, as if a race of giants had carved monstrous phalluses out of salt and crystalline mud. The queen had insisted they all wear heavy boots and rough, blue, cotton coveralls for this expedition, and though she had complained bitterly at the time, Teri was grateful for it now. The ground was uneven and often wet, the air was cold, and the dark and silence were oppressive. The only noises were of their boots against the rocky floor and the dull but distinct patter of water drops.
They reached what Teri guessed was the very centre of the vast cathedral. She stared down into a space resembling an ancient amphitheatre, the ground having been carved by human machinery into steps, down until the original floor was exposed: a brilliant white quartz inlaid with gold, making patterns like some ancient astrology, sweeping around a definite centre.
A definite centre with a missing piece, as if a small sphere had been plucked away. Teri touched her fingers to the floor near the dimple, half expecting to feel some powerful energy alive in the stone - but nothing.
"You're right to wonder," the queen said. "There is still power here. More importantly, there is knowledge, but it needs a key to unlock it. Give Teri your eye, Bell."
"Yes, Majesty," Bell said. Calmly she plucked out her left eyeball and offered it as ordered.
Teri shivered. The android was such a faithful copy of Teri's mother that it was impossible not to react sympathetically to such a grotesque maiming. With her eye removed, the machine within was visible. The thing that looked like Teri's mother stared back at her unemotionally with one human eye.
"Take it, Teri," the queen urged. "It is the key to this place."
Teri took the offered eye, half expecting it to feel soft and squishy, but in her hand it was a solid sphere. She turned it so that the blue eye looked back at her, and wondered if it could see at all. Perhaps it was just a cosmetic eye, a disguise for its true nature.
Teri placed the sphere in the dimple in the gold-quartz floor - and screamed as the great cathedral around her flooded with light and sound and movement. Gone was the amphitheatre and the forest of stalagmites. Instead, brilliant white quartz inlaid with gold designs stretched away in all directions, broken only by grandly decorated columns rich with images and hieroglyphic text rich in meaning.