April 14, 2023. South of the Pacific Ocean.
Latitude: Unknown—Longitude: Unknown.
After his grand escape from the asylum, and the aimless raft drifting at the unending expanse of the ocean. Marco found himself laying at the shores of an island—the details of this unexpected change, he did not know.
His raft laid down a distance away.
"No sand?" Marco thought, after feeling the hard wet ground with his hand, there was only stone—a kind he had never seen. Darker than obsidian and malignantly crystalline.
He propelled himself up using his hand, body aching and blistered, but at least he felt now he could walk a considerable distance ahead. He glanced around and instantly felt a chill run through his spine; the island's stone was soaked with seawater and littered with heaps of fish still writhing under Marco's astonished gaze.
"How could that be? There is no way fish would commit a mass suicide like this," Marco thought, beginning to summon assumptions of the island emerging to the surface at the cause of some earth-shattering earthquake.
"A sunken Island? like the legend of Atlantis?" He marveled, archeologist senses kindling.
The evidence strongly suggested his newly foraged speculation, at least when he stretched his gaze around and saw the blood-curdling sight.
Ahead of several ditches in the ground, there stood a ghastly city, unbuild by a human, he later would add, for the slabs of stones was gigantic, maybe three to four times larger than the Egyptian pyramids— carved with horrific bas-reliefs of no standard depth.
"Through all my researches, I never stumbled upon such bizarre set of hieroglyphics; I can see that the sculptures had skill—No, unnatural one— I cannot even tell for sure if this is even humanly made!" Marco uttered with a sense of world detachment steadily accumulating inside of him.
He should've run back, let himself drown, or die of thirst, a feeling told him, but several emotions fought evenly with the prospering dread. 'Marvel, greed, curiosity,' all of them made his only working foot stagger forward—towards exotic lands untrodden by a human.
"This could make me the new Howard Carter, or Indiana Jones, an archeologist of note and unsurpassed fame," With excitement, Marco realized, leaping a ditch and marching deeper into the rift of uncountable eras.
First, he encountered a strange structure of Acropolises stacked on each other to form a circular oozy black frontier. Beyond that came grey pedestals and stone gargoyles of dreadful humanoid creatures, with their spherical eyes that, for some reason, Marco scented were following his track. Then, anemone-infested crypts and vaults of startling angular shapes, all up-side-down, Marco found himself mumbling. God knows what could be lurking in those deep caverns.
"Amazing!" Marco cried out, awestricken beyond belief. "This place could be a door toward discovering an elder race that went to extinction Millions of years ago!"
"Or did it?" He speculated, not daring to utter the preserve thought audibly.
What fascinated him the most was that the race evidently possessed some level of intelligence, for they at least knew of physics laws to build such an intricate chain of a city.
Marco longed to enter those dark vaults and unravel their outmost antique mysteries, but a single structure pulled his full attention. A Mountain, or maybe a tower, he could not precisely tell.
He could only notice that the architects reserved their best efforts to the central stone build structure — in addition, all the four paths intersected at its thresholds.
"A monolithic citadel?" Marco thought and only now realized that there's no clear path to the top. If he ever wished to see what's above, he would need to climb those mammoth blocks—the creatures might have once called 'Stairs.'
Marco checked his left ankle and confirmed that it's almost paralyzed —he could only count on his right leg and what dexterity remains of his calloused hands.
By the time he ascended the first couple stairs, the sun had already given way to the gibbous Moon; Marco now scaled the rock using only his panic-heightened senses under the vividly starry night.
An average male would take 3 hours to make a complete ascent— Marco took five. Subsequently, climbing and resting, he finally gained the pinnacle of the citadel.
The hieroglyphics on the stones greatly intensified at this place, and he could see now that he stood on a deeply etched circular grey stone, lighted not only by moonlight but also itself, for it must have retained some phosphorous proprieties.
Marco could swear that he heard a screechy commotion below—like the simple act of stepping on the sacred stone had disturbed the creatures asleep in the abysmal tombs below. Fear started to catch up to Marco, but he was well prepared via his nightmares.
Marco crawled on his knees, inspecting the stone at different angles, and found that it contains seven prospective ports, each holding a completely different depth and geometry than the other.
"What could go there?" He wondered after looking at one of them, acknowledging the fact that those ports might be keyholes.
While the thrill of his findings finally began to subside, the voices below abruptly changed to a gurgling noise way beyond the city fringes.
Marco squinted his eyes toward the lantern-like light.
"A yacht?" He surmised, discerning a tiny white dot shuttling around the island, not daring to get close.
Marco raised his hands and yelled at the top of his lungs, not caring if the new arrivals meant evil or good.
"They would not hear you," A malignant voice spoke inside Marco's head, "They would not dare to come yet either,"
Marco grabbed his ears with both hands, frenziedly looking around for a possible source.
"Inside your head," Another voice chimed in, with a slightly different tone.
"Who are you?" Marco whizzed, alarmed.
"What are we?" A third distinct voice responded, "Something beyond your perception,"
"What do you want from me?" Marco interjected, heart-thumping inside his chest.
"Freedom," One of the entities sounded, with a tone much familiar to Marco.
"Y...You are the voice that spoke to me in my dreams!" Marco hissed. It all started to make sense to him now; the voices he often heard while asleep, their language... Those terrible tones, he so often listened to.
"You're the bastards that ruined my life," Marco shouted, fear ebbing down and anger soaring up.
The silence grew stark inside his head; not that he preferred it that way, but with a million questions bobbing heads, his thoughts twisted each time he tried to articulate one of them.
"We are beings of a different dimension; Imprisoned at this city since this planet was first molded," The voice said.
"Imprisoned? Why?" Marco retorted.
The voice did not answer but suddenly changed the subject, "Since the first human-inhabited earth, We have sought out thousands of your kind through their dreams; most of them went mad, and the others never managed to reach this place at the right moment of its ascend—"
"Until I came," Marco added, "And they were never dreams; they are nightmares!"
"Certainly they are. It's a test after all," The voice continued, "Don't you notice something, staring at some of the angles in here?"
Marco looked over, not discerning anything in particular.
"Normal human beings would have gone mad by simply looking at them—"
"Hm? That's why the man boarding the yacht did not step out?," Marco mused, "Who could they be?"
"Our pious worshipers," The entity chimed.
"This being has human followers? Possibly a cult!" Marco gaped. Yet, he knew the conversation was tapering down to one question.
"I suppose my role in this grand scheme of things is to free you? But how am I supposed to accomplish such a thing?" Marco said, a moonlight glint passing over his pupils.
"By taking on an ordeal no man had ever dreamed of," The voice said, "Specifically, toward what we call the seven primal universes, where gods are so mighty, their images and tales traversed the barrier of space and time to find your ancestors."
"Though the once worshipped gods at this day and age are only a set of myths and legends—mere fanciful idols of ancient ignorant people, with their last priests long passed away and their prayers long forgotten."
"You mean Mythical Gods? Like Zeus and Odin?" Marco amplified.
"Correct," The voice affirmed, "You shall journey those realms and steal from those very same deities."
Marco glanced down at the ports dug deep in the tablet of stone, "Y ...You don't mean the objects that are supposed to go in each of these ports are—?"
"They do," the entities cut him off, ostensibly getting hectic.
Marco gaped; he wasn't naive enough to ask for his share of the pie. If what this entity said was right, then he would be diving into universes with uncountable knowledge and power.
"Endless opportunities," He mumbled, nodding his head.
"How do I trave—"
He felt a finger poke him from the back. Startled, he twirled back to meet seven-man with long black hooded cloaks, blindfolded and apparently of mixed races.
The one in front, a hunched-man of old age, carried a cloth-wrapped book in his hand.
Without speaking, the man handed the book to Marco and stood aside.
"Open it," The voices impatiently shouted in unison.
Marco unclothed the book, looking at a plain charred cover.
"What so special about this book?" He wondered, tracing the edges with his finger and opening the first yellow-papered page.
He found a knife and a blank area, making him realize immediately what he was supported to do.
Marco slashed a finger, dribbling blood all over the page.
The page marvelously burned with black smoke, and lines started to coarse through its covering.
[Marco Allan Doré shall be granted ownership of the diary of truth] Marco read.
The book shook in Marco's hand, and the first page turned by itself, revealing black ink writing that resembled anything other than words.
For some reason, however, Marco could understand everything.
"Chapter one: Reincarnation," he read, eyes wide in alarm, "Wait, I would need to give up my body?"
The seven-man did not wait for him to read the page thoroughly; all of them forged in a different direction, drawing a heptagon with a special powder they scattered from their pouches only stopping when they reach the ports.
Marco heard chantings, and next, they all pulled daggers from their cloaks, selflessly committing the famed Japanese execution procedure "Seppuku" right in front of him.
Marco's knees gave up from the shock; Why in the hell would they do that? He horrifiedly glanced back at the page and found the same setting that just transpired.
"The spell needs seven human sacrifices?" he read.
Blood dripped inside the ports, and the green powder zipped to life, becoming a blinding green beam of light, fanned out like a whirlpool under Marco's feet— pulling him down at once.