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Incense fumes, cloying and sickly, clutch at your throat and sting tears
from your eyes. Shifting candlelight casts hypnotic shadows upon the
rough stone of the cavern roof, throwing the carved figures into light
and dark which seems to animate them. The little men mime their rituals,
led by frozen chants from stone throats.
As you look more closely at the scenes discovered, you feel drawn into
their dance. The frozen litanies thaw, the mime becomes reality. Circled
by men in animal masks, entranced by the the rhythms of the drums, you
begin your own dance. Hesitant at first, the beats come more quickly.
The walls of the cave pump like some ancient heart in time with the bass
rumble of the tympanic chorus. More quickly still, your dance becomes
more assured. Waving your head you collect a melange of images - the
fire you cavort about, writhing limbs, cloven hooves, dancing shadows.
Cloven hooves?
Faster and more frenzied, your feet pumping the ground, faster and
faster as the primitive voices swell in volume hurling out their primal
song to echo through the chambers. your heart is in your mouth as the
heat in your legs and in your chest burns hotter than anything you've
known. But your head is cold, oh so cold. The drums reach fever pitch
and the noise and the smell and the sweat and the heat is so intense and
then...
The voices stop and you scream. Your head feels as if an icicle has been
driven up through the base of the skull. You fall, and the goat headed
leader walks to you. "You are one of us now."
And you rise unsteadily to your newly formed hooves and gaze through
goat slit eyes upon your fellow acolytes.
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