Pergamon Dreams by Konrad Bennett Hughes
CW: disturbing themes/imagery
The drums didn’t stop. All night long we listened as the sound bounced off the temple walls.
Hidden deep in a crevasse of the mountain, the temple of our Goddess never saw the sun.
Intricately carved scenes covered the walls, floor, and ceiling. Scenes out of myth – heroes and monsters locked in battle, lovers embracing after trials that tore their world apart, combats and banquets, nobles and kings, hunts and councils all. The tales of our long dead kin haunting our dreams.
It was a place of darkness, though.
Only we who had been blessed would see it. The great fire in the middle of the circular colonnade was hot, the carefully prepared cedar wood giving off fumes sparkling in the air.
Our minds swam with the images on the walls as the drums beat.
Drum. Drum. Drum.
A faint sound at first, but it grew – ethereal, sublime – into a buzzing drone as the moon found its zenith, the air crackling with ritual.
My foot stomped. Then stomped again. I writhed with the first signs of the Goddess within me.
Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.
My kin and I around the flames found the rhythm together as the scenes upon the walls came alive, dancing around us, with us. A chaotic pattern to our myths, winding and whirling towards sanity and away.
Wine poured forth into my mouth, dripping down to soak my peplos blood-red. I staggered, spilling the krater.
A sumptuous hall appeared before my eyes with colonnades and statues. Upon a dais sat a throne with a cruel-eyed king laughing. Twin torches in her hands, a woman shrouded in shadow led her black hound forward towards the king.
As the hound began to growl, she threw the torches.
Walls collapsed in flames all around us. The stars shone bright above as shadows met with the howl of hounds in the forest far below.
A hand grabbed my throat, pulling me close. I wailed for the poison of desire, my lips screaming in ecstasy.
Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
I gave myself over to her strength. To her embrace.
The night fell upon me as the moon opened its eye.