Foundations

Just a dream I had.

 There is always a peninsula, and there is always a building. It stands vacant and empty. Its last inhabitants have long moved on.

 Throughout my life I have always taken jobs that break my back. This job is no different. Drifting through a region near the southern coast, I run into a small company of men. These men haul boulders and wooden planks across fields to the vacant megalith. With a friendly gesture, I hail
one of them, "Have you got any work for me?"

 For weeks I toil with them. At night I can hear inhuman sounds ecchoe through the courtyard, reverberate around its walls. A few times I see something. At first, it's only out of the corner of my eye. Then the apparitions become more bold.

 A wraith streaks past my field of vision long after the sun has set. I follow it, down into the bowls of this place. The entity is trapped.

It radiates fear. I can feel its emotions penetrate my form and my mind, freezing me in my steps. The next day, I confront the foreman. And the next day a witch doctor is on the steps of this place.

 

Rituals are held and the being seems to be banished. Work resumes, but the foreman seems to know something I don't. Natives of this landhave cohabitated with these things for millenia, but not I.

 

One rare day I have no labor. No stone to haul. No brick to lay. I and some of the other laborers swim across the small gulf to a town.

We eat and we drink. The sun sets and my consciousness leaves connected by some form of tether.  Mind without body I drift back to my waking life's place place of work. And the sun is risen. Time is different.

 

A deep pit has been dug and a man lies at it's base tied in hog fashion. He is old and he is fierce. Bloodied form the fighting that culminated with him tied at the bottom of this pit.

 

Words ring out from the man. Words that I cannot understand. I can feel them. They feel similar to that spirit. The same flavor. The same fear. And in the distance I can hear that same wailing, the wraith waiting for another of its own.

 Slowly, the men with whom I've worked with for so long drag boulders down into the pit. They take great care to not let any stone crush the man. They simply encase him as if it were a tomb.

 

Soon, the pit has an entire layer of rocks lining and filling it. Then comes the cement, the sealent. Suffocating and blinding. I can hear the man crying out muffled curses beneath those boulders. With a sickening creeping silence his cries are smothered by the hardening half rock.

 

Strange chants are uttered as the rest of the terrible foundation is laid. The man silenced forever.

 I wake some hours later with a pounding head in an alley. The long arduous swim back to that peninsula takes my cohorts and I the better part of an afternoon. When I arrive I see a familiar sight.

 

That same foundation I witnessed in my dream. The same monks whose chants still ecchoe in my mind laying bricks over that grave like some grim masons.

 

Gritting my teeth, I return to work. I shake off what I have seen. I drive it far from my mind. However, deep inside I still know what powers the lights and machines in these strange lands. I know what makes the crying wails at night. I know what these people have trapped within their foundations.

And I turn a blind eye to their barbaric rituals, lest I become another Dead Engine powering one of their terrible cities.