I will never forget that dank crevice on the side of that infernal mountain. I will never forget the friends I lost there. I wish however that I could forget their terror stricken faces. I wish I could forget the anguished cries they made in their final moments. I wish too, that I could return to the blissful ignorance of the horrors that lay out in the open. Horrors that lay still, sleeping in their undeath, whose waking would see humanity disappear as if a passing dream. I wish for a great many things that will never come to pass.

  It began with an insect– though for reasons which are too technical to explain, “insect” is not a very accurate term. It didn’t fall neatly into any of the family trees. Nevertheless it conjures up the correct image.

  It was the size of a tennis ball, translucent, with eight wispy appendages. Its body was ovaloid, almost pill-shaped, lacking segmentation, and possessing a gelatinous quality. There were no reproductive organs that we could identify, nor could we identify anything resembling a digestive system, and while it also seemed to lack any sensory organs, it did seem to have a certain amount of spatial awareness.

  Dropping various items into its enclosure elicited different reactions. Anything organic elicited the most excited response, wherein the creature would wrap itself around the object, say a piece of meat or plant matter, and begin to break it down. This would have been identified as its method of feeding, except that whenever the creature did this, it would begin to shrink, having lost about half its mass by the time we were able to notice this phenomenon. We tried the same thing with a plastic cube, which demanded a response from the creature, but did not seem to cause any kind of shrinkage.

  The creature did not live for very long in our care. After just three days it stopped moving, and within minutes its body had disintegrated. Despite attempts to preserve its body, the creature had more or less evaporated into thin air.

  Though short lived, our examination of the creature had lit a fire in me. Here was something mysterious, of seemingly unknown origin, that had evolved outside of the umbrella that encompassed man. And if there was one of something like this, then there had to be more. A whole new evolutionary lineage. Aliens, on our own planet!

  Petitioning our college for funds to embark on tracing the origins of the creature was easy. After all, what academic institution would not want to become a part of history?

  Once we secured our funds, the actual tracing of the creature was simple. It had been brought to us after being discovered in a refrigerated shipping container. It was as easy as going up back through the lines of manufacturing.

  Our lines of inquiry took us to several factories, one of which had an exclusive trade deal with a rural community from whom they purchased the raw materials for a particularly fragrant aromatic resin. After contacting a representative of that community, we sent them a picture of the creature. They recognized it.

  We wasted no time in preparing to rendezvous with the man who had identified the creature.

  “It is a sprite of Aga,” said the local man as he began to lead us to his village. “They are like…” and here he paused, scratching his chin to search for the proper english word, as it was not his first language. “They are like a monster– no, a myth, yes that is it.”

  “Does your village not believe they exist?”

  “Hmm… no, sprites of Aga are very rare. If you are not a craftsman you are unlikely to see them. They crawl down from the mountain because they are attracted to the scent of the aromatic resin. They do not live very long down here, and when they die they leave behind no trace. The first time I saw one, nobody except a few of the older craftsmen believed me.”

  The local man, whose name was Chen, gave us our starting point. We tasked ourselves with asking around for more, and just as Chen had told us, only some of the craftsmen had anything of substance to add. The rest of the village looked at us the way you might look at someone sincerely trying to find evidence of Bigfoot.

  In myth, the sprites of Aga were dubious omens. Sometimes they eradicated disease, and sometimes caused babies to vanish from their cribs. In reality, or at least in the stories given to us by the craftsmen, the sprites were a strange and rare pest. They crawled down from the mountain and ate the aromatics in the resin, leaving it scentless. Whatever the true nature of the sprites were, it became clear that the mountain would be our final destination. The local man, Chen, agreed to be our guide. He said that if the sprites came from anywhere, it would be from a cave near the top of the mountain that the villagers called “The Mouth Of Aga.”

  We took a day to gather supplies, and then set off, stopping in the village to meet up with Chen. While there, I bought myself a box of the aromatic resin. Having heard the craftsmen complain about the sprites as pests, I thought a box of resin could prove useful as a lure. It was when making my purchase that I noticed the villagers looking at us.

  “They think you are crazy,” said Chen, who had facilitated my purchase of the resin.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because you are going up the mountain.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  Chen paused, and thought for a moment before speaking again. “It is simply not done. To the village, staying away from the mountain is as common sense as not touching an open flame.”

  “But why? It’s just a mountain.”

  “To you, but to the people of my village and others surrounding the mountain, it is the place where God lives, or rather, the mountain itself is God.” Chen Must have read my silent fascination, because he continued saying:“The story goes that one day, a long time ago, Aga was searching for somewhere very quiet, and very dark to sleep. This was the world before Aga. Aga settled down to sleep, and in his dreams he pictured a world that was more than Nothing. Our world is Aga’s dream, and therefore it would be foolish to risk waking them up, however unlikely it is that you could. So it is believed.”

  “So it is, but you don’t believe I take it?”

  “I do not. Those like me are few here, and it is likely that the place I am taking you and your friends has not seen a single human being in many, many years.”

  Chen proved a good conversationalist for our trip up the mountain. He was from the village originally, but had left for a time to pursue higher education, returning to his village to see that it would prosper, which it was. It made the climb up the mountain a very pleasant one.

  “What is that lovely scent?” I asked Chen. It was nearing the end of our first day up the mountain.

  “The aromatics we put in our resin. If you ask the villagers, they will say that the forest draws it up from the ground, and I do not think that is far off. I think it comes from the mountain, and flows down to us in the valleys, seeping into the trees. Winds coming down from the mountain always carry the scent of the resin.”

  “Well it’s downright enchanting.”

  The trip up the mountain was not especially arduous, and Chen made a good guide. And our first day up the mountain saw us cover over half the distance toward the top.

  That night, after rehydrating our supper of MRE food, I dreamt of seeing my name in future science textbooks. I was lulled to sleep by the aromatic wind, which came one way and then the other, like the gentle breathing of a sleeping giant.

  I awoke the next dawn with the rest of my people. We were all of us sore, but we were still brimming with energy. The possibility of having your name stamped into history will do that to you.

  We spent the last day of our climb enthusiastically discussing the possible life inside the cave. If the creature, the so-called sprite of Aga, was subterranean it would go a long way to explaining some, but not all, of its peculiarities; a pair of researchers, a couple named Alice and Richard, theorized that we may be coming upon a much more advanced social order of animals. In essence they posited that the creature was like an ant, except that they had advanced in such a way that the workers were not born with any unnecessary sex organs. This they guessed mostly due to the creature's sexless nature, but partially to their native given name. It implied that their origin was from another, much greater, being.

  My partner in single manhood, and final member of our original quadruplet, was Ernesto. He disagreed with the couple’s theory. He argued that evolution does not work in efficiency, only in the “good enough”. Sex organs would not have been completely eradicated, even in a worker population.

  The couple, who together made up our zoological medical team, bowed to Ernesto in this respect, as he was our doctor in evolutionary biology. They asked him for his own theory, and I saw on his face a flash of the same anxiety. At first he did not want to voice his own theory, but the couple pressed him. Ernesto relented, stating that he was about to voice something he believed to be ludicrous. He said that characteristics such as the missing eyes, and translucent skin indicated a subterranean origin, yes, but that in his observation of the creature he could not help but liken it to an antibody or white blood cell.

  “So what? You think it’s part of some kind of giant immune system?” said Alice, bemused, teasing Ernesto.

  “Err… no not exactly. It’s just something I noticed in its behavior. I would have liked to examine its body composition, but it evaporated into thin air so quickly. Maybe it is some kind of social or colony animal, but if it is then it’s very specialized.”

  Near sunset, we arrived at the crevice.

  The mouth of Aga itself was a claustrophobia inducing slit in the mountain. It was smaller than expected, but large enough to fit a man and his gear. A bend in the path inside made it so that it was not possible to know what awaited us on the other end of the opening.

  The aromatic smell of the mountain, which I had almost begun to ignore, came very strongly out of the crevice.

  “Nothing to it, but to do it,” said Richard, the most gung-ho of our party. Without further fanfare, Richard squeezed himself into the crevice. No one, not even his wife, followed him in until we heard his voice coming from the other side. “It’s not so bad, it bends a little, but opens up quickly! You guys have to get in here, this place is massive!”

  The three of us shared a glance, and then one by one, starting with Alice and ending with myself, we squeezed into the crevice. When we poked through to the other side it was into a large subterranean cave. Richard was already scanning the area, his mounted headlight swaying from one end of the cavern to the other.

  I began to do the same. On the walls pooled little droplets of water, put there by the incredible heat and humidity of the cave. Examining the ground, I saw that we were on the lip of a ledge hanging above the cave’s floor, and beneath us flowed a river of the bluest water I had ever seen. Somehow, I felt the creature that started us on this expedition could not be far away now.

  Our zoological experts were the first to descend the lip we stood on, treading carefully down a slick slope that led to the cave floor. They had spotted a brownish residue that they wished to examine. Chen followed the couple, fascinated with their fascination. Ernesto took a keen interest in the current of blue water. Seeing nothing of particular interest to myself, I ventured deeper into the cave.

  I was hoping to be the first to set their eyes on a new specimen, but I was also mesmerized by the formation of the cave. It had segments like carved arches, and it brought to mind something I vaguely recalled seeing in an anatomy class. I was no expert in geology, but it didn’t appear to be a natural formation, though I could not confidently say whether this was true, as it also didn’t appear to be obviously man made.

  I kept going further in the cavern, following the blue river until I came to a dead end. Disappointed, I began to turn back, when I noticed a pile of moving rocks ambling on the opposite side of the blue river. As they got closer I saw that they were little tennis ball sized creatures, not unlike the sprite that had started us on our journey, except these were brown, with a seemingly rough texture to their skin as opposed to the gelatinous body that the sprite had possessed.

  “Guys!” I yelled, calling to the others, not looking away from the creatures.

  The little rock creatures came to the river’s edge. The first to reach the edge anchored themselves to it, the following rock creatures did the same, treating the first rock creatures as if they were the edge of the river. Together they began to form a bridge, or so I thought.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  I had expected to see the creatures begin to disassemble once the last of them reached my end of the river, but instead they simply became inert, and soon they began to be indistinguishable from the rest of the cave floor.

  Mystified by the little rock creatures, I began to posit an explanation for their behavior. I stood at the river’s edge for a time like that, until I noticed Ernesto, also standing on the river’s edge, also seemingly lost in thought how I had been. I saw him playing with a field microscope, he had it up to his eye, examining something under its builtin light. When he brought the microscope away from his face, he did not appear well. His mouth was agape, and his brow distressingly furrowed.

  “Ernesto?” I called, but he did not seem to hear me. I called again and again no response. At last I decided to walk over to him.

  He truly had not noticed me. As soon as I placed a hand on his shoulder, Ernesto jumped back from me so hard that he could have fallen into the river. That's when I noticed he was sweating, fiercely.

  “Ernesto?”

  “It’s blood.”

  “What?”

  “It’s blood. The river is blood.” He looked like he wanted to cry.

  I glanced down at the river, which was still almost luminously blue, and then back at Ernesto. I looked at him quizzically.

  “He– hemoglobin,” he said, stuttering, finding it hard to speak through his apparent fear.

  “What?” I let out again, feeling stupid.

  “He– hemoglobin m– makes mammal blood red,” he said, struggling to get the words out. He took a deep breath then added, “Some animals use hemocyanin to carry oxygen instead. It makes their blood blue.”

  I took another look at the river, observed its alien color. There was simply no way what he was saying could be true, and yet a sickness began to overcome me as I stared into the “river”, a sickness that began in my stomach, and radiated out to my extremities, making them cold.

  “W– we have to leave,” he said.

  I was just about to try and settle Ernesto’s nerves, when Chen’s voice came bouncing off the walls from the other side of the cave.

  “Hey!” He was bounding over to us, all joyful smiles. “You have to see what the animal couple found!”

  Ernesto looked back at me, mortified. Whatever they found, he didn’t want to see it.

  “We have to get out of here, Chen,” said Ernesto, confusing Chen. We had not been in the cave for even half an hour.

  Chen was confused, looking to me for an answer but I just shrugged. Ernesto tried to explain why he felt he needed to leave, but Chen couldn’t really understand him, since english wasn’t his first language, he thought Ernesto was speaking in metaphor. However what did come through was Ernesto’s panic and urgency. So Chen agreed to take Ernesto, and possibly the rest of us, back down the mountain immediately.

  Chen called out to the couple, who didn’t respond back. Confused again, Chen walked over to where he had left them, with me and Ernesto following soon after.

  “I do not understand,” said Chen. He was staring at a wall, confused. “There was an entrance to another part of the cave right here.”

  I flashed my light up and down the wall, finding exactly what I had hoped not to. Near the roof of the cave, I saw a rock creature settle into the last open nook of the wall. They were the very same creatures I had seen patching the river closed. I walked up to the wall, jumping back when I heard Alice’s voice come from the other side.

  “Hello?” Called Alice. I could hear her banging on the wall.

  “Alice?” I yelled into the wall, giving it a couple sturdy hits in case my voice did not carry through.

  “Thank god!”

  “How did you end up on the other side?”

  “Richard and I found a side path, and now it's closed. I don’t know how.”

  “Is there another way out? Alice? Ernesto thinks we should leave, and I’m starting to agree. There’s something not right in here.”

  “What? Why?” a pause. “Okay, but listen, we found the creatures. It's incredible, they’re formed inside these huge, mucus covered sacks. They just plop out! Richard and I took some pictures, I can’t wait to–”

  A longer pause, much longer.

  “Alice…?” I said.

  The only reply we got back from the other side was a scream.

  “We have to leave,” Ernesto said, with finality. “We are going!”

  I wanted to protest, but just then an unearthly sound resonated in the cave. It sounded like something between the rumbling of earth, and a moan, no a yawn.

  Think of me what you will, but in that moment I was a creature piloted entirely by fear. Whatever fate had befallen Richard and Alice, there was nothing I could do for them. I ran with Ernesto and Chen to the entrance.

  Ernesto entered the narrow crevice that made up the entrance, and started squeezing himself through. I followed suit, and so did Chen. Ernesto was almost halfway through when we heard that yawning rumble again. The cave entrance shook, opening slightly, and then it started to close.

  Ernesto and I noticed the crevice closing up, and began to make a retreat. It was too tight to turn and look, but I could only hope that Chen was doing the same. I felt the walls closing in around me.

  Ahead of me, Ernesto made his own frantic retreat. We each struggled backwards, scraping our skin against the enclosing walls of the crevice, and just when I thought that I would not make it, I fell backwards to the open cave.

  Ernesto was not so lucky.

  I could hear his frantic struggle, and cries for help, but there was nothing I could do. At last he managed to get the top half of his body through, and feebly I reached out a hand to pull him.

  “Help! Please for the love of god!” he cried, and my hand reached out to him, pulling him through. Approximately half of him.

  I held the top half of my friend and colleague, for only a moment. I offered him what little piece, if indeed there was any to be had, that I could give him. I felt his life mercifully leave his body when his hand, clenched to mine, let go, and settled to the ground. I wailed, and as if to mirror my despair, the mountain once again rumbled and yawned.

  A pair of hands grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me to my senses. It was Chen. He was saying something about the sprites of Aga. I was still in shock, but I listened to him. I recall now the faint scent attributed to the village’s resin, hanging much more strongly in the air than before.

  Chen started running back into the cave, and I unquestioningly followed. The beams of our flashlight’s bouncing chaotically off the walls. I came to just enough to question our choice of direction. We were running toward the dead end I had discovered, only it was open now. Whatever that rumbling was, it must have cracked open a new through, but when I looked up I noticed that the arches I had noticed earlier had not broken or cracked around the new tunnel, and that the new tunnel itself had the same organic seeming arches.

  As we ran, I remembered that Chen had said something about sprites when he’d hauled me up off the ground, and, on an impulse, I turned to look behind me. Naturally, I did not expect to see the horror that awaited me. Engulfing Ernesto’s remains, and lazily trailing behind us, were hundreds, if not thousands of sprites.

  Something in my mind broke then. And as Chen and I ran down what I was starting to think of as the mountain’s throat, I entered a fugue state, not quite believing what I was living through. If Chen had not been able to haul me up and make me run away with him, I wonder if I wouldn't have just laid down and let the sprites take me.

  Somewhere down the line, long after we had stopped seeing any sprites, a familiar scent cut through my dissociative episode. It was the smell of the resin, only much stronger than it had ever been before.

  Travelling further down the gullet of the mountain, we came to a split in the tunnel, and from one of the paths, I heard a familiar voice.

  “Alice, they're alive!” yelled the voice. It was Richard, with Alice’s flashlight bobbing behind him. He ran ahead of Alice to rejoin us.“Where’s Ernesto?”

  I could only gawk at him. I felt a complex mixture of relief, comfort, and then agony at the mention of Ernesto. I threw myself at Richard, and to his credit he did not back away, allowing me to hold him tight and squeeze him as I roared with pain.

  “What happened?” asked Alice, trailing behind Richard. “Where’s Ernesto?”

  I wailed again, and that seemed to be answer enough for Alice and Richard, because they did not ask after Ernesto again.

  When I had finally recollected my senses, I noticed that I was covered in brown residue. At first I thought it was dried blood, but Richard informed me that it was the source of the aromatic scent.

  “Some of that stuff fell from the ceiling on top of me, and suddenly hundreds of sprites started coming out of the mucus covered sacks we found. They’ve been after me ever since. I would have told you, sorry, but you lept on me before I could say anything.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, “Let’s just get out of here.”

  We started to move on, but a moment later Richard keeled over. He cried out in pain, and I could see that he was clutching the area around his ankle. When I stopped to take a look, I discovered that his foot was completely gone, leaving a ragged blood stump with a piece of bone sticking out. Then I heard them.

  The skittering of hair like feet, perceptible only from the sheer mass of them.

  “We have to move, Chen help me with Richard.”

  The good man, Chen, propped up my friend Richard, and together we shouldered his weight, moving forward. We moved as fast as we could, but it was no use. They were moving on us much faster than they had been back at the cave entrance, perhaps goaded by the scent of the aromatics that covered me and Richard, and now Chen as well. It was not Richard or his missing leg that sent the rest of my party to its doom. Call it an act of god. It was never meant to be that my friends would see the light of day again.

  As we marched, uselessly I might add, for the skittering mass was gaining on us, a part of the cave came down, or so we thought. What we believed to be the roof collapsing on us was actually a torrent of sprites raining down. They bounced sparingly over me, Chen, and Richard, burning my skin where they made contact, but most of them landed on Alice. The sheer force and mass of it knocked her to the wall.

  On the floor, Alice let out a hysterical frantic cry that turned into gurgling cries begging for the pain to end.

  Chen, and I, perhaps in our cowardice, did not think twice about moving forward, which nearly caused us to fall over, as Richard was not prepared to leave his wife behind. He made it to the mass that was conglomerating into a thick ball around Alice, and tried to pull her out. But it was already too late. By the time he’d managed to hop over to her and reach into the congealed mass of sprites he was grasping at boney remains. It was difficult to tell in the wildly bouncing lights of our headlamps, but I think, seeing that there had never been any point in trying to save his wife, Richard simply threw himself into the mass of sprites. He didn’t even scream.

  It was only me and Chen now.

  In my memory I do not recall feeling aches, or pains, or time. I recall only the darkness as our flashlights began to fail us. I recall Chen and I exchanging one final glance. Then, darkness.

  We continued running in the dark, miraculously avoiding crashing into any walls. Still it seemed fruitless, was there really any hope of getting out alive?

  And as it would turn out, there was.

  Hope came in the form of another crevice.

  Light poured out from the roof of the chamber that we were in. Pouring out from it was daylight. It was enough light to see by, but just barely, allowing me to examine the chamber that I found myself in. The walls were full of jutting rocks that seemed climbable, and so the crevice in the roof seemed reachable.

  I also noticed that, somewhere in the darkness and chaos before the chamber, Chen and I had split apart, and found ourselves on opposite ends.

  He was working on climbing a wall on one side of the chamber, and I on the other. We worked frantically, tireless, egged on by the increasingly loud skittering of the sprites. I heard them enter the chamber, their mass of hair-like legs creating a terrible chittering echo. Maddening as it was, I endeavored to ignore it. With escape possibly only a few chipped pieces of earth away, I tuned out everything except my own mental image of the cave wall I was attempting to climb.

  Chen and I both reached a lip near the crevice. Mad with hope, and delirious with fear, we smiled at each other. Freedom was so close! And then, he was overtaken.

  The sprites had caught up to him. First he cried out, falling to grasp at his ankle like Richard had. His foot had been melted away from under him. With his whole body on the ground it only took a second more for the mass of sprites to converge and congeal around his body, turning into a singular mass of dissolving antibody.

  With Chen taken, there was only me, and the sprites redoubled their efforts to hunt me down. I could hear them amassing beneath me, could almost feel them nipping at the bottoms of my feet. Their skittering surrounded me, and I cried out, knowing that it was finally time to join my friends. That’s when I remembered the box of resin I had stowed away in my pocket, forgotten.

  I managed to fish out the box of resin, attempting a hail mary play. My hands were trembling with adrenaline. I ripped the box of aromatic resin open, and tossed it over the edge I was standing on, and suddenly, the skittering around me stopped, and the chamber was momentarily deathly quiet. The sprites had stopped.

  I couldn’t believe my hail mary play had worked. I couldn’t help myself but to cry out. I returned to climbing to the wall of the chamber, reaching the light pouring out of the crevice, squeezing into and out of it onto the earth above, feeling as if I’d been reborn anew.

  Thank you god almighty I am alive!

  I remember crying out to the glory of the sun, and then, running, lots and lots of running. The next thing I remember is waking up in the village, inside someone’s home. They claim that I had run back to the village in a hysterical frenzy. I don’t recall that, but more than one of the locals confirmed this.

  At some point in my frantic episode, either the last one running down the mountain, or many I experienced inside the cave, I had lost my phone, and had to wait perhaps a month to reconnect with my college because of that.

  When I was recovered, and sent home, I gave a recount of what happened in the mountain, inside The Mouth Of Aga, but it was dismissed as a hysterical episode. I was told that I did not seem sound of mind. Of course I wasn’t. Who would be If they had lived through what I had. They thought I was making it up.

  Officially, my friends and colleagues had simply gone missing in an expedition gone wrong. My account of what happened in The Mouth Of Aga dismissed entirely, never making it to the public. For my own sanity’s sake I chose to let the matter go, however herculeanly difficult that was to do. Fate however had other plans.

  A number of years later, I was invited to an art gallery. It was a pompous affair, and I was glad for it. The strange customs of humanity, the fanciful dress, the mimicry of old aristocracy, these things are bulwarks against the meaningless of our existence. I would have been quite content here, if not for a section of the gallery on mountainous landscapes.

  Artists from all over had traveled the world to paint their renditions of the world’s most glorious peaks and ranges. It would have been beautiful, indeed they were hailed by every critic in attendance. Only I found them so god awfully horrible.

  I broke down in front of that section of the gallery, beginning to– despite myself –wail and cry as I was suddenly forced to recall the memory of that dank hellish crevice in the mountain. The mountain which the locals had called a god. Because I did not see mountains in those paintings, I saw sleeping giants.