Ardeth couldn't help but grin at the joy he heard in Rakil's tone. Moments later, the sound of a rock striking flint reached Ardeth's ears, and the torch roared to life. Rakil was standing twenty feet away, at the edge of a raised platform with his miniature sun held high above his head. Ardeth looked away from the seemingly blinding light of the flame until his eyes adjusted to it.
"I didn't know you carried flint," He said to Rakil with a small grin. Rakil chuckled.
"I didn't know abandoned temples had torches of such good quality strewn carelessly along the floor," the boy countered. Ardeth nodded and approached the platform, relieved that he would no longer be forced to rely on only four senses to get him out of the pitch black maze of Bubastis (five, counting his ability to sense the presence of objects and individuals without actually seeing them).
"It probably hasn't been abandoned for very long." Ardeth muttered distractedly, observing with great interest the platform, or rather, the objects on the platform. "There was a war in these parts a few decades ago. Refugees, or maybe even soldiers, could have hidden here."
Rakil huffed disdainfully and walked over to stand beside Ardeth and search for whatever it was his brother was gazing at. "I wouldn't stay in this vermin-infested dust trap if my life depended on it." When Ardeth didn't make any reply, Rakil made to step up onto the platform, which was only about two feet higher than the floor level. Ardeth threw his healthy arm out to his side, directly in front of Rakil's chest, and stopped him with one foot suspended inches from the raised surface. The boy gave Ardeth a stunned look.
"Do not touch it," Ardeth warned in a soft voice. Of course, Rakil's first instinct was to do exactly what his big brother had told him not to do, but something about the tone of Ardeth's voice made him decide to heed his warning and back off.
"What is it?"
"Disrespectful." Rakil's mouth dropped open. He gave Ardeth a glare and thrust the torch before him to cast light upon whatever it was that had caused his brother to turn into a religious nut all of the sudden. What he saw, that which only Ardeth, with his keen eyesight, had been able to see, gave the poor kid his third enormous shock in the space of ten minutes.
The platform ran across the entire length of one wall, and extended back about ten feet, whence it came in contact with the limestone of the inner wall.
And in that wall, extending further, both vertically and horizontally, than the light of the torch could reach, were hundreds of thousands of evenly spaced, square holes. It looked as if the masons had left out a four inch gap between each brick they had lay. Inside each square, all that was visible in the flickering light was some sort of rounded, possibly even spherical object.
"What...are...those?" Rakil asked, voice hoarse due to utter shock. Ardeth turned his head and grinned at the look he saw on his brother's face.
"Those are gifts," he replied. "Don't tell me you do not remember..." Rakil raised an eyebrow and Ardeth sighed. "In each slot, there lays a gift that was offered to Bastet, a sacrifice made to her by her followers several thousand years ago."
"What kind of gifts?" Rakil demanded insistently.
"Mummified cats." For a moment, Ardeth thought Rakil was going to drop the torch in his shock. He chuckled. "At first, they were mummified when they died of natural causes, then, they were bred for the specific reason of serving the purpose as sacrificial offerings, and eventually it got to the point that they were killed and mummified in mass numbers, in order to control the growing population." Ardeth used his right hand and pointed behind Rakil, to a statue that loomed ten feet over their heads, hidden by shadows, of a cat sitting patiently on its haunches, staring at them through empty holes that, at one time, had probably held enormous gemstones of some kind. "It was then that she ordered the offerings to come to an end." He smiled at the expression he saw on Rakil's face. "So you see: you're not the only one who's done research on the Cat Goddess."
"I want one," was all Rakil said in reply. He took a tiny step forward, closer to the platform. Ardeth quirked an eyebrow and gave a lopsided smile.
"You cannot have one." He said simply. "Besides, we need to get out of here. The storm should have passed by now, and my shoulder needs treatment." Rakil stood rooted to the floor, his eyes gazing longingly at the offerings.
"But I want to see how they made them!" The boy's voice was little more than a whine, the very kind of tone that never failed to infuriate Ardeth, but Rakil had whined much in the past few years, and Ardeth had almost grown accustomed to it.
"Step foot on holy ground and you run the risk of---"
"I don't care, Ardeth!" Rakil hissed vehemently. "I'm getting one." Ardeth moved to stop him, but was shoved aside violently. Dizziness caused his vision to swim. He glanced at his left shoulder and groaned, wishing he hadn't looked. It needed to be bound; the rock that had collided with him had left several deep gashes and many more shallow ones, not to mention a bruise that covered a fourth of his torso, which was already beginning to form. His mind was jolted off-track, and the pain left him completely disoriented.
He was unable to further restrain Rakil, who leapt onto the platform, ran to the wall, and grabbed the nearest cat mummy by its tiny head. Ardeth yelled for him to stop, but was not heeded. Rakil had made it three steps away from the wall, prize in hand, when a roar exploded from everywhere at once. Blinding light seared Ardeth's eyes. He felt the thick, solid rock beneath him trembling as if in fear of what Rakil had just summoned. He couldn't see, he couldn't hear, and he could barely think, but a voice rang solemnly through his head. It told him something big had just made itself present; something enormously powerful and overbearing. That voice knew exactly who it was, too…
Rakil had angered the Cat Goddess.
