This Sovereign Place

 The lines on her arm match the lines on the ground below. She follows them. Sweat on her brow, the taste of salt on her lips and tongue, crystalline blue eyes flicking between intersecting geometry traced into flesh and lengthy, minimalistic pattern across ancient stonework. 

The lines are geometric, straight, unfaltering and unbroken. Each one a thin, black-filled canal over white surface. Black lines that pass over saffron, crimson, ivory, and charcoal covered ground. Look to the flesh. Look to the ground. Back and forth. Measure each step with silent contemplation and heavy, thumping heartbeats. 

The glow draped across her shoulders has slowed its strange rhythm, and the girl fears it might fade soon, it’s organic green luminescence lowering and lowering until this place is returned back to the darkness she found it in. Long, thin fingers stroke it’s cool glassy surface, warmth to cold, and the green ripples in response, purring at the base of her spine. It will last just a little while longer. 

Follow the lines. Floor. Flesh. Floor. Flesh. The words her mother whispered a long time ago are lost now, as lost as the familiar sunlight was when she took the descent into this sovereign place. Down into an ancient murk. 

Sometimes noises echo out from the dark, the mist. Long rumbling notes that vibrate bone and shiver thoughts as if the earth itself was in song. She searches a cavernous hidden ceiling, stands in the shadows of vast pillars that curve and rise like this was the belly of an almighty Leviathan— but there is nothing. Just the lines. The flesh that holds those sacred marks. 

Dim questions wander like the girl does, existential. Ethereal. Who built this place,  behemoth and unending? What do the lines mean, why carve them in precious daughters from motherly hands? Are those distant trembling echoes figments, or something more, something unimaginable? 

The lines linger. Sharp, unerring. They vanish into perpetual gloom. She follows.