Mukaru reached Spirit Palace late, just as the sky went golden at the hour of sundown. He hopped silently from his uleox—one of the few animals native to this planet, something akin to a camel-elephant hybrid—and let it wander down to a nearby spring to rehydrate while he got his bearings. The spirits would soon awaken.
The valley was dotted with small ziggurats. Atop each one was a divining chamber, and this is where the spirits would enter this plane. There were hundreds of them, varying in only superficial ways, likely more from millennia of weathering than design. How was he to know which one belonged to the Holy Daughter Camaya?
Fog clawed its way over the crags to the north, a harbinger of the harsh night before him. He tried to focus on the task at hand of scanning the valley with an EM scope when a loud crash startled him. Mukaru dropped the scope and it rolled into a shallow pond.
Curse it all!
He started after it, fishing up to his elbow in the frigid muck, but abandoned it upon hearing the frightened bleating of the uleox. The stupid beast had fallen into the stream. It was drowning. And the hour was upon him.
Notes: I used an image as a writing prompt for this piece. You may be able to find the image on the artist’s ArtStation page. Image by Arnaud Kleindienst, used with permission.
Warmup Pages 