THE CITY OF THE GODS

THE CITY OF THE GODS
The jungle breathed around us. Not like a breeze through leaves, but a slow, damp inhale that seemed to come from the earth itself. I could taste it—wet soil, rotting plants, and the faint metallic tang of something ancient, something that had been lying in the dark for far too long.

We’d been hacking through vines for hours, the humidity pressing down like a physical weight, when Marcus finally called a break. I sat on a moss-covered rock, trying to ignore the ache in my shoulders, and pulled out the crumbling parchment from my pack. It wasn’t really a map—more like a fever dream scribbled in charcoal on fragile, yellowed skin.

I’d found it in Lima, in the private collection of a man who smelled of dust and mothballs. He claimed it was copied from a conquistador’s journal. He’d laughed when I asked what it led to.
“La Ciudad de los Dioses,” he said. “The City of the Gods. But you shouldn’t go there.”

Naturally, here I was.

The expedition was Marcus Vale’s idea. He was the kind of archaeologist who thought warnings were just part of the fun. Tanya Rivas, our linguist, had joined because she could speak three dialects of Quechua and wanted to trace certain myths to their roots. Hernán was our local guide, a man who moved like he’d been born from the jungle itself. Felix and Romero, two porters from a village days east, rounded out the crew. And me—Evan Carter, ethnobotanist, more comfortable in a lab than a machete fight with vines. I still don’t know why I said yes.

By the third day, I’d started dreaming in colors I’d never seen before—colors I still can’t name. I’d wake with the taste of blood and copper in my mouth, my heartbeat out of sync with itself. Tanya confessed she’d been hearing “stone voices” at night—low, slow murmurs that seemed to rise from under the ground. Hernán just said, “The jungle is listening now,” and kept walking.

The fourth night, we stumbled into a nameless village. The people stared without blinking, their faces impassive. An old woman pressed something into my hand: an obsidian shard etched with lines that seemed to shift in the firelight. Tanya translated her words:

“The gods eat those who walk on their tongues.”

I didn’t understand. I should have.

That night Felix vanished. No sound, no cry for help—just there one moment, gone the next. We combed the undergrowth until dawn, but found nothing. Not even footprints. By morning, Romero had refused to go further and left with the villagers. We were four.

On the sixth day, the jungle opened like a curtain.

It was there—rising from the mist, towers of black stone wrapped in strangler figs and curtains of moss. The city stretched across the basin like a wound in the green, its air unnaturally still. The architecture was wrong. Angles bent where they shouldn’t, walls curved inward and outward at the same time, stairs rose into nothing. The longer I stared, the more my head hurt.

At the center stood a stepped pyramid, its surface carved with spirals and jagged lines that shimmered faintly, as if slick with water. Hernán refused to step onto the plaza. Tanya just stood there, her lips parting in awe. “It’s alive,” she whispered.

Inside the city, time began to slip. Marcus swore one stairway took him up three levels at once, though I’d watched him climb only a dozen steps. Tanya’s hands shook as she tried to copy wall carvings that rearranged themselves when she wasn’t looking. I caught glimpses of my own shadow lagging behind me, a fraction too slow.

The air was heavy with a scent like crushed jasmine and burning metal. It clung to our skin, soaked into our clothes. My reflection in my canteen began to change—sharper cheekbones, eyes darker, almost inhuman.

On the third night, we heard it—a grinding deep below, like stone shifting against stone. The plaza trembled. At the base of the pyramid, a doorway simply appeared. No movement, no hinges—one moment stone, the next an opening yawning into blackness.

Marcus insisted we go in. Hernán refused, setting up camp instead. That was the last I saw of him.

The tunnel walls were warm, faintly pulsing, like muscle under skin. The descent twisted—sometimes it felt like we were climbing, sometimes falling. My heartbeat began matching a deep, resonant hum that vibrated in the air. Or maybe the hum was matching mine.

We entered a vast chamber lit without light. In the center lay a pool of black water, perfectly still. Above it hung a colossal stone mask—eyes too long, mouth too wide, face unlike anything human.
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