Caroline Chase and the Temple of Xal'Athar Parts 4.5.6 now added
Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2026 6:07 am
1
Caroline Chase had prepared extensively for her first expedition.
She had studied the temple schematics for three weeks. She had cross-referenced four separate academic papers on Xal'Athari burial customs. She had colour-coded her notes, which her father said showed good organisational thinking and her mother said showed she had too much time on her hands and shouldn't she be doing something sensible with her life instead of gallivanting off to Guatemala.
She had bought the shorts from SportsDirect.
They had been on sale. Twelve pounds fifty, down from fifteen, in a colour the label described as Adventure Khaki which was, she now realised, simply beige. They had seemed perfectly adequate in the changing room. Practical, even. Her mother had taken one look at them over the breakfast table and told her to put some proper trousers on, that you could see everything, that she hadn't raised her daughter to go traipsing around in her underwear in front of strangers.
Caroline had pointed out that she was going to Guatemala, not Sainsbury's.
Her mother had handed her a cardigan anyway.
The cardigan was currently in her hotel room in Guatemala City. Caroline had left it there deliberately and with some satisfaction.
She was five foot nothing in her boots, slight in the way that deceived people until they watched her handle a seventeen-hand horse, strawberry blonde hair pulled back practically, and she had been planning this moment since she was nineteen and found her father's old university paper on Xal'Athari ceremonial burial sites buried in a box in the attic. She was twenty-two now. Three years of planning, saving, and quietly not mentioning the specifics to her mother.
She exhaled, turned sideways, and squeezed through the narrow stone passage.
The zip caught.
A small sound. A brief metallic complaint from somewhere around her left hip. She registered it distantly, focused as she was on the chamber opening up ahead, the faint glint of something promising beyond the threshold, the carefully suppressed excitement of a person who had waited their whole life for this exact moment.
She tugged.
The zip freed itself with a slightly worrying resistance, and Caroline moved forward into the chamber without looking down, because she was a professional — or intended to become one — and professionals did not stop to examine their shorts at moments of archaeological significance.
Had she looked down, she would have noticed the zipper pull had bent. That the teeth were no longer quite aligned. That the zip, while no longer caught, had not entirely travelled back to its original position, and showed no particular inclination to do so.
She didn't look down.
She looked at the temple instead, magnificent and ancient and almost certainly full of traps, and she smiled.
Right then, she thought. Let's get into trouble.
Somewhere in Abbots Ripton, as if by instinct, her mother told her father she had a bad feeling.
2
The passage in the floor was exactly where the schematic said it would be.
Caroline allowed herself a small moment of satisfaction at this. Three years of research. She'd been right. Her father would have appreciated that. Her mother would have told her to come home.
She lowered herself in.
The passage was narrow — deliberately so, she suspected, some ancient architectural discouragement to tomb raiders who hadn't done their homework — but she was five foot nothing and had spent years folding herself around seventeen-hand horses who didn't want to be caught. Narrow passages held no fear for Caroline Chase.
She got her shoulders through, her arms above her head gripping the edge, and began to lower herself down.
She felt the catch before she understood it.
Something at the lip of the passage. Stone, or metal, some mechanism she hadn't accounted for in the schematic — a small protruding thing, a carved edge, a trigger point worn smooth by three thousand years of waiting. It found the back of her top with the quiet efficiency of something that had been doing this a very long time.
She lowered another inch.
The fabric moved with her. Up, rather than down. She felt it pull away from her waistband, felt cool temple air on the small of her back, felt the slow creep of exposure climbing her spine degree by degree as she descended.
That's odd, she thought, with remarkable composure.
She stopped. Assessed. She was hanging by her hands, shoulders through the gap, the mechanism holding the back of her top in a grip that tightened as she went down and showed no sign of releasing if she went up. The fabric was somewhere around the middle of her back now. She could feel it bunched up, pulled taut, her bra strap exposed to the empty temple above her.
Right, she thought. Manageable. This is manageable. Think.
She tried going up slightly. The top pulled tighter. She tried going down. It rode higher. She was suspended in perfect equilibrium between two options, both of which ended badly, hanging in a hole in the floor of an ancient Guatemalan temple in a top that was rapidly becoming theoretical.
The stone was very cool against her exposed back.
And that was the problem.
That specific sensation — unexpected air on her back, the sudden consciousness of exposure she hadn't chosen — sent something firing through her nervous system that bypassed rational thought entirely and arrived fully formed from four years ago.
The Henderson children.
She was twenty-two years old and hanging in an archaeological wonder of the ancient world and her brain had decided that right now, at this specific moment, was the time to revisit a Tuesday evening in Abbots Ripton when she had been babysitting two children aged seven and five who had apparently decided between them, with the casual cruelty unique to small children, that Caroline's clothes were a group project.
She remembered the feeling exactly. The sudden cool air. The confused half-second before understanding arrived. The small triumphant face of a five year old girl holding something that was no longer where it was supposed to be.
She had been eighteen then and thought that was the most embarrassing thing that would ever happen to her.
She was twenty-two now and hanging in a hole and the universe was lining up to prove her wrong.
Don't panic, she told herself.
She panicked.
It was a small panic, technically. A single sharp twist, an instinctive grab behind her with one hand to pull the top back down, the kind of automatic response the body makes before the brain can intervene with a better idea. For one brief moment she had the fabric in her fingers.
Then her other hand slipped on the edge.
She dropped.
The mechanism held the top.
Caroline Chase did not.
She landed in the lower passage in a controlled enough fashion — the equestrian in her knew how to fall, at least — and sat for a moment in the flickering dark, taking inventory.
Boots. Shorts — the zip situation unresolved but currently stable. Bra. A very strong feeling that her mother had been right about everything, not that she would ever be told.
She looked up.
Her top hung from the mechanism above like a flag of surrender, swaying gently in the warm subterranean air, entirely out of reach.
Mum, she thought, with the specific exhaustion of someone hearing a told-you-so across three thousand miles, if you ever mention the cardigan again I will not be held responsible.
She stood up, squared her shoulders with as much dignity as the situation allowed, and consulted her map.
The burial chamber was forty feet ahead.
She walked forward.
3
The passage was two feet high.
Caroline crouched in front of it with her torch and consulted her map with the expression of someone hoping they'd misread something. She hadn't misread anything. The passage was two feet high, approximately fifteen feet long, and the only route to the burial chamber.
She thought briefly of Bramble, her seventeen-hand chestnut who had once refused a six inch puddle for twenty minutes. She understood him better now.
Right, she thought. Fine.
She got down on her hands and knees.
The stone floor made immediate and personal contact with her and the first thing she thought was that she really wished she'd worn different underwear. Not that she'd packed for an audience. She hadn't. She'd packed for herself, which had seemed like a perfectly reasonable position in her flat in Huntingdon on a Wednesday evening, pulling things from her drawer by torchlight so as not to wake her mother, grabbing something small and pretty and entirely her own business.
It was very much her own business.
Her mother would have described it as next to nothing and what was she thinking and had she learned nothing.
The stone floor suggested her mother had a point.
She started crawling.
She was three feet in when the belt went.
There was a carved protrusion on the passage floor — decorative, probably, some ancient artisan's flourish that had survived three thousand years of geological patience specifically to hook the buckle of a twelve pound fifty pair of adventure shorts at the worst possible moment. She felt it catch, felt the resistance, instinctively pushed forward rather than back because forward was the only direction that made sense in a fifteen foot passage with something grinding in the temple behind her, and the buckle did exactly what buckles do when pulled sideways against their design intention.
It came undone.
The belt fell open beneath her and the shorts, which had been waiting for exactly this development, immediately began their assessment of the situation. Cheap fabric, compromised zip, no structural support — the waistband began its southward migration with the calm inevitability of something that had made a decision and seen no reason to revisit it.
She couldn't stop. The passage was too narrow to reach back, too low to adjust, too long to hold her breath and wait it out. She just had to keep moving and be grateful there was nobody here to see it.
Nobody here, she reminded herself. Empty tomb. Perfectly alone.
She was aware, with increasing and specific clarity, of cool air arriving in places that cool air had no business being. The torch beam bounced ahead of her, illuminating ancient stone, carved walls, the distant promise of the chamber beyond. Behind her, illuminated by nothing, her situation was deteriorating by the inch.
Her mother's voice arrived with the reliability of a bad signal that somehow always got through.
Caroline Elizabeth Chase you are not leaving this house dressed like that.
I'm not dressed like anything, Mum, she thought back. That's rather the problem.
The bra strap shifted. She froze, exhaled, felt it hold by what she estimated was one thread and a prayer, and kept moving.
She was almost through. She could see the chamber opening up ahead, the flicker of something beyond the passage mouth, the ceiling rising away into darkness. Ten more feet. Eight. The archaeology was right there, three thousand years of it, waiting for Caroline Chase who had planned this for three years and crawled through worse — she hadn't, actually, but it seemed like the right thought to be having.
She twisted to angle herself through the final narrow section.
The button met the stone floor.
It was a small sound. A brief mechanical protest, a single thread giving up the argument it had been losing since the zip incident two passages back, now hastened by the absence of the belt that should have been sharing the load. She felt the waistband loosen with the slow resigned quality of something that had been holding on out of politeness rather than structural integrity.
She stopped breathing.
The button held. Technically. It was still there, still attached, but attached in the way of something that had made its position clear and was waiting for the next excuse.
Caroline completed the last three feet with the careful deliberate movement of a bomb disposal operative and emerged into the burial chamber on her hands and knees.
She stood up.
The shorts made an immediate and decisive bid for freedom.
She caught them one handed. Stood in the dark of the burial chamber, one hand holding her own trousers up, belt hanging open and useless, bra strap off her shoulder by a thread, torch in her other hand, and looked up for the first time.
The guardians looked back.
There were four of them. Stone, or she assumed stone, arranged at the cardinal points of the chamber, seven feet tall, wrapped in ancient ceremonial linen, carved faces frozen in expressions of absolute authority. They had been standing here for three thousand years waiting for exactly this kind of intrusion.
She became very aware of her current state of dress.
They're statues, she told herself. Stone. Inanimate. They cannot see you.
They looked like they could see her.
She stood a little straighter, which was difficult while holding her shorts up, and swept the torch across the chamber. There, on the central plinth, exactly where the schematic said it would be — the reliquary. Small, bronze, covered in the same geometric patterns she'd been staring at for three years on photocopied academic papers in her bedroom in Huntingdon.
She forgot about the guardians. She forgot about the shorts. She forgot about the bra strap and the underwear and her mother and the cardigan in the hotel room in Guatemala City.
She walked forward.
Behind her, in the shadows at the edge of the torchlight, the nearest guardian's head turned.
Just slightly.
Just enough.
Caroline Chase had prepared extensively for her first expedition.
She had studied the temple schematics for three weeks. She had cross-referenced four separate academic papers on Xal'Athari burial customs. She had colour-coded her notes, which her father said showed good organisational thinking and her mother said showed she had too much time on her hands and shouldn't she be doing something sensible with her life instead of gallivanting off to Guatemala.
She had bought the shorts from SportsDirect.
They had been on sale. Twelve pounds fifty, down from fifteen, in a colour the label described as Adventure Khaki which was, she now realised, simply beige. They had seemed perfectly adequate in the changing room. Practical, even. Her mother had taken one look at them over the breakfast table and told her to put some proper trousers on, that you could see everything, that she hadn't raised her daughter to go traipsing around in her underwear in front of strangers.
Caroline had pointed out that she was going to Guatemala, not Sainsbury's.
Her mother had handed her a cardigan anyway.
The cardigan was currently in her hotel room in Guatemala City. Caroline had left it there deliberately and with some satisfaction.
She was five foot nothing in her boots, slight in the way that deceived people until they watched her handle a seventeen-hand horse, strawberry blonde hair pulled back practically, and she had been planning this moment since she was nineteen and found her father's old university paper on Xal'Athari ceremonial burial sites buried in a box in the attic. She was twenty-two now. Three years of planning, saving, and quietly not mentioning the specifics to her mother.
She exhaled, turned sideways, and squeezed through the narrow stone passage.
The zip caught.
A small sound. A brief metallic complaint from somewhere around her left hip. She registered it distantly, focused as she was on the chamber opening up ahead, the faint glint of something promising beyond the threshold, the carefully suppressed excitement of a person who had waited their whole life for this exact moment.
She tugged.
The zip freed itself with a slightly worrying resistance, and Caroline moved forward into the chamber without looking down, because she was a professional — or intended to become one — and professionals did not stop to examine their shorts at moments of archaeological significance.
Had she looked down, she would have noticed the zipper pull had bent. That the teeth were no longer quite aligned. That the zip, while no longer caught, had not entirely travelled back to its original position, and showed no particular inclination to do so.
She didn't look down.
She looked at the temple instead, magnificent and ancient and almost certainly full of traps, and she smiled.
Right then, she thought. Let's get into trouble.
Somewhere in Abbots Ripton, as if by instinct, her mother told her father she had a bad feeling.
2
The passage in the floor was exactly where the schematic said it would be.
Caroline allowed herself a small moment of satisfaction at this. Three years of research. She'd been right. Her father would have appreciated that. Her mother would have told her to come home.
She lowered herself in.
The passage was narrow — deliberately so, she suspected, some ancient architectural discouragement to tomb raiders who hadn't done their homework — but she was five foot nothing and had spent years folding herself around seventeen-hand horses who didn't want to be caught. Narrow passages held no fear for Caroline Chase.
She got her shoulders through, her arms above her head gripping the edge, and began to lower herself down.
She felt the catch before she understood it.
Something at the lip of the passage. Stone, or metal, some mechanism she hadn't accounted for in the schematic — a small protruding thing, a carved edge, a trigger point worn smooth by three thousand years of waiting. It found the back of her top with the quiet efficiency of something that had been doing this a very long time.
She lowered another inch.
The fabric moved with her. Up, rather than down. She felt it pull away from her waistband, felt cool temple air on the small of her back, felt the slow creep of exposure climbing her spine degree by degree as she descended.
That's odd, she thought, with remarkable composure.
She stopped. Assessed. She was hanging by her hands, shoulders through the gap, the mechanism holding the back of her top in a grip that tightened as she went down and showed no sign of releasing if she went up. The fabric was somewhere around the middle of her back now. She could feel it bunched up, pulled taut, her bra strap exposed to the empty temple above her.
Right, she thought. Manageable. This is manageable. Think.
She tried going up slightly. The top pulled tighter. She tried going down. It rode higher. She was suspended in perfect equilibrium between two options, both of which ended badly, hanging in a hole in the floor of an ancient Guatemalan temple in a top that was rapidly becoming theoretical.
The stone was very cool against her exposed back.
And that was the problem.
That specific sensation — unexpected air on her back, the sudden consciousness of exposure she hadn't chosen — sent something firing through her nervous system that bypassed rational thought entirely and arrived fully formed from four years ago.
The Henderson children.
She was twenty-two years old and hanging in an archaeological wonder of the ancient world and her brain had decided that right now, at this specific moment, was the time to revisit a Tuesday evening in Abbots Ripton when she had been babysitting two children aged seven and five who had apparently decided between them, with the casual cruelty unique to small children, that Caroline's clothes were a group project.
She remembered the feeling exactly. The sudden cool air. The confused half-second before understanding arrived. The small triumphant face of a five year old girl holding something that was no longer where it was supposed to be.
She had been eighteen then and thought that was the most embarrassing thing that would ever happen to her.
She was twenty-two now and hanging in a hole and the universe was lining up to prove her wrong.
Don't panic, she told herself.
She panicked.
It was a small panic, technically. A single sharp twist, an instinctive grab behind her with one hand to pull the top back down, the kind of automatic response the body makes before the brain can intervene with a better idea. For one brief moment she had the fabric in her fingers.
Then her other hand slipped on the edge.
She dropped.
The mechanism held the top.
Caroline Chase did not.
She landed in the lower passage in a controlled enough fashion — the equestrian in her knew how to fall, at least — and sat for a moment in the flickering dark, taking inventory.
Boots. Shorts — the zip situation unresolved but currently stable. Bra. A very strong feeling that her mother had been right about everything, not that she would ever be told.
She looked up.
Her top hung from the mechanism above like a flag of surrender, swaying gently in the warm subterranean air, entirely out of reach.
Mum, she thought, with the specific exhaustion of someone hearing a told-you-so across three thousand miles, if you ever mention the cardigan again I will not be held responsible.
She stood up, squared her shoulders with as much dignity as the situation allowed, and consulted her map.
The burial chamber was forty feet ahead.
She walked forward.
3
The passage was two feet high.
Caroline crouched in front of it with her torch and consulted her map with the expression of someone hoping they'd misread something. She hadn't misread anything. The passage was two feet high, approximately fifteen feet long, and the only route to the burial chamber.
She thought briefly of Bramble, her seventeen-hand chestnut who had once refused a six inch puddle for twenty minutes. She understood him better now.
Right, she thought. Fine.
She got down on her hands and knees.
The stone floor made immediate and personal contact with her and the first thing she thought was that she really wished she'd worn different underwear. Not that she'd packed for an audience. She hadn't. She'd packed for herself, which had seemed like a perfectly reasonable position in her flat in Huntingdon on a Wednesday evening, pulling things from her drawer by torchlight so as not to wake her mother, grabbing something small and pretty and entirely her own business.
It was very much her own business.
Her mother would have described it as next to nothing and what was she thinking and had she learned nothing.
The stone floor suggested her mother had a point.
She started crawling.
She was three feet in when the belt went.
There was a carved protrusion on the passage floor — decorative, probably, some ancient artisan's flourish that had survived three thousand years of geological patience specifically to hook the buckle of a twelve pound fifty pair of adventure shorts at the worst possible moment. She felt it catch, felt the resistance, instinctively pushed forward rather than back because forward was the only direction that made sense in a fifteen foot passage with something grinding in the temple behind her, and the buckle did exactly what buckles do when pulled sideways against their design intention.
It came undone.
The belt fell open beneath her and the shorts, which had been waiting for exactly this development, immediately began their assessment of the situation. Cheap fabric, compromised zip, no structural support — the waistband began its southward migration with the calm inevitability of something that had made a decision and seen no reason to revisit it.
She couldn't stop. The passage was too narrow to reach back, too low to adjust, too long to hold her breath and wait it out. She just had to keep moving and be grateful there was nobody here to see it.
Nobody here, she reminded herself. Empty tomb. Perfectly alone.
She was aware, with increasing and specific clarity, of cool air arriving in places that cool air had no business being. The torch beam bounced ahead of her, illuminating ancient stone, carved walls, the distant promise of the chamber beyond. Behind her, illuminated by nothing, her situation was deteriorating by the inch.
Her mother's voice arrived with the reliability of a bad signal that somehow always got through.
Caroline Elizabeth Chase you are not leaving this house dressed like that.
I'm not dressed like anything, Mum, she thought back. That's rather the problem.
The bra strap shifted. She froze, exhaled, felt it hold by what she estimated was one thread and a prayer, and kept moving.
She was almost through. She could see the chamber opening up ahead, the flicker of something beyond the passage mouth, the ceiling rising away into darkness. Ten more feet. Eight. The archaeology was right there, three thousand years of it, waiting for Caroline Chase who had planned this for three years and crawled through worse — she hadn't, actually, but it seemed like the right thought to be having.
She twisted to angle herself through the final narrow section.
The button met the stone floor.
It was a small sound. A brief mechanical protest, a single thread giving up the argument it had been losing since the zip incident two passages back, now hastened by the absence of the belt that should have been sharing the load. She felt the waistband loosen with the slow resigned quality of something that had been holding on out of politeness rather than structural integrity.
She stopped breathing.
The button held. Technically. It was still there, still attached, but attached in the way of something that had made its position clear and was waiting for the next excuse.
Caroline completed the last three feet with the careful deliberate movement of a bomb disposal operative and emerged into the burial chamber on her hands and knees.
She stood up.
The shorts made an immediate and decisive bid for freedom.
She caught them one handed. Stood in the dark of the burial chamber, one hand holding her own trousers up, belt hanging open and useless, bra strap off her shoulder by a thread, torch in her other hand, and looked up for the first time.
The guardians looked back.
There were four of them. Stone, or she assumed stone, arranged at the cardinal points of the chamber, seven feet tall, wrapped in ancient ceremonial linen, carved faces frozen in expressions of absolute authority. They had been standing here for three thousand years waiting for exactly this kind of intrusion.
She became very aware of her current state of dress.
They're statues, she told herself. Stone. Inanimate. They cannot see you.
They looked like they could see her.
She stood a little straighter, which was difficult while holding her shorts up, and swept the torch across the chamber. There, on the central plinth, exactly where the schematic said it would be — the reliquary. Small, bronze, covered in the same geometric patterns she'd been staring at for three years on photocopied academic papers in her bedroom in Huntingdon.
She forgot about the guardians. She forgot about the shorts. She forgot about the bra strap and the underwear and her mother and the cardigan in the hotel room in Guatemala City.
She walked forward.
Behind her, in the shadows at the edge of the torchlight, the nearest guardian's head turned.
Just slightly.
Just enough.
