I walked down the slope of an old quarry. It has long been abandoned, and the hole left, the shear cliff faces, the gradual pitch downward, and the silence of a place that once was filled with noise and business, soothes my soul. It is like a grave, a pit dug to lay down a giant or a dragon or something still greater.
It waits, death’s hungry mouth, for something to fit. I will not be swallowed up, I think. It wants something more substantial than me.
It becomes like evening, once you’re down far enough, and darker and deeper still the path goes. Only noon, only the strength of the sun, the summer sun, ever touches the very floor. Shadows make their home in this unfinished hole. I’m reminded of a riddle: If it takes an hour for a worker to finish a whole…but I’m sure you’ve heard it before.
My boot kicks a pebble over the unguarded side of the walkway, and the echoes of its fall, mixing with each new and more distant tumble, make an almost music with the crunch of my footsteps.
A grave might be empty because it is waiting for something, and it may be waiting for something stolen. Pluto was a god of treasure, after all, and the dead gods are treasures to some. Resurrection men, accidental perhaps, have not bothered to cover their tracks. What body have the pulled from here, and what is the market for the corpses of buried gods?
Tale Told 