Requiem for the Sun by Elizabeth Haydon

stretching into the darkness of the Loritorium’s dome. Seeing this place never ceased to cause him to reflect sadly on the overwhelming loss of it all, the ruin of what had once been a masterpiece, a deeply hidden city of scholarship, once a shining example of the genius of Gwylliam, the Cymrian king who had fashioned Canrif and the lands around it many centuries before. Now it was but a metaphor to the destruction that comes when vision gives way to ambition, and ambition to the avaricious hunger for power.
    Bugger it, he thought, anger burning in the back of his throat. I can only rebuild so much of what that idiot destroyed.
    Even as the thought formed, it dissipated. There was no end to what he could, and would, build and rebuild in these mountains, because ultimately it was not the outcome of the construction that was his purpose, but the process. The renovation of Canrif, and the additional projects he was fomenting, were all undertaken with one motive in mind: the building up of the Bolg, his unknown father’s race, from scattered tribes of primitive, demi-human, nomadic cave dwellers into a real society — a warlike, austere society to be certain, but nonetheless a culture with value, a contribution to be added to history.
    And he had an immortal lifetime to spend on that undertaking. How else was he to spend forever?
    But not this place, he thought. Never this place. This remains as it is, undisturbed.
    He took stock of the hidden measures he had set in place to insure the sacrosanctity of the place in the event something happened to either of them, musing idly for a moment about the devices attuned to their heartbeats, their own innate vibrations, set to seal the tunnel in the presence of any intruder.
If Grunthor were to die, I would have to bring in a score of work crews to open and clear the tunnel and then kill them afterward, he thought. Such an unfortunate loss of manpower.
    An orange-red glimmer caught his eye; he turned to see the wall of shale and dust gleam like molten lava around Grunthor’s hands, which were outstretched, forming an entryway in the mound, leaving a tunnel with walls as slick as glass. Achmed blinked away his musings and followed the giant Bolg through the opening.
    On the other side of the mound was what remained of the Loritorium, silent now. A haze of old smoke snaked heavily through the space beneath the overarching dome, disturbed perhaps by the vibrations of their movements and the introduction of the air from the world above.
    In the center of what remained of the courtyard the altar of Living Stone appeared undisturbed; the Sleeping Child, formed of the same elemental earth, lying supine upon it.
    Achmed and Grunthor approached the altar quietly, careful not to disturb the Earthchild. The chamber in which she had once rested before its destruction had borne a warning inscribed in towering letters:

    LET THAT WHICH SLEEPS WITHIN THE EARTH REST UNDISTURBED; ITS AWAKENING HERALDS ETERNAL NIGHT

    The two Bolg had long paid heed to that warning, having seen the threat to which it referred, a far more deadly Sleeping Child, with their own eyes during their travels through the center of the Earth.
    The child still rested as she had when they had first found her, her eyes closed in eternal slumber. Like the altar on which she slept, her skin was a polished gray surface, translucent, beneath which veins of colored strands of clay in hues of purple and green, dark red, brown and vermilion could be seen. Her body, tall as that of an adult human, seemed at odds with the sweet young face atop it, a face with features that were at the same time coarse and smooth, roughly hewn but smoothly glossed; she was like a living statue of a human child sculpted by a being that had never really seen one in close proximity, without any sense of perspective.
    The hair of the child was long and coarse, green as spring grass, matching the lashes of her eyelids. Those eyelids twitched