Crypt Quest: Warrior's Rapture
Melody of Madness
The shrieking wail of fuel-injected aircraft engines blasted a dollop of ferocious wind through Reese and Malik. The two fortuitous commuters stood off to the right of their own small plane upon the runway of Cambodia's Siem Reap International Airport as a larger one sauntered passed.
Hair now tussled, 6-foot tall, late-20s, brown leather-jacket-bound Reese Hunter glanced over to his 4-foot high, mid-30s, companion Malik Atwell. The stout man glared, annoyed at his energized colleague as if the discomfort was somehow the height-stricken adventurer's fault.
Malik gritted his teeth before relaxing again. "Sorry. I'm falling way too easily into the man-always-angry trope."
"You know who else fell into predictability?" Reese replied. "The great kings of the Khmer Empire, who warred and built the largest civilization of their time. It led to an oversaturated population wrought with religious conflict and invading enemies that ultimately brought a vegetable-building society to its knees."
"Dude. Do you ever switch off?" Malik asked rhetorically.
Reese shrugged. "Once. When I saw a guy being chased by a boulder."
- - -
Reese and Malik staggered with their travel bags through the exit of the large airport doors into an infestation of omni-directional rickshaws driven by desperate men, picking up hapless passenger after hapless passenger.
"Alright, leave the haggling to me," Reese issued. "The scam-oriented types in this country are money-hungry, desperate scavenger-dirt mongers who wouldn't hesitate to take you for all your worth."
Malik eyed him. "Uhh, you're thinking of Mumbai."
"Anak tow brasaeat te? Mphei dollar. Phlauv muoy," said a Cambodian man as he drove up to them in his local tuk-tuk rickshaw.
Reese hesitated, when suddenly an early-30-something dark skinned woman in a more colourful and brightly decorative tuk-tuk rickshaw rolled up behind the two. "He's ripping you off. Just so you know." She smirked.
"Anak now chhngay! Strei min kuor thveukear now tinih te!" the man shouted in anger at her.
The woman quickly shot back. "Jomrai! Mteay robsa anak sliek kraneat kantob teark haey aupouk robsa anak sravung!" Her aggression prompted the man to be so put off that he drove away. The woman then laughed to Reese and Malik's shocked looks. "I insulted his parents. They're probably dead."
"Your English is really—" Malik started before being shoved by the woman.
She spat. "—Shush, Disoriented Unknown Traveler! My name is Sophea Helea, and you're both taking my taxi because you understand that in a sand-obsessed country, people like myself struggle. The pay is terrible and the respect next to nothing. We're decades behind with no visible end in sight." She then smiled. "Westerners always get it. You guys get it."
"I can confirm your assessment of us 'getting it' —Is that the term the kids are using these days?" Reese asked. "I'm not old, just deep-dove into ancient historical affairs." He then shook his head out. "Anyway. What I'm trying to say is we're not going with you, but for reasons other than stated."
She narrowed her brow, sunk her head and focused her gaze on him. "You're a bunch of snarky artifact hunters, aren't you?"
"What? No!" countered Reese in an overly-denial way. "Those guys are basically thieves, violators of history and foodless hungry people."
Malik raised a finger. "And they smell bad."
"Then what's that wrapped in a cloth over your back?" Sophea pointed with her lips. "Appears to be a sword. Possibly an artifact you uncovered previously."
Reese clutched its cloth-embalmed handle behind his head, defensively. "How do you know we're not knights or Yakuza?"
"Because you're not," she deadpanned. "You're not on vacation, you're not on business, and you're not lovers because short-stuff here won't stop ogling me."
Malik quickly averted his gaze in embarrassment. "So, eight dollars USD to the temple then? Heh, heh, heh." He fake-coughed before his own deadpan, "It was money. That's why we were playing hard-to-get."
"Twelve each and I don't tell the authorities about your obvious intentions." She squinted one eye at them. "Also, your obviousness in general."
- - -
The short, bumpy ride up the aging and cracked paved road served to continuously jolt backseat tenants Reese and Malik into a perpetually disturbed cognizance. Their driver Sophea smiled, unobstructed to her normalized chaos and blaring of local pop music.
After zipping across the pathway over and passed a square-surrounding Cambodian moat, the stop to the decrepit stone entrance of the elaborate, nature-infested temple Angkor Wat sunk fascination and awe into all mesmerized explorers.
"Yes! We're here," Reese frittered, as both he and Malik sprawled out and into the stone entrance. "It was short, but also long in a non-short kind of way."
It was then Malik noticed and nudged Reese to Sophea's close follow. "I got you here, didn't I?" she injected as the two men stopped, dropped their bags, and turned to address her. "Oh, come on. Like you weren't expecting this? I want a cut of whatever you guys find. Or, a secondary find— Whichever makes me richer."
"No cut," Malik countered in an absolute, yet in an apparent concession to terms.
She shrugged. "Secondary it is." Then she continued. "You know, I studied a bit of my own country's history back in America. I was fine with the irony but still fascinated by the scattered ruins of the Khmer civilization."
"Sorry, but I'm just now realizing a serious brain affliction that may or may not be rendering my partner into previously unknown stratums of ineptitude." Reese upraised a momentary finger. "Excuse us a second." He then pulled Malik aside beyond earshot.
- - -
Malik was caught off-guard but knew what was up. "Ineptitude? I literally taught you that word yesterday. And, I don't like her or anything. I just think maybe she can help."
"We're here for one thing and one thing only: The find," Reese criticized. "Were you not in that taxi with me, or was it the Paris of Troy version of you?"
The short man grabbed Reese's leather jacket. "Hey, Paris and Helen had a love story that went beyond the conventions of everyday war!" He then let go. "Besides, the real issue here is what are we going to do with the artifact when we find it?"
"Looking for something here?" cut in a re-approaching Sophea, before Reese could respond. She examined a photograph.
When Reese realized what she was holding, he instinctively patted his empty pockets. "What? Hey. You thief!"
"Artifact hunter," she corrected. "At least, I think that's the façade you guys are going for, right? Anyway, this is a picture of a broken-off relief shard of a woman placing a musical instrument into a funerary case."
Reese took it back from her in a concession. "We know what it is. In fact, that shard came from this very temple," he elaborated. "It'd been passed around the black market for years, but we think there's more to it than the story of a woman in mourning."
"To be precise, we think there's a crypt underneath this place, containing musical artifacts therein," Malik added, enthusiastically.
Sophea shook her head in disapproval. "But people cremate their dead here. Try again."
"Most do, yes, but there are some known sects who ritualize burials," Reese said. "Since this temple was unconventional for its time, I'd wager its creator was as well."
She pointed to the photograph. "Well, I've been here a few times and that break pattern is unmistakable." She twitched her eyebrows pseudo-seductively at them, indicating to follow her before suddenly running off.
"Admit you like her. You both have that annoying thing going on," Reese said to Malik in response to her departure.
The short man turned to him. "Why don't you concede that mystery and wonder isn't all there is and that we can't keep every artifact we find, because we also have to eat?" Then he stole the photograph out of Reese's hands before running after her. "I'm tired of stale toast on soft bread!"
- - -
Reese stopped his chase having ascended a number of stairs to find Malik and Sophea taking in a corner of the main tower in an open courtyard. A superficial section high above several pillars on the elaborate main tower was cracked off.
"That's it!" Malik exclaimed while comparing the photo with the location. "Could we now be considered Crackologists? Also, who is this woman?"
As Reese began to climb on top of the lower tier roof, up the tower, Reese replied, "Well, this whole temple was built by the king of the Khmer Empire, who was rumoured to have a single wife; where other worshippers in his time had several."
"I'm trying to decide whether that's good or bad," Malik reacted, tapping his chin. "Probably bad? I think?"
Sophea stepped forward in a different confusion: That of whatever Reese was doing. "And why do we care about her?" She then looked over to Malik in response to Reese's odd behaviour.
"No, we climb stuff all the time. It's this whole thing," Malik explained, albeit vaguely, before jumping up and following Reese up the tower.
Reese reached the broken-off section. "Not sure why we care about her. But I'm betting she could have played a significant role in King Suryavarman II's life. A man who led several military campaigns to build one of the strongest empire's ever known." He located a stone snake statue, protruding from the wall.
"There's a bas-relief of our king in the south gallery of Angkor Wat where he's holding a snake just like this," Malik reminded, as both he and Reese were now flanking the object in question.
The other man reached out and grabbed the snakehead. "Just to be clear: Snakes aren't playthings." His weight unintentionally moved it like a lever, causing resulting mechanisms within the wall to grind and buck the cracked layer back.
Another section was revealed to contain an inner-layer bas-relief, but with nearly twenty small protruding mushroom-like buttons above the embossing-image of the same woman.
"Hold on. Women did not command armies in the 1150s," Malik countered.
From below, Sophea began shaking her head in amazement and realization. "Oh, Hell yes they did. She did, at least. But her success was conveniently forgotten by later patriarchies, wasn't it?"
"I think so," Reese surmised with her. "These umbrella things typically represent a commander's rank. The more there are, the higher the rank."
Malik reached over and started pressing each one down. "There were fifteen on Suryavarman's relief, and he commanded all armies." But his sprightly appendage was intercepted by Reese.
"Then fourteen it is," Reese interjected.
Nodding, Malik completed the task, causing one last grinding-result of stone, but, this time, it was beneath Sophea's feet upon the courtyard below. She moved out of the way as an entrance beneath her was revealed.
"And that, my friends, is the crypt of King Suryavarman II," Reese exclaimed seconds before Sophea was surrounded by weaponized Cambodian men.
The leader: The same angry, sun-burnt man Reese and Malik encountered first upon their exit at the airport, stepped out and held a knife toward Sophea. "Saum arkoun anak cheatisrleanh robsakhnhom. Llauv chaur thveu aoy kar sa mte ng nih ach chue toukchett ban."
"Your timing is impeccable, gentlemen," Sophea snarked just as her arms were held behind her back by another man.
Reese and Malik watched as she was taken down the entrance into the tunnel leading into the crypt. A few of the other knife-wielding men stayed behind menacingly awaiting Reese and Malik's descent.
"Dude, did we just fall into the bad-guy-squad/damsel-in-distress trope?" Reese asked while rubbing the side of his temple.
Malik shook his own temples. "No. She's working with them. That wrinkle-infested man just commented on 'putting on a performance'."
"Oh yeah. I forgot you spoke Khmer," Reese ceased his massaging in realization. "But we still need the find."
The shorter adventurer tagged his assertion. "Because we need to eat. Not to supplement the already over-saturated museums of the world."
"Right, and selling it to a collector isn't a literal sell-out in itself?" Reese countered.
Malik rolled his eyes. "I know someone's already contacted you from when we were back in England. Your excuse to leave Guy Fawkes Night for a midnight pancake was plausible but unlikely."
"Speaking of flattenings, can we just level these people for now?" Reese grumbled before dropping down several crevices and the first-tier roof until he landed before one of the men below. Dodging two knife-jabs, Reese caught the wrist of a third jab and countered with a force-palm to the other man's face.
As that first man fell back, the second man was welcomed with Malik dropping onto his shoulders and hard-punching him in the face. Malik leapt off the convoluted brute, using the jump to push the same man forward into a third.
Reese leapt over, kneeing both the second and third men in their sides, decompressing their lungs, redirecting their momentum and sending them sideways to the ground.
"People are always trying to kill us," Malik cursed after landing, himself. "Not that I'm complaining."
- - -
The two adventurers next took to the crypt, hasting their way through the tunnels until coming upon a large decorated chamber. Sophea and many more tuk tuk gang men were standing with her, peering at the wall before taking notice of their previously disregarded tourists.
"Mnoussa lngilngeu aey! Anak trauv ban ke baokabanhchhot yeang ngeay daoy strei lbich robsa keat nei lbich prei ning torotn," said the leathery man.
Malik translated. "He says we were easily tricked by this trickster woman of wild and rampant trickery."
"Don't listen to Gahiji," said Sophea. "He's basically the accountant of this operation, but a terrible one. He once ate so many red tree ants, he was puking abdomen and thoraxes for weeks." And then, "Thoraxies? Thoraxai?"
Suddenly, one of the men reached for an elaborately decorated cube-shaped stone coffin sitting in the middle of the room, pulling one of its four protruding snakehead corner caps. The entire room then began to transform its décor as well as emerged three large statue heads, down, in a triangle formation, from the ceiling by stone arms. Below the heads, the sudden floor-egressing of a gigantic, headless, leg-crossed statue body reached its peak and loomed over the motley catacomb.
"Who needs thoraxai, when you have the bodies of Angkor itself," Reese said in awe of the massive structures.
Malik tapped his chin as he read the new Sanskrit inscriptions on the statue version of a guitar-like instrument being held by the headless statue itself. "It's saying: The Heart of Mount Meru plays tribute to her god."
Then Sophea realized, "This entire burial crypt was built on her order! She put her king's body down here, as well as her instrument."
"Well, he was said to have died in battle against the Champa people, one of his many campaigns for a better empire, so it's possible, if she was also a military leader, in that same battle, she'd bring him home," Malik theorized.
The woman eyed him, impressed. "If Reese knew it was him, who the hell did you think was entombed here?"
"I dunno," Malik shrugged. "A bunch of royal monkeys? I like monkeys."
Both Reese and Malik were suddenly surrounded and out-numbered by Gahiji's men, each baring varied short swords, long knives and knuckled blades. "Anak teangpir kuchea mnoussa lngilngeu teangpir neak," he claimed, out-right.
"Fine. We'll access the artifact," Reese contended, failing to measure up to Malik's level of cross-cultural comprehension before being presented by sudden blank looks from everyone. "Isn't that what usually happens? The bad guys force us to take the risk while they watch safely from the sidelines?"
One of Gahiji's men impatiently shoved an annoyed Sophea for direction, prompting her to direct him to pry the cube-coffin open. The result was the man, upon attempt, was impaled by a blade out from the floor. His blood-spilt body fell limp, but held skewered upon the spike.
"Samleab chonobartesa!" Reacting, an upset Gahiji ordered everyone's deaths.
Malik gritted his teeth as he intercepted the downward arm of an attacking sword meant for Sophea. He then leapt and kicked the henchman down before catching the enemy's mini-sword for himself, both to Sophea's surprise. "Yes! Use that anger. It's magnificent!" Sophea said in the heat of the moment. "Don't ever change."
"Uh, it's your fault they're even here," Reese countered as he grabbed the blade-wielding fists of two Khmer men and spun them into slicing each other. "And now they hate you??"
Malik was hit by an enemy and sent smacked into the robust statue. "She turned on those artifact hunter usurpers, just like I've made a turn on what to do next!"
There, he glimpsed three medium-sized head pictographs at the base of three guitar-like iron strings on the statue's Indian guitar before being once again henchmen-engaged in sword-to-sword combat.
"We have to move the right head onto the statue?" Sophea concluded, across the chamber, as she dodged a swipe by Gahiji and hid behind Reese who was knocking down another henchman. "It's pretty obvious, if you're wondering about me."
Reese then took on Gahiji's attack, saving her, before his assailant was accompanied by two more Khmer men. "We weren't. Just to be clear," Reese countered as he crossed his wrist with a sword-wielding wrist before kicking her attacker-problem back.
"Dude. Wait. She's right!" Malik asserted, relegating his arms to his own combat while his head turned up to study said stone craniums. "The heads appear to be: Buddha, Vishnu and Shiva."
A kick to Reese suddenly knocked him into Sophea, sending her to the crypt's dirt floor. "They must represent the temple itself," Reese said, turning to see her recovering.
"Yeah, and hopefully not that Communist army that cut off statue heads and violently subjugated our people for decades," Sophea deviated bitterly as she got herself up. "What I'm saying is, people need to relax at temples." Then she pointed her eyes at Malik. "Especially Buddhist ones."
Malik squinted, confused for a moment, between the breath of his battle with his other man. "Why would you say something so arbitrar— Ohhh! It's a Buddhist temple."
He swiped his mini-sword across the chest of his dumbfounded enemy and then turned to the iron strings where he plucked the Buddha one.
The entire chamber suddenly shook as the triangle heads ceiling-rotated and placed the Buddha head on the statue body while spikes launched out of the floor throughout the place, impaling another henchman, and then another. Then, strange string-based music began to emanate throughout the chamber, prompting the spikes to dangerously pop and recede randomly, all over.
"Dude! What the hell??" Reese was nearly impaled from below, and the close-range spike attack made him lose his balance and fall.
Malik leapt onto the statue body to avoid his own impaling. "Don't look at me. It was her idea!"
"Alright, never mind. It's clearly not a Buddha statue," Reese pushed on as the music began to slowly get louder. He turned to suddenly be confronted by Gahiji whom was accompanied by three final Khmer men. "That leaves the heads of Vishnu and Shiva."
The statue-bound short-stuff snapped his free fingers. "Vishnu! Wasn't this temple originally built to worship that adorable, avatar producing little scoundrel?"
"That's right," Reese affirmed. "And this statue faces west, and so does the temple: And that specific god was sometimes associated with the west. His wife must've followed suit." Reese upholstered his large cloth wrapped sword from his back and began to block angle after angle of incoming short sword attacks.
Sophea skipped passed a protruding spike. "Can I just ask: How do you guys just know how to fight out of nowhere? Is that a thing everyone can do, or what?"
"Chonobartesa del meanamnach del luoch mk pi pheasaea he ndei nung rongtoukkh knong chivit banteab!" yelled Gahiji as he, Reese and his men were violently-engaged and forced to sidestep musically driven floor spike after musically driven floor spike.
Malik turned back to the musical stone activators to focus. "Oh, he says we're powerful foreigners and when we steal from Hindi we will suffer in the next life."
Gahiji and his henchmen were then spike-impaled before Reese, who clashed his clothed-covered sword to protect against a floor-spike coming for him. Meanwhile, over by the effigy, Malik plucked the Vishnu iron string that caused the Buddha statue head to be stone-mechanically rotated out for the Vishnu head.
"No!" Reese said, dropping his blanket-torn weapon to catch Gahiji's limp body. "Angkor Wat was converted from a Hindu temple, and these guys are descendants from that former civilization."
The statue grew two more arms out to place their stone hands upon the stone-guitar, causing the music to stop. All floor spikes receded, and the coffin mechanically opened to reveal a woman's decaying body propped upright and cross-legged, while the same guitar-like instrument sat in her lap.
"He was a bully and a selfish jerk," Sophea said, stepping over to Reese. "Like he said, Hindi believe in reincarnation; so, he's going to have to come back and deal with that."
Reese, Sophea and Malik then made their way over to also see the dead woman quickly decompose to the new air. Malik read the ancient Sanskrit inscriptions inside: "To await my love in the after-life."
"She must be talking about the King," Reese said. "Her burial indicates she reached the end of her reincarnation cycle and is waiting for him in Heaven."
Sophea nodded. "So, the King was never really found after all. She faked that part and had herself put down here."
"Are we seriously admiring her while her dead corpse is decaying right in front of us?" Malik interjected to Reese and Sophea's blank stares. He then was compelled to steal the guitar-like instrument from her cold dead hands.
Reese turned to him. "Quest complete."
Sophea reached in and stopped her hand before a decorated headpiece. "Knowing what I know, perhaps I should follow through completely with my withdraw from those men." She recoiled. "I can deal with the world without having to resort to cheap tactics."
"You know we're standing right next to you, right?" Reese repulsed.
She continued. "Ah, that reminds me. Sorry about the deception. I needed the right guys to finally turn on those idiotic men and their stupid arrangement with me, and apparently you guys can just fight really well out of nowhere."
The woman took out a pen and wrote her number on the photograph she somehow re-stole from Malik at some point, before handing the picture back to him.
"Do yourselves a favour and sell your find for some money. And let's have drinks when you guys are back in town," Sophea offered.
Malik and Reese watched in shock as she sauntered out of the irregular tomb. "She's kind of hot in a learned-a-lesson sort of way," Malik commented.
Reese scrunched his brow. "I'm still not sure if selling out can be considered any sort of higher wisdom, but thanks to history's clear deceptions, perhaps mystery is no longer the sole charm I used to adulate. Maybe, like the Khmer Empire, our successes bring about an end. But that doesn't mean we can't start again."
"So, we're going to have an actual meal for once?" Malik impulsively licked his lips in the distant thought of that. "I've always wanted to try the Cambodian Fish Amok."
"Yeah. I'll call my guy," Reese conceded as he sighed and grabbed the instrument from his partner to examine it one last time.
But Malik, noticing, quickly grabbed the pear-shaped guitar, held-still, to examine its backside. "Hold on. There's more Sanskrit on this? It says: Play to Call the Weapon of the Gods."
"What?" Reese immediately turned it over to see for himself. "A weapon? Are you sure?"
The growth-stunted adventurer slowly nodded gravely in response. Both artifact hunters traded concerned looks suddenly realizing the implications of such an inscription: An epitaph of utmost power.
"Now we can't sell it."
And history would prove, once again, it not what it seemed to be.