Blind Cartographer

Her fingers stick together where the blood has pooled. Rabia almost counts herself lucky that she cannot see anymore, because the gore of her own enucleation might have made her sick. 

As it is, all she knows is the sound of her own heavy breathing and the tickle of cool, dank air on the wet insides of her eye sockets. 

There is no pain, just as the ritual promised. It is disconcerting, to say the least, but Rabia can't complain. She has felt so much pain since coming down here. So many friends and colleagues taken by impossible doors and cursed reliefs. It feels like a reward that Wahyudi’s final challenge is to sacrifice a sensation, rather than take on more.

Still, her legs shake when she stands. Hands stretched out before her, Rabia grasps for the wall that she knows is a foot or so behind her. 

She stumbles again. There is nothing where she expected rough hewn stone against her palms. She pushes forward, certain she'll hit something eventually. But the empty air goes on and on. 

A whimper crawls up her throat and past her chapped lips, unbidden. 

Rabia tries to go to where she entered, the grand arching mouth having been directly across from her. The dais room is large, fifty square meters long, according to her own translation of Wahyudi’s original maps, but it should take her only a minute to cross it.

Something falls from her pocket and hits the ground with a plastic clatter. Her old Oxford pen. She doesn't have much of a need for pens anymore, seeing as she no longer has eyes, but she stops and searches for it anyway. Rabia half expects for the ground to disappear from under her the same way the walls have.

It doesn’t, but her pen is nowhere to be found. Instead, her fingers graze something small, cold, and round. A coin. The engraving is a w-shaped, and she’s sure it is the winged crown of revelation. Wahyu Temurun. 

She picks it up, stands. Her wet fingers fumble it. The coin falls, and the ding of its impact echoes around her. 

Rabia gasps. A sound reflective surface, like the stone walls of an ancient monastery swallowed deep by limestone collapse, must be at least seventeen meters away for an echo to be heard. 

She finds the coin, lets it fall once more.

If she can trust the walls to stay put this time (and that’s a big if) the reverberation of the ding indicates that there should be a wall about twenty meters to her left. 

She pockets the coin. Her walking speed, greatly reduced by disorientation, should be about fifty meters a minute. Her palms find cool stone in under thirty seconds. 

She laughs. Jubilant sweat breaks at her hairline, mixing with the salty pools of blood on her cheeks.

Rabia is a smart woman, a pedigreed historian and cartographer. With this gift from Wahyu, she can make a new map.