WARNING: Silly breast inflation follows. Nyatch, You probably already knew that. But don't fool about with Precolumbian MesoAmerican civilisations unless you know what you are doing!
The vines encompass the temple; pressing it to earth; jealous of their prize. Even the summit is twined deep and about in verdant thrawl; restraining its oblique mass through four centuries of stony sleep.
The thwicker-shlack voice of a machete spills bird-song from the wounded bush. A rainbow plumage circles the mound, craws, and heralds the parting way. Two travellers come, betrayed by voice and gleaming steel.
Their tongue is alien to the people who built this place, though they are not kin to the first pale-men who plundered these lands, swarthy and gold-drunk. One is not even a man. Yet a similar hunger drives them also to seek the company of ruins, old ghosts.
But some ghosts are not quite dead, and now they stir uneasy.
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"Careful; the last ones are treacherous"
"I am being careful... Oww! Shit. I think that was my other ankle"
"Ohcomeon...not again; look, just lean over, over by this; here, right? Keep your weight off it. We're here anyway".
Clearing the steps to the temple-summit, the taller traveller props his long-bladed machete against the stone and moves to steady the lesser. She seems ungrateful; or at least ungracefully accepting. She is younger too, this one, yet holds no excessive delicacy in her poise, no concession of weakness. Leveraged against the raised stone dais, fatigue fades about her in perspiration. But her glance is still alert, curious, as it scans the surrounding ruins.
"Bloody hell, I'm knackered. And they built in this humidity?" Her exhaustion beats against the restless noise of the jungle.
"Not this bad, then. Consider 400 years back; the undergrowth would be cut...; they'd have had fields, cultivation,everything". The arc of the man's hand builds an empire, raising relics from ruin, then lets them fall back in the same gesture. He has seen this before in a hundred silent civilisations; now his hair is bleached by age as much as sun, the knowledge pinched in thin cheekbones, a clotured forehead.
His companion counts less than half his years, but her eyes are topaz-burnt; marked by the memory of some trauma that shaped her to adulthood. About them, the thin breeze circles the man-raised mount, cooling her exhaustion such that breathing now comes evenly; letting her find some centre which few of her sex do in the presence of this place. Focused, she parses dark vine-clung hair along her brow, tieing it back to a shoulders length. Leant forward by a span, she kicks a pebble over the drop, watching it skim and spin dizzyingly through space, clutched to the jungle below. "Not much to show for it now. Just stone...more stone...sun."
A frown. "You could be back at that finishing school is Switzerland, remember? You wanted to see archeology, real archeology; not dry-as-bone old fossils with a hot-dog stand to keep the kids quiet". The man draws a measure from a tin canteen, proffering without expectation.
"Yeah...and it's been great... I don't want to seem ungrateful. Just that I expected...to feel more". She waves him away, trims her garb; less modest than his, perhaps, but with practical concessions to the lithe tyranny of her youth. She cannot feel the stones beneath her feet, or the awe of the sun, though she comes clad alike to many who did...
"Because you're not using all your senses. Because you're only looking with your eyes." He taps, remonstratively, on her brow, anointing her with a smudge of loam from travelled hands. "Anyway, Let's not leap to conclusions; usually the most interesting aspects of a find are the last to fade". He turns to part the vines about the dais; half-gloved hand tugging memories from their clinging expanse. Driven into the dead rock is the voice of the living, spoken wordlessly into time. He breathes for them as his finger traces their outline. "The blessing of the sun, through the fertility of the corn and people, all bound together."
"Fertility rites? So girls only then?"
"Possibly. Incan ceremony wasn't noted for your, uh, modern British sensibilities on affirmative action. Look at these carvings...idealised forms, typically exaggerated...characteristics"
"Oh gosh. That is funny. I'm jealous. how was she meant to mount the stairs...?"
"Lara, it's not wise to mock without understanding. Pay attention to the text; it looks like early Aymara "
"Early Aymara doesn't have a written form" Her blank refusal stuns him.
Exasperation. "Gods, where have you been? I bet you learnt that in a book."
She looks chagrined. "Well, as you were right about the fifth Suyu. I'm not going to contradict you on ancient writings that shouldn't exist". But he is deaf to her; already following his river of knowledge into understanding,
"Blood of Inti". A gnarled finger taps and circles, echoing the ancient pulse of indenting chisel " Sun-god. Inti. Sun-Blood, Sun-essence. The word for essence is the same as blood in this context. A ceremonial drug? Whatever the sun is made out of."
"Probably hydrogen and helium, then; or did I read that in a book too?"
"Miss Croft...what you've been studying, what you've read.... it's only the first part of understanding. Archeology is so much more than matching symbols on a book to crumbling rock. It's about immersion in another culture; separated by time; belief. Opening yourself to what was". He gentles suddenly, seeing in her frustration the spent passions of his own youth, the need to know, to master knowledge as one would mortality. His smile cracks through a weeks worth of stubble, "It's about; understanding here, in the heart, as much as knowing here, in the head. Take this altar, for instance...you're thinking blood sacrifice?"
She nods. "There's tether-points. They were tied down. Why else tie someone down?"
"Yes, but the ideographs are strange. And look; the stone isn't abraded by knife work... there's no guttering for the run-off; no brazier points for the burnt offering like you'd find at Cusco. But more than that....it feels wrong...doesn't it?".
She kneels beside the dais, winces, squints, hesitant at the threshold of understanding. "Breathe, Lara" He tells her, "breathe through."
Four centuries of uneasy slumber, submerged purpose, beat against her perception. And for an instant then, something other; she sees this place as it was and remains. The chant of a whole people to the narcoleptic pulse of skin-taut drum; the sting of incense about the whirling, blurring dance of the Daughters of the Sun, raised above on his throne. "Sky-sacrifice..." she mutters, aloud.
"And sky-sacrifice isn't mentioned in either oral tradition or...what?", his glance falls on her sudden reverie.
"Oh...nothing...I just thought...some kind of dance. A blessing for the offered-daughter. From noon to sundown she was to journey to heaven and bring back life". She whispers the last as if dazed. For a moment she comes close to understanding, sensing at the edges of the genus loci.
"Lara, that's...". The condescension is gone now "...quite good. Quite a good translation. I...did not think you could read this?"
"I can't.... it's just...". A mis-step, forcing a lance of pain up her leg. Her face contorts and the moment of understanding passes. She is bound again to the visible world.
He is sympathetic. "It is OK; do not try to explain. You've already....seen more than I hoped. Be steady. Rest your ankle. Avoid having any weight on it." He returns to his work.
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The female leans back fully, smiling, his respect releasing her from the need of proofs; for a moment, for a heartbeat.
Her body is drawn across the slab, shadowing her eyes with one hand against the zenith of the sun. The golden disk gives no relief, and she relents, inhales, and folds arms back across the expanse of warm igneous stone. Relaxes. Outreached as the condors' span, she is at once and at one to the Hanan Pacha. Opened to the spirit of this place; the understanding that surpasses knowledge, found in a moment of awful surrender.
She is not of The People, but she is of age, and in the place and time of offering. It is enough.
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She ripples at the touch-which-is-not-touch, her mouth forming unconscious surprise.
She breathes, drawing in the heady scent of the jungle for what seems like the first time. Rotten wood and fermenting roots. Her chest heaves, quivers. The tightening fabric of her blouse betrays the blessing, the cotton teased apart. A thin blush of perspiration inculates within.
She opens her eyes against the glare. Somehow, it troubles her less. The void is blue, vast, comprehending. Her gaze falls to the surrounding bowl of the mountains, peaks raised against the vault of the sky. Something stirs to cognition.
"Ohhh...."
"Lara?"
She bolts awake, gasps and clutches, feeling the realness of her disbelief. Bigger. The sense of strain tightens across her, fine-stitched garments plucked apart by an invisible hand of pressure. In a moment, she is brought into the fullness of womanhood, and beyond.
"OHHH!"
"Lara!"
Her hands part one span, then two, to fall underneath the arc of her breasts. A low sibilant noise mounts within. The People of this place called it the Snake-of-the-Wind; messenger of Inti. They knew he would come to the daughter and whisper within her the secret known only to birds, clouds. But this one knows only the heterogeneous pulse, rising with her heartbeat, merging into her.
Thwap...thwap.... beyond outstretched fingers, buttons scatter like prayer beds spilled from a novices' hand. "What's happening? What did you DO?!" Two yards away, he may be stood in another world. The understanding that has guided abandons him; leaving him curiously stricken, unwilling to accept the doors he has opened.
"I....I didn't...I... " Shock blanches her face, and she takes short breaths (but the snake draws longer, deeper). Crescents of blush-colour spill about the deepening shadow of her cleavage as her blouse is sundered button by button. Within, a thin lace of foolish undergarment already lies straining to burst. (An orgy of asphyxic fumbling, fingers find release, breath). Unbound, her swollen bust pushes out, rising like dough through kneading touch, or guanabana ripened heavy on the tree. Yet even now they grow strangely boughed. As if seeking the kiss of the sun that gave them life.
"Not...heavy..." she gasps, sensing their utter strangeness through intimate familiarity.
Bigger. Her eyes flow as pools of conscious terror, subconscious longing. (There is no shame; many felt fear in the moments before the ichu-rope was loosed and they took the same, high path). Larger than her torso now, her breasts intimate their secret, pushing up as much as out. In their sacred presence her companion remains rooted to he spot, earthbound, uncomprehending. Unable to share her blessing. "Lara...you're....no, wait, get some of the gas, out... can you breathe out, burp, or anything?" he ventures, desperately.
A moment of lucidity, flashed into anger. "Honestly, it's my boobs, not my stomach! They're not connected, you know!", she laughs wildly, feeling the edge into hysteria.
"Listen, don't panic, we can...."
"Who says I'm panicking...I'm the one blowing up like a ..."
"Don't say, Listen Lara, it must be...". He seems to be trying to back away, but the spectacle leaves him helpless to aid or deny. He has become an outsider again, a bystander.
Bigger. Her face is shaded from the sun, golden rays crested about the rounded domes before her. Warmth brushes her nipples, and she feels rather than sees them cajoled to perking grace. Palms cupped at to the juncture of her ribs, she tingles at the electric arc that jolts across her breasts, the matchless expansion straining her fingers apart. Slowly, inevitably, her shoulders rise under the insistent tug, drawn upright from the table, head tilted back in the air, hair gliding across stone.
"....Like a fucking bal......Oooooh...."
Bigger. And the sensation washes over her, body flexing under some invisible, intimate compulsion, bucking against the table. Perhaps she wishes it was just the pressure, the fear, that makes her ache so. But some kindled secret blushes along her body, teasing each nerve alight, the fierce heat a lover's touch against her. Enriched with complicit desire, the blessing oblates her natural curves, taking her rounder and fuller, honouring of the sun. Seated on the lip of the altar, her world is now defined by two rising globes. Not quite translucent, but shimmer-shaded as a dream, their strange geography maps out in canyon and pole, shadow and light. Disbelieving, she presses against their firmness and immediacy; feeling their relentless lift rebound against her.
"Can't see....try...push them down...". But she can't.
Bigger. Beyond the span of her arms, her inflated femininity sways gently, becoming entangled by the wind. She is pulled upright, balls of her feet resting on the dais. Boots skate over the ground, as if etching new patterns in the gnarled stone. And again the flush of sensation makes her whimper, softly. Part of her must understand what is coming, dividing her between fear and discovery.
"No...please....don't want to...". But she does.
Bigger. A futile reaching as her peach-pink flesh strains upwards, inflated expanse now equaling her height. The deep resonant hiss renders her bust taut and drumlike. Her hands, slick with perspiration, seek purchase on the solidity of the altar, find none. She takes one unreal stride on tiptoe, a second, to teeter at the rim of the summit; the plaza an abysal plunge hundreds of feet below. A helpless tremble, the flush takes her over the edge....
Detached, she watches a bead of sweat break from the cusp of her breasts, falling as if weakly sensed by gravity, a libation of salt and water for the jungle beneath. But her secret moisture is offered to another element; emeshed into sky-buoyancy. Her arms hang limp now, but her feet wave helpless, high above the canopy. Slowly, irresistibly, she begins to rise, gyrating with the breeze.
Words leave her as floating understanding fills her senses. The anchor of her reason slipped from the earth, she is a bubble in an ocean of air; drifting higher and higher. Suspended from twin spheres of buoyant delight, she is lofted towards a pale blue heaven.
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He makes no sign, but sits cross-legged by the altar, watching the post-noon shadow creep out from its shelter. Above, a mote is lost against the radiance of the sky. Many hours till sunset.