"Diana! Come look—the elephants are amazing!" Cassie was perched on top of an elephant, waving both arms at her. The other three—nominally focused on their treasure hunt—were waiting patiently, apparently won over by Diana's endless willingness to answer questions.
Diana just smiled and shook her head. Thea kept two baby elephants at home, and even those were only mildly entertaining. The elephants at this tourist site had been broken in so thoroughly that the spark in them was nearly extinguished. What was there to enjoy?
She didn't join the group on the elephant they were sharing. Instead, she found one that still had a hint of spirit in its eyes, stepped onto the mounting block, and swung herself up with one clean motion.
The effect was immediate. The elephant felt something strike straight to its core—primal, instinctual terror. Its legs nearly gave out. Diana caught the panic before it could spread and soothed the animal with a gentle pulse of divine power, and no one in the crowd so much as glanced their way.
"Move out! We're going to Phnom Bakheng!" Cassie's cheer rang out ahead of them, and the two elephants lumbered slowly forward.
Phnom Bakheng was a modest hill—a rise of roughly 65–70 meters (about 215–230 feet)—and one of the few elevated points within the main Angkor complex. At its summit stood the ruins of one of the earliest Angkor temples, built during the reign of Yasovarman I as the first state temple of his new capital. It established the architectural principles that all later Angkor structures would follow. The sweeping panoramic views from the top made it one of the most popular spots in the entire complex.
The five of them rode their elephants up the slope at a leisurely pace. From the summit, the entire temple complex unfolded below them in every direction.
Cassie's boyfriend Dacey made small talk—asking Diana if she was tired, whether she needed a break—and then, in a tone carefully calculated to sound offhand, slipped in a few very specific questions. Questions that, in Diana's assessment, only a dedicated scholar of ancient Hindu history would normally encounter. She was mildly curious but didn't press.
Dacey thanked her profusely and walked away, leaving his girlfriend behind.
"What is your boyfriend actually researching? You're not doing anything illegal out here, are you?" Diana had never especially warmed to Americans abroad. They had a particular talent for being vocal about their own values while remaining spectacularly indifferent to everyone else's. The ratio of Americans abroad who broke local laws to those who didn't was... not impressive.
Her read on these four: they were here to lift something from Angkor Wat, split the proceeds, and live off the story for the next decade. The kind of thing some Americans considered an adventure, and then passed down to their children as though it were something to be proud of. A cycle of bad values handed from one generation to the next.
Cassie, though—Diana genuinely thought she was a good person. Worth steering away from a bad path before it was too late.
And Cassie was, in that moment, feeling her own doubts surface. She'd signed on thinking this would be a lark—a fun story for parties. But somewhere along the way, the vibe had shifted from adventure to something she couldn't name.
Still, love made her push the unease down. She told Diana everything was fine. Diana let it go gracefully—she'd picked up more than a few things from years of living alongside Thea, including the art of knowing when to change the subject. She redirected the conversation to somewhere safer, and Cassie, grateful for the out, followed along.
The next morning, Diana watched them pack their gear and said her goodbyes. The four exchanged warm farewells. She and Cassie swapped contact information, then Diana set off alone down a different path.
The four young people watched her disappear around a bend, then changed direction and hurried off the other way.
What they didn't know was that Diana had doubled back. A basic invisibility charm wasn't her strongest suit, but it would do.
She trailed them from a distance. They kept adjusting their route against something—consulting whatever they had—until they stopped in front of a crumbling old shrine at the outermost edge of the Angkor complex. This far out, even the local children who begged near the main gates didn't come.
Cassie's expression was tense, clearly arguing with Dacey. But Dacey's mind was made up. He drew a knife across his palm, pressed his bleeding hand to an ordinary-looking stone pillar, and waited.
No dramatic rumble. No blinding light. The four of them simply vanished.
"Damn—a teleportation seal!" Diana swore under her breath. She should have moved sooner instead of watching. She sprinted forward.
The teleportation energy hadn't fully dissipated. She dove through before it could close.
The membrane of space tore around her like parting water. She landed in a world of jaundiced sky and blood-red earth. The air was scorching, heavy with heat haze—and somewhere in the murk ahead, indistinct shapes moved and gathered.
"A minor pocket dimension. Modeled on one of the hell-planes." After years of running across strange worlds alongside Thea, Diana's frame of reference had grown considerably. Two seconds of observation was all she needed to orient herself. She wasn't worried about her own situation—even if there was no exit, the Mother Box could bring her home. It was the four kids she was worried about.
She scanned the horizon. No sign of them. She picked a direction and moved.
Several dozen kilometers away, behind a low rise in the crimson earth, Dacey and Cassie lay sprawled on the ground. Cassie's physical constitution was far beyond normal human limits—she regained consciousness first, shook her head clear, and crawled over to where Dacey lay. She grabbed his shoulder and shook him until he stirred.
Dacey came around slowly.
He looked at the alien sky and the alien earth, and his eyes lit up with something fierce and hungry.
"This is it. This is exactly it. Just like the records described." He kept nodding, murmuring to himself.
Cassie was terrified. The air here crawled against her skin. Some deep instinct in her soul screamed at her to leave immediately. She cried and begged Dacey to find the way out.
"You don't understand! This is a divinely sealed site. If we get to what's inside, we'll never have to answer to anyone again!"
He could see she was barely holding together. He took a breath, softened his tone, and pulled out a small notebook—palm-sized.
"This has been in my family for generations. One of our ancestors came to this part of the world during the Age of Exploration. He heard the legend from the local people—that somewhere here was a sealed place containing power beyond anything the world had ever seen. Power that could shake the heavens themselves. He was a plain man; the door to that world never opened for him."
"I thought I'd live the same quiet life. Working at a repair shop, going nowhere. And then..." He reached into his bag and carefully unfolded a tattered, half-disintegrated sheet of parchment.
Cassie took it. She stared at the cramped, angular script crawling across the surface and understood nothing.