After almost stumbling down into the secret hatch of the sacred garden, while struggling to get Rina down there, Arya and Benji heaved heavy breaths.

The air smelled thick here, thicker than the dark alleyways and branches they had witnessed inside the valley during their previous visit.

There were multiple trickling noises due to seepage from the underground water. They walked deeper into the tunnel, which led nowhere into the darkness.

"Seriously, are you sure this is a temple?" Arya asked, shining her flash from the tab to the muddy ceiling above. "By temple, don't you mean graveyard?"

"Temple." Fiana confirmed, her voice had lost any possible liveliness.

The tunnel abruptly ended in a chamber which had an altar at the centre. Lanterns similar to the ones they had seen in cave ways were lit, all around the chamber turning its ambience into a ruddy foreboding stage for something, they didn't know would happen .

"Oh." Arya helped Fiana to lay her sister down and glanced the so called temple. "This is beautiful."

"Immensely beautiful!" Benji circled around the altar. "Where are we gonna bury Rina, now?"

The answer for his question was a wet, growling old cough coming from the other side of the altar. Benji got startled the moment his feet hit and felt something rather warm and softer on the ground.

"Oh my, What the Fuc...today is cursed. Holy mother, again?! Please don't be dead, please."

Fiana sprinted around the altar to find the Pastor lying on the ground. Like Rina, he had been shot several times on his shoulder. The pastor's breathing was painful, raspy with coughs in between. His face with greying hair was smudged in dry, matted blood.

"Father." Fiana shook him up. "Father."

Pastor coughed up some blood, spat it aside and addressed Fiana. "My child, you must leave with this place, it's been compromised."

Fiana nodded, pointing her finger at Rina's body.

"I'm sorry." The pastor suddenly started crying like a baby, turning his head away from Fiana. His eyes were shut tight to hold the tears back. "I am sorry, I am such a coward, instead of protecting them, I hid in this place just to protect this bloody useless book."

The pastor retrieved an old leatherback journal from under his shirt. "I thought I am bound to protect this, Fiana. But I've been looking back and thinking well lately, after I got stuck here -unable to move my limbs or stand up, this book is the cause for all our misery. Nothing good has ever come to us by following Joshin's teachings. Hayal the chosen one, they said. Our tribe is chosen to survive the apocalypse, they said. We are blessed, he said. But look at us. Oh look at the blessings we have received."

"What is that book?" Arya yanked the book from the pastor's hands rudely. "Is it the map?"

"What map?" Benji asked, unaware of any such mentioning, from Arya ever before.

"Burn that book, my dear. It's of no use but to bring bad luck." The pastor chuckled, "all my life I was taught to believe in Joshin and his teachings, about Sinukhi, the almighty... How he will arrive in his spherical chariot of thousand colors from heavens to save us, take us back to a better world, a whole new world, like how he took Hayal. The rebirth, they called it."

Arya flipped over pages of the old leatherback journal, the letters were worn out, erased at places. Scratched and rewritten in most pages with some pages completely torn out. "Where's the rest?"

"That is the rest." Pastor groaned and coughed up blood again. "It's from the era of the beginning of apocalypse, it's only our determination to follow Joshin' that we were able to save at least so much."

"Benji, Benji look." Arya flipped over some pages and pointed at something. "This is what I saw in the hailstorm earlier. I swear on anything or anybody, you name it."

Benji frowned and intensely looked into Arya's eyes. "Are you sure?"

There was a diagram of a sphere of some kind, with pentagonal shapes all over its surface. In the centre was an inverted triangle where there was a sketch of a human child lying on his back. The text read, 'Oracle of Hayal.'

The pastor laughed, "you keep seeing them time to time. The Oracles of Sinukhi, legends say one of them took Hayal and whispered the knowledge into Joshin's ears. But beware, my child. They have been visiting us from the beginning of the end, and yet haven't been able to save us from this hell hole. Sometimes, I wonder are they enjoying watching our deaths? Cruel little buggers."

"Oracle," Fiana pointed and looked over to Rina. "Save."

Benji took the book and landed on one particular page while flipping the other half of it. The page had a design of the wheel network that the tribesmen had used to base the design of their garden. He read into the texts scribblings and squeezed his eyes showing the pages to the ruddy dim lights illuminating the temple tomb.

"It says, 'Aluffrat' but in English." Benji sulked his brows together to make sense out of it. "I don't understand, some words are total neologisms here, that make no sense."

"It does make sense, you ignorant city brat." The Pastor angered, which sent him into another bout of cough. "It's Sankribian, the slow continental drift made merging of different languages. People wandering around and practicing savagery, only added to the process."

"It means, the deep." The pastor continued, "Joshin studied and tracked the paths of oracles every night. He found out that Oracles had been conglomerating and visiting, from all possible directions, to one place in particular for centuries. His love for his son was so deep that it turned into an obsession. Then he decided to pay a visit to that place, even if it meant a decade of acid rain, scorching sun, frozen lakes and mountains, hunger and diseases. On his journey, one day he met a man who became his best friend and a true disciple of his teachings. Then the number doubled and in no time there were several hundreds of his disciples. And when he finally found that place, he called it 'the deep' - the allufrat, for the depth of his love for his son. The depth of his desire to meet him again."

"What did he find in the deep?" Arya asked, almost mesmerized by the story.

"The universe." The pastor seemed pale, he winced his face in pain, trying to lift his shot limb upwards. "He saw the whole universe -the beginning, the end. The past, the present and the future. The Oracle spoke to him again, Joshin described it as a direct spiritual contact with Sinukhi himself. He said that Sinukhi engraved in his mind about this structure he has drawn, right here on this map."

The pastor tapped his bloody hand on the map of Aluffrat, soiling its texts and structures.

Arya tisked and rolled her eyes, obviously not enjoying how he had to ruin the book with his bloody fingers just to show the map. "Can I keep it, if it's not worthy anymore to you or your tribe, perhaps it's not bad either to give it away to some random city brats?"

"Josh...Joshin," the pastor lifted his limp fingers and pointed at Arya, "He also... Said that, this journal in the wrong hands will wipe out humanity from the whole...whole universe."

Benji looked at Arya, worrisome streaks visible on his forehead. Arya could only imagine the rage he felt inside of him against Silas.

"Wrong hands?" Arya nervously smiled and held the pastor's hand, in an attempt to comfort him. "now tell me, do you feel mine are wrong hands too?"

"Times make even the right hands molt into wrong hands, my dear." The pastor laughed groggily. "Can you say whether mine are wrong hands?"

Arya frowned and withdrew her hands slowly in response.

"Perhaps Fiana could say?" The pastor motioned towards Fiana to hold his hands. "My dear."

"Father."

"How you've grown into this strong woman from that sickly little child - a bad batch from the poison Oasis." The pastor complemented, squeezing her grip. "I'm sorry I had to execute your father, for what he did. I shall be punished in eternity for my doings."

Fiana nodded, her face devoid of any emotions. Arya studied this girl who had gone through so much more than the eyes met. She felt an immense amount of something towards this girl, that Arya couldn't put her finger at.

"I am ready." The pastor held his hands on his chest and took a deep breath, "you must leave."

Fiana hung her head down and sat still by his side. Benji and Arya didn't know what to do, so they waited.

"Now!" The pastor said.

"But we'll have to bury Rina before we leave." Benji spoke for Fiana.

"Fiana, my dear, you should know that your sister will not be alone here." The pastor tried to convince Fiana, "I owe you at least that much. Now, leave before raiders come back."

"Raiders?" Benji and Arya exclaimed.

"Yes, southern raiders. They had all kinds of stolen gadgets from city dwellers like you. They are savages, they stop at nothing. Nothing." pastor caressed Fiana and continued, "So leave, Fiana. Find your tribe... Find your mother. Say her sorry for me. Go."