Temple Of The Black Vines

"Slash! Slash! Slash Slash!" The rhythmic sound of a machete cutting through vines accompanied a lone woman as she hacked her way through the dense foliage. Panting with exertion, Eliza stopped for a moment to catch her breath as she managed to reach a small clearing just a few yards in diameter.

Her black tank top was drenched in sweat from hours of maneuvering through the jungle, causing her shirt to cling to her slender but athletic frame. Her straight brown hair was tied up into a ponytail while a few strands clung to her damp forehead. Despite her relatively scant attire from her waist up, her legs bore thick nylon cargo pants with pockets packed to the brim with various survival supplies including a fire starter, a first-aid kit, an additional knife, and a flashlight. Slung across her back was a pack containing food, water, and other miscellaneous items.

This journey was supposed to be relatively short, "If my source is to be believed," Eliza Chambers thought. The young woman had been traveling the world searching for artifacts, treasures, and valuable materials to sell to make her living. Well, not just for her. As she caught her breath, Eliza reached up to her neck to hold out a small locket. She opened the latch and revealed a picture of two girls. One was a younger version of Eliza herself, but the other was her young sister, Serena.

Eliza smiled, her heart warming as she gazed at her younger sibling. They came from the wealthy Chambers family, but her parents made less and less time for the two sisters as they grew up. This wealth was what allowed Eliza to fund her travels, but unfortunately, that meant leaving her sister behind. Serena was almost ten years younger than Eliza, so when Eliza left home, there was no way Serena would be allowed to accompany her. Despite this, Eliza made sure to always stop by her childhood home regularly to check in on her family, even though her parents seemed not to care about her visits. Serena, however, was always excited to hear about Eliza's travels, and the elder sister regularly brought Serena gifts and souvenirs from Eliza's expeditions. Eliza promised that, one day, she would allow her little sister to join her on her adventures -- a day that Serena eagerly awaited.

With her brief respite over, Eliza snapped the locket shut and continued her trek. Thankfully the ointment that one of the local tribespeople had sold her seemed to be keeping the bugs away, but Eliza did notice that there was a distinct lack of animal activity in the area. This swamp should be covered in insects like dragonflies and mosquitoes, but there were none. The only sounds of life came from far off in the distance and were easily drowned out by the slashes of Eliza's machete and the wet suction of her boots as she stepped through the muck.

She quickly got back in the rhythm of slicing through the plant life and pushing the cut brush aside with her other hand, but suddenly, when she swung her machete, the blade hit nothing but air. Eliza had to stop her arm from swinging the blade too far and cutting her leg. Looking ahead, she saw a large gap in the foliage that appeared seemingly out of nowhere. One moment she barely had room to take a step and the next she had entered a massive clearing.

The ground was covered in a thick fog, and ancient trees formed a canopy that blocked out nearly all sunlight, giving the area a dark, gloomy atmosphere. As Eliza stepped into the clearing, she looked around and noticed that the glade was a perfect square. The plants at the edges of the shape bore no marks of any tools or trimming by humans; it seemed as if the vegetation had naturally grown that way.

But as interesting as the clearing itself was, what really caught Eliza's attention was the stone structure in the middle. The building was in surprisingly good shape for being seemingly abandoned in a swamp. The only signs of disrepair were a web of black vines covering most of the structure's surface. The building bore a resemblance to Mayan pyramids with its square base, flat top, and tiered structure, but instead of steps leading to the top, there were staircases that led down beneath the stone monument, heading far underground.

As she approached the building, Elizas heart raced. If this was an undiscovered ruin, who knows what sort of valuables could be hidden inside? When she got within ten feet of the structure, Eliza began pacing around the exterior, looking for any clues she could find about the mysterious ruin's origins and whether or not it had been visited recently. The stone was largely undecorated apart from a single band of carvings that completely encircled the whole pyramid. The carving resembled a Celtic knot with a pattern of strands woven together in a complicated braid, but there was one key difference. While Celtic knots were always one continuous shape, this carving looked almost like a frayed rope that had a central braid pattern but had seemingly random projections that stuck out from various points across the strands.

Eliza looked closely for any signs of footprints or marks on the stone where fingers had left oil that changed the pattern of moisture accumulation on the rock. To her absolute delight, she found none, providing the first hint that this ruin was virtually untouched. In addition, there were no scrapes on the stone steps indicating that artifacts had been dragged out, and there were no scorch marks from torch flames. Swallowing nervously, Eliza's heart pounded in her chest as she reached into her pocket to pull out a flashlight.

With her light in one hand and the machete in the other, she made her way down one of the staircases that led deeper into the ruin. As she slowly crept further in, Eliza felt as if an eternity had passed before she finally reached the bottom of the steps. Looking toward the sky, she pointed her flashlight up to illuminate the stone stairs. Using her eyes to roughly measure each of the steps, Eliza estimated that she had descended at least a hundred feet into the earth.

Turning her attention forward, she saw that the room at the bottom of the staircases was connected to a long hallway. As Eliza walked down the stone corridor, she noticed all sorts of carvings on the walls. There were illustrations framed above and below by the same braided pattern that encircled the structure up above. The carvings between the braids appeared to picture a long line of figures walking down the hallway in the direction Eliza was headed. All of the figures depicted appeared to be female, and as she moved deeper, Eliza saw what looked like some sort of progression or journey.

The women in drawings started out fully clothed in a toga-like garb that Eliza had never seen before. The next few carvings depicted the women appearing to disrobe as they moved further down the hallway. Soon they were completely nude, and there were images of other figures, both men and women, painting tribal markings on the nude women's bodies. Suddenly the illustrations were interrupted by the braided pattern appearing once again, but on the other side of the break, Eliza could see that the last few illustrations were of women who appeared to be pregnant.

Biting her lip, Eliza muttered to herself, "This must be some sort of fertility temple. I can only imagine the sort of debauchery that happened within these walls..." There were no depictions of nude men in the carvings, but Eliza let her mind run wild as she imagined lines of beautiful women being stripped and painted before being gangbanged by athletic tribal warriors with big hard...

She shook her head, trying to clear the thoughts away. Before, her heart was racing as she anticipated various traps guarding the temple, but now her pulse was quickened with arousal, "What has gotten into me?" Eliza thought as lewd images ran through her mind. She tried to concentrate on the situation at hand, but her mind kept wandering to daydreams of women being taken in both the mouth and vagina by thick, throbbing members. Most of all she thought of the men letting out animalistic moans as they emptied their seed into the women before other men took their place and continued fucking the women without rest. It didn't take long for Eliza to picture herself in place of those women, imagining what it would feel like to be stretched by those exotic cocks as the men roughly groped her body and had their way with her. What it would feel like as their manhoods pulsed inside her, filling Eliza with their fertile seed...

Eliza gasped as her foot caught on a loose stone and jerked her out of her reverie. She managed to catch herself on the wall before she fell, and when she looked to the side, she saw that her palm was resting directly on the image of one of the pregnant women. Panting heavily as she recovered from her stumble, Eliza jerked her hand away from the carving and instinctively tried to brush her hand on her pants as if she had touched something filthy.

Shaking her head, Eliza turned to continue down the hallway, but she stopped as she realized she had reached the entrance to another chamber. This one was much larger than the room at the base of the stairs, and nearly every inch of the wall was covered with even more intricate carvings. As she carefully stepped into the room, Eliza turned in a circle as she studied all of the imagery. The room only had a single entrance, and around that entryway, there were depictions of women appearing to masturbate in various states of undress as well as different points in their pregnancy.

"Is there something about this place that makes people... aroused?" Eliza thought. Her logical side believed that was clearly impossible. "It must just be the images of nude women that had gotten me all worked up," she reasoned, nodding to herself but not quite believing her own explanation. But as she looked away from the carvings and examined the rest of the chamber, Eliza gasped. There on a pedestal at the center of the room rested what appeared to be a black egg made of obsidian. It was about the size of a basketball, which even for obsidian would be a large chunk. But as she got closer and shined her flashlight on the object, Eliza was shocked to realize that it appeared to be a single black opal.

Immediately her breath started to quicken. Looking around, Eliza quickly scanned the rest of the room, trying to see if there were any other treasures. To her amazement, several similar pieces of black opal were embedded in evenly spaced holes around the room. A single one of these stones must be worth... Eliza couldn't even think how much, and yet there were at least a dozen massive gems in this chamber alone.

As she turned back to the stone on the pedestal, Eliza bit her lip. Even though she hadn't encountered any traps yet, she still thought that the one in the center of the room was far too obvious of a target. So instead, she moved to the side of the room and tried to pull one of the opals out of its setting. Despite being made of stone, the setting was a near-perfect fit, and the stone barely budged when Eliza tried to dislodge it. Frowning, she took out her knife and managed to wriggle the tip of the blade in between the opal and the setting. When the blade reached in about two inches, Eliza tried to use the knife to pry the gem out of its rocky prison. At first the stubborn rock refused to move, but when Eliza put all of her weight into prying it free, something happened.

The prongs of the setting shifted slightly and made an audible "click" followed by an immediate grinding sound. In less than a second, a thick stone door emerged from the floor of the entrance to the chamber and sealed the room shut. In a futile attempt to escape, Eliza sprinted to the exit only to bruise her shoulder as she ran into the solid wall that had trapped her. Immediately Eliza began to hyperventilate as she saw no way out of this room, but then all her practice exploring kicked in.

Taking a deep breath, Eliza steadied herself as best she could and managed to calm her racing heart. She didn't know if this room had any sort of air supply, so she had to conserve as much oxygen as possible. Turning her flashlight on "low" to conserve battery, Eliza set about examining every detail in the room, trying to find some sort of trigger to reopen the door. But less than a minute later, her fate would take an even more dire turn.

She heard a faint rustling sound that slowly got louder and louder as time went on. As she moved the light around the room searching for the source of the noise, Eliza noticed the "vines" that she saw on the exterior of the structure slowly creeping up from small holes in the ground. The strange tendrils moved at a leisurely pace, weaving in and out of the lines in the wall's carvings as the black organism spread toward the ceiling.

In less than a minute, the majority of the chamber's walls were covered in the dark plants, but for some reason, the floor remained untouched. Eliza backed away from the wall quickly, trying not to get too close to the tendrils or to the pedestal at the center of the room. But then the worst happened. Once again, there was a loud grinding noise, and to Eliza's horror, the floor of the chamber began to retract into the outer walls, leaving an ever-growing circle of empty space around the central pedestal. At the same time, the pedestal itself began rising to the ceiling until the top of the stone structure fit neatly into a slot at the roof of the chamber.

In her panic, Eliza grabbed onto the vines on the wall, but they were covered in a slippery slime. As the last of the floor disappeared into the walls, Eliza lost her grip on the tendrils and screamed as she plummeted into the darkness below.

"Splash!" To Eliza's surprise, the bottom of the chamber was coated in some sort of liquid that was about chest deep, but in the total darkness, it was difficult to glean anything else about her surroundings. Thankfully a green light soon illuminated the room, and when Eliza looked for the source, she saw that the glow was coming through the massive opals embedded in the walls. The pit that she had fallen into was also lined with the gems, including the pillar that was connected to the pedestal that had risen to the ceiling.

There was a loud gurgling sound, followed by movement in the fluid that had cushioned Eliza's fall. As she watched, the fluid began draining into holes along the central pillar, quickly forming a vortex in the murk. The pull of the vortex was strong, and it even managed to drag Eliza into the central pillar. As she held onto the stone, she could feel the drains in the floor with her feet, and to her relief, they weren't large enough for her boots to fit through. But unfortunately the holes were plenty big for some of Eliza's belongings, and she yelled out, "Fuck!" as she watched her machete and knife fall down the crevices.

With the room now emptied of the strange liquid, the pit was eerily quiet for a few moments. But the peace didn't last long; another loud gurgling sound could be heard as a different fluid began pouring out of jets all around Eliza's prison. The torrent of fluid was inescapable, and all Eliza could do was sputter and try not to drown as she was completely hosed by the liquid. This substance was much less viscous than before and flowed almost like water over Eliza's body.

After a few seconds, the onslaught ceased, and the liquid quickly flowed down the drains, leaving Eliza alone in the room once more. As she sputtered and tried to clear her mouth, nose, and eyes of the foreign material, a strong burning smell hit Eliza's nose. A thick smoke began to rise from all over her body, and Eliza screamed, thinking she had been hosed with acid. But to her surprise, there was no pain. Not even the exposed skin where the liquid had made direct contact felt any sort of burning. But Eliza's belongings weren't so lucky.

The first thing she noticed was her backpack falling off her body as somehow the straps had come loose. As Eliza watched, the pack quickly disintegrated into a puddle of goo before flowing down the drain as well, but the backpack wasn't the only casualty. Eliza quickly noticed holes appearing in her clothes, including her thick boots. Her shirt melted away almost immediately, quickly followed by her bra. As she instinctively put her hands up to cover her breasts, the waistband of her pants gave way, causing them to fall to the floor. Now in contact with the wet ground, the pants didn't last much longer than her backpack, and by the time her pants had fallen, her underwear had already completely liquified. Next thing to go were Eliza's boots, and she could only watch as the last shred of her outfit was stripped away by the fluid, taking her socks with it. But there was one item remaining. Evidently, the liquid took longer to dissolve metal than fabric, but before Eliza had a chance to catch it, her necklace fell off as well, quickly disappearing down the drain.

Now completely naked, Eliza was truly panicked. She was utterly defenseless, trapped, and completely exposed. She backed up against the pillar at the center of the pit while instinctively trying to preserve her modestly by covering herself with her arms. She looked around frantically, screaming, "Hello? Anybody? Please let me go! Help me!"

Tears quickly began to flow down Eliza's cheeks, blurring her vision. When she finally realized there was no one there to see her nakedness, Eliza dropped her hands and walked over to the edge of the hole. The vines that had covered the walls of the main chamber had made their way down into the pit as well, and she hoped that she could climb them to safety.

But before Eliza could take a single step, she tripped as her foot caught on something. As she looked back, Eliza let out a scream of pure terror as she saw a vine -- no, a tentacle -- wrap itself around her ankle and begin snaking its way up her leg. It wasn't acting alone. All around Eliza, tendrils of various thicknesses began peeling away from the walls of the pit and making their way toward the nude woman. Eliza desperately thrashed and tried to get away from the tentacles' slimy grip, but the longer she struggled, the more time the black limbs had to ensnare Eliza's body. In less than a minute, the tentacles had completely secured all four of Eliza's limbs. In addition, two tentacles had encircled her neck, and one wrapped around her midsection.

Eliza was both disgusted and horrified as she felt the worm-like appendages crawl over her naked skin, leaving trails of slime in their wake. As a treasure hunter, Eliza was no stranger to gross creatures, but having dozens -- or even hundreds -- of them crawl across her skin was like nothing she had ever prepared for.

With surprising strength, the tentacles lifted Eliza into the air while pulling her limbs apart so that she was spread into an "X" shape with her legs splayed uncomfortably wide. With their prey now secured, the tentacles behavior seemed to change. Many smaller tendrils began poking and prodding around Eliza's body as if they were searching for something. Two tentacles rubbed their tips all over Eliza's breasts, kneading her sensitive mounds with surprising care. Eliza looked down at the tentacles, her screaming stopping for a moment as she stared in shock, but then things got worse.

Feeling several tentacles exploring the area between her legs, Eliza looked up at the ceiling, whispering, "No no no no no no... Please, god, no! Please don't! Don't touch me there!"

The tendrils paid her no mind, and almost as soon as the word "there" left Eliza's lips, a tentacle forced its way past her anus. The slimy coating made it nearly impossible to resist the intrusion, and after the tentacle entered, it went deep. It went so far into her that Eliza felt that any moment it would come up her esophagus and emerge from her mouth. But eventually, the tentacle finally did stop pressing forward; however, it wasn't done yet. It was merely moving to the next phase.