“This is it,” Viitás said, his voice heavy in the reflections of sunlight thrown into the cavernous maw of ancient and hungry darkness. This is it. The temple. There was no doubt. Of course the ancient accounts had named a different place, a shallower ridge of mountains to the north and moist, swampy flats stretching along a broad, westerly path. The rivers were not the same, and the lakes—long-shifted from their beds and drained into deep, jagged fissures—betrayed what the oldest maps declared. The world had changed. The Ithyn Desert (once a blip on the ancient maps) had grown and consumed everything in what became its stony, infertile basin. There were no ancient words for the vastness of today’s Ithyn Desert, no names for the new mountains and the vanished lakes, but the temple (this sand-swallowed place) bore a single, significant label. “Dēō Vôl,” Viitás said, a quiet gesture in his voice. She followed the sound of his words and found sunlight (funneled into this domed, cavernous place through a complex array of mirrors) shimmering on chisel-hewn face of a pale, limestone wall. She faced, she realized after a long moment’s scrutiny, a doorway, a portal…a significant thing. In the logic of this world’s most ancient religion, she faced a door. Its false transom (a small, complicated mural) recalled the shimmer of glass and the view of a river (and bridges) beyond. The past was there: the one country on this planet she could never, ever enter. Dēō Vôl lived there. Dēō Vôl accepted worship. There. She knew the old stories about Dēō Vôl, the god who was his own wife and the Crosser of Bridges, and now—after decades of work—she stood in the cavernous heart of His first temple, staring upward at the ornate gilt extravagance of the central dome. For centuries, even the most tenuous thoughts of Dēō Vôl lay entombed beneath the Ithyn Desert, and now, beneath the desert, she stood beside her gentle and eager guide, staring at a door that was a blank wall, and a mural that was its transom. Others had seen this temple; she understood this profoundly, but she, with Viitás at her side, had been granted a private visit, a chance to see something, though she didn’t yet know what. Viitás knew, and it was only a matter of a few moments before he revealed it. * Okay, this isn’t really a buried temple on another planet. Some dude named Viitás didn’t stand there with some woman who never revealed her name. Instead, it’s the lobby to the Crain Communications Building in Chicago. I stood there: a few steps away from Tara, while Bill and Corey disappeared into interesting corners and pointed their cameras at things. Tara and I did the same, getting those angles and those light balances and all of that other stuff that photographers like to go on about. We were surrounded by a lobby full of gorgeous things, and I suspect we could have stayed there for hours longer than we did. We stayed there for a very long time. I even gawked a little bit. This isn’t the entire inner dome, but it’s a part of the west wall. The depiction of bridges and the Chicago River made me think of…some other place…and I suspect that’s the origin of the story fragment above. I’d like to dedicate this photo to Tara (auntietk,) especially since she’s just won quite an honor here on Renderosity. She’s the Photography Gallery’s Photographer of the Year, and I must say that she deserves the title. Congratulations, Tara, and thank you all for looking, viewing, and commenting. CONGRATULATIONS TARA!