What Is Done

There was a time when the desert was a forest, and the sacred temple stood where the river bent like a silver spine. No one remembered how it was built. No one claimed to know who carved the towering stone or set the altar where the sun struck perfectly at dawn. The temple simply was—older than memory, older than the towns that would later cluster around its shadow.

On the inner walls were carvings of beings not quite human:
eagle-faced guardians with wide wings and eyes like polished obsidian.


The harpies.

The Wise Ones.
Keepers of the sacred.

It was said they protected the temple.
It was said they watched over the land.
It was said they never left—even when the forests died and the earth turned to dust.

Most believed the harpies were only a story.
A warning.
A way to keep children respectful.

The land safe.

The adults remembered.
The children did not.

It began as rebellion, always does—with boredom, bravado, and a need to prove nothing sacred existed anymore.

They gathered from every nearby town and settlement: dozens of children and young teens drawn together by whispered plans. A party. A dare. A conquest of the temple that had supposedly frightened generations before them.

They stormed the entrance, laughing as the heavy doors groaned open.

They lit torches.
Played music.
Danced where offerings once lay.

Carved their initials into stone older than sand.
Their voices echoed through the chamber, sharp and thoughtless.

And beneath the floor, something stirred.

The harpies had not left.
They had only slept.

Deep under the dirt floor, they rose.

Dust fell from ancient feathers. 
Talons scraped stone.
Bones long still remembered movement.

Eyes opened like black suns returning to the sky.

The children didn’t hear the awakening.
They didn’t notice the doors closing.
They didn’t see the harpies barring the entrance with the strength of creatures carved from legend.

But the adults did.

Parents ran from every corner of the desert, pounding on the sealed doors, screaming at the carvings, at the stone, at the legend they’d prayed was only myth.

“Open! OPEN!”
“Let them out!”
“Please—please—they’re only children!”

The harpies answered with a single chant, a voice like stone grinding against stone:

“What is done cannot be undone.”

The ground trembled.
The sky shuttered.
The walls groaned like something living.


Inside, the children screamed as torches fell and dust rained from the ceiling.

The adults howled.


The harpies did not open the doors.


Some holiness, once broken, cannot be mended.

The temple collapsed inward with a roar that shook the bones of the earth.
Stone shattered.
Sand swallowed everything.

And then—silence.

When the dust finally settled, there was nothing left.
No temple.
No doors.
No bodies.
No trace of anything that had once stood holy.

Only the legend remained.

A whisper on the wind: “What is done cannot be undone.”

And beneath the earth, the harpies slept again—waiting for the day the land might once more be worthy of sacred things and their protection.