This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/asanskaarilegend on 2026-08-07 11:44:54+00:00.

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My name is Nikolai. I am an archaeologist by trade, fifty-six years old, and a man who has long outlived his own convictions. I have a deep, jagged scar running across my jaw, a permanent reminder of a life I tried to leave behind. I force myself through rigid physical conditioning every single day, keeping my muscles hard and ready, but it feels increasingly pointless. I feel the creeping age settling deep in my very bones. Every morning, the dry air makes it just a little harder to breathe. It is getting impossible to pretend the decay has not already taken hold of me.

I was born in The Soviet Union. When the Union collapsed, I stayed just long enough to watch the scavengers arrive. I saw foreigners flood over our borders to carve up the motherland. They took our natural resources for pennies, but worse, they carved up our people.

For every man who drank himself to death in those bleak years, there were many more young girls lured to horrid fates in foreign ‘beauty pageants’, an easy way to repackage trafficking to the innocent such that they would come of their own volition, like moths to the flame.

Watching that brutal, desperate scramble destroyed every ideological pillar I ever possessed. It killed my religious convictions right alongside them. Before the fall, I was a deeply devout Orthodox Christian. The horrific violence of those days stripped the faith entirely out of me. God abandoned us to the wolves, and I abandoned Him in return.

I fled south to Turkey, choosing to bury myself in antiquity because the dead demand absolutely nothing of you. By two thousand and two, I was granted Turkish citizenship and a place at the university.

I work alongside a new generation now, still in archaeology. My current team consists of four younger colleagues, true-born Turkish men and women who possess an exhausting, untainted optimism I lost decades ago.

Our latest venture started on a bus in Iraq. We were riding out of Nasiriyah in a cramped, rattling transport, pushing away from the south and heading deeper into south-central Iraq. The past few weeks in the city had been gentle, not exactly unexpected, but surprising perhaps.

But as we drove further north into the arid wastes, leaving that warmth behind, the atmosphere inside the cabin shifted. My younger colleagues sat a few rows ahead, laughing and reviewing our survey maps, completely oblivious to the isolation swallowing us. Our destination was a newly uncovered cluster of ancient Christian ruins found north of the city.

The ruins we were seeking were an academic impossibility. Preliminary dating of the masonry and the few recovered artifacts placed the site in the very early first century. If the data held true, it drastically changed the entire accepted historical narrative of how Christianity spread.

It meant early disciples, or perhaps some forgotten, older offshoot of the faith, had pushed deep into the cradle of Mesopotamia decades before anyone previously thought possible. For a man who had entirely lost his faith, it was a bitter irony to be tasked with unearthing its hidden origins.

The bus groaned to a halt just outside a small, dust-choked town near Batha. This was our stop for the night.

Nasiriyah had been full of life and hospitality, but this place felt somewhat more hollowed out. The few locals who watched us unpack our gear from the undercarriage did not smile or approach us. They stared with saddened eyes, whispering among themselves in hushed Arabic.

My younger colleagues did not notice the shift in the atmosphere. Emre and Kaan were too busy arguing over who had to carry the heavy surveying equipment, while Zeynep and Elif took photographs of the dying light hitting the low mudbrick buildings.

We secured rooms in a small concrete guesthouse for the night. It was a dreary place to rest. Yet, it was absolute luxury compared to what I had been through, thirty odd years ago, in Moscow. Tomorrow, we would be sent drivers and cars, courtesy of the Iraqi Archaeological Society, to take us to our final staging area.

Our actual base camp was to be near an abandoned village perched right on the edge of the excavation zone.

I left my cramped room and walked through the dusty streets with Kaan. The setting sun bathed the town in a harsh, bleeding orange light. As we navigated the narrow dirt alleys, the truth of this place finally settled over me. The residents were not hostile at all. They were just as hospitable as the people in Nasiriyah. But their warmth carried a heavy, unsettling weight.

"They are looking at us strangely, Nikolai," Kaan muttered, adjusting his glasses and keeping his voice low. "Do you think they resent us being here?"

"Look closer, Kaan," I replied. "That is not anger in their eyes. It is pity. They look at us the way a priest looks at a dying man."

Before Kaan could process that thought, a voice called out to us. Near the edge of the town square, a local man waved his weathered hands. He was old. His face was carved by the desert sun beyond my own fifty-six years, lined with deep, dark creases. He was tending a small open fire, and the rich, smoky smell of roasting fish filled the evening air. He was preparing Iraqi carp, their national dish.

"Welcome, welcome!" the old man called out in thick, broken English, gesturing frantically to the woven rugs around his fire. "You are the scholars, yes? Sit. Eat."

"Thank you, uncle," Kaan said, his natural enthusiasm returning instantly. He practically dropped onto the rug. "Is this masgouf? It smells incredible."

The old man nodded slowly, turning the many spiked fish over the glowing coals. "Yes. Masgouf. You eat well tonight." He paused and looked up at me. His dark eyes were filled with that exact same sorrow I had seen in the alleys. "Tomorrow, you go to the old stones in the north. The abandoned place."

"That is the plan," I said, offering a polite nod. "We are here to study them."

The old man shook his head, keeping his eyes fixed on the fire. "Some stone should stay buried, Russian man. The earth eat them for good. But we will not speak of dark in night. Eat. Drink tea. You are my guests."

I thanked him again and told Kaan I needed to stretch my aching knees. The boy was already seated, entirely unbothered by the old man's warning, and instead helping him cook.

I stepped back from the fire and let my eyes wander. Nestled between two crumbling stone homes was a building that made me stop in my tracks. It was a church. Judging by the stark concrete architecture, it was built no earlier than the nineteen fifties. Finding a relatively modern Christian church sitting out in the open in this remote stretch of the desert was entirely unexpected.

A low chuckle escaped my throat. The sound was dry and devoid of real humour.

"What is it?" Kaan asked, looking up as he fanned the flames.

"Irony," I said, pointing down the alley. "We travel thousands of miles and plan to dig through tons of hostile earth to find ancient Christian ruins, and there is a parish sitting right next to our hotel."

Kaan laughed and went back to his task.

A strange compulsion took hold of me. For a man who had abandoned his faith in the gutters of Moscow, the sight of that cross should have meant absolutely nothing. Yet the heavy shadow of the building pulled at me. I walked away from the warmth of the fire, away from the laughter of my colleague, and approached the heavy wooden doors of the sanctuary. They were unlocked. I pushed them open with a heavy groan and stepped into the dark.

The air inside was stale and heavy with the scent of old dust and melting wax. The wooden doors slammed shut behind me with a resounding thud, cutting off the sounds of the town outside. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the dim light filtering through the grime coated windows, aided meekly by a bunch of weak incandescent bulbs. The sanctuary was small and entirely empty save for a few wooden benches near the back walls.

Two figures stood near the front of the nave.

One was a tall Caucasian man, looking to be in his early thirties. He possessed an unnatural level of physical fitness, radiating an aura that made my own failing joints ache in jealousy. He was dressed all wrong for the Iraqi desert. He wore a heavy trench coat, dark sunglasses, and a bowler hat.

During my younger days in The Union, I had seen men who carried themselves with that exact same intimidating posture. He gave off the distinct, chilling vibe of a spy, but there was something fundamentally stranger about him that I could not immediately identify.

The second figure was an ancient, wizened man standing at his side. He was impossibly old, far surpassing both my own age and the man cooking carp in the square. His skin was folded and draped over his frail bones in deep, permanent ridges. Looking at his frail posture, I joked to myself that it was possible he was old enough to have personally witnessed the construction of the ancient ruins we were traveling north to excavate.

He leaned heavily on a bright yellow walking stick that stood out vividly against the drab grey concrete of the church interior.

The loud creak of the door hinges had drawn their attention. Both men turned their heads to stare at me as I stood frozen in the entryway. I braced myself for a confrontation, my muscles tensing out of pure habit, but the ancient man simply offered a kindly, disarming smile. The expression was completely warm and punctuated by an utter...

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