The air inside was dry and cool, matching well with the cold gray stone the place was built from. Everywhere he looked, motifs of dragons wound their ways around columns and archways, a hypnotic labyrinth of elaborate scroll work.
The traveler felt beckoned inward, and made his way further and further, down empty passage after empty passage. The temple was ancient and looked to have built generation upon generation, winding downward and inward to some eldritch core.
The silence grew louder than any noise he’d ever heard. Even his footsteps faded instantly, sucked into the sonic vacuum of the strange structure. His sense of place and space began to fade, and his sense of time along, till he walked an impossibly long time, searching for the center.
Eventually, he came to it; and his disappointment was insurmountable. Just a bare chamber, a long neglected altar. Not even the sconces remained, the once sacred space pillaged long ago for everything not nailed down.
Then he began to feel it…a real and direct sensation, he reached out through time and found a different version of the place, one brimming with life and vibrant worship. A time and place now gone, but perhaps not gone forever.
He made his camp there, in the grand inner sanctum of the shrine of all dragons, and ate a simple meal of boiled noodles seasoned with a sauce he picked up from one of his village’s victims. His meager campfire lit lurid shadows on the ancient sculptures, and it wouldn’t have been hard for anyone’s imagination to run wild with hallucinations of the ancient past. He slept soundly for all this, at least until the dreams began.
