the force of which would be felt on the surface of the sea as a directionless wave. The ships of Jason's fleet were tossed about like children's toys as the sound and the swells grew in size and violence. Finally, the two great halves could not withstand the attack and started to crumble in earnest. In addition, the cascading effect cracked the very surface of the great sea bottom. The two plate edges crumbled and collapsed and two miles of the restraining edges fell apart, and the two plates, having nothing to hold them back, whip-cracked and slammed into each other at over a hundred kilometers per hour, creating a ripple effect that was broadcast to the seabed the plates held above them.
The first devastating effect after the two halves collided created a great chasm in the seafloor, not the effect the Atlantean scientist had anticipated. Instead of the force being pushed up and out, it went down. The madman had been seeking a tidal wave of immense proportions that would swallow up the invading fleet of Greek warships, a wave that would eventually wash up on the northern coast of the barbarians' homeland. With Atlantis sitting high against the mainland to the north and south, they themselves would be protected against the tidal surge. But instead the seabed lurched upward and the supporting volcanic lava lake beneath cascaded into a void of a great, widening chasm, taking the sandy bottom of the Mediterranean with it, and that was followed quickly by the sea itself.
Lookouts perched on the tallest structures and Crystal Dome of the main city of Lygos watched as a giant eruption of water rose into the northern sky. At first it rose a quarter of a kilometer into the air, carrying Jason's armada toward the clouds as it went. The lookouts started cheering from every defensive wall of the land as they watched the complete and utter destruction of the barbarians. As the sea started its downward plunge, drowning and crushing twenty thousand Greeks as it did, they watched in awe as the waters started to spin in a whirlpool of enormous magnitude. It spread outward as the seafloor opened beneath, taking the remains of smashed ships and men down into a crazily spinning vortex of death.
The cheers stopped as the walls and parapets started to shake beneath their sandaled feet. An earthquake unlike anything they had ever felt before started to gain in intensity and the very air became a warbled wave of displacement.
The great invisible sound wave had ceased; its crushing effect had done its job as the great sound bells cascaded into the void where the seafloor had been. However, the sand and rock continued to slide into the immense fabricated cavern until it struck the lava that flowed beneath the two great plates two miles below the surface of the sea.
Talos knew that something had gone wrong as the look on the face of Pythos went from one of ecstasy to one of sheer terror when the floor beneath them began to tremble. In the giant chamber a mile beneath Atlantis, the general heard a great crack as if the earth's back had been shattered. It was the sound of the colliding plates sending their killing force back to the source.
The look on the old man's face was frightening as he turned and ran for the copper barrel. He hurriedly threw the top up and reached inside just as a tremendous shaking started in the subterranean cavern. He ripped out the copper line and spike even as flames erupted on his hands, melting the flesh upon them. He screamed in agony and then lifted the glowing-hot diamond from its cradle. His eyes were maniacal as he turned to Talos.
'We must get to the surface!' the old man screamed as the glowing diamond fell to the stone floor. He stared around him in shock at the failure of his life's dream, and then he slowly started to stumble forward toward the tunnel that led to the shelter far beneath the cavern.
Talos calmly reached out and grabbed the old man by the arm as he tried to run past the last of the great Titans.
'You will stay to see the end result of your witchery, old one!'
As he spoke, the floor beneath them opened and lava spewed forth to cover the running slaves and cowering guards. Then, a rush of seawater swallowed even the eruption as portions of the giant cavern disappeared into the void that had opened beneath them. The last to fall was the great paddlewheel.
A mile above the cavern, Androlicus watched as the great columns started to tumble inside the Empirium Chamber, but the immense crystals that made up the geodesic dome held firm against the natural forces arrayed against it.
As the old man watched the end of the world start to unfold around him, he quickly reached for the knife he had saved for the inevitable conclusion of his civilization. He raised the sharp blade high, but just as he started to strike his chest over his beating heart, the city started to slip and rise. His last thoughts as the ceiling of marble crushed the life from him:
As panicked citizens ran from the crumbling walls, they had no sense of the cataclysm that was literally sucking their great island from beneath their feet. At first it was just the outer edges that vanished in an eruption of lava and seawater, then more and more went as trees would in a strong wind; first a wave of earth rose thirty feet as it smashed toward the main city, then the very ground broke in and fell.
All at once, with nothing below the island to hold its weight, it simply folded up like a book closing, and the great three rings of Atlantis, a thousand kilometers in diameter, slammed together, burying the intact Crystal Dome in its center as the main island slid beneath the waves. Atlantis vanished into fire and water. And as the earth settled and a terrifying silence grew, the two tectonic plates beneath the island started to settle into their new homes, fifteen kilometers from their original position.
Ten thousand years of civilization disappeared in less than three minutes, the seafloor swallowing it whole. The earthquake--the largest in the history of the planet--had other effects as the great shaking coursed along the fault lines that had been so meticulously and wrongly mapped for hundreds of centuries. The twig-and-mud huts of Egypt and Greece were vaporized as the earth jumped and settled. The sea emptied around the isles of Sparta, creating a large barren spot that would five thousand years later become the Sparta plain. The sea rushed from the shores of Africa and drained into the gaping maw of the wounded earth. The sea retreated as the coastline of modern northern Egypt saw the light of day for the first time, and then the earthquake swallowed whole the barbarian slaves that had come so near to freedom. A population of nearly a million souls was cut down to twenty thousand.
The wave of power continued through the large mountains to the north, crumbling and crushing the barbarians beneath tons of rock, to set their own civilizations back four thousand years. The full length and breadth of Italy made its first appearance as its leading edges fell into the void, but would soon be covered by the retreating waters, until again it rose from the unsettled sea a month later.
The fault line continued to crumble all the way to the Pillars of Heracles. The wave of earth actually made the small mountain range of the pillars jump and then quickly collapse back, creating a difference in height of one- quarter mile in its features and separating the future land of Spain from its African neighbor. The great western ocean started its run into the Atlantean-Africanus Plain, washing away all the features of ten million years. The great sea filled the void left by the Atlantean science, coming together with tidal force that sent water and earth a kilometer into the air, creating, through rain and smoke, a new ice age.
The waters vented their murderous rage into the lands of barbaric Troy and Mesopotamia, creating a great new sea where only a freshwater lake had been before, and would become the great Black Sea. Still the waters roared forth, creating their own weather system, which, on their march east, created the rains and the great flood that would eventually lead to the legends of Gilgamesh and Noah.
The sea took forty days to recede into the basin where the continent of Atlantis once sat. The rush of seawater crushed the lives of almost everything living north and south of the Mediterranean. In the south, the flood still followed the jagged line of the Nile River into Ethiopia, where the remains of a once-great civilization would be buried for thousands of years in a bleak landscape of desert.
The earth would rumble and shift for five years as the world of the West and Middle East settled into the vast area the modern world would come to be known as the Mediterranean Basin.
The Age of Enlightenment was over and the battle of man was just beginning. The last act of a surviving boat crew and citizens of Atlantis, the last of the great Greek gods as they were once thought of, was to bury, on behalf of a forward-thinking Androlicus, the great secrets of science and technology, the very history of a vanished world, and a dire warning of consequence of mind and arrogance. But most of all, the great treasure of Atlantis was safe, and the very means to end the world were hidden a thousand miles from where the Ancients had invented it, where Androlicus hoped that the great chart could never be matched with the weapon again.
However, the arrogance and the desire of some men to hold sway over their brothers would arise repeatedly, as sure as the sun had risen on that last day of the Ancients.
