Ah, but they liked their mysteries, and so far as Pyrrha knew, Tethys alone understood much about their society or nature. Still, she kept casting glances out over the waters as she plodded along the beach.
That, and searching the shore for sign of ghosts. “Where are you?” she dared to call out, some distance from the harbor.
She didn’t really expect an answer and didn’t get one. Just the whistling wind and the rhythmic lap of the sea, and the fall of her sandals upon wet sand.
Gods, she knew there were entities out there, beside her, just beyond her perception. But she couldn’t make her vision shift into that Realm just for wishing it. Death brought it on. Would catching a crab or something be enough to trigger the visions?
Probably not.
Sighing, she made her way to a seaside cave she sometimes visited. It rose but a little ways above the water, and the tide had probably cut away the stone in some distant past. Now, it acted as an overhang just deep enough to provide shelter and privacy.
With a frustrated moan, she wrapped her arms around her knees. The answers were right here, but she couldn’t reach them. Papa certainly knew more than he’d said, but all he would ever tell her was that she was fine. That she was precious and should enjoy her childhood. Play in the sea, eat the sweet breads, and run for the joy of it.
Not that any of that sounded so awful, just that, how was she supposed to appreciate little things when great mysteries lay close enough to feel them breathe upon the back of her neck? She was special … she had to use that …
She was crawling through a tunnel, torch out ahead of her. Prodigious, squirming shadows encircled her, almost seeming to tug at her wrists and ankles, making it feel she waded through a mire. Grunting with the effort, she pushed ever forward.
Ahead, the passage grew narrower, and she had to turn sideways to fit. Pyrrha shoved the torch in first, then twisted, wedging herself inward. Why was she pressing on? Should she turn back?
The thought came to her, and yet her body kept moving, summoned by some … presence … deep within the mountain. She could not say how far underground she had delved, but deep.
Was this … a dream?
Rough stone scraped her cheek. Warmth dribbled down her chin and neck. The passage forced her to worm through it, seeming to close in around her with each foot forward. What if it grew too tight? What if she couldn’t turn back and got stuck in here, alone? Would she die of thirst, screaming herself raw for help that could never find her?
The vision of such hit her, and its terror actually made tears rise up at the fringes of her eyes.
And still she could not make herself turn back. Deeper and deeper, until the passage opened up into a wide cave, the base of which lay several feet below the opening she was in. Despite her attempts at grace, Pyrrha tumbled from her point of ingress, pitching down onto the chilled floor of the greater cavern with a pained grunt. Her torch clattered down beside her and lay there, flames dancing in front of her face.
She was lucky she hadn’t singed herself.
With a huff, she rose to her knees, snatching up the torch to look around. She was in a wide tunnel, but her torchlight failed to reach both sides of the space at once. The cave was smoother than she’d have thought, with no stalagmites and few stalactites. Was this a lava tube?
Forcing herself to rise, she turned about. She couldn’t say which way she was meant to go since the tube seemed to vanish into darkness in both directions. Maybe it didn’t matter.
Picking a direction, she plodded onward. Her sandals echoed faintly upon the stone beneath her, her steps drawn forward though she could not have said why. Her flesh had grown clammy with chill sweat, and she cast a single furtive glance behind herself. The expanse in both directions seemed a fathomless darkness.
A sick sensation began to grow inside her gut, the feeling she was not alone down here. Some monstrous, alien intellect lurked in the darkness. Was it ahead? Behind? It seemed almost omnipresent in the tenebrous tract she had intruded into, as though she had delved so deep beneath the Earth as to reach somewhere else. Somewhere inhabited by a timeless mind so momentous it spread through the whole of the mountain.
With each step she took, the sensation of wrongness increased, but still her feet refused to turn back. Then came the scraping of something rough over the stone, reverberating through the tunnel, and the sensation that whatever lurked out, she not only felt it, but it felt her.
… COME FORTH …
Pyrrha blinked awake in the darkened sea cave, heart hammering so hard as to become an actual pain in her chest. She lay drenched in sweat, shivering and sick from the nightmare she’d seen. Nightmares had long haunted her, but this went to a new level of verisimilitude.
And that voice … Had she heard it before?
Daring not sleep more, she lay in the cave, staring out at the ocean, afraid to close her eyes until pink dawn painted the sky. No, she was afraid even then.
In the early morn, she returned to the harbor, then climbed the stairs cut into the cliff, making her slow way back to Thebes. The city lay far, far above the harbor, and the climb always winded her a bit. Which was fine, she took the time to pause halfway to the landing and take in the view of the waterfall beyond the city and the brilliant cobalt of the Aegean. Today, though, not even that cut through the panic of what she’d dreamt or the horror in the night that had
