Prometheus leapt ashore, then extended a hand to her. When Pandora took it, he hefted her onto the platform. Thetis swam alongside them, guiding them to a small sailboat just a bit larger than the boat they’d left. Small enough for one person to sail it, though she doubted it would do well if he tried to make a crossing over the full Thalassa.
Which meant he must have somewhere else on this island in mind. Prometheus climbed aboard.
Pandora cast a last glance back at the polis that had been her home. The Pleiades were dead, and maybe Zeus and his minions would have tracked her down if she stayed. Maybe not, though. She was just a mortal. There was a chance she could have slipped back into her life.
But then, if she refused Prometheus, she’d never have access to the mysteries he presented. Never solve this puzzle. And was her life in Atlantis truly so blessed she could not stand to leave it?
So, she took his hand and hopped onboard.
Part II
With Ambrosia forbidden to Man, it was, perhaps inevitable that someone would attempt to concoct a facsimile. Thus were the Silver and Bronze Ages plagued by the blight of Nectar. The nature of its underground distribution muddles any attempt to accurately uncover exactly where it began, but records indicate there were multiple variants of the brew. One thing seems certain, however. While Nectar did offer some facsimile of the benefits of Ambrosia, it also caused a rapid onset of madness, violence, and, on occasion, complete metamorphosis.
— Kleio, Analects of the Muses
9
Pyrrha
216 Golden Age
At fifteen, Pyrrha found she could shift her focus to embrace the Sight without the aid of death. At will, she could look across the Veil and perceive the cavalcade of shades who flitted through Thebes and its harbor. Outside the city, the ghosts grew fewer in number while the sense of other, older presences watching intensified.
As on this misty evening, while she wandered the woods beyond the polis, ever searching for sign of spirits. Men told tales of dryads or other sylvan denizens lurking just beyond the bounds of civilization, and though she felt the presence of something she could not name, she rarely saw sign of aught besides ghosts in the twisted shadows of the Penumbra.
She found no dryads, though she saw trees here bent back in unnatural angles such that one could imagine they writhed with some alien presence inside. In the deepest dark of midnight, she sought for keres, but found none. In the midst of raging storms, she had stared defiance into the lightning, scouring the clouds for the signs of harpies. No, the only spirits she ever saw were the Telkhines, those sirens of Pontus pledged to Tethys.
It had grown so dark that, even with the lamp in hand, it had become a challenge to see the roots before her, so Pyrrha began to wend her way back to the harbor. Once again, she looked into the shadows of the Underworld and saw no sign of the greater powers she knew lurked out there. But that night, three years back, she had felt the presence of a colossal will, and it would not hide from her forever.
As she drew closer to the polis, the numbers of shades increased. More men and women lived in Thebes, so naturally, more died there. The wandering shades seemed most oft those who met violent or perfidious ends. Pyrrha could only guess such deaths left them feeling trapped here, wanting retribution for slights perceived or real. Sometimes, even, she had been able to exchange words with a ghost. Their voices seemed wispy and tattered, their speech more susurrations than fully formed words. When she understood them at all, she heard only lamentation.
The procession of the dead seemed endless, shades bemoaning their pain—death did not seem to abate it, at least not for those trapped upon the edge of the Underworld—and demanding she act against whoever had wronged them. Once, she met the ghost of a man who accused his brother of murdering him and claiming his wife. In an attempt to assuage the shade’s pain, Pyrrha had sought after the murderer, only to find he had died himself in the Ambrosial War fifteen years ago. When she had told the ghost, his wails had only redoubled, and he cursed the Fates that his brother would never face retribution.
The hatred in his eyes had scourged her soul and left Pyrrha trembling, afraid to shut her eyes, much less venture out at night. The terror had persisted for days. In the end, she had been left to wonder, even had she found the murderer and somehow gotten the magistrate to prosecute him, would the ghost have even still found another reason to lament his Fate? Was the murder itself a mere focal point for directing misery? Was peace an illusion the dead strove for but could never actually find?
Out in the brume, a female figure drifted, her hair and dress wispy, her skin pale as moonlight. At first, Pyrrha took her for another shade, but her weeping, while Ethereal, sounded more real than that of most shades. For that matter, why was the mist so thick in the Penumbra? “Wait!” Pyrrha called, chasing after the woman. But the figure vanished out into the vapors as though she had never been.
Had that been a lampad? A spirit of Mist? She’d heard Nymphs speak of them before, some even claimed that great numbers of them had come to foretell death before Kronos’s assault on Thebes.
Dashing through the mist, Pyrrha chased after the spirit. Ahead, she heard the muted roar of the waterfall north of Thebes. Within the Penumbra, the water lost substance, and thus the falls became more a whisper. In her hurry, her foot caught on something and Pyrrha pitched face forward onto the shadowy ground. The impact jarred her.
By the time she had her senses, it felt as though the land had begun
