Her fist trembled at her side. Every instinct bellowed at her to flee this place, crawl back into the tiny tunnel from which she had emerged, and never look back.
COME FORTH … BRIGHT ONE … YOUR MIND SCRAPES THE ABYSS … SO VIBRANT …
An Old One, Tethys had called Python. A creature from before time itself, spawned by the fathomless Primordials.
It beckoned, and she approached. She plodded further down the tunnel, until her torchlight glinted off a jagged wall ahead. An abrupt sense of cyclopean immensity settled upon her, as if the Earth itself reared before her, alive and aberrant, utterly beyond the scope of comprehension.
YES …
An incandescent eye opened in the wall before her, its faint radiance adumbrating the shape of a saurian head rimmed with a thicket of broken horns and spines.
She would wake each morn, drenched in chill sweat, aware of the essence of the dreams, while the substance had faded.
There was no turning back.
10
Pandora
1570 Silver Age
As it turned out, Prometheus used their small ship to skirt the coast of Atlantis, offering her a view of the magnificent landscape she’d never really experienced. Even from far off, the great Evenor Mountain seemed to scrape the stars. For a time she watched the coastline, then huddled down amidst some blankets, arms wrapped around herself.
Exhaustion had snared her of a sudden, the night’s wild flight catching up all at once. Prometheus nodded as if to tell her to rest, and she did.
When next she opened her eyes, the sun had risen, glinting brilliantly off cobalt waters, almost blinding in its radiance. Away from the polis, natural beauty dominated Atlantis, with woodland covering most of the southern peninsula. She judged they must be cresting around that now. Prometheus stood at the tiller still, apparently having moved little while she slept.
“I’m sorry about your nieces,” she said, then regretted it. Such sympathies fell so far short of being enough to salve wounds so deep. ‘Sorry that the king murdered seven members of your family in one night.’ Or six, perhaps, as Merope had left for Korinth and … Oh, damn. After Enyo’s death, Zeus must surely send someone after her as well.
“Thank you.” His voice was dry, scratchy. He didn’t seem to have wept in the night, though he certainly looked as though he could have used it. “Rest a bit more. It’ll be hours still until we make Marsa.”
“Where’s Marsa?”
“The port on Ogygia.”
A small island off the coast of Atlantis. It explained why he’d only needed this tiny ship. Ogygia was ruled by Kelaino’s daughter, wasn’t it? Would they be safe even there?
Not knowing what to say, Pandora lay back and watched the clouds passing overhead.
Upon a precipice on the western shore of Atlantis stood a modest temple, jutting up like a boulder topping the cliff. Based on the location, it had to be Brizo’s temple. Seeing it refreshed the Oracle’s warning from yesterday. As Brizo had promised, Atlantis had fallen. The dynasty that had ruled for sixteen centuries was wiped out in a single night. Half the royal palace had probably burned down, and Pandora didn’t even want to guess at the number of souls sent screaming down to Hades in the Underworld.
Beyond that precipice, they broke away, for the smaller island of Ogygia. It was dominated by a single mountain that covered most of the land, with light woods poking out from the rocky coastline around it. They made port at a harbor on the southern shore that, after the grandeur of Atlantis, seemed quaint. The town of Marsa proper lay up a dirt path a bit, in the foothills beneath the mountain.
Prometheus pointed. “I have a home here, upon the mountain slope. My Aviary, the locals call it.” Aviary? For birds? Pandora loved birds. “We’ll be safe there. They cannot find you here, while you are with me.”
“Because you’re an Oracle.” Was that, after all, not what pyromancy meant? Diving hidden truths from the fire.
He glanced her way, brow raised.
“And even if they had another Oracle, they couldn’t see you. Your visions interfere with each other, yes?”
A hint of a smile was her only answer, but she was almost certain she was right. Certainly, Zeus had Oracles working for him, divining the future, spying on his foes. So the only reason she could imagine Prometheus could be certain they’d be hidden was if he knew none of Zeus’s Oracles could see him.
“I need to make a stop,” he said when they reached the town. They’d passed a few spice farms before reaching the center of Marsa. Here they saw a modest market, fragrant with the scents of cloves and marjoram and a dozen other spices. Workers bustled about, packing these goods into barrels, oblivious to how their world had just changed. “Kalypso needs to hear about her mother.”
It was another punch to Pandora’s gut. A task dreaded, though inevitable. Necessity—Ananke—demanded Prometheus carry it forth before she could hear the news from someone else. The bolt that had slain Kelaino had surely come from Zeus himself, even as he had murdered Alkoune.
Rumor traveled with the swiftness of Aeolus’s winds. Word would come of the massacre soon, and then there would be the panic, the chaos of not knowing who their new overlord would be.
Another thought struck her. With the Pleiades dead, Zeus could appoint whomever he wished to oversee Atlantis. Which meant overseeing the Ambrosial distribution. Was all of it, even the Nectar propagation, a veneer for his political maneuver? Did the king think it unwise to simply execute Atlas’s daughters without charge and thus find something to accuse them of? Did it rankle him that Nymphs not directly loyal
