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 …
The voice bombarded her, even as it had come to her in dreams down through her years. It had known. It bombarded against the inside of her skull with all the discordant force of Supernal invocations, as if able to bend reality to its whims.
Was that Python speaking in her mind? She had not dared to believe the drakon could hold such power. Ahead, she once more heard mammoth grating of scales over stone. The slithering was intermittent, as if the massive serpent only sought to reposition itself on occasion. Nevertheless, Pyrrha winced with each grinding echo.
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.
All breath ceased for her and Pyrrha’s heart seized up, even as she collapsed to her knees.
The eye was bigger than she was. It looked inside her, scourging her soul to its pith with its alien regard. The force of it ravaged her, left her trembling and paralyzed.
… DRINK AND … BECOME …
With painful slowness, she managed to turn her head. Then, in the recesses of the tunnel, her torchlight glinted off some liquid that seemed not quite water.
The eye shut, plunging the cavern into greater darkness once more, and the mammoth serpent slithered forward, parading a wall of endless coils in its passage.
Released from its hold, Pyrrha found she could move once more. And had dawdled far too long already. In such places, it felt she would never again look upon the light of the sun. Almost weeping, she edged her way forward until she reached the pool of it. The surface reflected her like a mirror, silvery and perfectly still.
Having no idea what would happen when she drank it, Pyrrha decided to scoop a draught up in a waterskin. With that claimed, she quickly fled the tunnel, retreating until she found the small passage she had crawled through.
Casting a last glance over her shoulder—and seeing no sign of the serpent—she forced her way out.
Almost completely bereft of drachmae, Pyrrha didn’t expect to find shelter within the fort. Instead, she headed into the woods beneath the mountain, found a sheltered glade, and built a small fire. With her campsite secured, she unstopped the waterskin and sniffed the substance she claimed from those catacombs.
It had a faint acrid scent to it but otherwise seemed unremarkable. So … Had she done all this just to toss the stuff away? Maybe she should. Themis had made no secret that some who touched the drakon essence died from it.
And Python itself was monstrous beyond words. Something so far removed from human experience as to shame conceptions of knowledge.
But within this liquid was power. Unmitigated, unbridled power she could imbibe and make part of herself. Everything she had ever sought could be hers with a little more strength.
So why in Nyx’s dark bosom should she turn back now?
She threw back the skin and took a long swig. Thick, viscous fluid poured down her throat, its bitter bite souring her mouth. She gagged almost immediately. Gods, she needed pure water. She stood with the intent to head for a nearby brook she’d seen, but her knees gave way and sent her tumbling to the ground. Her stomach convulsed.
Darkness seized her.
Pyrrha cradled the gray-eyed babe, dabbing her finger against the newborn’s hand in hopes of getting her to grab it with her own tiny digits. The girl stared at her, wide-eyed, hand half closing around her finger.
“Aww. That’s it, Mama’s got you. Mama’s always got you.”
Her midwife moved about the plush chamber around her, gathering up rags and towels. “Are you well, my lady?”
Pyrrha was perfect and graced the midwife with a smile. “Well enough, Eileithyia. Well enough, for certain.”
The door was flung open before Eileithyia could say aught in answer, and Zeus billowed in, his platinum hair flowing about him.
“Well,” he demanded.
“A beautiful baby girl,” Pyrrha said, beaming.
Zeus, though, seemed to deflate, and he shook his head. “A girl.” Was it scorn in his voice, or just disappointment?
Either way, Pyrrha frowned at him. “What should we call her?”
Zeus shrugged, apparently beyond all care for the birth now. “Whatever suits you.”
Pyrrha groaned, pulling herself out of the weirdly vibrant dream. People she’d never met had felt as real as though she knew them. Was that a hallucination induced by imbibing drakon filth or a prophetic dream? She tried to rise, only to find vines had grown up around her wrists and ankles.
“What the …?” A surge of panic seized her, and she tugged on the plants holding her
