Flailing from the sudden removal of the wall beside her, Pandora pitched over sideways and landed upon a muddy bank. The late afternoon sun glinted off a waterway in front of her. As she pushed herself up, any doubt of her location vanished. The hints of aquamarine striating the marmoreal walls that rose up from the canal, those she would know anywhere.
Atlantis.
The Box had really brought her back. Small ships and boats wended around each other in an intricate dance to navigate the canal. Some aboard the boats stared at her, perhaps mistaking her for a common prostitute down here seeking custom. Unwilling to let anyone see it, she stuffed the Box inside her satchel.
The earthen wall across the way meant she stood in the middle ring, looking at the acropolis island. Just beyond her location, a mighty bridge spanned the water, the deer reliefs announcing she gazed up at the underside of Taygete’s Bridge, though she’d never spied it from down here. Across from her, marble stairs offered a return to street level.
Pausing only to brush the mud from her peplos—the garment would look rather archaic, she supposed, but it was all she had—she climbed the steps. For a moment, she had to just stare in rapt wonder at the glory of the city. Though she could not see aught of the grandeur of acropolis island beyond the earthen wall, still, even the middle ring glinted like a marble mountain worked with a thousand intricate ridges.
She allowed herself a moment to take it all in. It felt like another lifetime when she had lived here. Another Pandora, in fact. While she could not say she missed this place, as such, still, it remained thick with memories for her. Not all of them terrible, she supposed.
But she did not belong here now. For the moment, she needed to focus on a way to reach the gate to Tartarus beneath Zeus’s palace. Spoken aloud, the obstacle would have seemed insurmountable. For who could breach the most secure location in the scope of the World? But she would, of that she had no doubt. There was no room for failure. Not in this.
To find the way forward, though, she needed time and information. As much knowledge as possible. Though the Pleiades were gone, the acropolis itself had a fine library. If Pandora could flatter or inveigle her way in, maybe she’d find a way to reach Tartarus without dying in the process.
At the threshold of Taygete’s Bridge, she faltered, though. A woman striding across, a Nymph, met her gaze, and the other woman’s eyes widened. That was the Oracle Brizo. The Oracle stumbled backward a step, hand going to her mouth. At seeing Pandora? Why would she even recognize—
A tremendous rumbling reverberated through the polis, like the growl of a momentous drakon waking beneath the city. Pandora cocked her head to the side, not quite certain what was happening. Brizo fell back once more, shaking her head.
Dust and loose debris trembled upon the ground, and just in front of Pandora a flagstone edged upward. A tremor had Pandora swaying in place, steadying herself with her arms.
Then the land bucked like a ship caught in a tempest.
A wave passed under the ground. All around it, the stones rent themselves asunder, heaving skyward, ripping great gorges open. Sulphuric vapors and geysers of seawater erupted from these fissures, grasping toward the setting sun.
The cacophony of destruction drowned out the screams of the population, though Pandora saw the utter terror that washed over the entirety of Atlantis as though they were a single organism. She saw it writ plain upon Brizo’s face as their gazes locked once more. No, not mere dread of mortal danger, but the abhorrence of a foreknown doom.
With a grinding shriek, Taygete’s Bridge pitched inward. Brizo vanished into a crunch of stone raining down into the canal.
Turning to run, Pandora screamed herself, though she couldn’t hear her own voice. A rushing, panicked crowd jostled her and sent her stumbling. A cluster of legs slammed into her, sending her satchel skidding away, and she threw herself forward, fingers grasping it. It skittered forward, just out of reach.
Another wave seized the island, this one even more calamitous. The geysers that had erupted in scattered patches now spilled over into one another. From her knees, Pandora watched the fissure flense through the city, and beyond, through the whole of the island.
The land adjacent to her tipped over at an angle, spilling hundreds of fleeing refugees into the rapidly expanding gorge. Beyond, upon Evenor Mountain, flashes of lightning illumined a jet-black cloud that had encircled the peak. Bright, galvanic arcs that seemed ready to blow apart the very bedrock of Atlantis, even as these quakes swallowed the city.
More and more of the flagstones cracked, great sheets of terrain turning nigh vertical.
As Atlantis literally split in half.
And Pandora had no idea what had happened to her satchel.
Scrambling, she managed hands and knees, stumbling forward through the surging crowd who fled in all directions. More knees jostled her, sent her sprawling once more. The land continued to heave, and a stone gave way beneath her.
With a shriek, Pandora fell a half dozen feet to where a flagstone had settled below street level.
Oh, fuck. Not like this! Not like this, after everything!
A woman wearing a crimson khiton hopped down beside her, offering a hand. Pandora grasped it and was hefted to her feet. She met the other woman’s gaze.
It was her. She was looking in a mirror at another Pandora.
And the other Pandora held the Box in her free hand. “We don’t have much time.”
The Cycle Continues …
Next Book: Eight hundred years after the fall of the Old Kingdoms, Man struggles to survive. Odin, an Ás jarl, must lead his people. But when a goddess offers a chance at immortality, everything changes.
The Apples of Idunn: books2read.com/mlapples
Epilogue
221 Golden Age
The
