The flaming, ancient sun hung high over their heads and beat down on them harshly, as the surrounding edifices shaped in triangles pointed ever toward it from their tips. They sat on a large rock jutting into the Nile river, its ripples colored an infected orange. It melted the rock away slowly with the lapping of the small waves, a remnant of the storm.
Egypt, who rarely spoke, said, "Thank you."
Greece shielded his lightly toasted face against the heat, and nodded carefully. His hair was in tangles brushing against his skin, and his eyes narrowed. Usually in this weather he would collapse in a desire to sleep, but he was so focused now that the thought didn't occur to him. He wondered what to say next.
"It's beautiful here still," the brunet mustered, "after all that's happened."
"I am only grateful to see the sky once more without the heavy shroud of black," Egypt said, his simple headgarb lining his face as he gazed into the hazy distance.
Greece made a low sound in agreement. Looking down at the steady northbound flowing of the river, he felt as though he had reached the most fertile place in the world, only to find it ransacked by the gods. "I understand. Given the similar conditions of my own country, I am grateful for our spared survival as well. I only lament to say that she..."
"Atlantis."
"...was not nearly as fortunate," Greece said carefully, looking away from his friend. "My people broke out in boils and remain very ill, though I knew to make attempt to find her right away while there still may have been time, as vulnerable as she had been. When crossing the waters, I feared the worst. I thought to myself, 'if only she had been closer to me, or to Gupta perhaps...'"
Egypt folded his hands in his lap as his gaze moved stoically across the horizon.
"...though that was before I discovered that it would not have made her any sort of difference. If it were the case, it would have surely destroyed either of us."
"She thought the mountain so beautiful," Egypt murmured.
The rippling sound of the river seemed to drown out their thoughts, trailing away into the gaping mouth of the delta beyond. The flight of a snowy egret, for a moment, made an imprint on the sun god's face before collapsing into the riverbank and stepping carefully through the poisoned reeds. Their mourning, though intuitive and premature, was picked open fresh again by this affirmation.
"The disease, the swarms, the darkness, the quakes. The river still runs red. My people believe that it was the work of a desert god," Egypt lamented, "though it was from the north the black fog came. In the fervor of this new religion, and with the magnitude of their violent despair, they will believe anything."
Greece sighed. "So where does this put the rest? Perhaps the greatest mind our world has ever seen was cut away by the scissors of fate. Is our future entirely lost?"
"She was young," Egypt responded.
"Stolen before the world could discover her. Were we wrong to keep her sheltered?"
Egypt sat staring ahead. Greece was looking at him, looking into his dark eyes, his distress a claw tightening its grip upon the flesh of his face.
"Well? Were we?" Greece's fingers grasped the edge of the stone like a weapon. "Was it up to us? Could we have foreseen it? Do we deserve this famine, Gupta? What can we possibly..."
He stopped. Their eyes never caught; they didn't need to. Greece was becoming more upset, his face colored now, his motions sharpened by the knife being driven into his heart.
"...Has justice been served upon the guilty?"
"Served before they could see our daughter's beautiful smile," Egypt said quietly.
The sun slid slowly in the sky back to its home under the Western Earth, catching shadows of the wreckage wrought for miles before them. Their seat was a recent toy thrown to bits by the grinding chaos that dispersed as slowly as it came; their scene was slowing to a halt.
Greece's body began to weaken as his head sunk into Egypt's shoulder.
In the second millennium BC, the ancient island culture of Thera suffered a massive volcanic eruption that completely destroyed it, and brought physical disaster to the landlocked nations surrounding it as well. Since Thera existed in the Aegean Sea between Greece and Egypt, two of the most developed cultures in the world at the time, it's imaginable how advanced the people of Thera must have been. Due to the island's isolation from other nations, however, only myths of its existence had survived up until recent centuries. It has been speculated that the doomed culture of Thera and the lost continent of Atlantis were one and the same. It has also been asserted that the ten plagues that struck Egypt in the book of Exodus actually occurred, and were all parts of a massive fallout from the same volcanic eruption.