VII-Into the Dark
Lara looked up from the scuba tanks at her feet, taking a moment to drink in the scenery. The bright blue water of the southern Aegean Sea glittered in the sun, lapping softly against the sides of the pleasure craft. The small island of Kimolos, green and peppered with exposed rock, jutted out of the water a quarter of a mile away. Excluding a few distant fishing boats the day before, she was alone, over ninety miles from the heart of Athens.
It was a great day to do a little diving.
She turned her attention back to the tanks in front of her, making sure that the air within was flowing. Satisfied that it worked, she turned around, fastening a weight belt around her waist over the black wetsuit that she wore.
"Almost ready?"
Lara looked behind her. Marc was sitting on edge of the boat's low stern, clad in his own dive gear, tightening a strap on his tanks.
"Almost," she replied, reaching for the wicked-looking dive knife on a nearby bench. She fastened the long knife against her calf, the sun warmed plastic sheath hot against her bare skin.
While she hated rushing things, Lara understood his need for haste: the world was indeed going mad. They'd barely made it to Greece in the first place, beating out the travel restrictions that most governments had put in place. The world economy was fluctuating wildly, and it had cost Lara more than one pretty penny to get the equipment, provisions, and weapons that they needed. A handy brick, empty guard shack, and a little skill at a pricy boating club dock had gotten them the boat, a knife-like Sunseeker Predator 75. Not too bad, Lara mused, even if it didn't have the…helpful…modifications that her own back home sported. She had no qualms about "borrowing" the boat; there was a war on, after all.
They had been listening to the boat's radio nonstop since they had left the shore. All around the world, governments were either crumbling or coming into conflict with each other. The Korean peninsula was in a state of open war, and Russia and China were starting to trade threats. The government in Mexico had been completely overthrown, the chaos spreading like wildfire into South America with coup after coup. A hastily-forged Iran-Iraq-Saudi alliance had already taken over diminutive Kuwait and Qatar, and was beginning to mass troops along the Israeli border. India, Pakistan, Bosnia, Palestine…and of course, the United States caught with its fingers in all of the pies. It was as if every bitter rivalry and political dispute had exploded in one horrible moment, the pressure cooker of global conflict finally blowing its lid.
And all Lara and her guardian could do was push the boat's throttles to their stops, filled with a terrible and inexplicable urge to hurry.
Marc helped fit her tanks onto her shoulders before they both fitted their masks onto their faces. A thumbs up, and he leaned back, falling into the water with a splash. Lara slipped the regulator between her teeth, holding a hand to her mask as she too left the boat, the water closing over her in a flurry of bubbles.
She righted herself a moment later, looking around her and getting her bearings. The water remained clear under the surface, shafts of yellow light sparkling down through the blue-green depths. Marc was just to the right of her, gesturing for her to follow him as he started swimming towards the base of the island. Lara was right behind him, cutting through the water like an arrow, her eyes searching all around her for any sign of anything unusual. They continued on like that for several minutes, the silence of the ocean covering them like a blanket.
The base of the island came up suddenly in front of them, a wall of stark rock towering above them. Lara's eyes widened when she realized that a doorway had been carved into the stone, surrounded by ornate carved figures and gods in the style of the ancient Greeks. Poseidon with his trident, surrounded by Oceanids—sea nymphs. Lara had seen odd things throughout the world, but the idea of Greek statuary carved underneath the ocean…
Her partner stopped in the water, checking to make sure that she was still behind him. She gave him the thumbs up and he nodded, turning back to the task at hand and stroking through the water straight towards the yawning darkness of the carved doorway. Lara followed him without hesitation, drinking in the details of the water around her as if she could sense incoming danger through the liquid.
They were forced to switch on the dive lights strapped to their wrists within ten feet of the cave's entrance, the stone of the entrance tunnel they were in closing off the light like a black hole. The temperature of the water dropped a few degrees, making Lara shiver involuntarily before her body heated the water trapped between the suit and her skin. Experienced in cave diving, she didn't let any of this bother her, following Marc and occasionally sweeping her light over the solid stone walls around them.
They swam in the darkness for over twenty minutes, occasionally passing by natural and man-made tunnels veering off at right angles to the tunnel they were in, plunging deeper into the darkness. Marc continued forward, following the main tunnel as it curved around, quickly becoming a maze. Yet Lara kept following him, trusting that he knew where he was going.
The tunnel took several more twists and turns before grey slate tiles appeared out of the darkness below them, angling upwards. Lara reached her hand out, pressing her palm against the stone for guidance as she kept following Marc, looking up and trying to make out any sort of exit in front of them.
It was so dark above the surface of the water that Lara didn't know that they had reached the surface until her tanks became heavy on her back, breaking the surface of the water and losing their buoyancy. She and Marc both stood up, using their wrist lights to cut through the gloom.
They were standing in a small, narrow grotto, no bigger than an average living room. The floor was covered knee-deep in water, making the air smell dank and musty, slime and algae glistening on the walls in the light from their lamps.
"Almost there." Marc's disembodied voice rang out in the darkness, the beam of his wrist light shining on a doorway thirty feet in front of them. "This will be easier if we leave the gear."
Lara didn't argue with him, quickly slipping out of her dive gear, setting it all on a small ledge protruding from the side of the grotto and Marc followed her example. He turned to face her in the darkness, his light sweeping over her to make sure she was behind him.
"You might want to stay behind me; this place is pretty dangerous."
"I'll keep that in mind." Lara's voice dripped with sarcasm.
"Oh. Sorry." She could hear the grimace in his tone and smirked satisfactorily.
They sloshed forward through the water without any further conversation, aiming straight for the doorway. Lara strained to hear the smallest sounds in the darkness, carefully scrutinizing the rock around her for any sign of clues or danger.
Which was why she jumped when Marc went flying backwards as if hit by a car, barely avoiding a collision with her as he was thrust back for a dozen feet, landing in the water on his back, his head disappearing under the surface.
Lara had her dive knife out before she knew it, searching the blackness in front of her with her light as she quickly stepped backwards, seeing nothing but motionless rock. She sent little waves rippling out as her hand plunged under the surface, grabbing onto a part of Marc's wetsuit and hauling his upper body above the water. Her eyes flicked rapidly from the doorway to his face, warily watching both as he coughed and gasped, spitting out a mouthful of water, looking dazed.
"Wha--?"
"Sssh!" Lara hissed, searching the darkness with all of her senses. She knew from experience that just because she couldn't see anything didn't mean that it wasn't out there…
She whirled when she saw something shimmer out of the corner of her eye, whirling around, holding her dive light and knife out in front of her.
Nothing, just the empty doorway. She was just turning away to search the darkness when she saw the shimmering again. This time, she turned slowly, sweeping the dive light over the area experimentally.
It was so subtle that it was no surprise they'd missed it the first time. A faint, nearly translucent blue shimmer filled the doorway, shifting and swirling like vapor, only visible when Lara's light swept over it, its reflection visible on the water.
Marc had slowly regained his feet beside her, holding a hand to his head in an effort to staunch the trickle of blood leaking from a jagged cut on his temple. Lara turned to him, still holding the light on the door so that the shimmer was visible.
"Do you know what that is?"
Marc peered at it a moment before frowning, looking unsettled. "I had not expected to find that here, much less one that still had power."
"What is it?" Lara asked again.
"A barrier, in a way," he said softly, stepping forward, an arm's length from the doorway. He gingerly reached his hand out, grimacing as his hand appeared to stop at a wall of solid air, shaking from some sort of violent force. He withdrew his hand, shaking it as if it had been smashed by a hammer, trying to ease the pain. "You'd call it magic, a bit of ancient sorcery designed to keep…individuals…like me out of places as powerful as this." He glanced at her, and then back at the doorway. "You could get through it."
Lara looked at him for a moment before taking a step forward. A part of her could scarcely believe what she was doing as she lifted her hand, slowly lifting it to where she knew the blue shimmer filled the doorway, fingers outstretched. She didn't realize that she'd gritted her teeth, slowly reaching out…
…and almost falling forward as her hand passed right through. Lara gently let out the breath she had been holding, looking back at Marc.
"What's back there?" Lara's tone gave him no room to even consider anything but the truth, cold and razor-sharp.
He sighed heavily, wiping blood from his forehead, cleaning it from unmarred skin. "A safeguard that's turned into a mistake," he said, looking grave. "Tiny pieces of each member of the pantheon, placed within physical vessels, assuring an eternal presence on the Earth, irregardless of how many remained faithful."
Lara's eyes widened a little as the pieces started falling into place. She knew that she was dealing with something beyond the normal, but this…"You were dying out," she said softly.
He nodded barely, "A crude way to put it, but yes-- losing our hold on the world." He shifted his feet as he shifted the scope of the conversation. "There was another site like this one at another location, but it was plundered hundreds of years ago." His eyes focused on hers. "Most of them were destroyed over time, but others survived, which is how you came into brief possession of one of these vessels. But until now no one has known just how powerful those vessels are. Someone is essentially holding a god to their will. We'll have to take the other vessel from this site before we can regain control from this person."
Her eyes slid over to the doorway, staring it down as if it were a physical enemy. "Which one? Mars?" Lara felt something ugly twist in her stomach, thinking of the violent firestorms racing over the globe as she said the ancient, savage war god's name.
Marc shook his head slowly. "Not exactly. Athena."
She bit her bottom lip, thinking for a moment, before taking a step towards the door, flipping the knife in her hand with a wry smile. "Alright then, off to recapture a Greek goddess of war."
She stepped through the door without another word, the blackness swallowing her completely, leaving Marc to wait in the dripping gloom.
~~~~~
a/n: I know this took a while and wasn't too gripping, but hang on, it's coming…
a/n2: I started this whole thing before the current Iraq, N. Korea conflicts. A real eye-opener I guess…