Hey guys, remember me, Jack Clewline? I'm that guy who was writing the Atlantis story, then a bunch of crazy s#!t happened and I was gone for a month? Good times, good times...

"Sully!"

Nate's face went underwater, then came up again. All around him the river was littered with the debris of Xu Fu's crumbling ship, and he fought and kicked to keep from getting pulled down with the wreckage.

"I'm here kid!" Sully's voice came back to him over the din.

A section of the hull shot to the surface, and the two of them smashed into it and rolled down the side until the river carried them past.

"Crap!"

"This way!"

One moment they were above water, then the next they were below, only to be spit back to the surface as another fragment of the ship rolled over and caused a surge. Nate found that trying to keep track of Sully was almost impossible, but he fought for it nonetheless. He spit filthy water from his mouth as he broke the surface, only to inhale another mouthful a moment later when the end of a beam struck him in the stomach and knocked the wind out of him. His cry of pain was stifled as he was sucked below the churning rapids again, then a hand grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him up.

"Stay with me, kid!"

From what Nate could tell, Sully had found a piece of the deck that he was clinging to with one hand while holding Nate above water with the other. It struck him as funny, seeing that this whole thing had started as his attempt to save Sully, but he was in no place to complain.

The river curved, and the two treasure hunters clawed their way to a low beach at the apex of the bend. Sully walked a few steps out of the water, dripping wet, and then dropped heavily to a seat, while Nate crawled on his hands and knees before rolling onto his back and flopping an arm over his face. They both lay panting and coughing, and Nate closed his eyes after a minute and began imagining himself on some tropical paradise beach far, far away from where he was...

"Nate, move your ass!" Sully growled suddenly and grabbed his arm, yanking him back away from the water's edge. Nate stumbled in the direction Sully was leading and looked back to see a portion of the ship's bow scrape down the shore, carving off a huge chunk of the sand where he had just been laying before coming free and slowly drifting down the river.

Nate stared, his chest heaving. "Holy... That thing took half the beach with it!"

Sully nodded and put his clenched fists on his hips. "Good riddance. This job's enough of a beach already."

Still watching the disappearing chunk of detritus as it washed downstream, Nate spared a glance at his mentor and scoffed. "That... was a bit of a stretch, Sully."

He shrugged. "Eh, you of all people know it's true."

Nate scowled, but decided not to press the issue. Turning on his heel, he muttered, "Time to make our way back to find the others I guess."

"We could do that," Sully said, not moving from his position. "Or, we could go that way," he pointed further downstream, "and figure out where this ship came from. You know it can't have come up the river without this canyon being flooded, which tells me that the sea must be nearby. The others will catch up. They know where to find us."

Nate stared morosely at him, then shrugged his shoulders. "Sure," he said resignedly.

They trudged in silence, picking their way along the river and forging up onto the side of the mountain when passage on the bank was impossible. Nothing they were passing even registered in Nate's mind, so caught up was he in his thoughts, and he mostly just followed Sully's lead. After a while of this, Sully stopped in the middle of the path and turned to him.

"Alright, kid. Enough of the silent treatment. I know you don't wanna talk to me, but you've been in a funk ever since you've been back from the States, and it's bogging you and everyone around you down." Sully narrowed his eyes at him. "You may not like it- hell, I don't really like it, but we've got a job to do, and we need you Nate." He folded his arms stubbornly over his chest. "So, like it or not, you're either going to tell me what happened, or stop moping around like someone peed on your favorite couch. Deal?"

Nate glared at him and was about to snap at him again, but he stopped himself. He looked at Sully's furrowed brows, his bushy mustache quirked up on one side over the thin, frowning line of his mouth. He cut the perfect figure of a stern but caring father, and Nate felt that thing in him that wanted to just get even more cold and hard give just a little. After all, Sully was the closest thing to a father he had ever had. Nate hung his head and mumbled, "Elena left me."

The silence that followed was long and palpable. It was only after he heard Sully sigh that Nate looked up and saw he had relaxed his stance a bit, his weathered hands returning to rest on his hips. Shaking his head low, Sully said quietly, "That's what I was afraid of." He studied the ground by his feet, then looked back at Nate. "What did she say?"

Swallowing the lump in his throat, Nate struggled for words. He hadn't had to think much about Elena's note since he left it in the trash there in America, and the memory brought with it a dull kind of pain. While he stood trying to muster up the courage to talk, he listlessly drug the pad of his thumb over his belt buckle, cleaning a smudge of mud off of the spade design etched into the bronze. "She was gone when I got there," he began. "Rented a place in New York. She left a note, though. Said she was afraid of losing me, of me dying I guess. She couldn't handle having to worry all the time, so she took off." Nate gave another weary sigh and lifted his head. "She said something about thinking I was going to be a Hercules, but instead that I turned out to be more of an... Atlas, I guess? I think that's what she said..." he mumbled the last part and trailed off.

Sully hummed in response, then motioned for them to start walking again. "She thought that you'd be able to set the load down eventually, or at least share it." Maybe it was supposed to be a question, but it sounded more like a statement to Nate. "That what she was saying?"

"I...I think so."

"Well," Sully pressed his back to the mountain and shimmied along a narrow ledge until the path widened again. "There's no easy way to say this, kid, but... she's not wrong. You should learn to share the load a bit." He looked over his shoulder to make eye contact with Nate but kept walking. "Remember what I was tryin' to tell you back in London?"

Nate was despondent. "Yeah, yeah, rub it in..." He grumbled and kicked a rock, watching it fall to the river with a splash.

"I'm not rubbing it in," Sully insisted. "I'm tryin' to help you get through this whole thing."

"I can't."

With another glance back at his protege, Sully inquired, "Can't what?", as he continued to push forward.

"Share the load."

Sully's eyes narrowed again. "Why not?"

Nate huffed and ignored the question in favor of focusing on traversing the rugged terrain. "Jesus, Sullivan, do you have to keep the pace quite so brisk?"

He raised an eyebrow. "You're not going to tell me you're getting old, are you? That's my card to play."

"No," Nate said petulantly. "It's just that if you have to pursue this interrogation of yours, I'm not all that good at talking about this stuff while bustin' my ass through the mountains."

"No, you're just not good at talking about this stuff period. Mountains or no mountains. Case in point, you still haven't answered my questio-"

"CAUSE I JUST CAN'T, OK!" Nate exploded. "It's my job to do, and it's my problem!"

Sully stopped and turned at Nate's sudden display of emotion, his grey eyes meeting those of his surrogate son. Nate's eyes, though normally a bright and animated sky blue, seemed dark and cloudy, like a thunderhead rolling in, about to unleash a storm.

"Everything good that's ever happened to me I just have to screw up, and I'm not going to see anyone else get hurt from this!" Nate continued, his exclamation bordering on a rant. "I came back to get you all out of this mess so that you could go home and not have to think about this anymore, and I'll take care of this shit-show of a job." His chest was rising and falling heavily with emotion, and his voice dropped low as he added, "If I'm lucky, maybe it'll be the death of me and I won't have to wreck anyone else's life. You all would be better off without me."

Sully stood stunned for a minute, then shook a reprimanding finger in Nate's direction. "That's some real shitty logic there, kid. This ain't some catastrophe that you need to rescue us from, we're all in this together. We work together, Nate- always have and always will. And you know what?" He made sure to make eye contact with Nate as he continued. "Whether you're Atlas or whether you're Hercules, you've got one thing neither of them had." He paused and inclined himself toward Nate a little more. "You've got friends that have your back. Me, Chloe, Charlie- goddammit, even Molly, apparently- we're all ready to go to hell and back with you. And that's something none of those Greek guys had." He put a hand on Nate's shoulder. It was gentle, but affirming. "You made a bad play, Nate, but you're not out of the game. Neither is Elena. So just make some room under that big open sky for all of us to get under there and help you, and you'll see Nate. We've got this. We'll whip their asses into next week."

Nate stared at him with a torn look, the battle to quell his inner turmoil evident in the cloudy depths of his blue eyes. Finally succumbing to his mentor's fatherly wisdom, he muttered "Guess I don't have much of a choice, do I?"

That got a genuine chuckle from Sully, who dropped his head and shook it in amusement. "Guess not. Looks like you're stuck with us." He smiled warmly, then jerked his head in the direction of the path ahead of them. "Now, c'mon." His eyes sparkled. "Atlantis ain't gonna find itself."

Atlantis... The word sent a shiver down Nate's spine, and electricity through his veins. He was reminded of the thought he had earlier that day and had voiced to Molly, when he told her that he had gotten so caught up in the drama, the tragedy, the rescue that had been this whole mission... there were times he couldn't even remember why he started on it. Truth be told, once Elena had left him, with nothing but his own stupidity and jackass self to blame- there was a lot of things he had a hard time remembering. Hearing the name of the city they were trying to track down was like cold water to the face.

"Yeah, let's go," Nate said, his voice still low, but his mood slowly on the mend.

They resumed walking, and Nate was only a little surprised that Sully went right back to his upbeat gait. In Nate's still relatively glum mood it took some extra effort on his part to keep up, but he was a little glad that someone was there to keep the momentum going.

"So I don't mean to pry," Sully began carefully. "But surely this isn't the first time you two have talked about this kind of thing, right? What did you tell her before?"

Nate scratched the back of his neck and frowned. "Uh... I think I said something about how the only thing it takes for evil to win is for good men to do nothing... or, ya know, something like that..." he muttered.

Sully looked at him with raised eyebrows. "You seriously said that?"

"Hey, it's a good line..."

"Yeah," Sully scoffed. "...the first thousand times it got said."

Nate huffed. "Well, I didn't know I was going to be answering to the cliche police, so..." he gestured in a vaguely dismissive way.

"Somebody's gotta keep you honest," Sully retorted as he climbed over a fallen tree.

Nate smiled. The banter came easy and felt familiar and comforting. It made him feel like he might make it through this after all. Like maybe, just maybe, he could move on from this and never look back. Vaulting a waist-high ledge, he scratched his head and winced at the amount of grit that caked his scalp. "So, what actually happened in Egypt while I was gone?"

""Eh, the usual." Sully shrugged. "Showed up, found the secret entrance into the creepy underground temple, survived a booby trap."

Nate raised his eyebrows. ""What kind of booby trap?"

"A scale that dumped you into a pit of spikes if you weighed more than a goddamn ostrich feather. Sheesh, talk about stilting the odds..."

"Ma'at." Nate offered. "The scales of Ma'at."

"That's the one," Sully agreed.

Scoffing, Nate muttered, "Pretty crazy surviving booby traps is 'the usual', huh?"

"Speak for yourself," Sully answered, pushing a branch out of his way and inadvertently letting it snap back in his protege's face. "You're the guy who fought a whole squadron of planes single handedly from a cable car."

"Oh c'mon!" Nate replied. "That was not a booby trap!"

"Yeah? I'm startin' to think you just like saying the word 'booby'."

Nate opened his mouth to give a comeback, but only ended up laughing instead. "You and your dirty mind." He grabbed a rock and pulled himself up a big step.

"Anyway," Sully continued, "then we found the map, the big hairy villain showed up, started waving guns around, and the rest, as they say, is history."

"Hmm." Nate lowered himself from a ledge behind Sully. "That guy is really hairy, isn't he?"

"Could skin 'im and use him for a rug..." Sully joked.

"Eww."

Nate and Sully walked under a looming rock overhang and emerged from the shadows back into full daylight. And for the second time that day, both of their mouths opened in wonder.

In the plain that stretched before them, two monstrous figures carved from stone stood hunched over, their heads bowed, arms raised, and elbows bent at right angles, their palms pressing flat to the sky above, in a pose clearly mimicking that of men carrying a great load overhead. Each had the stature of a titan, with muscular bodies so carefully and realistically carved that you could almost imagine their sturdy limbs flexing and straining with the exertion of their task. Their jaws were hard set, faces contorted with concentration, but their eyes stared straight ahead, focused on some object in the distance that Nate and Sully were unable to see.

"Well I'll be goddamn," Sully rumbled.

Nate looked on, mouth agape and wonder in his eyes. "The pillars of Hercules," he said with bated breath. "It's gotta be!" He spun in a slow circle, taking in their surroundings. Behind the two titans, on the side of the plain closest to him and Sully, was the remains of the crumbling facade of a stone building that was apparently built into the cliff, with a square-cut header over the door that rested on cracked Corinthian columns. Beyond the statues, the grassy valley was vacant until, on the far side of the plain, a ridge rose up, made of a of large stones haphazardly piled up.

"In front of 'the pillars of Hercules'," Nate mused. "So it must be somewhere close. Like really, really close."

Sully hummed in response and stroked his chin. "What do you think those guys are looking at?" he pondered.

Nate glanced first at Sully and then at the two stone giants that towered over him. "Good question." He scanned the visible horizon. "We should find out." Trotting over to the ruined facade, Nate called, "Here. I'll give you a boost and then you can help me up." With a roll of his shoulders, Nate laced the fingers of both hands together and bent his knees slightly while Sully rested his hands on Nate's shoulders and put his right foot up into Nate's palms.

"Alley-oop!" Sully grunted as he pushed off with his left foot while Nate heaved on his right. The added lift got Sully's fingers to the top of the stone header, and he climbed up on top of it and knelt down. "C'mon, kid. Grab my hand."

Nate jumped up to reach his hand, and Sully helped pull him up onto the large, flat header with him. They both scaled the face of the ruins, using various architectural details for hand and footholds until they stood on the tops of two pillars, about twenty feet apart from each other and directly behind the two statues at the level of the figure's shoulders. Shooting a look over at Sully, Nate asked, "You ready, old man?"

Sully smirked and gave a nod of affirmation. "As I'll ever be, boy-o."

Together they jumped, bending their knees and swinging their arms to get as much lift as possible from their takeoff, and cleared the gap between them and the statues in a giant lunge. Grasping onto the giant stone arm to catch himself, Nate pulled himself up and stood on the Titan's broad shoulder, resting a hand on the neck for balance's sake. The stone felt cool against his palm. "Whoa," Nate breathed as his eyes moved toward the horizon.

Beyond the ridge lay a huge lake, pooled in a bowl-shaped depression in the mountain, with turquoise water that sparkled in the sun, its surface placid but for a few small ripples when there was a breeze. On the far edge of the pristine pool rose the corners of what could only be a gate: broad, square columns of stone jutting out of the water, about thirty feet apart, with just a hint of the top edge of the massive doors between them visible above the surface. The entire arrangement was leaning back at an steep angle, as if it had sunk into the ground at some point, and not far behind it the water ended, giving way to a field of coarse, irregular rock that was black as coal. Nate recognized it as an old lava flow, out of which the crumbling tops of buildings surged sporadically, each of them at strange angles to each other. Finally, in the distance, beyond the strange scene in front of them, the mountains opened up to the shimmering North Atlantic that was dotted with whitecaps and breakers that rolled in toward the cliffs, the roar faintly audible as the salt water crashed against the rocks.

"It's incredible..." Nate whispered, his eyes glassy. In his peripheral he could see Sully lifting himself up to assume a similar position as him on the other statue, and then the older man also paused in wonder and stared at the scene before them. A few moments of silence passed.

Nate scoffed softly and shook his head. Sully looked over at him, and he swept his arm out toward the horizon and spoke in a voice loud enough for Sully to hear, "'If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants'." He paused, still taking in the sight. "If only Newton could have made it this far."

Sully frowned, allowing a moment's reverence for the deceased scientist, then then nodded in Nate's direction with a smirk. "You about ready to put that thing to more use than just bein' a keychain?"

For a moment Nate was puzzled, but then he remembered the astrolabe hanging from his shoulder holsters and his hand moved to touch the bronze. "Yeah. Let's do it."

A sudden commotion from the entrance to the valley drew their attention, and both treasure hunters looked down to see Chloe, Cutter, and Molly spilling onto the grassy plain and staring up at the statues, equally as dumbstruck as they had been. "Nate? Sully?" Chloe called.

"'Bout time you all showed up!," Sully yelled cheefully.

"What'd we miss?" Charlie asked.

One corner of Nate's mouth turned up in a crooked smile as he looked down at the Englishman from his perch on the statue. "Oh, just... finding the lost city of Atlantis is all."

"Yeah, yeah," Cutter groused. "Be a smart-ass, will you?"

"C'mon, kid," Sully said in a lower voice just to Nate, "let's go finish this up," he paused and made eye contact, "together."

It was a race between this and the next chapter of Sixth Sun, and this just barely won out in the end, so for anyone reading that story you should be getting an update on that in the next couple days.

For anyone who's listened to Uncharted: The Hidden Kingdom, you may have noticed a brief homage to it in Nate and Sully's conversation. For anyone who hasn't listened to Uncharted: The Hidden Kingdom, why haven't you listened to Uncharted: The Hidden Kingdom?