> “An unmarked carton arrived today at my manse, and inside was a well-polished skull and one gemstone. Where the other two are, only my tormentor knows. I shed a single tear for my loss because there is no time for any more.”
The waters were blue and warm and colorful coral dotted the sunken wreck. Although my surroundings were pleasant, my predicament was not, as what was supposed to have been a routine survey dive had gone south when a piece of the Antikythera’s mast had come loose and pinned me to the deck. I struggled for a few minutes, trying to pull myself out, but the wood had landed precariously close to the hose connecting my mask to the air tank, and I feared that one wrong move would leave me free but trapped a hundred and fifty feet underwater with no oxygen.
I closed my eyes and steadied my breathing, remembering what the master diver had taught me those many years ago.
“Panic and fear are the enemy,” he had said. “You can banish them to the dark recesses of your mind if only you will it.”
“Easier said than done,” I muttered.
I opened my eyes and surveyed my surroundings. My left leg was trapped at the ankle, but the rest of my body was free. I used my hands to sweep the coral-filled deck, wincing at the pain, until my fingers felt something starkly different than the sea life that had claimed the ship for the past 2000 years: a circular piece of metal.
I stretched to reach it and with my free foot and my hand, I was able to drag it toward me. It wasn’t just a metal trinket, but an intricate wheel that could have been a gear in an ancient machine. I apologized in advance to the antiquity societies that would probably trade my life for the metal as I used it as a wedge to-
“Red,” said a voice in my ear that I didn’t recognize. “You need to wake up!”
What a silly call sign. My hair was clearly blond and besides, I didn’t remember hiring a teenage girl as a tender. What was going on at that surface that-
“Jen,” said a different voice. “Please. You’re babbling nonsense about some Greek food you ate last night.”
Something was definitely wrong. Maybe my tank had sprung a leak, and I was hallucinating after breathing too much carbon dioxide. I tried to center myself again with slow, deep breaths, but the nagging women in my ear would not relent. I ignored them and returned to the task of freeing my leg when I happened to glance at myself in the signal mirror on my wrist and found that the face reflected back at me was not my own.
“What … what is going on?” I said, in a voice I didn’t recognize.
“You’re trapped,” said the girl.
“I know that,” I said. “But who are you and why do I look and sound like a 25-year-old?”
“Because,” said the older woman, “you are. Something happened down there and somehow you slipped into the Antikythera memory that Dalia gave you. You’re reliving it instead of it feeding your subconscious.”
“You’re nuts,” I said. “I’m getting out of here and away from the two of you and whatever you put in my tank.”
“Find your center,” said the girl. “Remember who you were. Remember who you are. Remember who you’re going to be.”
“Nonsense, it’s all nonsense,” I said. “I’m shutting off my comm now. Good day to you both!”
“I’m sorry, but you’re only a remnant,” said the second woman, and I paused. It couldn’t be true. I couldn’t just be a memory. I was real. A daredevil who had braved the deep all over … wait, why couldn’t I remember my last dive?
“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I said. “Help me. Please.”
“We will,” said the girl, “but you have to trust us.”
“If you can’t find your own path out,” said the woman called Beatrice, “then I’ll create one for you.”
“OK,” I said. “But how?”
“You just need to surface,” she replied. “It’s like any other dive, yeah? Come back to the surface. Come back to yourself.”
“I can’t,” I said. “My foot is trapped … I’m trapped … and I…”
“Start with your foot then,” said Beatrice, “and then the rest will follow. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” I said, grabbing the gear again. I pushed the metal down and the mast gave way slightly. Another burst of effort resulted in another shift, but it still wasn’t enough, and I collapsed backward onto the cold deck, the stark reality of my situation becoming clearer by the second.
“Again,” said the girl.
“Can’t get sufficient purchase to move it,” I said.
“Don’t care,” she replied.
“Well, that’s nice of you,” I said. “Fine.”
My third attempt failed as well and this time, for good measure, the gear broke in two.
“Thanks, you dumb kid. Now I’m completely fucked,” I said.
“Not yet,” said Beatrice. “I want you to push the three buttons on the dongle connected to the hose and then breathe in.”
“That will cut off my air entirely!” I said.
“It won’t. Please. Trust me.”
I tried to pull my leg free one last time, only to wince at the wood pressing down even harder into my ankle, and then slowly brought my hand up to the hose.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“OK,” I said. “Here goes nothing.”
I pushed down on the buttons, took three deep breaths, and then watched as the world dissolved around me.
I was still underwater, still trapped under a piece of wood, but I was no longer at the bottom of the Aegean Sea and I was no longer someone else.
“Red here, over,” I said, but all I heard in response was muffled static in my ear. I took in my surroundings and found my ankle stuck under a section of the cabin’s wall, a piece of the painting’s frame wedged underneath. I moved my leg, and, buoyed by a combination of all three buffs, I kicked the wood away like it was a twig, and then pushed myself upward.
I rotated my headlamp in a circle to try to find Curtana’s box, but found that the airlocked room was no more, as the crush of the intruding water into the cabin had reduced it to a shattered wreckage, like the rest of the ship. Before I could start flinging away the centuries-old timber, a slow beeping sound pervaded my ears, which, had I been at normal speed, would have been a glaring alarm. But it was loud enough for me to grab the air tank’s pressure gauge, which for some reason showed I only had a few minutes left of oxygen.
“Shit!” I yelled, but again, the time displacement caused by the speed buff left little hope that the duo up above heard more than a chirp. I swam forward, hoping that the robot would be waiting just outside the room, only to find a wall blocking my path. I looked up, finally realizing that the pressurized blast had not only destroyed the cabin, but had blown a hole in the floor down to the Board Room. Which is where I evidently now found myself.
Sufficiently reoriented, I combed the room with my light, and eventually located Curtana’s box next to one half of the ship painting. I swam over to it in an instant, but the Foxhound continued to mock me, as it was empty. My anger reaching a boiling point, I put my palms together, pulled my arms back, and then propelled the water forward, unleashing a guttural cry into my facemask.
The resulting wave swept through the room like a giant fireball, creating a maelstrom of wood and coral in its wake. It was then that I saw it, a shining beacon in the dark chamber, twirling in the current I had unleashed. I pressed my flippered feet against the floor and launched myself up, catching the sword just below its blade.
My headlamp decided at that moment to burn out, but it didn’t matter, because I had a new north star. I extended my newly claimed Relic out in front of me and followed its light back up to the surface.
----------------------------------------
“This isn’t a sword,” I said, placing a large brown case down onto the Guild’s Board Room table that evening.
“Was there a cello in there when you bought it?” asked Ty with a snicker.
I undid the clasps and opened the lid, its hinges protesting wildly, to reveal a long wooden pole with a sharp blade fastened at the end. Removing the Relic carefully so as not to accidentally stab someone, I hoisted it into the air, my two hands gripping it tightly, before placing the bottom on the ground. Its height nearly dwarfed mine, and I pictured myself in the Armory, wielding it against Emma’s twin blades, but all I could imagine was the Guild onlookers collapsing into fits of laughter as I clumsily tried to defend myself.
“I never said it was,” said Dalia.
“Yes, you did,” I said. “You sent me to get Curtana, the Sword of Mercy. It’s in the name!”
“That is true, but names can be deceiving.”
“What am I supposed to do with this thing?” I said, placing the “sword” back inside the case.
“May I?” asked Dalia, as she ran her hands down the length of the staff.
“You don’t need my permission,” I said.
“Yes, in fact, I do,” she said. “This Relic, by the laws of the sea, of the Guild, and probably the Commonwealth, now belongs to you. It is only polite to ask a Relic’s owner before one picks it up.”
“Permission granted, then.”
“Ty, go get me one of our more useless books over there,” said Dalia.
She pointed to the bookcase at the back of the room and Ty scurried over, returning shortly with a rather large tome that sported a frayed black leather cover. The Guild chair, at least for a few more days, lifted Curtana into the air deftly as if it was a feather, before settling into a two-handed stance, her high-heeled feet shoulder width apart.
“Pull!”
Ty tossed the book, with some effort, upward and as it reached its zenith, Dalia rotated her body backward and then brought the Relic down in one swooping motion to slice the whole thing in half. As the pages rained down around us, Dalia twirled the staff in a horizontal circle, dicing the loose vellum into pieces, before setting Curtana down into its case.
“That,” she said, “is what you do with this ‘thing.’ Now get back to work.”
She left the room through the rear with a flourish, the door slamming behind her for good measure.
“Your mom knows that I nearly died just this morning at the bottom of the East River, right?”
“Ugh, again she leaves me to clean up her mess,” said Ty, ignoring me to bend down and pick up the remains of the book, muttering under her breath as she did. “Sorry, what were you saying?”
“I got trapped in the memory from that electrum she gave me! And got trapped under the weight of the destroyed cabin! If Beatrice hadn’t force-fed me that super serum she brought, I probably would have died from decompression sickness.”
“Yes, well, you didn’t,” said Ty. “So, in my mom’s eyes, the mission was a complete success. I mean, also? Seeing you explode out of the water like some kind of mega dolphin holding Curtana aloft? It was worth the price of admission.”
“I don’t remember any of that!” I said. “But I’m so glad I could entertain you.”
I felt my heart racing and took a deep breath to slow my anger.
“Umm, you didn’t happen to snap a picture?”
Ty laughed.
“No, but you’ll have to take our word that you were a sight. Now, I could use some help picking up the re-”
“Why is this a Relic?” I said, grabbing my new partner with one hand. Despite the length of the pole and the thick metal blade at the top, it felt about as light as the old broom that had been left in the coat closet in my apartment.
“You’ll have to ask King Henry,” said Ty.
“Not helpful,” I said, trying to mimic Dalia’s twirling strike without stabbing myself or Ty. Instead, I tripped and knocked the large case off of the table and onto the same foot that had been trapped on the ship. My eyes widened as the Mediterranean waters swirled around me and scuba gear began appearing on my body. I blinked, and the room was completely gone, replaced by the underwater nightmare that I was intimately familiar with.
“What’s happening?” I yelled into the scuba mask that was now secured to my face. I closed my eyes again and steadied my breathing, remembering what the master diver had taught me those many years ago.
“Panic and fear are the enemy,” he had said. “You can banish them to the dark recesses of-” A sharp pain reverberated across my cheek, and suddenly I was on the floor of the Board Room, the Relic’s case pushed to the side, and Ty standing over me.
“I was afraid of this,” she said, extending her hand to help me up, which I took.
“I fell,” I said. “Back into the memory. I thought the electrum only inserted the memories into my subconscious.”
“I did, it does,” she said. “But you broke the barrier when you were down there. And it seems like it’s seeping through whenever you get close enough to what happened.”
“So now I’m going to believe I’m underwater every time my foot gets trapped under something?” I asked. Curtana was splayed across the floor next to the table and I picked it up and returned it back into its case, afraid that if I fell again, I would lose myself.
“No,” said Ty. “Because I came prepared.” She fished into her jean jacket pocket and placed a gold bead on the table.
“What. Is. That.” I said. “Never mind, I don’t want to know. No more beads, no more memories.”
“It’s not a memory,” said Ty. “The opposite, in fact. It will draw out the diving memories, like poison from a wound. You won’t be a master diver anymore, but I doubt you’ll mind.”
“And then what?” I asked. “I don’t know how to fight with a sword. And certainly don’t know how to fight with whatever this stupid thing is.”
I smacked Curtana’s pole, which just made my hand hurt.
“I believe it’s called a glaive,” said Ty. “And as to your earlier question regarding what’s so special about your new Relic, we’re still combing through the restored Compendium, but the only relevant part we’ve found so far is one cryptic line.”
“And what does it say?” I asked.
“Curtana is mercy.”