One week later…
Leta’s smile behind her mask could probably be seen from the boat bobbing 30 meters above her head.
It had been five days of sunny skies and clear waters as they worked from dawn to just before sundown. The team had made significant progress in clearing away most of the sand and silt around the northern perimeter of the main building, which had been dubbed The High Steep.
Her favorite part had been clearing away the very edges of the interior rooms along the wall. In the five days they had been below examining the ruins, they’d found several small artifacts, the most astonishing so far being what appeared to be a metal coin. If it was what they thought it was, then this small disc the size of a two-pence was the oldest coin ever found.
The possible discovery had everyone excited, especially Leta. Today was supposed to be her day off, but she had volunteered to switch with Pilar.
Just being in the water, the ‘glugh glugh’ of air bubbles escaping up to the surface, and the gentle push and pull of the underwater currents were enough to make her feel like the happiest nineteen-year-old in the world.
At her side, the whine of an underwater vacuum vibrated the space as she used a brush to push the debris into the hole. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched for something of interest to catch in the vacuum’s safety net, but so far the most interesting thing she’d come up with was some pieces of pottery.
Checking the air tank gauge on her wrist, she saw that she was just under half a tank. Enough time to continue clearing back the silt for a little longer.
Underwater with her were Vigo, who was a ways ahead of her and beginning to clear away the external edge of the eastern side of the complex, and Jun Sun, a dedicated young Chinese woman who was busy photographing the outside north wall that had just been cleared.
She was in one of the far northwestern rooms, clearing away the sand around the interior walls and marveling at the tiny bits of paint that still stained the walls thousands of years later. Most of the walls were only 30 centimeters tall from the interior floor, but this particular room was a bit taller, a bit larger. Most likely these were staff quarters, so whoever had lived here was someone of high station within the household.
Leta was mentally singing a song, probably looking like a dancing hippo underwater, when she noticed an odd form taking shape in the wall she was cleaning.
Buildings in Mesopotamian times were made of a combination of mud cores and an exterior of baked bricks and plaster. Bricks would be uniform in size to ensure the structural integrity of the building.
And yet, as she swept back the sand clinging to the wall, she saw that one brick had been mortared diagonally rather than horizontally. This was an interior wall with no indications of a door or window, so such an out-of-place error in design seemed jarring.
Leta slipped the brush handle through a strap around her thigh and ran her gloved finger around the odd brick’s edge. It wasn’t flush to the wall like all the other bricks, but it was noticeably raised to the touch.
Her thumb ran over the lower edge as her mind thought of reasons for such an odd placement when the stone seemed to give way, pushing inward as if the mortar gave way.
‘Shit!’ Leta grunted into her scuba mask as she pushed away from the wall, terrified that she had unintentionally destroyed such a relic.
Her heart sounded like it was in her ears as she felt herself hyperventilating with fear before an odd shift in the water had her turning her head towards the complex’s interior.
The seabed less than a meter away had started to give way like the maw of a beast opening wide to catch prey, revealing a square of darkness about 60 centimeters on each side.
Fear turned to giddy curiosity as she looked from the vertical brick to the hole, as her brain could only come up with the idea that she had just found a secret compartment.
‘Holy… wow…’ She breathed out, bubbles haloing around her head as she wondered at the technology she’d just discovered.
As she floated towards the trap hole, her mind raced with possibilities. How had the mechanisms for the trap hole survived thousands of years underwater? Was it spring action? The Greeks and Egyptians had been known to build clever contraptions to deter thieves, but nothing she could think of had been made during the period of this site. Who was the person who lived in this room and required such an advanced device?
Leta was practically vibrating with her excitement. She could think of no time that such ingenuity was shown in any early Bronze Age artifacts.
Technology such as this trap door belonged to remarkable early inventions like the battery of ancient Egypt or the wine vending machine of first-century Greece.
Leta hovered above the hole and peaked into the darkness, which was only now seeing sunbeams for the first time in millennia. At first, she couldn’t make out much; a long barnacle-covered shape about a meter and a half in length and flat stones she would bet money were cuneiform tablets were the most easily recognizable.
She turned her head, and another item caught her eye.
It was slightly green, like copper that had oxidized.
Strange.
While bronze would have included large amounts of copper, it would have been offset with tin. The ratio for whatever the artifact was was significantly abnormal for the estimated building age.
The oxidized metal was raised upwards like two arms reaching for the heavens behind a ball-like object.
Surrounding the artifact were the edges of what appeared to have once been a box, the wood covering it having long decomposed until all that was left was the bottom that had been preserved in the silt and darkness.
But that wasn’t the most interesting part.
‘Is that…glass?’ Leta thought in astonishment.
Held within metal prongs and obscured by oxidation runoff, sand, and ancient barnacles was a small glass tube around three or four inches long.
If Leta could have screamed in excitement through her apparatus, she would have.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Glass bottles weren’t invented until 100 BCE in southeast Asia, at least 100 years before the Romans learned about the technique. By that time, this building would have been underwater for nearly 3,000 years!
Leta, at nineteen years old, may have just discovered the oldest piece of intact glass in history.
It completely rewrote history, proving that the Early Bronze Age civilization had not only succeeded in serious maritime capabilities but had truly advanced by leaps and bounds past the Stone Age and into the future.
The tube contraption had stylized prongs and was tilted upward at a 45-degree angle, a tapered cone ending in an extremely narrow metal tube that was attached to another piece of the same alloy.
Leta turned to look up and started waving her hand, trying to get someone’s attention. Vigo spotted her movements and gestured that he was coming, but it was a slow swim in her direction.
Leta pulled up her vacuum and started to brush away the sand to see if the artifact was affixed to anything or if it was freestanding.
It looked like the remains of some inscription carved into the strange ball-like protrusion, but it was so rough that she couldn’t hope to try and understand it.
Maybe if she whipped it off…
In a flash, the sphere split like a flower edged in thorns, suddenly malleable tentacles wrapping around her hand and digging into her skin through her gloves. She hadn’t even had a chance to scream before the metal and glass contraption activated, the narrow cone whipping forward with a speed that was much too fast for something underwater and much too fast for her to react.
Before she could try to wiggle her hand free of the metal tentacles, the small tube was stabbing into her hand centimeters below her wrist, digging through skin and muscle like a hammer runs a nail through the wood.
Leta nearly coughed out her breather as she screamed in pain.
Instincts took over, and Leta forgot that this was a priceless artifact thousands of years old as she grabbed the tube and prongs and tried to forcibly pry it out of her arm.
Through her grunts of shock and pain, she hissed as she felt a burning sensation spreading through her wrist and fingers and up her arm.
Through the haze of kicked-up sand caused by her thrashing, she could see the black liquid in the vial emptying into her hand through some unseen pressurized mechanism. Leta wasn’t focused on the engineering of such a device or the unsanitary and possibly deadly bacteria in said liquid; instead, she was only focused on getting free of what was hurting her.
As the vial emptied the last of the liquid into her bloodstream, Leta watched in mounting horror as the glass and metal of the artifact seemed to liquefy like stone, becoming magma, pushing itself into her body through the hole it had made as if chasing the liquid.
First the vial, then the prongs holding it up, and finally the tentacles unwound themselves from her fingers and crawled into the hole in her hand like starving leeches, smelling blood.
Finally free, she cried into her apparatus as she clutched her wounded arm to her chest, pain wracking her body as if she’d been stung by a Portuguese man of war from head to toe.
Her thrashing had caught the attention of the other divers, and as she slowly swam to the surface to depressurize, Vigo and Jun were quickly swimming their way to assist.
Leta surfaced and pulled her breather out with her free hand, finally being able to voice her pain as she screamed to the clouds above.
“What happened? Are you okay?” Jun, the first to get to her, asked in alarm.
“I dunno.” Leta hissed through the pain as she floated on her back. “There’s something down there. It… Fuck, it burns! Ah…”
“Hey!” Vigo flagged down Dr. Galloise and the rest of the team who were on the boat, “We’ve got an injury!”
Jun pried Leta’s fingers away enough, gasping when she got a glimpse of the massive hole in her hand that was still bleeding.
“It is alright, we have you.” Vigo tried to calm her, but she could barely hear him over the roar of blood in her ears as the burning in her veins seemed to be mounting.
She hissed as the arm that he wrapped around her shoulders to help her float back to the boat seemed to stab at her suddenly sensitive skin, her flesh feeling like it was being seared with hot embers with every movement.
She didn’t remember Vasilis pulling her from the water or Dr. Galloise frantically undoing her scuba gear.
She didn’t even remember Jun brushing her blonde hair from her face and telling her that what was about to happen was going to sting, but she did remember the screech of agony that scorched her throat as Dr. Galloise poured hydrogen peroxide over her hand.
When she could open her eyes, her vision was spotted with blots of green, their faces becoming almost unrecognizable.
She got the impression that Jun had cut her wet suit off and had pressed a towel to her wound as someone was shouting into the radio with a panicked rush.
Through her hazy vision, she could see that the strange artifact had done some serious damage to her hand.
It was a complete mess, with a deep gouge about seven centimeters above her wrist, almost directly in the middle of her hand. The gouge itself was less than a centimeter in circumference, but the wound was puckered around the edges, and black lines were running from the wound like spiderwebs under her skin.
She couldn’t tell at first glance if it had gone all the way through her hand, but it felt as if it had hit the bone and was painful to the touch.
Vasilis got the boat engines roaring, and Leta was then told to lay down, rest, and not to move. The Greek sailor drove like a mad New York cabby, pushing the boat to pick up speed that was probably dangerous for such a craft. It seemed to jump as it took each wave, and through the pain that consumed her, she almost wondered if she was in more danger of dying from Vasilis’s crazy sailing than the wound in her hand.
But soon, thoughts were hard to come by, replaced by groans and cries of pain as her body went from burning with fever to wracked with chills that nearly chipped her chattering teeth.
“I-I-I’m-m, s-so-so sor-r-ry.” She stammered through her uncontrollable shivering, an odd thought floating through the miasma of pain that she had let the team down by getting hurt.
“Don’t fucking die on me,” Dr. Galloise shouted back at her. “That’s how you apologize!”
She could tell that the loud Canadian woman was scared, though she buried it under a lot of bravado.
Minutes ticked by as the boat sped for land.
Eventually, Leta’s tongue started to feel stiff, and she could only moan her discomfort.
A few team members brought her water to keep her hydrated, but her body’s muscles were so stiff that she couldn’t lift her head to drink.
The sun was low on the horizon when Santorini came into view. Leta could only make out a blurry, dark blob with twinkling lights that got closer and closer as the boat cruised onward.
She had become more and more scared that she was going to die as her skin started to pale, her lips turning blue, and her limbs, once rock stiff, now went limp.
Her heart seemed to be beating double time as panic began to set in.
At the dock, Dr. Marrow and the rest of the team were waiting. An ambulance and stretcher waited for her arrival.
Leta went in and out of consciousness as they loaded her onto the stretcher.
She remembered Vigo telling the medics something in broken Greek, and the medics opened her eyelids, but by that time she couldn’t see anything.
Soon, thoughts became spotty.
She felt a jolt as she was moved from stretcher to gurney and felt the pinch of a needle in her arm.
She could almost make out the light behind her eyes of the fluorescent tubes in the hospital hallway as she was wheeled away.
The beep of her heart monitor seemed too weak.
That beep was getting more faint.
Beep……… beep………… beep…………………….beep……………………………..
beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-
Silence.
Leta felt as if she were floating in an abyss, cold and desolate when suddenly something blurry came into her field of vision.
They looked like odd hieroglyphs that were a strange mixture of cuneiform and some other language she’d never seen before but felt that she knew intimately.
Visions danced through her head.
Silver wings.
A flash of blue light.
A temple of white marble cloaked in shadows.
Then, an androgynous and unaccented voice so clear as to be almost mechanical penetrated the darkness of her visions.
[Host Identified.]
[Testing compatibility with the host.]
More visions swam through her mind’s eye.
A crown of silver and white that dazzled with blue gems was placed on the head of a beautiful woman with white hair and opal eyes that changed colors in the light. Others with smaller crowns bowing so low that their heads touched a golden floor.
What looked like a silver angel hallowed in starlight, hands outstretched as she beheld the light of a new day dawning on a world that burned in ruin.
Runic symbols tattooed on the stars blurred and warped like a fever dream when suddenly she could read them.
‘MONARCH. ONE WHO RULES ABOVE ALL’.
[Host compatible with the system]
[System uploading…]