Vigo, though further away, was the first to notice. Using a flat hand to wave at her face ‘in a come here’ gesture, she underwater sign language to tell him “Look here” by pointing two fingers at her eyes and then down at the hole.
He nodded his head and gave her the sign for “okay” before swimming her way.
Leta turned back to the hole and, pulling up her vacuum, 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.
Leta’s world narrowed to a haze of agony until hands grasped her shoulder. Through the blur, she saw Vigo, Jun Sun at his heels, his eyes a mixture of worry and determination behind his goggles. Helpless in the water, she depended on them as they painstakingly guided her upward, careful to avoid decompression sickness.
The moment sunlight and the warm air hit her face, she 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 Doctor Galloise and the rest of the team 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 Doctor Galloise frantically undoing her scuba gear.
She had no memory of Jun brushing her hair aside and warning her about the sting to come, but the searing screech that tore through her throat as Doctor Galloise poured hydrogen peroxide over her hand was unforgettable.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
When she could finally open her eyes, green spots blurred her vision, and the faces around her were almost indistinguishable.
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.
At first glance, she couldn’t tell 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,” Doctor Galloise shouted back at her. “That’s how you apologize!”
She could tell the loud Canadian woman was scared, though she buried it under a lot of bravado.
Minutes then hours 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 or even swallow.
When Santorini came into view, the sun was low on the horizon. 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.
Doctor Marrow and the rest of the land-based team were waiting at the dock with an ambulance and stretcher, waiting 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 felt the medics open 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 life form identified.]
[Testing compatibility with the Host life form.]
More visions swam through her mind’s eye.
A storm so great it covered an entire planet, arcs of lightning as thick as skyscrapers tearing both clouds and earth asunder. A crown of silver and white dazzled with iridescent blue gems was placed on the head of a beautiful woman with long white hair and opal eyes that seemed to change colors in the light. She was dressed in white-metallic plate armor that looked as if someone from the Dark Ages had been given a vision of the far-off space-wandering future. Two wings unfurled behind her. Instead of soft plumage, they were composed of sharp, metallic-looking blades, each one traced with a delicate, almost ghostly, white light. Above the intricate crown, a corona of lightning encircled her head like a halo, moving with the slight motion of her head as if it were an extension of her being.
Other beings cloaked in fine clothes and adorned with smaller, more simple crowns bowing so low that their heads touched a golden floor.
In her hand, she held aloft something that could have been a scepter but was shaped like a spear. It, too, was made of the same metal as her armor and glowed with white-blue runes.
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 life form is compatible with the system.]
[System uploading…]