by James Hunter
About eight feet in, something squealed to my right. It sounded like some sort of wild boar had unwittingly stumbled into the webbing.
Poor guy.
But I put the piggy from mind and kept right on pushing. I needed to worry about my survival at the moment. More squeals quickly followed, though, and after a few more feet I finally caught my first look at one of the boars. My steps faltered. Dude … uncool. The creature had a pig’s face—flat nose, pointed ears, pink skin, and a wide mouth jammed full of tusks—but it also had dozens of black beady eyes. And instead of a plump belly and stubby legs, it had a bulbous body sprouting eight long, hairy legs.
The spider boar launched itself at me, and I unloaded my pistol at close range, losing control in my sheer horror. It was huge, and it wasn’t alone.
Harnessing that sheer terror, I pushed my way through the strands of webbing, ejecting my magazine and reloading my last as I moved. I had seven shots left, and though that wasn’t much, at least the bullets worked on the spider boars. Another six of the weird pig spiders scuttled toward me.
I tripped out of their web and stumbled down a set of cracked steps leading toward the walls of the ruined city. The walls were blasted and pitted, but they seemed sturdy enough to hold off invading monsters, at least for a little while. And if I could make it through the main gates, I could slam them shut behind me. Yes, odds were high that even more hideous creatures haunted the ruins of the city—maybe a horde of demon zombie ants?—but right then, besieged by the spider boars and harried by the vulture women, I didn’t care.
Any port in the storm, as the saying goes.
I rushed across the landing, where a mosaic showed a scene of a hero with a spear and shield fighting a multiheaded dragon. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t stop and appreciate the art or ponder what it meant.
I glanced back and saw two spider boars rushing down the stairs in an avalanche of legs and hair and tusks. I wheeled around and gave each a bullet to the brain. They squealed as green goo erupted from the wounds, and slumped to the side.
But the pause cost me big. There was a shriek from above as a talon ripped into my shoulder, adding to my growing collection of wounds. The matronly vulture beat her wings furiously, lashing out with her clawed feet before lurching up and away. She circled overhead, preparing to make another run.
With a grimace, I clutched at my bleeding shoulder, eyeing her as she flapped her oversized wings. I was down to five bullets, and I couldn’t afford to waste any ammo. What I needed was to find cover and fast. I tore my gaze away and full-on sprinted until I hit the city gate. More arrows showered me—the snake men had finally caught up. Most of the arrows clattered on the stone or bounced off the walls, but one glanced off my shoulder, leaving a shallow furrow across my skin.
I ignored the flash of heat and shouldered my way through the wooden gate. I wheeled around, eyes wide as I saw the horde of monsters descending on me like a biblical plague.
Another twenty spider boars scampered from the jungle, tearing down the stairs. Some were big hairy males, but I also saw several females with pink teats swaying and baby spiderlings clinging to their multi-jointed legs licking at lips covered in viscous goo, which I was positive was poison. With my current string of luck, it had to be poison. The baby boars only had nubs for tusks, but I bet the ivory would be sharp and their poison would either kill me or paralyze me.
More screams from the vulture women.
More arrows from the snake men.
With every ounce of strength I had left, I muscled the gates shut, then found a long beam of iron-reinforced wood and slammed it down, locking the gate.
I backed up, breathing hard, pistol ready. My boots left bloodstains on the marble ground, and I realized it was my blood. Those vulture women had worked me over good.
I waited in terrified anticipation. But nothing came at me from the sky. Nothing tried to break through the gates into the city. No arrows arched over the stone walls. I let out a shuddering sigh of relief, my hands shaking from the adrenaline still coursing through my veins. Holy shit, I’d done it. I’d made it to safety. I bent over and clasped my knees, taking a deep breath to help calm my frazzled nerves. I’d made it.
But then another thought flashed through my mind. A deeply troubling one. What if I’d accidentally stumbled into the lair of something even worse? Something so bad, even other monsters were afraid to come here? I stood and turned, scanning the ruins of the city stretched out before me. Everything was white marble, graceful columns, and intricate friezes. And the central temple at the heart of this place? It could’ve come straight from the pages of a Greek myth. Greek myth. The words resonated in my mind, and suddenly things started to click inside my brain.
A few of my buddies had run a new campaign not so long ago—one set inside a Grecian world, so all the myths were still relatively fresh in my mind. The vulture women were from Greek mythology. They had to be the harpies. Had to be. And an uncharted island in the middle of the Mediterranean definitely fit with that theory. I still wasn’t a hundred percent about the nagas or the spider boars, but the harpies were unmistakable.
If so, what new frightening thing lay in the city? Were the monsters outside the gates afraid of some ancient goddess hibernating in the crumbling ruins? That temple would make the perfect lair. Hopefully whatever I found wouldn’t be bulletproof.
FOUR
The Ruins
I chugged the last of the water from my canteen. Dammit, if I was going to die, I didn’t want to die thirsty. I tried not to think of it as an act of desperation, but it probably was. Not only was I severely injured, but I was on a hostile island, and I’d managed to burn through most of my ammunition already. On the plus side, those spider boars could’ve gotten me. But they didn’t, and I was still breathing. Chalk one up for the good guy, I suppose.
The sun crept toward the ocean in the distance, and the shadows lengthened around me like inky fingers. Most of the buildings inside the city were intact, but they looked beaten down and not just from age.
A while back, my squad had visited Ephesus, an ancient city in Turkey that dated back to before the Romans. That city had been ravaged by time and the elements, worn down by long, hard years. This place looked different. Everything seemed well-preserved—the frescoes fresh and sharp, the grooves intact. Even bright splashes of paint remained. It almost seemed like these mysterious ruins had been ransacked after a battle, then abandoned days later.
The central temple dominated the landscape.
Fanning out from it were barracks and stables to the north and a massive hall to the west, including several terraces overlooking the Mediterranean. I wandered past the stables and entered the barracks. A leaf-shaped iron short sword lay in the dust. I picked it up and gave it a few swings, the blade whistling through the air. Wasn’t sure if it would pierce the skins of the harpies, but it certainly couldn’t do worse than my pistol. I thumbed the blade. Still wickedly sharp. Huh, maybe there was a little magic to it.
I’d played in untold Dungeons and Dragons campaigns where non-magical weapons couldn’t hurt certain creatures.
I stopped the thought dead in its tracks and shook my head in disgust at my extreme dorkiness. Here I was, fantasizing about magic swords as my wounds stiffened and drying blood coated my green skivvy shirt. I was being a moron. My DnD skills weren’t going to help me here. While it didn’t feel like it, this was real life.
Still, even though the sword probably wasn’t magic, having it at my side was a small comfort. With only five rounds left, I’d need something better than my K-Bar to fight off the freaks roaming this island. I slid the sword through my utility belt and moved farther in. There were spears and other weapons littering the ground. And a few skeletons. I inched closer and toed the thigh bones of someone long dead. For a heartbeat, I envisioned the body springing to life like in the old Jason and the Argonauts movie, the yellowing bones jerking like Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion creatures.
No,
these skeletons were just the remnants of dead people surrounded by their weapons from a war that seemed like old news even when the fall of Rome was still fresh.
Idly, I wandered out of the barracks and through the columns holding up a massive dining hall. The interior was chock-full of wooden banquet tables covered in dusty plates and silver wine goblets. Battered shields and torn battle standards decorated the rafters like war medals on display. I kept going, emerging onto a wide terrace framed in by a marble retaining wall. I made my way over to the short wall and peered over the edge, straight down to the frothing water two hundred feet below.
Off to my left was a set of treacherously narrow stairs, which switchbacked down the cliff face, connecting to a secondary defensive wall that edged a white sand beach.
The cliffs, the marbled city, the ocean, it all reminded me of the island of Santorini. Admittedly, Santorini attracted European honeymooners and drunk Australian tourists, not crowds of mutant Greek mythological creatures.
Moving across the terrace, I saw other buildings to the south, mostly marble and stone, but a few wooden structures as well. One looked like a palace fit for a king. There was a smaller building nearby with several chimneys poking up toward the sky like accusing fingers, making me think that was probably where the forge was located.
A black shape swept through the sky, immediately drawing my thoughts away from the strange cityscape. I squinted and strained to see what the hell this new thing was, but it was too far for me to make it out clearly. It was humanoid though, with giant bat wings and obsidian-colored skin. Another monster, no doubt, though I noticed it didn’t fly over the ruins proper but kept to the walls. It alighted on a guard tower on the east side of the city, crouching low, its wings stretched wide.
Well, it seemed the city had some magic to it after all. Otherwise, I would’ve been battling the bat-winged creature, too.
I turned my back to the scenic ocean view and made my way back to the great hall and the temple.
My combat boots click-clacked on the marble floor, the sound echoing off the high ceilings. All the while, the bat thing watched me from a distance. I heard the gurgling of water as I neared the temple. On the east side of the building was a fountain underneath a colossal statue of what could only be Ares, the god of war. A Greek warrior’s helmet covered his head, a cloak billowed behind him, he held a sword to the sky, and a shield concealed his other arm. The statue was at least fifty feet tall, and I traced a finger along the sandal straps etched into the marble.
Well, I’d found a water source—another small victory. I filled my canteen with the sparkling water, pure and crisp and clean. Then, I leaned forward and drank my fill. I really needed to take some time to wash my wounds, which were almost certainly infected. I mean those harpies didn’t exactly seem clean. But my head was aching like mad, and I felt weak and woozy. What if I passed out here in the open?
Would the bat thing come and snack on my body?
What had the harpies said? Flesh for their faces? Yeah, that was no good.
And I was sure the spider boars would love to slurp the skin off my bones. I didn’t want to think about what the snake men would do to me.
So instead of lingering out front, in full view of the bat-winged creature, I slipped up a wide staircase that led from the fountain into the temple, which reminded me of the Parthenon in Athens. But when I reached the top of the steps, I hesitated, some part of me reluctant to go into the inner sanctum. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but deep down I had the strangest feeling that if I crossed the threshold, my life would change forever. Call it intuition, but this temple of Ares had a power to it that was undeniable.
And that power called to me, beckoned me on. A warm breeze blew a dusty, musky smell out of the temple and into my face. Come, come, come.
I moved through the outer columns on stiff, reluctant legs, then stopped in front of the frieze carved into the far wall. It was a battle scene divided clearly between the good guys and the bad guys. And those bad guys looked very familiar. Clustered around a faceless god, nagas, spider creatures, harpies, and a whole host of other villains were posed in various pre-battle formations. They faced a copy of the statue I’d seen in front of the temple: Ares, with his sword, shield, and helmet, looking heroic as his cloak billowed out behind him.
A thousand women warriors surrounded the war god, bristling and fierce, holding a variety of swords, spears, javelins, bows, and other implements of Greco-Roman warfare. Amazons, if I had to guess. Curiously, some of the women rode huge mounts—ancient mammoths, boars, even some giant eagles. Others pushed war machines crafted out of wood and metal—catapults, trebuchets, ballistae, and siege towers rolling on great stone wheels. Some of these looked like medieval siege engines but hopped up on steroids and tricked out.
A few of the female warriors had their hands raised, and energy seemed to coalesce around their fists. Spellcasters? Probably.
Other women were in the process of turning into animals: wolves, bears, even a snake or two. Shapeshifters? Definitely.
I blinked, trying to understand what I was seeing. Then I noticed a bat-winged woman perched on the shoulder of what could only be called an evil god. A faceless being of dark power, carefully depicted in the stone masonry. It was an exact copy of the bat-creature I’d seen flying around the city. The same one who was now perched on the eastern guard tower. Could it be the same creature? And who was the evil god? I moved closer, studying the frieze, rubbing absently at my chin with one hand.
The faceless god seemed to be rising out of a hole in the earth even as that same hole puked out the fiendish beasts around him. At the bottom of the scene were ocean waves meticulously carved into the marble. And in the midst of those waves were three islands—two circular, one crescent-shaped. And surprise, surprise, the evil god was rising from the crescent-shaped island. The same one I was currently stranded on.
Another warm breeze blew through, and I smelled that musky scent again, which reminded me of gym class or the barracks when Stinky Pete skipped a shower.
I left the frieze and rounded on a hallway, which connected with the temple’s inner sanctum.
What I saw stopped me in my tracks.
FIVE
The Godstone
Inside the temple was another statue of Ares. This version had the same helmet, shield, and cloak as the one by the fountain, but in this iteration, the god of war had his sword sheathed at his side. He stood tall, feet planted wide as he prepared to hurl a monstrous spear at some unseen enemy.
All of that was same old, same old.
What stopped me cold was the corpse in front of the statue, balled up on the floor.
Surrounding the body were the remnants of a battle that had clearly taken the lives of hundreds. Human skeletons littered the marble floor, the bones nearly turned to dust, their armor rusted almost to nothing. Bones of monsters were intermixed with the human remains: I saw the outlines of harpies and snake men and other creatures, including humanoid monstrosities thirty feet tall. The skeletal fists of these hulking warriors were curled around clubs the size of trees. Immediately, my mind jumped to the cyclops from Homer’s Odyssey. It seemed they weren’t a myth either.
All of the people and creatures involved in the temple battle had been reduced to dusty bones, but not the central corpse of what had been a giant of a man.
I shuffled in farther, my footfalls ringing through the columns and bouncing off the high ceiling above. I had the short sword in one hand and my pistol in the other, on the off chance that the enormous, well-preserved corpse rose to his feet and turned monster zombie on me.
Even curled into a fetal position, the corpse was impossibly large—twenty feet tall if an inch—plus several tons worth of flesh that didn’t seem to be decaying. His skin, however, was an off-gray color, like old meat slowly going bad. The stink filling my nostrils wasn’t the smell of death, though. It was the scent of sweat and exertion after a hard PFT. But it was amped up by a thousand
percent.
I grimaced at the stench and continued forward.
“Hey, you alive?” I asked, prodding the massive body with my boot.
The instant my foot touched the body, a brilliant glow filled the air. I winced from the onslaught of blinding light, which emanated from the Ares statue at the far side of the room. Carved into the figure’s breastplate was an enormous, intricately carved rune, which blasted out a golden light like the sun at noonday. The golden glow seemed to throb and pulse for a minute, eventually narrowing until it illuminated the body of the giant like a spotlight in a theater.
Oh shit. I scrambled back a few steps as the giant stirred and groaned, clutching a leaf-shaped sword to his chest. A hulking spear lay on the floor next to him, partially covered by a gigantic circular shield. A helmet obscured the man’s face as he lay on his red cloak, stained white by a thick layer of dust. The glow from the rune gleamed off the metal of the armor like a bonfire, but something shined even brighter.
A fist-sized diamond was embedded in the giant’s breastplate, and it sparkled with more colors than I could believe. It was like concentrated sunlight moving through a million prisms all at once.
I guess my first thought should’ve been, holy shit, that diamond must be worth a fortune. But it wasn’t. The second I saw it, I knew the gem promised bloodshed and violence and tremendous power. And with power like that, for a guy like me, that meant responsibility.
Still, the diamond drew me on. It was like a car wreck. I shouldn’t look, but I had to know. I had to touch that glittering gem because it beckoned to me. Against my will, my feet broke into motion, and I shuffled closer, inch by reluctant inch. Man oh man, this was a bad idea. The worst idea. But then, before I knew what I was doing, I bent and touched the brilliant diamond, running my fingers over its smooth surface.
