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I shuddered at the memory of my friends teasing me one night when I woke to the touch of those millions of feet moving up and down my leg. I nearly hacked my friends to death too as I turned the eelfish into tiny parts. Their laughter still rang in my ears every time I saw one of these demonic fish.
About an hour later swimming around the rock wall, a sudden opening in the cliff made me tread water and stop the dragoons following behind me. The opening looked like a rift, a rift that seemed to go on all the way to the surface, but narrowed on the way up.
Down below at our level it was wide enough to allow three of us to enter swimming shoulder to shoulder.
A low glow was coming from within and I signaled the dragoons to turn off their lights and to wait for me, as I made my way cautiously into the opening. Staying close to the wall, I peaked into the entrance. The glow came from a little farther above me, illuminating a cavernous space, about twenty by twenty paces long and wide. Jagged rocks filled the bottom, and jagged walls led up.
Ignoring small cuts as I swam as close as I dared up on the wall I stopped when my eyes came level with the ground above me.
A lone siren swam in circles, her hands grasping a long spear. A guard. I watched her for a little while until I was sure it was only her, before I tugged hard on her tail when she came closer to the edge. I tugged hard enough for her to lose her spear. Her eyes opened wide when she saw me and her mouth was about to do the same, but I planted my palm on top of it, to stifle her scream of alarm.
She dug her clawed fingers into my arm, shredding my flesh until I managed to catch both of her wrists in mine. Her tail moved up my legs, circled around my waist and began to squeeze.
Despite the tank pushing oxygen into my mask, it was hard to breathe with her tail tightening around my lungs. The blood from my arm was dissolving quickly in the water, but the current would carry the particles with it. Mantadors were known for their keen sense of smell, one particle was enough to attract them from as far as the volcano to here.
I needed to end this fight quickly, if I didn’t want a swarm of mantadors upon my dragoons and me. Not to mention that the siren was close to getting me to pass out.
There was no choice, I hated hurting her—I had never hurt a seffy in my life—before I realized that I was about to incite a war with seffies. Sirens, granted, still, seffies.
Snyg, I cursed and banged the sirens head against the wall, knocking her out. Her tail loosened around my torso, allowing me to take a deep, painful breath.
Before I had a chance to contemplate my next move, the water stirred around me and my ten dragoons swam at me at a deadly speed, pointing up and behind them, where I made out the long dark shadow of a mantador. They must have been close by and my blood had led them straight to us. With my dragoons swimming so urgently I realized there had to be more of them. Many more.
I gripped the unconscious siren firmly and began to swim the only way open to us, up.
NIARA
I didn’t like not seeing Myles for a few days, but the idea of diving in the middle of the night into a nest of sirens didn’t appeal to me either. I suppose I could have insisted at least to come along with him and waited on the boat, instead I pounced on the idea of doing some more research in the ruins of the city by the volcano island. At least it would keep me occupied enough to not constantly think about Myles, also I was sure my days exploring the ruins were coming to an end once we moved Aecor. Instead of a day trip it would take two days.
So with a heavy heart I bid Myles good-bye and Kyle took me straight to Death Mountain. To make things a bit easier, we had marked the spot with a buoy.
Ours wasn’t the only boat, several others had accompanied us to resume their underwater training that had been interrupted by the battle with the Chrymphten.
Three dragoons accompanied me during my dive, while the rest either took off to where they liked to train or remained aboard the ship to keep an eye out.
As always as soon as the first statues and obelisks came into view, the world around me faded my sole focus was on the ruins. Even after all my dives here for the past few weeks, it never ceased to amaze me to swim through these breaking apart buildings, to think that the ground below me wasn’t just sand, but paved roads, roads that had been traveled by people many thousands of years ago.
I swam toward the fountain and sat at the edge, looking into the basin filled with shells and some seaweed growing on the edges. A snail made its way up the center column, cleaning it off whatever algae might be growing.
Who were you people? I wondered, trying not to float up. Sitting underwater was harder than on land for sure.
Something blue caught my attention where the snail made its way up painfully slow. I used my hand and first fanned it against the column, then wiped. More colors became visible under a layer of seafoam, that broke under my fingers like sand. The seafoam was the same color as the rest of the fountain, making it appear as if the center was just a column, but it wasn’t just a column. It had been painstakingly decorated with colorful pebbles into a mosaic.
Intrigued I pulled out a piece of cloth I had brought to clean artifacts and began wiping at the column in earnest. Soon I floated in the center of the basin, swimming up the column that was twice as thick as me, wiping foam as I went. I didn’t stop to regard the mosaics, set on taking in the whole picture once I had it freed of the seafoam, still the artful displays didn’t escape my attention.
Painstakingly the artist had assembled pebbles, some the size of a needle head, in all colors of the rainbow, arranging them so that darker shadows were visible underneath a person’s muscles. I marveled at one’s image perfectly depicting his hollow cheeks, looking so real, it could have been an image taken with a palmtop.
I floated back after I was sure I had cleaned the entire column, to take in the full sight and was amazed how much it reminded me of Egyptian stories back from Earth. It hadn’t been easy to come by books of Earth’s history, thousands of years ago, but I had owned a couple and the resemblance was astonishing.
The lifelike figures were aqua like the Leanders, with the same kind of burning black eyes, but their facial structures were a bit different, kind of like Neanderthals differed from Homo Sapiens, only these people didn’t look as primitive. It made sense though, if they had lived that long ago on this planet.
Whatever story the artist had tried to retell on the column, spiraled up from the base and I found myself swimming engrossed in circles around it, following the depictions.
It was a representation of how these people had lived off the land, a very fertile land from the looks of it, they appeared very advanced in the arts of biological science, which this column was dedicated to. It showed how they bred, what I assumed to have been some kind of livestock, larger, how they invented serums to harvest more vegetables or made certain animals lay more eggs.
It was intriguing to decipher their accomplishments, which were in some cases mindboggling, when I came across a cross breed between a bird and some kind of rodent. Whoever these people had been, they had been extremely advanced in biochemistry. Still, judging by what I had discovered in their houses, they had lived relatively primitive. Then again, I mused, the Leandars flew in spaceships and many preferred torches, so maybe it wasn’t such a stretch to see these people advancing in one area but not in others, maybe it was us humans who were wired weirdly because we had developed so many different technologies in so many different fields. Then again, didn’t one advancement bring upon another?
Not necessarily, I allowed, it depended on need. Many of humanity’s achievements were built on war and survival, the urge to usurp others. A more peaceful species, might develop differently. I made a note to think some more on this later, when I wasn’t hundreds of paces underwater and continued deciphering the fountain.
