Time Remaining: 10 Months, Twenty Four Days
The men went ashore in two shifts – Odysseus had heard cautionary tales about pirates and mutinies, and had decided that – if he wasn’t on board the ship – there needed to be enough men to defend the ship, but not enough to sail away with it. The galley had a shallow enough draft that they were able to moor within swimming distance, so most of the sailors simply jumped overboard into the clear blue sea. Odysseus loaded their rowboat with some hunting supplies and empty casks for fruit and drinking water, and took it to shore.
The men scattered to hunt, forage, and simply enjoy being off of the boat, but Odysseus caught sight of a structure on a hill further into the mysterious island’s interior. Odysseus, ever curious, decided to take Adresteia and investigate. Acrysius and a group of men – their heads filled with dreams of lost treasures – decided to follow them.
The forest was strange to Odysseus. The bird calls were largely familiar, but the trees and undergrowth were quite different from those in Ithaca – the leaves were narrower, more rigid with sharper edges. It fascinated him, and he began gathering leaves and flowers as they went – Ithaca’s healers were, by necessity, botanists as well, and they would doubtlessly find these plants to be fascinating.
As they neared the structure – or more accurately structures - Odysseus marveled at the construction of the buildings. Aesthetically, they were reminiscent of the buildings the Minoans had raised on ancient Crete, but the stone work was entirely different. Rather than cut marble or granite, or fired clay, the stones used in these building seemed grainy, like sandstone, and porous – though not so porous as pumice. Ultimately, the stonework was terribly unpleasing to the eye, and it was clearly deteriorating under the weight of invasive plant growth, but Odysseus found it fascinating nonetheless.
Stranger still was the entrance into the structure. The entrance had two openings through which the interior of the building could be seen, and though dark, it seemed fairly clean, suggesting that something had kept the island’s flora and fauna from spreading inside. That ‘something’ was a nearly invisible field of matter suspended within each of the openings. The material was streaked with dirt, and marred by a number of scratches, making it visible to the naked eye, but Odysseus imagined that if they’d been new and clean they would have been absolutely transparent. All of the men marveled at the material, and they debated how to bypass it while Odysseus studied the entrance carefully.
Finally, Acrysius picked up a large rock, saying “hey, it’s worth a shot” and tossed it through one of the openings. The invisible wall shattered like a clay pot or a piece of thin volcanic glass. Odysseus scowled at him.
“What?” Acrysius shrugged, “You wanted to look inside didn’t you?”
Without a word, Odysseus gripped a metal loop on one side of the adjacent entry, and tugged it. The entire panel – invisible barrier and metal frame both – swung outward with a long creak.
“Well, we each found our own solution,” Acrysius said, “and we learned some things in the process didn’t we?”
Odysseus shook his head and stepped inside. The stark contrast between the overgrown exterior and the clean interior was stunning. A thick layer of dust covered everything, and there were a few long abandoned spider webs, but the transparent barrier had held out anything larger than a vole. Unfortunately, it was also incredibly dark inside, and no one had brought the means to craft torches. Odysseus and Acrysius stumbled around inside for a while, searching for something of value – either clues to what the place was, or loose treasure the previous tenants might have left lying around. Odysseus thought he’d lucked out when he chanced upon some rolled and sealed documents, but the scrolls crumbled as soon as he lifted them from the cobweb-covered table they had been left on.
“Maybe we should go back to the ship and see about digging up some torches?” Acrysius said.
“By all means,” Odysseus nodded, “Or a few of the shields we brought – get the shiniest, most polished ones you can find. We might be able to reflect the sunlight in here.”
“Aren’t you coming?” Acrysius asked.
“Do you need me to hold your hand on the walk back to the ship? No?”
“Hey, I’m just worried about leaving my captain alone in a mysterious building on a mysterious island.”
Odysseus sighed, “I’m sorry. Thank you for being concerned, but it’s entirely unnecessary. If there was anything dangerous in here, this place wouldn’t be in as fine a condition as it is.”
“Fine, but don’t come crying to me if you fall and break your neck wandering around this place in the dark.”
Acrysius left and led the men back to the ship. As soon as they were out of sight, Adresteia swooped through the broken door and alighted on the table of unfortunate scrolls, where Odysseus was still searching – now very carefully – for anything of interest.
“I don’t suppose you brought a torch?” Odysseus asked the bird.
The question was rhetorical, but Adresteia shifted into her human form, and with a snap of her fingers created a small ball of lightning in her hand. The light was blinding, a sidelong glance left Odysseus’s eyes stinging and filled with stars. Adresteia closed her fingers around the ball, dimming it to a soft red glow. Odysseus blinked his eyes hard, his eyes taking several seconds to adjust.
“So…” Odysseus felt suddenly awkward speaking to the naked woman in the dim light, “Is this your… true form…?” Stories about the gods were filled with shapeshifting feats, but they weren’t especially educational tales.
“Partly,” Adresteia spoke for the first time since she’d been sent off with Odysseus, “This is my appearance when I wish to look human, but it is not too different from my natural form. A bit smaller and lacking the wings and talons, but otherwise pretty similar.”
“And the clothes…?”
“Do you expect me to weave them out of thin air everytime I change shape?” Adrasteia said, “Or fly around as the only eagle in the world wearing a tunic?”
“My apologies,” Odysseus said, “Being as I have your ear, and as you’re actually speaking to me… what are the chances we came across this island by chance? I mean, I have followed the course we were given perfectly, so there was a chance we could have sailed right on past, but…”
“I very much doubt that our arrival here is a coincidence.”
“You don’t know?” Odysseus asked, “Athena doesn’t tell you these things?”
“Athena withholds a great deal of information. Sometimes it’s for compartmentalization, and sometimes it’s because she assumes everyone should already know it, or will learn it soon enough on their own.”
“Then why doubt this is a coincidence?” Odysseus asked.
“Because Athena likes to orchestrate things to look like fate,” Adresteia said, “and because this is where I was created.”
“You were born here?”
“In a way,” she said, “Now, come; if we’re here for a reason, I imagine that reason is to show you something.” Adresteia led him deeper into the darkness of the building until they were out of sight of the entrance, her ball of lightning providing the only illumination.
“Show me what?” Odysseus asked.
“Something you need to see.”
“What do I need to see?”
Adresteia led them down two flights of stairs, to another windowed door. She pressed her free hand to a metal plate next to the door, but nothing happened. She pulled on it, but it was locked. Finally she picked up a piece of equipment Odysseus could not recognize off the floor, and used it to smash through the transparent barrier.
Inside, she found another plate on the wall, with small levers on it, and after flipping the levers to no effect, she channeled the ball of lightning into the wall. The room went briefly dark as the lightning disappeared, but almost immediately the room lit up, surfaces all over the room covered with blinking, twinkling, or steady lights, and clear panels in the walls bathed them in soft white light. The room, it turned out, was huge; it stretched well beyond the small portion Adresteia had illuminated with her magic. On one side of this space, there was a cell partitioned from the rest of the room with metal bars sunk into the floor and ceiling. Inside the cell was a massive corpse, chained to the floor.
Odysseus rattled the door set into the wall of metal bars, and finally popped the lock with a solid impact from his shoulder. He stepped cautiously into the cell and studied the remains – they were desiccated, almost mummified.
“This was a clean room,” Adresteia said, “I imagine that’s why the prisoners left here haven’t decomposed. Now that we’ve breached the room, nature will reclaim them quickly.”
Odysseus wasn’t sure nature would want them; he rolled the oddly proportioned body over to see its face, and was mortified. The corpse generally appeared to be human – accounting for the desiccation, a very large human when it was alive – but its head was like that of a bull, and its feet were hooves. It was very reminiscent of the beast Theseus was said to have slain in the labyrinth under Knossos.
“You can tell by the size of the horns this one was young when they left it to die in here.”
“What is it?” Odysseus asked.
“One of Hera’s purpose-built engineered life forms.”
“I… honestly I don’t understand.”
“You understand animal and plant husbandry, yes?” Adresteia said, “Breed a large bull with a large cow, get a calf that grows up to be large itself.”
“Yes, I understand that much.”
“Hera uses the same underlying principles to create living beings to serve her. This might have been a Class II combat form hybrid before it was abandoned. Class II never made it beyond the prototype phase, though.”
They walked past other cells, the light following them as Adresteia speculated on the nature of the corpses inside.
Odysseus found another large figure, this one with a single empty socket where two eyes should have been, “A cyclops.”
“Foot soldiers Hera gave to Poseidon for combat on dry land,” Adresteia studied a glowing panel next to the cell, “Apparently it’s a hybrid of a titan subrace residing in Gath, and a nearly extinct subspecies of human beings, with interrupted cellular bifurcation resulting from an attempt to fuse the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This one was a young juvenile.”
“They get bigger?”
“Cyclopes? Much bigger.”
Finally, they came to a cell where a masculine figure hung suspended, his wrists chained to the ceiling and his feet to the floor. He had two additional appendages growing from his back, punctured by metal hooks that were chained to the walls on either side to hold them out stretched. Dried out feathers covered the floor, with a few still adhering to the extra limbs.
“A winged man,” Odysseus marveled, “Could he fly?”
“I doubt he ever got the chance to find out.”
“Is this what you look like in your true form?” Odysseus asked, “Was he a relation?”
“Wings are fairly common among those with Titan blood. Kronos had them, Nyx as well. Most of Kronos's children and grandchildren too, I think, though they usually hide them. I even knew two demigods - Zetes and Kalais - who had functioning wings."
"I suppose when you can change your form at will, one would choose to have wings as often as legs."
"You're not wrong," Adresteia shrugged, "And it's certainly a useful trait to confer on a living weapon. I know Hera created Nike to replace me, as well as three malformed spawn; Aello, Ocypete, and Celæno. I suppose those three weren't the only failures along the way.”
“What was wrong with this one?” Odysseus asked, “I see no deformities.”
Adresteia examined the panel next to the cell, “It deviated from behavioral limitations. It wasn’t… servile.” Evidently, Hera hadn't found it easy to correct the mistakes she made with Nemesis.
“Was this something I needed to see... or something you needed to see?” Odysseus asked.
“For me it’s just a reminder of what I already know. For you,” Adresteia said, “I hope it gives you some idea of the powers you’re involving yourself with.”
“You think I shouldn’t have taken Athena’s offer?”
“I think Athena was right when she said it was unwise for their kind to mix with your kind,” Adresteia answered, “And that you have a right to understand what you’re getting into.”
“Thank you,” Odysseus nodded.
“Well, I’ve made my point, so we ought to make our way back to the surface. I wouldn’t show this to your men. It could compromise our operational security.”
“Fair enough,” Odysseus said, “but I have one more thing I want to look at.”
Adresteia was surprised the mortal wasn’t ready to leave the dark subterranean structure filled with dead bodies, “What could you possibly be interested in?”
“Would it be fair to assume Hera wasn’t the only one creating things here?”
“She often collaborated with the others,” Adresteia said, “So yes, there were probably other projects here.”
“And this here,” Odysseus pointed to a diagram on a panel on the opposite wall, “This is a cross sectional diagram of the structure we’re in, correct? And this symbol, the cow, that denotes this floor to be Hera’s.”
“That’s accurate,” Adresteia recalled the facility when it was still operating. Much had changed between the last time she saw it and when it was shut down, but the basic lay out of the building was unaltered.”
“Then I would like to go to the lowest floor,” Odysseus said, tapping a stylized pictogram of a hammer and anvil.
“Ah,” Adresteia said, “The forge.”
“I’m right then? It’s the forge of Hephaestus himself?”
“Not the forge, no,” Adresteia said, “But he likely kept a modest workshop here.”
“The modest workshop of Hephaestus,” Odysseus said, “Is still something I must look into.”
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