New York
Present day
It was just after two a.m. on a moonless New York night. The city’s strikingly-lit skyline was advertising its wares to all and sundry, engrossed in its frenetic rhythmic dance.
The Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue was asleep, journeying from dreams to nightmare and back, dreaming wild dreams, dreams that took it through each of the periods represented in its gilded belly. A figure was moving silently through its dark and veiled venerable halls.
The Museum’s sophisticated security system was no match for such a skilled predator. It responded to the touch of the exquisite figure cajoling it and dug deeper into its dreams. The figure slowed its pace as it was approaching its destination, deep inside the bowels of the building.
The figure found what it sought. It could not resist the impulse to briefly admire, under the sparse light of its torch, the object the beauty of which overcame immovability and screamed its presence. The figure chided itself for resigning itself to its weakness for beauty.
With a deft movement, the glass case was violated and the object of its affection was in its hands. There was not the slightest blink from the lasers that the figure could see with its thermal vision.
The figure took the time to savour the moment and the texture of the object, and, caressing its back, the figure removed a panel and checked inside. Hidden in one corner was a piece of paper folded numerous times.
The figure took it out, unfolded it and, concentrating the light on it, examined it and read its contents. It smiled in the dark, a smile wasted with no witness.
She would be pleased, the figure thought to itself.
And then in an instant the figure was gone. It disappeared as silently and as quickly as it appeared. The ghostly figure was consumed by the night, blending with it as if it never existed as a corporeal being.
In a flash it landed on the soft ground of the bog of Marathon, near Athens, and was then carried underwater, deeper and deeper, until it reached the underground city, its own personal refuge and secret base of the Ruinands’ power.