Cyprus
Present day
Up on the mountain, Katerina, Vasilis, Lara and Aristo were carefully descending following a steep path that barely clung to the edge of the cliff with gritted teeth.
They reached the entrance to the tunnel and went inside. Only then did they dare to switch on their torches. After a few minutes in the tunnel, feeling mercilessly being suffocated with the earthen walls threatening to consume them, they emerged in a large cavern.
They were relieved to be free of the claustrophobic confines of the tunnel. Lara set off a couple of flares to light up the cavern. There was a generator, but she didn’t dare turn it on for fear of the noise betraying them.
Scattered around them were remnants of the excavation, tools of the trade, dug-up remains and objects and holes in the ground behind cordoned off areas, and openings, just visible, smattering some of the outer walls of the cave, leading only God knew where.
Lara lost no time. ‘Hey, here, this way, quickly. There’s no time to lose. Hurry. There is still a possibility that we may have been followed. We cannot underestimate the Ruinands.’
She led them through one of the gaping openings into a short tunnel and then another cave, smaller than the one before. Now here there were no more openings or gaps on the outer walls. They were stuck. Lara turned to Vasilis.
‘This is the end of the road. This is as far as we can go, unless you want to start hitting your head on the walls with the hope that one of them will give up and disgorge its secret and allow you to break through.’
‘How about not underestimating me either?’
As if an invisible hand was guiding him, at that moment not in control of his own actions, Vasilis closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on the task at hand. He could not resist a proper challenge. He did, at times, have a penchant for tackling the seemingly impossible.
But perhaps it was not that impossible in this case. The effort he would have to exert would cause him pain as well as exhaustion. He closed his eyes and focused all his senses in an attempt to open up a channel and connect at a deep level with the rock formation obstructing his way.
He began to suppress his subconscious resistance to the side effects of his act. He gave in slowly, and he felt that he was succeeding and breaking through, even though elements of resistance were always there in the background, hibernating, strengthening, biding their time.
He knew that the resistance and doubt were part of his strength, part of the process and not an obstacle, a familiar feeling that had become part of him by now.
A bright sunlight-like object appeared on the ceiling of the cavern and started to expand and to turn night into day. The torches were redundant. A single ray travelled above their heads and partly through their bodies and their minds, and they saw it act not just as pure energy, but as if it was an individual being, some kind of out-worldly form of life.
The ray connected with the wall and at that spot the rock melted, as if shot through with the deadliest heat of a laser. The ray developed eyes that turned to Vasilis and back at the wall, and a hand came out of the ray and drew Vasilis by the hand and led him to the wall. It pulled his hand to bring it to touch the wall and an entrance opened, revealing, behind a light cloud of some dusty substance, a cavern even bigger than the first one they passed.
The ray coming from the adjoining room bounced off the walls and exploded, sending sparks in all directions, sparks that hit them, but did not harm them, and instead gave them a strange sensation of being pampered and massaged at a spa, totally relaxed. They felt at least ten years younger.
They saw around the cavern niche after niche filled with statues attired in Byzantine dress. All the statues had their right arms raised and indicating at a point in the distance. The four intruders into this rarefied space of the sentinels suspended in a time of their own tried to follow the direction of the extended arms to the point where they intersected.
At the meeting point of the imaginary lines created by the extended arms the ground opened up and a platform rose on which stood a transparent figure, alive, but with no internal organs, as they could see through the figure to the opposite side of the cavern. The figure had a voice.
‘Hello, friends. Please come aboard.’
Vasilis, Lara, Katerina and Aristo obeyed reluctantly. As soon as they were on board, the platform started a dizzying descent, a hell of a rollercoaster ride. Only they did not feel dizzy, but increasingly warmer and warmer, in a cosy sort of way, as they descended to where they didn’t know, couldn’t imagine and couldn’t wait to see.
When the platform stopped they were led to a small hall that seemed to be floating in space, a rotunda, surrounded and supported by an exquisite combination of Corinthian columns interwoven with all sorts of exotic flowers and figures, magnifying the effect of the Corinthian rhythm.
The rotunda was surrounded by water and it seemed to be floating and bobbing along. They walked across the water, as if it was not there at all, as if it was a solid surface, as if they were walking through an enveloping mist that gave them no feeling at all of warm or cold and which did not in the least obscure their line of vision to the centre of the rotunda where a man was standing waiting for them.
He looked like a young last Byzantine Emperor. Had he found the secret of life and eternal youth or was he some kind of apparition or ghost? Then he spoke.
‘I want us to play a game.’
No welcome, no greeting, no introduction, no explanation, nothing. How rude, the four visitors thought at the same time independently of each other. They came close to expressing it, but, at the last second, common sense kicked in and they, wisely, held back and waited, speechless.
‘Once you’ve cured the tragedy that you will find further down your path, you will be free to go with a gift to boot.’ Said the last Emperor look-alike.
A strange noise behind them made them turn, but they saw nothing. However, they kept hearing something like footsteps and a banging, as if someone or something, some machine or device, was trying to break through tightly-packed earth.
It couldn’t be the Ruinands, could it? They surely must have thought them dead after the crash of the pod on the mountain and they wouldn’t have followed. The Ruinands couldn’t have seen anything.
Vasilis and the others had been careful to switch on the torches only when they were well inside the tunnel and far from its entrance. Was it that someone had switched on a torch too close to the mouth of the tunnel? It was a waste of time to speculate. Vasilis and the others dismissed the thought.