Santorini Isand, Greece

Sunset glinted off the vivid blue of Santorini's roofs. Houses and trees lay in a gorgeous green-and-white patchwork that clung to every nook and crevice on the cliffs of the volcano's ancient caldera. Of course, I didn't see any of it because I was in a six-foot trench excavating my ninetieth piece of blooming Minoan stoneware of the day.

The CEO's personal assistant twittered into my phone, "Ms Natla is keen for you to arrange another dig next week. She suggests a site near to the temple of Knossos in Crete."

"Another dig? We've already unearthed over three hundred items of Minoan stoneware, figurines and jewellery for the Natla Museum." I'd led two digs in eastern Crete, and this was our second dig on Santorini. Work, work, work, and Natla Technologies still weren't happy. "We're running out of Minoan sites to explore!"

"We can increase your fee, Lady Croft."

"It's not about the money, it's—" The realisation hit me like a dig-trowel between the eyes.

It wasn't that Natla Technologies had more money than sense. They were looking for some specific Minoan artefact. Something special. Something that they didn't want to tell me about. So much for the elusive CEO of Natla not being the sharpest tool in the box. If anything, she was a scalpel. She'd insisted on so many digs in the hope that I'd deliver thousands of artefacts, one of which might be her coveted item.

"Fine. I'll lead one more dig. We'll pack up this weekend and get the ferry to Crete on Monday."

Uncle Conrad's entreaties for me to rest and grieve were submerged under a tsunami of curiosity. What exactly were Natla Technologies looking for? And, more importantly, how easily could I steal it from them?

Finally free to drink in the serene night-time beauty of Santorini, I was too exhausted from the dig -- and my mind too alight with theories about Natla's wondrous artefact -- to enjoy my meandering through the crooked side-streets of the town, where shisha cafes and ouzeris rubbed shoulders with alcoved shrines lined with prayer beads and blue glass eyes.

My walk took me across cobbles lit with dim lights strung across trees, towards the crumbling brick seawall that hung over the deep blue lagoon of Santorini's caldera. A shadow skittered out of the darkness beyond my peripheral vision. I turned, but nobody was there.

Too much sun, not enough water. Perhaps I was seeing things, but that instinctive ability to detect danger — and run blindly into it — that I'd inherited from my tomb-raiding ancestors had me grasping at my belt for my dagger.

The shadowy figure followed with light steps, turning the corner as I splayed myself across the nearest wall. Unsure of what manner of thief or grave-robber I was facing, I edged away towards the cliff, hoping that the shadow wouldn't see me in the gloom beyond the wall, or risk attacking so close to the sheer drop into the volcano's submerged crater.

The shadow pounced.

Clad in figure-hugging black and wielding a balaclava and a tarnished fencing sabre that looked like it had been commandeered from a school locker, my attacker — clearly a woman — made a peculiar sight. However proficient with her sabre, she wasn't a professional. She lunged fast, but not fast enough. I threw myself beyond her reach towards the seawall. The woman hissed as I took another deft step away, hopping onto the eroding brick parapet that separated me from the blue below. So, another tomb raider had her eye on Natla Technologies's clearly-not-so-secret treasure.

Focussed on centring my mass above the brick parapet, I narrowly missed a sabre thrust from nowhere, and then another, parried clumsily with my dagger, my feet barely keeping to the decaying brick under my feet. I feinted, twisted and turned with the shadow's advances, each one more forceful than the last.

Although fast, I could see traces of that familiar school swordplay, practiced with vigour, but without a trainer. My attacker was agile, but I could predict her moves, not a single blow landing. Hasty footwork and overreach meant one thing: rage had begun to hinder her as she mounted attack after useless attack. 

Determined to nip this rather vulgar nonsense in the bud, I swung my arms wildly as if teetering over the hundred-metre fall into the volcano's caldera. My mind whirling with the rosy nostalgia of school épée drills and fist-fights, I spun around and leapt off the parapet, and onto the shadowy lady.

Sweating and breathless, she flailed at me with a tiring sword-arm before letting it clatter into the dust as we skidded on cobbles, grabbing at clothes and limbs as we rolled. Gaining speed, we hit the wall with a thud. The parapet creaked.

We tumbled together again, my knife finally free of its sheath. I slashed at the woman's shoulder, inches away from flesh. She fell hard against the parapet in her retreat. A rusty plume of brick dust puffed out of the cracking seawall and ribboned away into the water below.

Shaking herself free of dust, the woman followed on swift feet and barrelled into me. We rolled, a tangle of elbows and knees crashing hard into the parapet. The seawall groaned, heaved... and carried us over the gleaming water, along with a crumbling sheet of bricks. Our momentary platform fragmented, and we fell down into the caldera's lagoon, smashing through the water's surface.

The woman's balaclava bobbed amid seaspray, brick dust and bubbles, but I couldn't find her in the water. Launching myself through the dark waves, I was too late to see the brick that came hurtling towards my head.

Blackness crept into my vision, my limbs like lead. The bottom of the lagoon loomed. Consciousness slithered away.

~~☆~~

My eyes blinked out sand and grit. An almighty spasming of my stomach had me sitting bolt upright. Water began to pour in an agonising torrent from my mouth and stinging nose.

I'd washed up in a pool that emptied into a small cave, eroded into the side of a cliff by millennia of pounding waves. The cave entrance above me wasn't more than a manhole which opened to a view of the caldera's moonlit waters, and the distant glitter of lights of the town. The cave must have been on one of the islets in the centre of the volcano's crater.

Aside from a few sabre-nicks, a bump on the head and a lungful of brine, I was not too shabby. Though, I wasn't quite ready to squeeze through the cave entrance and brave a two-kilometre swim back to the edge of the crater while my head was still fuzzy. And I'd certainly leave it until the next day to tell Natla to shove their next dig up their jacksie and bugger off while they were at it.

Driftwood, shells and other debris had washed up in the cave over the millennia, but little else was in there save a shrine of some sort set into an alcove in the cave wall. The shrivelled husks of ancient fruit lay scattered on a marble altar, and dry wisps of votive flowers and leaves were strewn around by centuries worth of meltemi winds whistling into the cave. Chiselled and polished into the thick marble slab was a depression, not much bigger than my fist. Etched onto the front in ornate Ancient Greek were the words:

τῇ καλλίστῃ

Ti kallisti. The most beautiful. Or, when translated to modern Greek, it was rather more like the best.

Whatever artefact had been worshipped whilst wedged into the depression in the marble had been robbed from the grotto years, perhaps centuries, earlier. A sacred chalice, or an enormous fist-sized gem? Whatever it was, Natla and my would-be assassin had both been looking for it. It didn't take much to guess which tomb-raiding bastards had stolen the artefact from its secret cave.

My tomb-raiding bastard family.

~~☆~~

The cellar was even more choked with dust than the last time I'd ventured down there. I must have been ten when I'd first crept into the cellar to explore the old crates of rejected exhibits that hadn't been considered consequential enough for Dad to display in Abbingdon Manor's archaeological museum. At fourteen I'd gone through a phase of spending hours in the cellar poring over Mum's papers and artefacts in case they might east the pain of missing her, just a little.

The crates closest to the cellar door were full of Mum's meticulously labelled finds, not that she'd ever kept many. The handful of Minoan items she hadn't donated to the Ashmolean were nothing but shards of pottery and the odd figurine. The remainder of the cavernous cellar space was taken up by stalagmites of stacked crates almost reaching the ceiling, brimming full of artefacts from Croft family digs of old.

Dozens of crates of Dad's finds, dozens of my grandfather's, and more still, as if venturing to the far recesses of the cellar was a walk backwards through archaeological history. Egyptian, Indus Valley, Mesoamerican, Mesopotamian. There was even a Polynesian crate. The Croft family, the most successful of the great rebel archaeologists had undoubtedly taken ti kallisti from its hallowed altar. I wondered when I'd start stacking my crates in the cellar, carrying on the tradition of hiding treasures in the dark forever.

I'd vaguely remembered seeing them ten years earlier, but lost amongst so many other artefacts and covered with a decade of new dust, it took rather a long time to find what I'd come for: three crates labelled "Site 1 - Santorini".

Chips of painted stoneware, bones of long-dead Minoan townsfolk, jewellery from burial sites, ceremonial weapons. I rooted between pot-shards and bones until I found a small hessian bag tied with thick twine. Dusty and wedged into a corner, it wasn't surprising that I'd overlooked it the last time I'd opened the Santorini crates a decade earlier.

The bag was heavy. I eased it out of the crate with cupped hands and probed gently at the contents through the hessian. Hard and round, it felt like metal. Perhaps a small cannonball that had somehow got mixed with the find.

A swipe of my knife, and the bag gaped open. A dim aureate glow appeared from inside. I shrugged the hessian away. My heart trembled in my chest.

Lifelike and moulded in detail, from the roughness of the skin to the veiny little leaves at its stem, sat a golden apple. Etched into its golden skin in ornate Ancient Greek were the same words I'd seen in the grotto at the heart of the volcano's caldera:

τῇ καλλίστῃ

I'd seen countless items of golden jewellery, ornate golden armour, gold-patterned weapons, but I'd never seen a golden apple. So beautiful and so realistic in its form, the apple looked as if it would fit perfectly in the depression set in the altar of the hidden cave on Santorini. It must have weighed three kilograms, at least. Why would Natla Technologies want such a thing, other than to melt it down and make circuit board contacts with it?

I held the apple reverently with both hands. It exuded a warmth, unlike the cold press of metal that I was used to from dig tools and weapons. The apple warmed up so quickly with my bodyheat that it startled me. It began to feel too hot to touch, and I set it onto its hessian sack on the cellar floor.

The air began to bubble and ripple around me. At first I dismissed it as exhaustion from four digs and a flight back from Santorini making me see things, but no. The air was definitely charging with a strange electricity.

A terrifying crepitation crackled around the golden apple, and the air churned as if the blurred vision in a mirage were solidifying out of the cellar's empty space. Blackness swirled in the mirage, like looking into a warped mirror. The turbulent air sizzled, and a vision grew out of the gloom of the cellar, as if projected onto the very motes of dust in front of me.

Women charging on horseback across a battle plain. Handsome women in leather armour and sporting colossal weapons as they rode, scattering a tight phalanx of what appeared to be Greek infantrymen in leather armoured tunics and sandals. At the head of the charge was a tall lady, clearly the queen of these fearsome women, dressed in a golden helmet, a crimson breastplate, and a lapis-plated battle skirt. Everything about her was magnificent: the bewildering array of weaponry clipped at her belt and hung about her armour, the mud-spattered muscles of her arms and legs straining against her horse, the mane of black curls that snaked out from under her helmet as she swung her sword.

The vision rippled, the women regrouping and riding again at the Greek soldiers, spearing some and sending others fleeing. The infantry charged at the queen alone, one of the Greek generals at the prong of the attack. The queen pursued.

I could see what they were planning. They were separating her from her women. She leapt from her horse and hunted the general on foot, her sword slashing away at air inches from his sandals as he fled, taking her further from safety.

No. I didn't want the scene to play on. More than a historical scene being projected onto the wall of the cellar, the vision seemed to be a re-enactment of a scene from the Olympian epics, a clash between Gods and Amazons.

The queen cut through Greek troops on her way back to her women, her shield held above her as archers rained down arrows. She wouldn't hold out much longer.

"No!" Afraid to touch the burning hot apple, I reached out, my hand rippling the charged air at the surface of the vision in an attempt to end it. "She can't die!"

Her wooden shield straining under the weight of a mace, the queen charged on.

"No!" I stabbed at the air in front of me; perhaps if the vision ended I could prevent history, or pre-history -- or whatever divine mythology was being played out -- from being made in front of my terrified eyes. Desperate, I forced my head into the rippling vision, appearing metres away from the queen and her pursuers.

The queen turned, three infantrymen almost on top of her. A man lunged for her, grabbing at the vambrace on her arm.

"No! Leave her alone!" I leaned further into the vision, beckoning the queen to me. "Come here!"

The queen took a deft swipe at a soldier with her sword, and with a flick of her wrist, a coil of gold emerged from the sack at her hip. The coil became a golden streak that arced across my vision. A golden lasso.

The lasso whipped around my arm like a serpent, wrapping tightly and knotting as if sentient.

The queen screamed, "Pull me!" just as a mace crashed down on her shield, shattering it to nothing but a handle and splinters.

I pulled, and pulled even bloody harder, dragging the queen towards me inch by inch. Unable to pull against whatever supernatural forces lay at the boundary between the vision and the cellar, I set my heels against the crates, heaving until the lasso bit deep into my skin, heaving so hard that I felt close to blacking out.

With a final tug, the armoured queen shot into the cellar. The vision of the Olympian realm she'd come from shimmered in the background behind her as a soldier's arm fumbled at its edge, before disappearing in a shower of light.

Releasing my death-grip on the crate, I sat back into the dust, my arm stinging as the lasso unwound itself from my arm. A flash of silver appeared before my eyes.

The queen stood over me, her lips twisted into a furious snarl under her helmet, and her sword's blade pricking into my neck.

--------------------

WC: 2663

Author's Notes:

1. The banner image is the beautiful DC Wonder Woman #58 cover variant by Jenny Frisson. She's famous for her Red Sonja covers, which are also amazing if you want to Google them for a quick look.

2. Golden apples feature in a lot of video games! You can find them in Minecraft, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, Assassin's Creed, and Hello Neighbor. But you can't find them in Tomb Raider, sadly. They appear a lot in folklore across the world too, but you might have guessed that this apple is the Golden Apple of the Hesperides, from Greek mythology.

3. Here is a cute map of Santorini - you can see the approximate circular shape of the crater of the volcano, although some of it has been eroded. You can also see the islets in the centre of the crater where Lara was washed up in a cave.

------------------

Reading lots of ONC stories? Try reading this!

Till the Hawk Moth Flies by -dreamsinwords (pronouns: any/all) on Wattpad