Before Olympus

The phrase became their next destination.

Before Olympus. It sounded like a riddle, and for two days they treated it as one. Cael ransacked the library. Mara studied maps. Noah, who did not like riddles, announced that it clearly meant a place before Olympus, possibly a car park, and was sat on by Ilyan.

It was Cael who finally found the thread.

"Olympus," he told them, over a table strewn with parchments, "was not the first home of the gods."

"I thought it was where they lived," said Noah.

"Where they lived last."

He explained, slowly. Before Olympus there had been another sanctuary, a high white place on a different mountain. And before that sanctuary there had been something else, a civilization whose name no one living could speak. It had not simply fallen. It had been unwritten, scrubbed out of every record like a stain from a cloth.

They traveled through three Gates before they found its ruins.

The first Gate delivered them onto a salt plain under a white noon, where the wind blew grit into their eyes. The second dropped them into a river valley thick with ferns and hung with the screaming of unseen birds. The third was a hole in a cliff face, lined with seven rings of weathered stone, that opened into a long cold tunnel running down.

At its end lay a circular chamber beneath the earth.

It was perfectly round. The domed ceiling was black with age. Light came from nowhere in particular, a pale suffusion in the air, like moonlight in fog. And the walls, every inch of them, were covered with carvings.

"The history of the world," Cael murmured.

Elias walked slowly around the chamber, trailing his fingers along the cool stone.

Humans came first. The carvings showed them in their thousands, small and plain, farming, building, raising children, looking up at the stars. Then came the Keepers, tall robed figures standing at the shoulders of the humans like tutors. Then the gods, rising out of the stone in glory and fire. Then the Titans, vast and heavy-browed, striding across the carved horizon with the world cupped in their hands.

But something appeared before all of them.

He found it at the very beginning of the wall, so worn that it was nearly smooth. A blank figure. It had no face. It had no name. It stood alone in the first panel with its arms at its sides, and around it, in a thin ring, were seven lines.

Elias touched the figure.

A voice filled his mind.

NOT EVERYTHING THAT IS FORGOTTEN IS DEAD.

It was not a whisper. It was a statement, flat and ancient and sure. He felt it in his teeth.

The chamber vanished.

He saw his mother again.

This time she was older. Her hair had gone gray at the temples. She stood in a pale room, and her coat was torn at the shoulder, and she looked as if she had not slept in days. She was not speaking to Mara or to Cael. She was speaking directly to him.

"If you are seeing this," she said, "I failed to stop the first awakening."

"Who are you talking about?" Elias asked, though he knew she could not hear him.

She answered anyway. Perhaps it was only the recording, only the stored shape of a sentence she had spoken to the empty air. But it sounded like an answer.

"The one who was here before the gods."

The recording ended.

The chamber snapped back into place around him, cold and round and silent. Noah had hold of his sleeve. Mara and Cael were staring at him with expressions of dread. Ilyan stood against the far wall, his face unreadable.

Behind them, stone cracked.

It was a sharp, flat, ringing sound, and it came from the wall they had just examined. A seam opened in the carvings. Dust sifted down, and then, with a long grating moan, a section of the wall slid back to reveal a doorway.

Beyond it was darkness.

Elias stared into it. The dark did not look empty. It looked attentive.

And from the darkness came a familiar voice.

"Elias."