Alessia in Atlantis: The Forbidden Vial by Nathalie Laine

Author:Nathalie Laine [Laine, Nathalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

32

Celestial sunbeams coming from the surface danced around them, giving a spooky, sacred quality to everything, like light rays in a cathedral. In front of them stood the ruins of a giant, stone pyramid, seaweed bursting from cracks in its rocks. All around it were the remains of smaller, broken buildings: piles of rocks, lonely pillars, and square archways to nowhere. They were nothing more than a playground for the fish swimming in and out of them now.

Alessia and Kella fit their shells into their ears.

“Where are we?” Alessia asked.

“I think these are the remains of Azlanu. It was a city state like Atlantis, south of the Gulf of California. But it didn’t bend to the Emperor.”

A shiver ran down Alessia’s spine.

“Look up there!” Kella pointed to the top of the stone pyramid. A faint glow flickered across an open doorway under the pyramid’s flat roof.

Without waiting, they set about climbing the large staircase leading up the front of the pyramid to the opening. Great totems carved into fearsome creatures with heads twisted backwards, and squared serpents and crocodiles, loomed over them. The stone stairs under their feet were smooth and slippery with wear, and partially crumbled away. But they finally reached the top and peered in.

The ravages that had occurred to the rest of the Azlanu buildings hadn’t spared the pyramid. Its inside had been almost hollowed out. From what had obviously once been a complex structure of chambers and tunnels, there now remained only a few broken platforms sticking out from the walls into the void that was the center of the pyramid. The floor at the bottom of the pyramid was a sea of rubble, and standing on that rubble, holding fishbowls containing glowing jellyfish, was a circle of almost thirty people, kappas, and other creatures.

Metella floated down to join them, using the remnants of the floors jutting out from the walls as stepping stones.

A friendly man at the bottom greeted her. “Welcome!” he said through a phosphorescent conch-horn, that allowed his voice to propagate through the water. “Grab yourself a walrus milk, and join us!”

Alessia couldn’t tell if anybody she knew was there, since they wore their wetsuits over their noses – although one looked suspiciously like their strange professor Gizma with her perpetually changing wetsuit pattern, and another may have been Naror, the so-called ‘class liar’, flanked by his parents.

The attendees would lower the neck of their wetsuits just long enough to suck their drink from the tip of a sealed walrus tusk, and then cover their faces again. Some looked at each other, with shells in their ears: probably chatting in their minds.

“So who are we spying on?” an excited voice whispered through Alessia’s shell. Herior appeared beside Alessia, and Kella almost tumbled off the pyramid in shock.

“What are you doing here?” Kella’s voice snapped through the shell.

“Larthu was with his grandpa and when I saw the fearsome twosome slipping out looking suspicious, I couldn’t help myself. So what are you up to?” Alessia

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