THE CAVE
Danae’s breath danced like little ghosts in the gloom. She rolled away from the dark belly of the cave and looked out onto desolate whiteness. She was in a crevice halfway up an indomitable mountain at the end of the world, shrouded in a freezing fog of never-ending clouds. No one had ventured this far for centuries. No mortal, anyway.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she fought to recapture the warmth of her dream. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not go back. The cold of the mountain was in her bones.
Surrendering to reality, she untangled herself from her bag and turned her attention to her throbbing hands. Biting down on the tips of her goat-hide gloves, she tugged her fingers free. Blood oozed from the cuts she’d sustained during the climb. Sucking in a sharp breath, she placed a hand on the wall and pushed herself up, leaving a smear of red. On her knees, she shuffled deeper into the cave, away from the biting flares of wind. Her mouth tasted of salt. She lifted a bloody hand to her cheek and realized she’d been crying.
She’d dreamed of a beach. Plumes of white sand streamed behind her brothers as they raced down to the rock pools at the edge of the sea. She’d been sprinting to catch up, desperate to be the first to capture a crab. Her sister watched them from the bank, Alea’s chuckle skipping across the breeze.
Danae barely recognized her younger self running along the shore. Her childhood felt like it belonged to someone else, as though she were harboring the memories of a stranger. She looked down at her battered hands and thought of what they’d done, what she had done, to get here.
She’d been eighteen when she left Naxos. She must be almost twenty now. It felt like she’d been gone for days and decades, all at once. She thought of her parents, her brothers and her little nephews. Through everything they were her anchor. She’d clung to the hope of returning to them, but now when she tried to conjure their faces, they slipped through her memory like smoke.
She adjusted the lion hide draped over her shoulders. The beast’s jaw yawned over her head, its fangs rested on her temples and its shaggy mane flowed down the length of her back. It was said to be impenetrable to any blade, torn from the body of the infamous Nemean lion by the greatest hero who’d ever lived.
Her stomach twisted at the thought of Heracles discovering it stolen. Her need was greater than his, but she couldn’t stop imagining the expression on the hero’s face the moment he realized she’d betrayed him.
“Enough,” she muttered to the empty cave.
She reached for her bag and tugged out an ink-black dress, then set about slicing off strips of fabric with her blade. Once her fingers were bandaged, she inspected her arsenal. She had a knife, a waterskin, the shard of omphalos stone, her pipe, a near empty pouch of herbs, a purse of drachmas, her midnight cloak and one-and-a-half stale biscuits.
Her stomach groaned. After a breath of deliberation, she ate the half biscuit then tilted the waterskin to her lips.
She swore.
The water was frozen. Pulling it under her furs, she gasped as the icy vessel stung her skin. Hopefully the heat of her body would melt it, or she would die of thirst before she reached the summit.
Her eyes wandered to the last biscuit, then she noticed a mark beside it on the cave floor. A groove scored into the rock. She moved the biscuit to reveal a set of claw scratches. Scouring the ground, she found more. Her brow creased. What bird would make a nest in such treacherous conditions?
She crawled deeper into the cave, hope flickering in her chest. If there was a nest, there might be eggs. The light dwindled the deeper she moved, but the cave was deceptively large at the back. The ceiling expanded upward into a kind of antechamber, high enough for her to stand in.
Her foot crunched on something hard. She bent down and picked up a shard of bone. It must be a large bird. Big enough to catch prey the size of a goat, given the length of the bone. She flattened herself against the wall, allowing as much light as possible to flow into the back of the cave.
The floor was littered with objects. Twigs, coins, rocks, broken pottery, shreds of fabric and fragments of what might have once been armor. Her pulse quickened. No birds hoarded like this, not even magpies.
A piercing screech cut through the wail of the storm. Danae threw herself to the front of the cave, fumbling for her knife. A moment later a mass of feathers hurtled in, claws scrabbling across the rock.
At first, she thought it was an eagle. Its feathered head loomed toward her, yellow eyes wild and curved beak tipped with frost. It filled the cave, tawny wings blocking out the light as they bashed into the sloping walls. Then she saw the rest of its body.
From the wings down the creature had the torso, hind legs and tail of a lion. Its front legs were a grotesque hybrid of the two animals, powerful and muscular like a giant cat’s but scaled like a bird’s, ending in long arched talons.
It was a griffin. A creature she’d only heard of in legend. In another life she’d have been petrified, but this beast was a mere drop in the ocean of horrors she’d faced.
Half blinded by the dark, she dived to avoid the griffin’s talons. Not fast enough: she cried out as claws raked her forearm, catching her skin below the cover of the lion hide. She thrust up with her knife, but only managed to nick the edge of a wing. The griffin made a guttural sound, somewhere between a shriek and a growl, and its attack became more frenzied.
She was so weary. She wouldn’t be able to keep this up for long.
There was always another way.
She gasped, her elbow slamming into the cave wall as she threw herself against the rock to avoid another strike. No, she was too weak to use her powers. Her lower arms were already torn to bloody shreds, and she barely had enough strength to keep dodging the griffin’s talons.
What would Heracles do? He’d fought a dozen creatures more terrible than this and lived. Although, he had the advantage of supernatural strength. Without using her powers, all she had was a knife and an impenetrable lion hide that could be ripped from her back as easily as tearing the wings from a butterfly.
Thelion hide.
The griffin lunged at her again. If this went wrong, she was dead. The creature had almost driven her to the back of the cave. Soon she would be pinned against a solid wall of rock, then the beast would rip her apart anyway.
She lowered her head, so the lion’s face was pointed directly at the griffin, and roared with all her might.
