There was a canyon hidden in the forests of Themyscira that cut so far down into the earth it was like a great blow had cleaved the skin from the world's bones, and in the depths of the great wound water ran surrounded by a sparse scattering of green. Clear and blue, flowing to and from parts unknown, outletting into water tables and submerged caves where it would sit untouched even by the roots of the oldest trees. Caves old as creation itself and empty even of titans. As the river ran it passed through an area where the trees wilted, grew slanted and enchanted out and away like the trunks had been bent by forces beyond knowledge. There would be the door to the underworld, or at least one of the doors. It circumvented Styx; the gods loved their little exceptions and loved more doling them out to favorite subjects. As Cassie edged her way down the unkempt stony stairs carved into the side of the cliff, that was where she was headed..
The approach was perhaps more dramatic than the destination. In fact, the approach was definitely a lot more dramatic than the destination. The thing about the underworld, like the world above, was that most of it was empty space. Places that maybe nobody had ever stood before. Three feet to the left of a clearing, the back corner of a certain hallway, crawlspaces, attics. She'd grown up picturing a big lake of fire where the bad people suffered, then had tried to grapple with fields of wheat and dark places as far below the earth as the earth was below the sky. You didn't really think about how long it would take to walk from one circle of hell to the other. Unless you were Dante.
Cassie shifted her pack nervously as she kept winding down. A fall wouldn't really have killed her. Assuming she let herself fall - her flying always needed more work - she'd probably just sort of bounce off the ground or splash into the water. The former would hurt like hell, the latter would be worse. Inside her backpack was not only her map to the underworld, there was a collection of college textbooks. She was not about to pay for replacements. There wasn't a Wonder Woman discount.
She had intended to be out after the celebrations the night before, had certainly left on a high enough note with Diana and Nubia, but right as she had one foot out the door back to her own world, they stopped her. One of the usual duties of Wonder Woman, one of the dull ones that Diana had hated doing, was going to need seeing to before she left. It wasn't risky, it wouldn't be exciting, but it would make for a fine enough first day on the job. Perhaps, looking on the bright side of things, it would give her a bit of a chance to get her head back into the human world too. Do some studying before her break ended and it was back to class. She hadn't even thought about Calc since stepping through the portal. It wasn't something she was too excited about.
Finally at the bottom of the stairs, she sat for a moment and took a breath. Her legs, even stronger than they'd ever been in her life, felt gummy and dead after the long climb down. Even though her pack weighed little, it sat awkwardly on one shoulder or the other. The straps didn't really mesh with her costume. She'd have given a lot to be in a pair of hiking boots or tennis shoes instead of the lite-metal sabatons which rode up past her ankle and made her walk with an awkward goose step. She'd been told that she could get Hephaestus to remake the costume any time she wanted, and she was going to have a list of improvements pretty shortly. The training hadn't covered much in the way of stairs.
The door to the underworld wasn't hidden. There was no reason for it to be, but Cassie had never pictured it just right out in the open. Unornamented, not even especially nice-looking. It didn't exactly look the part of the door to the Underworld, though perhaps it looked somewhat the part of one of the back doors. Just set into the steep rock side of the cliff by unknown hands, supported by no frame. More like the cliff had formed up around it than anything else.
As she opened it and stepped inside, she was immediately hit with the kind of thick, impossible darkness that she had worried about. It was like the light from the open door behind her didn't even make it through the frame, and when she closed it behind her it seemingly didn't make a lick of difference. She reached into her bag and pulled out a little emergency flashlight from her hiking kit, but it didn't do anything either. She hadn't expected it to. Cassie put the flashlight back and blinked a few times. But you never got used to it, even when your eyes adjusted to the dark, it was like staring into a pot of coffee.
This was what they'd told her it would be like. Cassie made a mental note that when the Amazons told her something would be dark, cold, big, etc; she should assume that they absolutely meant it in ways she'd never experienced those adjectives before. However, she'd also been told this darkness was, more or less, just a filter. She set her hand back on the wood of the door to orient herself, but despite not having taken a step away, it wasn't there anymore when she reached out. Sighing to herself, Cassie simply got walking. It didn't matter which direction, so long as you moved forward, you got somewhere.
She walked in the dark for a few minutes before it seemed like shapes started to emerge. Black-on-black. Volcanic-looking stone jagged like torn bread, blacker than the darkness itself. Even as her feet seemingly hit against massive tufts of it, they moved right through. None of it was real until it actually became real, but she wasn't there yet. The skyline seemed to gradually get brighter around her, until she could at least make out a sort of horizon. A primordial up-and-down. It was the first building block being set in the pile of her actually being somewhere instead of nowhere. Then slowly the skyline became jagged and distinct, rises and falls, shapes and depth like a distant set of black teeth, some nearer and some farther. Then suddenly, she nearly tripped, the ground distinct and real under her feet in a way it hadn't been before. As she kept going, she started to see little individual points of light scattered across the way. Islands and plateaus of brown earth and red rock in the black expanse, shapes like vague impressions of people standing on them. She mounted one of the nearer ones and stepped close to a campfire which seemed to be burning the air itself, the huddled figures around it looked half-there and half-not.
"Hey, uh..." Cassie scratched the back of her head, "You guys know where I can find Echidna?"
They all sort of drifted to face her and started to chatter in bits of broken speech. None of them English. She heard little flairs of Greek - that probably should have been obvious - but also bits of what sounded like Latin and Russian.
"Right, fair enough." Cassie shrugged. She kept going.
From what she'd been told, the Underworld was half what you made of it at any given time and half an actual place. In some areas, a great number of people or one powerful spirit conjured a pocket of 'being' so strong that it became an unshakable, real location that you could chart on a map. The rest of it was an inky, unreal expanse. Half-dreams of an afterlife, deviationist worlds only conjured by one or a few. Both infinitely long but also without size. Cassie wondered for a moment about those cults that thought they were getting picked up by the mothership, but forced the idea out of her mind before she found out what that looked like. She knew, broadly, what Echidna's domain looked like. She'd had it described to her, and since it was being conjured by something both alive and incredibly powerful, it was unchanging and well-defined. That said, she was trying to picture somebody else's description as hard as possible. Every detail that had been half-remembered, everything she wasn't sure about, was adding travel time. And the more she lost confidence, the longer still it would take.
As she focused she started to see what she'd been told. A sort of mountainside dotted by cave mouths, but it was almost like somebody was playing games with her. One would be shaped more like a square than a circle, one would have three torches instead of two. A lot of them, from what she could see, ended only a few steps after they started. She wondered if any of it was real, and if there was any intent to it. Whether some of them were filled with nasty traps or fake Echidnas to keep her from reaching the real one. Or, simply, if the nature of the place meant that it was just trying to give her every misimagination it could. Every way in her head she was worried she might mess up one of the details and get lost. Slowly, the fakes started to pop up less. Cassie perked up as she started to see marble columns and burning pyres. From what she'd been told, those were equal parts markers that the Amazons had left for each other, and the rememberings of those markers. Everything had at least one duplicate, some of them duplicated and then re-duplicated on out far into the horizon. Cassie tried not to think about grains of rice on a chessboard, it made her head spin.
Finally, she arrived at the mouth of the cave. A lighted torch burning infinitely on each side, a pair of little stones carved into the top like a serpent's fangs. It wound down like a spiral staircase into the dark, and as Cassie started walking down she was struck by how much easier it was to see than it had been on the edges of the Underworld. This wasn't real darkness, just like the light probably wasn't real light. It was a simulation.
At the bottom of the staircase was a massive cavern that looked equal parts cave and ballroom. The walls were bare jagged stone, the ceiling supported by a set of extravagant marble pillars decorated around with elegant torches. A great brazier burned in front of a lifelike statue of Gaia. Cassie could see an incredible-looking bed in one corner and a surprisingly nice collection of modern amenities and tools scattered about. Echidna, it seemed, was perfectly capable of making it the nicest cave she could. But she couldn't change that it was a cave. And, if Cassie did her job as well as the others had before her, Echidna couldn't leave.
Between the pillars at the center of the room was a square of white bricks on the floor surrounded by a circle of rocks speckled silver and gold. Despite her strength, Cassie darted into the square as quickly as she could. Only once she was seated inside did she let herself heave a sigh of relief and rest her back against one of the pillars. She hadn't even seen Echidna yet, but there was no doubt she was there. There was nowhere else for her to be.
As if reacting to Cassie's presence, the torches above her started to burn just a tiny bit brighter. Cassie tried to look around and catch sight of Echidna, but it was still too dark to see. The torches reacted to - were powered by - the presence of an Amazon. Inside of them were wards which bound Echidna in place. They needed to be recharged once every five or so years. Echidna couldn't pass the circle or the square, so now that Cassie was here, Echidna couldn't really do anything about it. Outside of harassing a shoplifter, this was probably about as risk-free a first job as she could have asked for.
The problem was that charging the wards was going to take a while.
Cassie shrugged her backpack off and rifled through it until she found one of her college textbooks. As she pulled it out, she felt the nervousness and focus she'd felt since entering the Underworld turn to bored mush. She shook herself. It didn't matter what she did while she was charging the wards, so she'd have liked to get some studying done. Walking back into year three of college after nearly a full year with people who hadn't so much as heard of a cosine was going to be a slap in the face. Time was slower, much slower, on Themyscira. But it did still move.
She gave another craning look into the darkness for Echidna. Even completely safe from her, Cassie would have still preferred to know where she was. She could still whisper into Cassie's ear, apparently even make Cassie see things if Cassie wasn't vigilant. Maybe she was asleep, that would have been a good outcome. Even knowing she wasn't a threat, Cassie still would have liked to know where she was.
