Note: all characters are over 18, as established in previous chapters.
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Master of Elements: Chapter 11 - The Temple of Theia
"Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other." - Euripides.
Athena wanted to come with me in the search for the meteorite which we reasoned and hoped would be found somewhere in this region. She certainly deserved the chance, given she had done all the research including providing me with a list of ancient temple sites in the area. Despite this, I said no. She was the one who could quickly transit the others in and out of the Aether world and that was too important not to have her full concentration.
It would have been helpful to send Brigit, Matsu and I out with a list of locations to visit each and we could have covered the possibilities in a day. This had always been a remote part of Greece and, despite the long history of this country, had never attracted much in the way of building projects in any era. However, we only had one car, so I decided it would have to be me and one other. Since both Brigit and Matsu claimed the honour, I let them settle it with 'rock, paper, scissors', a contest that the Irish redhead, to her great satisfaction, won on the second round, her scissors slicing Matsu's paper.
So it was that Brigit and I went in search of a rock that we couldn't even be sure existed. Typically, when looking for something you usually find it in the last place you try, but not this time. We established its location at only the second attempt. This was not entirely coincidence, as I had a suspicion that this particular place might be the right one.
I had chosen our first stop on the basis that it was only just down the road from the hotel, no more than five miles away. It had been a washout, nothing more than a patch of flat ground next to the road, with nothing to see. Apparently, there had once been a small trackside shrine to some nature deity on the site, now long gone. Neither Brigit nor I felt anything special about the place and we had soon moved on.
In contrast my second choice was deliberate, because I felt the location was significant. It was not in any of the obvious passes through the mountains, instead being a little away from the beaten track halfway up a steep hill. I had concluded from a study of the maps of the area that whoever chose to build a temple there must have had a very good reason for doing so. It proved impossible to get a car up to it. I parked as close as I could and then we had a fifteen-minute walk up a steep and winding path on the tree covered hillside.
Our destination was a flat space that seemed to have been blasted out of the hill, since to our right was a shear rock face, while to our left the slope fell away sharply. I thought, hopefully, that it might be what you would get if a meteorite had struck the hillside gouging a crater, and later people had flattened the ground somewhat as the site for their temple.
Unlike the first place we had visited, there was something to see, albeit not much. There were a few stumps of pillars above ground, much weathered by the centuries, and it was possible to see on the ground the rectangular footprint of where the temple had once stood. This was helpful, as I had done my research and could make an educated guess as to where the most holy spot inside would once have been and I had a feeling that if the meteorite we sought was here at all, that was where we would find it.
I had been worried that there might be people here, officials or tourists, but the place was completely deserted, with little sign that anyone visited. I had two spades in the boot of my car, borrowed from the hotel's gardeners, in case we needed to do any digging, but I had left them behind in case anyone was present - the Greek authorities take a dim view of the looting of antiquities and spades would have been hard to explain. Now I wished I had brought them, as I didn't fancy trekking back down the narrow path and up again. Therefore, it made sense to check whether there was anything here before we took the trouble to do so.
Brigit seemed sure as soon as with reached the top of the path and stepped out into the sunshine of the flat terrace sliced into the hillside long ago. She stopped and gave a sort of shiver, not of fear it seemed but excitement. "Ooooh.... Chris, can you feel it?" she asked.
"Umm, no," I said quizzically, "What do you feel?"
"Power. It feels good, running through my body like electricity."
This sounded promising, so I advanced into the clearing, pointing out probable features of the site as I went. "Assuming the temple was approached up the same path we have just used, which given the geography of the hill seems likely, then the first thing you would have seen is an open air altar, as worship took place outside the temple not inside. That would have been about... here. Rounding the altar, we would have gone up some steps and encountered a colonnade of pillars supporting the roof of the place - it took the Romans to discover the self-supporting arch - and seen the doors to the temple proper."
I got the impression Brigit wasn't really listening to my research. She seemed increasingly distracted by what she was feeling. I was starting to experience it too, although, it seemed, in a more defuse and less intense way. There was a sort of tingling in my body and senses, a bit like static electricity but much nicer. In fact, it was quite erotic in its effect and if Brigit was getting a stronger dose I could understand why she wasn't that interested in my lecture on ancient Greek architecture, not that I let that stop me showing off.
"Once through the doors we would be in a sort of antechamber called the pronaos and from there we would pass into the main room called the cella or naos. At the far end of that was the holiest place - typically a statue of the god or goddess to whom the place was dedicated; so if we just walk to about there..."
We were about three quarters of the way along the length of the patch of roughened ground that marked the site of the temple and dead centre in width. I planned to stop here anyway but was left with no choice as Brigit suddenly sank to her knees and gave a gasping moan.
"Are you alright?" I asked crouching next to her, "where does it hurt?"
"It doesn't hurt," she said through gritted teeth, in a tone that conveyed frustration with my idiocy, "I just came."