Chapter 531

The Aegean wind tasted of salt and something else, something acrid, metallic. Niko, fourteen and already weary of the world, spat onto the bleached stones of the Piraeus docks.

"Quit being dramatic," Lena said. His sister's voice was as sharp as the sea breeze.

He glared. "Easy for you to say. You're not going."

Their grandfather coughed, a sound like rocks grinding. "Enough. We do what we must."

The research vessel, the Chimera, bobbed gently, a sleek predator hiding its teeth. It wasn't the name that bothered Niko; it was what the Chimera represented.

Hope built on myth.

Inside, the air was sterile, clinical. Gone was the tang of the sea, replaced with disinfectant and something indefinably off.

Dr. Minos, all white coat and weary eyes, greeted them. "Welcome. We're glad to have you onboard."

He sounded anything but glad.

"What exactly are we looking for?" Lena asked, always blunt.

"Titans," Dr. Minos replied flatly. "What remains of them."

The old tales of Greece had new significance, the flesh of the Titans holding possible cures for the incurable. Lena frowned. "That's crazy. They're stories."

Grandfather's grip tightened on Niko's shoulder. "Some stories are older than time, child."

The ship hummed, pulling away from the land, away from familiarity.

Days became a haze of choppy waters and sonar pings. The Chimera pressed on. Niko saw a strange pattern in the readings on one monitor.

He tried to bring it to Dr. Minos' attention. "Doctor, look here," he began, tapping the screen. "This energy surge—"

Dr. Minos waved a dismissive hand, not bothering to inspect anything himself. "A glitch, Niko. Nothing to fret about."

But it kept recurring, pulse of energy, deep beneath the waves, the deep depths around Crete.

He heard it again, the low, guttural sound, vibrate beneath his feet. A sense of dread started creeping its way into the deepest parts of his body.

Then the lights flickered.

"What was that?" Lena's eyes widened. Even she couldn't fake indifference.

An alarm blared. Red light strobe down the halls. People shout, their tone frantic.

Dr. Minos, his face a mask of fear, shouted, "Seal the lower decks! Now!"

Too late.

The metal shrieked as something vast tore into the ship's hull. Cold seawater flooded the corridors, washing over Niko's feet.

They were on the move immediately, stumbling their way toward the higher decks as the vessel groaned under immense pressure.

They rushed on with an eerie feeling, they couldn't be out of the depths of the ship without something big going on at this location in particular.

"What's happening?" Niko gasped, his voice barely audible above the alarms.

His grandfather spoke but his old tone gave away what was really running in the minds of most. "We have disturbed something we shouldn't have."

The screams started next, sharp, raw and carried a fear like a dagger to his back. Lena grabbed Niko's hand. Her skin was ice cold.

He looked through a porthole. Something was circling the ship, vast and dark. Its size made his brain itch, as if seeing something not meant for human eyes.

It was the size of an island, its presence warping the water around it.

They were gathered on the bridge with a handful of surviving crew, the ship tilted precariously. Dr. Minos, his face ashen, spoke in a trembling but somehow a little resigned manner.

"It's… it's one of them."

"One of who? One of what?" Lena demanded.

"A Titan. Or part of one. Something very, very old."

Suddenly, something crashed on the deck overhead. A wet, heavy thump followed.

Whatever it was it began to crawl closer, its immense weight buckling the metal beneath it. He listened for too long until his body trembled with the echoes of an earthquake.

Lena choked back a sob. Their grandfather squeezed Niko's shoulder, but his eyes held no comfort, only acceptance.

The hatch to the bridge buckled, twisted inward. The thing outside wanted in, had grown tired of it's simple crawling method, and gave an extra force.

Sparks showered the cabin, a blinding pyrotechnic display as metal shrieked, protesting its violent destruction. The hatch tore free with a horrible grinding sound, swinging back and striking Dr. Minos to the deck, not getting back up from the strike.

A tentacle, thick as a galleon's mast, snaked into the bridge. Suckers lined its underside, each one the size of Niko's head. They opened and closed, hungry mouths tasting the air.

Panic took over now. Not the fear of the known, but the terror of the alien, the incomprehensible.

Lena screamed, pushing Niko behind her. It almost struck Niko as he quickly shifted himself out of the harm's way.

The tentacle crushed one of the crew, bone snapping like twigs. Then it began reaching, the grotesque limb lunging towards Lena.

Grandfather shoved her aside, taking the full force of the Titan's appendage. The air left his lungs in a whoosh. There was blood. So, so much blood, soaking his tunic with no regard for it.

Niko didn't think; he moved. Grabbing a discarded flare gun, he aimed it directly at the tentacle, at those horrific, sucking mouths, eyes flooded with so much sorrow as he saw what occurred so abruptly to his own Grandfather.

He didn't want to experience it either.

He fired.

The flare struck home. The tentacle recoiled, a screech that somehow registered in the bones erupting. For a heartbeat, there was reprieve.

"Run, Niko! Run!" Lena shouted, pulling him toward a service corridor.

They fled into the guts of the ship, metal groaning as more sections failed, more pressure gave in to the Titan. The Chimera was being eaten alive.

They scrambled down ladders and wove their way around wrecked compartments, but everything changed and seemed twisted around every corner to give the other a chance. The thing was hunting them; that he knew. He knew its persistence well enough for the simple fact it wanted blood for what had already come upon it.

He could feel it coming. It wouldn't simply lose them.

Lena pushed open a hatch, revealing a small, cluttered laboratory. The air tasted of chemicals and something metallic, a lab for tests long forgotten, now being stumbled on after something huge shook their paths.

"In here!" she breathed. "Maybe we can find something."

Hope was a dangerous thing.

Rows of vials lined the shelves, filled with strange, luminescent liquids. Strange technology hummed quietly in the corners, too, as if watching them be still within this tiny confined cell. The green in one flask seemed familiar, its fluorescent sheen catching the ambient glow and seeming to catch every ounce of attention in Niko's peripheral point.

Lena grabbed a fire extinguisher, ready to fight if that's what they would truly come down to for a single breath. Niko examined the vials, trying to make sense of the faded labels, when something made Niko flinch away. He stumbled onto his hands.

A sound… a voice?

It felt less like it was heard, more like it resonated inside his skull, a strange occurrence for their already existing, horrible predicament. It began to gnaw on Niko's deepest nerves.

Help me…

The sound grew stronger, closer. He reached for a vial, compelled by something he didn't understand.

Lena stared, panic making her hard to persuade. "Niko, what are you doing? We have to go!"

"It's talking to me," he muttered, barely hearing his own words as the sound echoed so much throughout his head. "I think... I think it wants me to release it."

He clutched a vial of viscous black liquid, faintly shimmering. Free me.

The hatch exploded inward.

The tentacle, glistening and impossibly large, filled the doorway, and now covered whatever view existed. Lena screamed again, raising the extinguisher, getting her turn to give.

Before she could even take action on using it, she turned from having an entire tool of defence, to being knocked onto the hard floor. Her blood quickly expanded outward.

The vial shattered on the floor. The dark liquid swirled, rising like smoke and coalescing into a shadowy figure.

He seemed all too familiar with its arrival. And strangely, its purpose.

Not of a Titan, but of something trapped within the Titan. Something parasitic.

The creature lunged for Lena, smothering her, its shadow sinking into her skin.

She thrashed, choking, the last breaths in this final hour becoming weaker and weaker.

"Stop it!" Niko cried, but his protest felt meaningless.

The shadow pulsed, then released her. Lena collapsed, unmoving. Her skin was grey, veins gone the pitch black color of space, her time ceasing. The very blood seemed congealed inside them all. Her end felt way too soon.

The shadow turned to Niko, and now being so open, and not hidden, stood still within this contained little room. I am free, the entity echoed through his mind. And I thank you.

Then, an order to take in all of these strange instances together; "And now I must finish what was started. I shall not be bounded." It felt final as if something terrible must begin its course.

The lab began to shake, the last of the structure of what contained it to fall into itself as the chaos and din outside seemed to become a unified, unseeable darkness. Metal tore and supports screamed a song of misery and pain. Everything trembled within this small world the creature occupied.

The Titan itself roared, an earth-shattering bellow.

The shadow stretched and snaked toward him. A slow and drawn process filled with great agony and final decisions. It began entering Niko.

Terror washed over him. This wasn't freedom, this wasn't a release. It was an end. His ending as he realized the vial was only there as something so much worse: a prison. And to free what lied beyond that prison, its only goal and the only reason was to unleash whatever lies waiting.

To turn him, Niko into a vessel. A way off of the slowly crumbling wreck of an old machine called a heart.

He fought, pushing against the darkness in his mind. His arms are pinned and pinned by force now of his control in reality. Images filled him now and passed the barriers from beyond this one small room with an extreme intent: vast battles of the Old Gods, celestial entities clashing in epic contests, darkness devouring everything in sight.

He understood the shadow's purpose now, and with clarity that came like a stabbing.

The Titans weren't simply beings; they were prisons. Wards against something far older and darker than any God could fully take or have the capacity to even attempt to understand for their small beings.

And it was trapped within their very form of its living vessel, and for a prison itself. A means for stopping what came beyond the form. And here lies the greatest of betrayals. A form trapped inside and waiting.

A power which only desired freedom through lies and betrayal in any form that presented its unfortunate arrival.

And Niko, in his foolishness, unleashed it onto a great end to so much more. All because of simply feeling he heard or was supposed to release, something greater in what laid here to await for everyone.

The ship split apart with violence beyond words to form into so much terror; its end a horrible final stroke to add to this end and fate he was coming into to pass for himself and others.

Water rushed in, cold and consuming and his death seemed apparent for it now too: the vast unending and unknown end to follow along and begin anew.

And then his own.

The Aegean claimed another victim. Its taste shifted once more, metallic, briny, something so close it echoed to be almost unspeakable. A memory in life began anew here on after. The water continued its endless work in life for others.

Only for Nico it felt and took differently and the final, closing blow as his last moments were lost to blackness here.