Daisy St. James and the Forge of Fire ✔️

Chapter 8. Villa de Misteri

 Daisy groaned when she heard the alarm clock screeching at her. She swiped to enter her phone, and winced at the brightness of the light. A few more minutes of sleep were tempting, especially after the events of the previous day. But they needed to pack for their mission.

And, Daisy realized, she needed a shower. Badly.

Dr. Gillespie was already awake, and was throwing all of her things into the hiking backpack she'd taken in lieu of a suitcase. Daisy's mother didn't say a word to her, instead remaining focused on her task.

In the shower, Daisy couldn't wash out the blonde streaks towards the front. She sighed as she brushed out her thick straight hair. It would look mismatched— and it was an easy way to identify her as the museum culprit.

But at this point, remaining undetected was no longer the goal. It was to get in, get the artifact, and leave before ARI had a chance at the artifact in Pompeii.

As Daisy tied her still-drying dark hair into a tight ponytail, she thought about the records of Atlantis. There had never been a time when she hadn't known about the lost city, and the grand mystery it presented.

There was a saying, that all roads led to Rome. In the underground of people who explored the occult and studied the supernatural, the expression was that all roads led to Atlantis.

Artifacts of supernatural significance appeared on and off throughout the years, all over the world. All of them had a trail leading back to the lost city. Maybe the glass used to make them came from where divers found evidence of its existence. Or the metal used to forge the weapon was found in a meteor that struck near the city. Or the people who made it came from a long tradition, invariably leading back to Greece.

Everyone in Daisy's world had ties to Atlantis.

But how it truly fit into everything, and why it was such an epicenter remained unknown.

The city's ruins were also proving to be near-impossible to find. Only records from survivors and others who attempted to find the place in the past could be used for certain. Random theories and conjectures were often tossed out of the window, no matter their validity.

The problem with the highly historical and rational approach was that these were mere fragments, in many languages and with piece missing or the original being damaged. Dialects were dead and there was faded ink and stains that obscured it. Or there was simply bad handwriting. Not to mention that sometimes only the transcripts remained, and thus the clues given by the materials used to make the original documents were also lost to time.

Through the records, researchers who worked with handlers like Dr. Harrison found a common thread. Whatever disaster— the few scatters from the survivors did confirm that a disaster of some magnitude happened— had occurred, there was a contingency or a conspiracy by the nobles of their society.

Keys were supposed to be hidden in strategic locations around the globe. Hints of labyrinths and monsters and riddles teased the detectives in agencies like the DSA. But only recently were they coming across more well-preserved documents— like maps.

Daisy missed her chance there. It was a miracle at all that they found the diary of an ancient Roman member of what became the Proserpina Society. What it contained within it was a second miracle. It told that there was a key hidden in Pompeii, and could be accessed in the Villa de Misteri.

The member had been the one to safeguard the key they would wield now. How it fell into the hands of ARI, even temporarily, they would never know. But Daisy wasn't one for pedantics.