An excitable archaeologist meets a reclusive immortal Titan. The two have to work together to save the world from certain doom. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, it would be if the most primordial evils weren't standing in their way...
Join Kass...
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Kassandra's idea to head back to the motel and get an early night was a good one.
Or at least, it would have been, if she had slept.
Instead of falling into a tired slumber, she tossed and turned all night. Diving and swerving between restlessness and the lull of light sleep, Kass' tired mind was trapped in surrealist visions of exploding metal and crumbling stone. Voices whispered around her, caressing her clothes, tugging at them like a playful summer breeze, all saying the same thing;
Elpidodotis...
The word from the chamber tattooed itself onto her very soul.
Giver of Hope.
Kass snapped upright in her stiff bed as a new thought broke through her rambling mind. She couldn't speak Greek; modern or ancient. For a young girl of her heritage, her parents had been devastated. As a child she had argued with them ('Why do I have to waste all of my Sunday at Greek School when all of my friends speak English?'), and as an adult she regretted it... but that didn't change facts. Apart from a few choice swear words, and the names of some ancient historical or mythological figures, she couldn't make head nor tail of the language.
Fumbling around blindly on the low bedside table, Kass grasped at her phone. With a low hiss as the bright screen flared to life, she looked at the time and groaned. Her alarm would go off any minute, and she felt like she had gotten no rest. Still, she had a mission. She tapped in the code to unlock her phone and swiped away a few notifications before she opened her browser. She typed elpidodotis into the search engine. It didn't come up with an immediate hit. She found a translator and tapped a few variations of the words in.
While Kass couldn't find an exact match. However, she was impressed when her search revealed that 'dodotis' was often used to refer to a donor. Elpis, as she already knew, derived from the name of the Goddess of Hope.
"Well, I'll be damned," Kass muttered to herself, voice croaky with lack of sleep. She rubbed her eyes and looked at her phone again.
If she was honest with herself, she could write off the entire previous evening as a sunstroke induced hallucination. She had been working awfully hard, and she probably hadn't hydrated nearly as much as she should have. The fact her imagination dredged up some approximation of a Greek word and slammed it together haphazardly with the name of a Goddess wasn't that impressive.
"I need to get out more..."
Kass got to her feet with a groan, stretching her aching limbs this way and that. She made her way to the bathroom to freshen up before she got ready for the day. By the time she was dressed and heading out the door, she had almost convinced herself that the whole episode the previous evening was part of her overactive imagination. At least, until she reached into her pants to retrieve her car keys and her fingers brushed against a shard of warm bronze.
