Aeon's Witness (Arctic Circle, 1972)

[LUDMILA ILYUKHIN]

“The weather is fucking shit!”, yelled the pilot over the throbbing of the helicopter’s rotors and the howling Arctic wind outside. “There’s a storm brewing, so you’ll have to hurry unless you want to end up stranded on the island!”

“-We won’t take long”, replied Ludmila. She was with a small team of Committee agents, several miles above the Arctic Circle in a Mil Mi-8 helicopter flying over the desolate, ice-locked Schmidt Island. The island’s actual limits were not visible in the terrible weather conditions Ludmila and her team had to operate in, but she had been told that the entire island was buried under a massive sheet of ice. Besides, this wasn’t her first time in the Arctic Circle.

They were there to search for signs of a missing expedition lead by eminent Soviet scientist Aleksandr Oroslov. The expedition had reached Schmidt Island by boat and had ascended the ice cap, heading towards an unspecified location on the island’s Northern tip. They’d given regular messages to the Arctic base back on one of the large islands for a few days before all contact was lost. Evidently, this could have been handled by a simple team of Arctic rescuers, but this was no normal case. Strange blue lights, unidentified ruins and other strange phenomena had been sighted in the last few years on Schmidt Island, and the Committee had given the expedition support in order to find out what exactly was going on.

And now with the expedition missing, the Committee had sent some of its own agents to clarify things. Unfortunately, it just so happened that a storm hit the island as the team was sent in, and the Committee’s director did not take kindly to delays and failure. As the chopper reached the Northern half of the island, it slowly began to descend towards a relatively flat expanse of ice, and once it was hovering close to the ground, its bay door was flung open and its passengers disembarked.

“-I’ll be back in four hours”, shouted the pilot. “Make sure you’re here when it’s time!”

The chopper then flew off, its rotors throwing snow about. Ludmila shielded her eyes against the driving snow before putting on her snow goggles. The temperature here was freezing and well below zero degrees Celsius. Everyone on the team was wearing thick Arctic gear to protect themselves from the terrible cold, except Ludmila who was only wearing some boots, a light, red windbreaker and some snow goggles. Her hands and head were fully exposed to the freezing wind, but she didn’t even notice the biting cold. A clear reminder of her inhumanity.

“-All right comrades!”, shouted Ludmila. “Stay together. The camp’s not far from here. Once we get there, we inspect every single centimetre and take any information or research we may find. After that, we’ll try to look for the expedition’s members. Poyekhali*!!

The team set off, their boots crunching in the snow and ice. They travelled in silence for a few minutes before finally reaching the camp. It was at the foot of a long, smooth slope and was made up of sheds that had been dropped off by helicopter after the first team had reached the site. Ludmila and her team made their way down the slope and entered the camp site. A few electric lights were on, barely lighting up the Arctic light, and the wind howled eerily through the camp’s old sheds, but there were no people in sight.

Ludmila headed for the closest shed and knocked on the door. Nobody answered, so she opened it and stepped inside. It was cold inside, and the shed was clearly abandoned as not a single light was on and the stove was cold and fire-less. There were a few beds, unmade and empty of occupants, although Ludmila also noticed a gun rack nearby from which the rifles were missing. The Rusalka turned around as she heard the booted steps of one of her team mates come up behind her.

“Any sign of the expedition? What about their research?”, she asked. The man shook his head.

“-Niet, tavaritch Ilyukhin”, he said. “We did find some notes about some ancient artefacts found East of the camp, but nothing else. The camp is completely empty.”

“-What on earth happened to them all…?”, said Ludmila, partly to herself and partly to her comrade. “They didn’t even send an SOS.”

She walked past her comrade and back outside, into the storm and the icy wind. A sudden, particularly violent gust of wind dislodged Ludmila’s ivory white comb, making it fall lightly into the snow. As the comb left the Rusalka’s hair, she underwent a sudden transformation. Her face became more drawn, her eyes lost their pupils and irises and became completely white. The man with her did not flinch however. He knew of her secret. Everybody in the Committee did.

”Fucking wind”, said Ludmila in a voice as cold and chime-like as ice. She reached for her comb and re-arranged her hair, restoring her human appearance. She hated exposing her true appearance as it reminded her of her inhumanity and her previous place in life: a simple, ignorant river spirit with no free will.

“-Sorry about that, tavaritch”, said her comrade. “Also, I think you’d better come and see the notes we found. They could give us an idea of what happened to the people here.”

“-Da”, said Ludmila before following the man towards an edifice which she assumed was the camp’s laboratory. As she entered the building, she saw how barren it was. There were only a couple of tables and chairs as well as some books and objects that were probably the artefacts the scientists here had found. The Rusalka went over to the closest table and studied the objects there. Her eyes widened when she saw that they were all non-natural and clearly made by human hands. There were small, spherical objects of unknown purpose, strange engraved rods of some unknown metal, stone fragments, tablets with indecipherable glyphs on them and what seemed to be part of a strange, time worn piece of armour.

“This is strange”, she said. “Humans never settled this part of the world until the 20th century.”

“-Here’s the notes”, said one of the men inspecting the building. Ludmila took them and read. The notes spoke of the same strange phenomena that had been reported on the island in the past few years. They also spoke in detail of some ruins found to the East, not far from the camp. Ruins engraved with strange symbols. Ludmila was immediately intrigued by this, and decided to go see the things for herself.

“All right. You all stay here, I’m going to check these ruins out. Soslov, come with me. We’ll keep in touch with the camp via radio.”

The Rusalka then left the small building in company of Soslov, a young agent from St Petersburg. After getting their bearings, they travelled East, and after walking for about thirty minutes, they arrived at the ruins. At first, Ludmila couldn’t see them, but as she drew closer she saw black, clearly not natural structures rising from the ice. As she reached them, she saw they were large blocks of stone that came up to her chest and were engraved with the same kind of unrecognisable glyphs as the tablets she’d seen back at the camp. To her satisfaction, she saw signs of humanity here: a couple of ice axes with their handles buried in the snow. Some rope and a rifle. Why had these things been left here?

The Rusalka climbed over the stone blocks. They seemed to be part of a long, low wall that vanished under and ice mound a few metres away. The wind wasn’t so bad here, so her visibility was improved. As she looked around, she noticed several disturbing signs: three bodies in the snow.

“I found something!”, she shouted before heading towards them. She knelt down beside them and immediately saw how they had died: bullet wounds to the chest. They had been shot, but by who? And why? Had the expedition fallen into infighting after succumbing to some strange and unknown influence?

“I don’t like this at all, Soslov”, she said as the younger man reached her position.

“-Me neither”, said Soslov. “Besides, this place is giving me the creeps. We’d better go back to base now…”

“-You’re scared of some old ruins, Soslov? That’s new”, remarked Ludmila with a hint of sarcasm in her tone of voice.

“-I don’t know. These ruins…they just don’t feel right.”

“-We can’t go back just yet. We need to look around some more, find more clues. Maybe the expedition isn’t far.”

Ludmila stood and headed towards another part of the ruins. There was another body there, the body of Professor Natalya Ulianov. She seemed to have been stabbed through the throat with an ice axe, which was lying nearby, its pointed blade covered in frozen blood. Their were no tracks in the snow, as the wind had covered them up. She looked around her again, but saw no other signs of any bodies. She began to walk away from the professor’s corpse, reaching for her radio as she did so.

“-Dnepr, this is Niva, we’ve found some members of the expedition including Ulianov. They’re all dead, murdered by…”

She never finished her sentence. As she walked, the ground beneath her gave off a loud, menacing crack. She looked down, and her eyes widened as she saw the snowy ice beneath her feet crack and give way. She fell for a few metres before violently hitting the cold, hard surface of an ice ramp, which took her further down into the depths of the ice cap. She screamed wildly for help she knew would not come, but retained enough of her wits to grab her ice axe and slam the blade into the ice. It slowed her descent somewhat, but did not halt it. On and on she slid, light disappeared altogether and she was plunged in freezing, thick darkness. After what seemed like hours, she suddenly felt the ramp give disappear beneath her. It took her a few seconds to realise what was happening: she was falling off the ramp.

“NOOO!”, she yelled, wildly slamming her axe into the darkness in front of her. The axe hit ice, but again did not bury itself into it, merely scraping its surface and slowing her fall. After a couple of metres, the ice broke, and Ludmila fell. She fell for a few more metres before her legs brutally connected with a flat, solid surface beneath her. She felt horrible pain shoot up her ankle before she bashed her head on the ground and lost consciousness.

*Let’s go!

[LUDMILA ILYUKHIN]

Ludmila slowly rose from the murky depths of unconsciousness. She could feel something hard beneath her, and her leg felt numb with occasional hints of pain. Her head was throbbing like it had been hit with a tank, and as she opened her eyes her vision of the world was blurred and fuzzy. She groaned and tried to stand, but got a nasty head rush out of it.

She waited for her head to stabilise before sitting up. She winced as she felt pain lance up her leg. Had she broken it? After reaching for her torch and switching it on to illuminate the complete obscurity that surrounded her, she pulled her trouser leg up. Her heart sank at the sight of her ankle. It was bruised and swollen. Nevertheless, Ludmila hoisted herself up gingerly and tried to stand, putting some weight on her swollen ankle. Agonising pain shot up her leg as soon as she did that, and Ludmila whimpered and bit her lip. It was broken all right. That would make getting back to safety even harder, maybe even impossible, but the Rusalka was not the kind who gave up easily. She saw her ice axe lying nearby, and she picked it up. It would probably prove to be useful later on.

She shone her torch upwards. She'd fallen pretty far, and could see the long gouge in the ice her ice axe had made. Apart from that, she saw no light from above, and climbing back up the way she'd fallen was impossible with her broken leg and her lack of rope and climbing gear. She looked around her for a possible exit, and found what appeared to be a narrow ice gallery leading out of the small cavity she was in. Leaning against the icy wall, she steadied herself for the arduous journey that lay ahead of her, if the gallery even lead somewhere.

Moaning in pain, she limped her way out of the cavity and into the gallery. The gallery was made out of rock and ice, and went downwards. This was not a particularly good thing, as Ludmila wanted to regain the surface, but she continued anyway, moving carefully in order not to slip and fall. The gallery seemed to go on forever, and the only sound there was Ludmila's laboured breathing and clumsy footsteps.

After what seemed to be an eternity, Ludmila arrived in a much larger cavern. Her footsteps echoed around it, and she noticed that the floor here was flat and made mostly out of rock. As she looked more closely, she suddenly noticed something abnormal: the floor was paved.

Archaeologically speaking, that was impossible. No civilisations advanced enough to carve stone and build complex structures like the one she'd seen on the surface had ever existed in this part of the world. Ludmila shone her torch around the cavern. Few rock walls were actually visible, as they were covered in ice. Those that were were also carved with symbols similar to those she'd seen on the surface.

"Where on earth am I...?", said Ludmila in a hushed voice. She limped further into the enormous cavern, her booted feet's steps echoing on the cold, paved floor. Suddenly, her torch caught on something human, and Ludmila started. She raised her ice axe and called out to the thing in the shadows.

"Who goes there?", she called, but she received no answer. After waiting for an answer for a few more minutes, she took a few more laboured steps towards the thing and discovered, much to her relief and amusement, that it was a statue. She studied the object by the light of her torch, and again was dumbfounded at how such a thing could have ended up here. It was slightly larger than she was and sat on an carved stone altar. It was very finely carved and seemed to represent a man sitting in the Lotus position with a scroll on his lap. His head was surrounded by a halo made out of some unknown metal.

"Amazing", whispered Ludmila. The spell the statue put on her was broken when she remembered that she was alone in an uncharted, man-made area. This made her put her ice axe back onto her belt and reach for her Stechkin machine-pistol, which she gripped tightly in her right hand. She shone her torch around her and saw a doorway leading out from the cavern, so she went that way.

The doorway lead into a corridor that seemed to be carved out of solid rock. On its walls were glyphs and pictures of creatures Ludmila had never seen or heard of, and which she suspected had not walked the Earth for millennia. As she walked, the silent awe the place exuded made her grow silent and thoughtful. Where was she? Who had built this place? It was obviously uninhabited, and had not been lived in by anyone (or anything) for ages. As she walked, her torch suddenly illuminated a particularly ghastly carving that made her stumble slightly. It represented what appeared to be a huge, tentacled horror, or several, she couldn't tell. The carving made her eyes hurt, and she couldn't quite apprehend its proportions or exact appearance. All she knew was that it filled her with an immense sense of dread.

Ogdru Jahad...seven are They...

Ludmila shook her head. Had she heard something? A voice, whispering to her from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, gone as suddenly as it had come. She decided to not stay here any longer, and continue her journey through the ancient catacombs.

After leaving the carving behind, she felt relieved. However, she still felt a dull sense of horror and dread in her. As she moved on through the corridor, her eyes detected a faint glimmer of light up ahead. Had she reached a gallery leading to the surface? Hope flickered in her heart, and she would have started to run had she not been injured. As she reached the end of the corridor, however, her hope was replaced by something altogether different: awe.

The corridor lead onto a large stone platform. Statues of strange beasts lined the platform's sides, some intact and some broken. The platform was the starting point of an enormous stone staircase that lead downwards into what could only be described as a city. Ludmila's eyes took in the lost city in silent awe. There huge, ruined buildings, temples of old forgotten by Man, pyramids that rose high into the icy vault that kept the place hidden from the surface, and many deserted, empty streets, squares and vistas.

Something by the side of the staircase caught Ludmila's eye: an electric torch much like her own and some small metal boxes. She went over to these small objects and examined them closely. The boxes and the torch were definitely not from this strange, forgotten place, so Ludmila deduced that a member of the lost expedition had left them here recently. There was no sign of any human life in the area however.

What was strange about the place, apart from the fact that there seemed to be an entire city beneath the Arctic ice, was that the huge cavern seemed to have its own source of light. Ludmila switched her torch off to save the battery and observed the city attentively to find the source of the light, which was a light, blue white colour. After some observation, she saw several orbs floating at the top of several, very tall towers that seemed to have been built to house the things. The streets also seemed to be lined with smaller versions of these orbs.

Slowly shaking her head in disbelief, Ludmila carefully started to make her way down the staircase. What were these orbs? Were they some form of electric lighting? Magic? She would have to find out, but first, she'd have to find the way out of this place. As she climbed down the enormous staircase, the silent air was suddenly shaken by two, sharp detonations. A rifle being fired somewhere in the city. The expedition's surviving members perhaps?

Machine-pistol in hand, Ludmila steadily descended the staircase. As she entered the city, she could not help but feel that she was getting into something way beyond her own understanding of the world.

(To be continued soon!)

[LUDMILA ILYUKHIN]

Finally Ludmila reached the bottom of the stairs. The stairs ended in a large, rectangular square bordered by many buildings, and old, ice-encrusted fountain stood in the centre of the square, and was in turn surmounted by the statue of a woman made out of the same, unknown metal as the stone statue's aura Ludmila had seen earlier. The Rusalka limped slowly through the square, looking around her in silent amazement. Some of the buildings were beginning to collapse, and rubble had spilled into some parts of the square.

Ludmila saw many blue crystals lining the buildings like street lamps. They were the source of light she'd seen earlier. They were all fixed into a metal holder, and strange luminous blue glyphs were visible on the walls the crystals were attached to. The glyphs and crystals seemed to pulsate slightly, and Ludmila was again baffled by how the things could give off light. She continued her expedition, going past empty, collapsing buildings and statues of men and women long gone. The statues themselves also seemed to radiate a strange feeling of otherworldliness, as if the models they were based off were not human to begin with.

At the end of the square was a small, short flight of steps that lead up to three different streets that all lead off in different directions. Ludmila stopped and considered each direction carefully, despite the fact that she had no idea where to go. As she stood and considered her next course of action, she suddenly heard footsteps coming towards her. Gingerly she turned towards the source of the footsteps, machine-pistol in hand.

"Who goes there?!", she shouted. A human silhouette seemed to emerge from round a corner, and soon, Ludmila found herself facing an elderly man armed with a Mosin-Nagant rifle. His left shoulder was bandaged, and the man had the look of someone who was engaged on a difficult road.

"Professor Oroslov!", said Ludmila, recognising the head of the missing expedition.

"-Who are you, and how did you find this place?", asked the professor in a harsh voice.

"-I am agent Ludmila Ilyukhin, of the Committee. I was sent to the island with a small team to try and find you and your men. I found the ruins East of the camp and fell through a hole in the ice."

The answer seemed to satisfy the professor, who relaxed visibly.

"-I see. You probably fell through the hole I used to get down here...but can you be trusted? Are you honest and pure of heart? Or are you another one of those dangerous fools consumed by greed, ambition or fanaticism? But come, we cannot stay here. You are injured, I am old, and this city is not safe."

The professor then turned around and set off in the same direction from whence he came. Ludmila hesitated for a few seconds before limping after him, wondering why this apparently deserted place was dangerous. The professor kept in the shadows of the buildings, almost as if he were afraid of being spotted by something. After a while of walking along the long, straight street, the professor turned into one building, and Ludmila followed. She found herself in an atrium, with an ice-filled pool that had probably contained water at some point in its history. There were also what appeared to be the frozen and dead remains of plants around the pool, plants that Ludmila did not recognise at all.

"You must have many questions", said the professor as he sat down on an old stone bench. "Ask them, and I will try to answer them."

"-What happened?", asked Ludmila. "Why were members of the expedition killed back on the surface?"

The professor took a deep breath and began his story:

"-Everything went well at first. We set up camp and scouted the area out for any interesting elements. On our first night we saw flashes of blue light in the East, so the next day we set off to find their source. We would have found nothing and gone back to base empty handed had Ulianov not tripped over a strange stone. It was too angular, too perfect to be natural, so we sent a few people back to the camp to get some shovels, and we dug. We discovered a ruin, a ruin that could not possibly have been there, but Ulianov and I knew what it was."

"-What was it?", asked Ludmila, now genuinely intrigued despite her growing fatigue and the pain in her broken ankle.

"-The home of the first race of men, the Golden Men. The Hyperboreans."

"-The Hyperboreans? Now, come on, professor. How could a well respected Soviet citizen and researcher like you believe in such things?"

"-Because they are real. This place is part of Hyperborea. Hyperborea was lost with the Ice Age, swallowed by the ice and waters of the Arctic Ocean. It is invisible to us, and inaccessible save for certain entry points. You and I and a few others came in through such an entry point."

"Anyway, after the excavation, we also found the entrance point. As soon as we discovered that, Ulianov and I began to argue. She wanted to go down and explore the caverns under the ice cap and contact our superiors to tell them about our discovery. I, however, was beginning to have doubts. The discovery of Hyperborea could have potentially catastrophic consequences on the rest of the world, especially if people like Ulianov harnessed its secrets..."

"-What secrets are those?", asked Ludmila, her mind returning to the strange blue crystals.

"-Vril", said the professor.

"-Vril?"

"-Yes, Vril. The greatest power in the universe. The Hyperboreans had harnessed it to serve them. They built cities with the power of Vril, they made weapons with it. This city is the resting place of the secrets of Vril."

"-But what of Ulianov and the others?"

"-Ulianov...I quickly realised that she could not be trusted. We came down here once before, and when we found the cities and its lights, she became very excited. She knew it had to be Vril, and she began to rave about glory and making the Union benefit from this discovery. Soon after we got back to the surface, I discovered that she was also a KGB informant. I could not let her discover the secrets of Vril."

"-So you killed her", said Ludmila sternly. In a flash, her machine-pistol was aimed at the professor. "You are a murderer and a traitor, Oroslov."

The professor didn't even flinch as Ludmila pointed her weapon at him. He merely smiled and chuckled, shaking his head as if the Rusalka was nothing but a foolish, brash child.

"-Are you really that blind, my dear?", he asked. "Mankind is a race so dedicated to warfare that if Vril were to be discovered, it would mean the end for all of us. Hell, imagine the Soviet Union getting its hands on Vril. War would be immediately declared on the United States and NATO, and untold levels of death and destruction would tear the world asunder. The Union can't be trusted with such a discovery. It is a rotten regime, and I will not have the likes of the KGB and Ulianov get their hands on the secrets of Hyperborea."

"Do you see any of the promises of Communism in the Union? No. Lenin's dream of an egalitarian society free of exploitation has not and will never come true. What we have instead is a corrupt heartless and inhuman regime crushing its people under the boot of totalitarianism. When we prepared for our second descent, I too action and killed the KGB dog Ulianov and a few others. I escaped by going down the hole, but I was followed by the others. They are fools, greedy, stupid fools who think this place will bring them fame and riches."

Ludmila hesitated. She could just shoot the old man right now and end it all, but something about his words made her hesitate. If Vril was indeed real and as powerful as Oroslov claimed, it would bring an incredible leap forward in human technology. If Vril were to be harnessed, a world free of starvation, poverty and oppression could be built.

A utopia.

However, like the fire Prometheus had stolen from the Gods to give to Mankind, Vril would also have a terrible destructive power attached to it. She had seen many of her country's military parades. Rows upon rows of tanks and missile-launching mobile platforms designed to bring death to as many enemies as possible. Wouldn't Vril be harnessed as a weapon? And if so, would it not hold the potential for Mankind's complete and utter annihilation?

Finally Ludmila lowered her weapon. "I suppose you are right, professor. But what happened to those who chased you here?"

"-Most of them are dead. I killed a few, but the rest pried too deep into this city's secrets and ended up releasing something that killed them."

"-So we aren't alone, then."

"-No, far from it."

"-All right. I'll help you keep this place a secret, but only if you get us out of here. I do not fancy being imprisoned in a dead city trapped beneath several thousands of tonnes of ice."

[LUDMILA ILYUKHIN]

The old professor nodded.

“I will help you find the way out, Miss Ilyukhin, although I’m not sure I will really be able to help you. I’ll still try.”

Two gunshots echoed loudly in the frozen, silent air of the dead city, the professor seemed to grow concerned over this.

“It appears someone from the research expedition survived, probably one of those KGB thugs. This is not good. If they find a way out, they’ll talk about this place and then…”

The professor shook his head grimly, as if the thought was far too terrible to be expressed out loud. After a short silence, the old man looked back up at Ludmila.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to get rid of them. We can’t let them reveal the secret of this place’s existence.”

“-Professor, you seem to forget that my leg is broken, that we have little ammunition and that you are quite old. What you’re suggesting is that we take on trained KGB agents with such a small arsenal and with such crippling physical handicaps. Unwise to say the least”, retorted Ludmila.

“-I am aware of these things”, said the Professor with an impatient wave of his hand. “But we must do whatever is in our power in order to keep humanity safe from itself.”

“-Very well then”, said Ludmila. “Give me your rifle, and I’ll try to take them down.”


A few minutes later, Ludmila was back in the dead streets of the ancient city. She’d made a crutch out of a piece of wood she’d found lying in the street and was limping along at a steady, if ungainly pace. Again her mind was struggling with the mind-boggling magnitude of the situation she was in: she was in a city where the very concept of civilisation had existed aeons before the first men started to make tools out of sticks and stones, and this lost civilisation had also harnessed an unknown but incredibly powerful energy, energy quite capable of leading to the total annihilation of humanity, and possibly the world.

However, these thoughts were quickly dispelled by a more immediate concern: she was alone, injured, poorly armed and about to take on what could be several armed men with military experience. Another gunshot echoed through the empty city…or was it empty? Ludmila could suddenly feel tension within her, a strange feeling of fright and unease that was not caused by the proximity of an armed and potentially hostile target. There was something else lurking in this city, something unspeakably horrifying.

And then she heard echoing steps somewhere up ahead. Quickly she brought her rifle to bear, ready to greet whoever was coming her way.

“Oh God!”, yelled a hoarse male voice filled with terror. “It’s still after us! It’s still after us!”

Ludmila’s eyes caught sight of three men armed with rifles running towards her. One of them stopped and fired twice at something behind them before quickly sprinting off in Ludmila’s direction again.

“-What the fuck…?”, said Ludmila, not understanding the men’s attitude until an enormous shadow fell over them all. The Rusalka looked up.

It was huge, the size of a building. Hundreds of beady, glowing green eyes sprouted off what Ludmila presumed was its head, and it seemed to move on a set of gargantuan tentacles. Ludmila tried to scream as fear flooded her mind and body, but the cry died in her throat and came out as a strangled moan. The men paid absolutely no attention to her as they sprinted past. Finally, Ludmila’s survival instincts kicked in, and she turned around and tried to get away from the monstrous being. It soon became clear that she would not be able to outrun it, so she quickly threw herself into an open doorway leading into one of the city’s many abandoned houses. She tripped and hit the icy paved floor hard, but thanks to the adrenaline pumping through her body she managed to scrambled deeper into the house.

The Rusalka then hid behind a column, trying to keep her gasping breaths under control. Never had she been so terrified as she was now, and her heart was beating away like a crazed marching drum. Cold sweat beaded on her forehead, making her skin tingle and sting in the cold air. She felt the thing’s presence somewhere behind her, but she dared not look out from behind her column lest she be seen. Her imagination brought up images of a single, horrible green eye staring into the house through the doorway, piercing the darkness, searching.

Searching for her.

And then, the presence left. Ludmila waited for a few minutes before finally glancing out from behind the column. The doorway was empty, with nothing but the faintly illuminated street beyond. The Rusalka heaved a long, shuddering sigh of relief and slowly got back up on her feet. Her mind’s eye was still burning with the horrible vision of the thing out in the dead city. What was it?

The question was cut abruptly short when Ludmila received a painful blow to the jaw, sending her crashing into the column and onto the floor. Blood gushed from a split lip, and the Rusalka looked up to see one of the men the thing had been chasing. He had taken advantage of the moment of weakness caused by the blow to take her rifle away from her, and before she could stop him he had already drawn her machine-pistol from its holster and tossed it aside.

“You!”, he said, “you’re with that traitor Oroslov!”

Ludmila looked up into the man’s eyes and saw the wild spark of folly dancing in them. The man looked haggard and pale, and his breathing was ragged, almost bestial in sound. There was little doubt that his mind had snapped while being chased by the abomination outside.

“-No”, she said in an attempt to humour him. “I’m part of a rescue team…”

“-LIES!”, spat the madman. “You are lying! You’re with that filthy traitor Oroslov!”

Before Ludmila could react, the man landed a heavy blow on the side of her face. She fell sideways, blood spattering onto the cold paved floor. Despite the burning pain in her cheek and skull, the Rusalka still had enough energy and will left to try and strike at her attacker, but her kick hit nothing but epty air as he easily dodged it. He then clamped his heavy boot down on her broken leg, and the Rusalka bit her lip in agony.

“I will kill you, little bitch, and I will kill your friend, the Professor”, said the man. “And I will reveal this place’s existence to our country…no traitors like you will stop me.”

His boot pressed harder onto Ludmila’s injured leg, and she screamed. A few tears sprung from her eyes, but in the end she managed to kill her scream by gritting her teeth. With her face even paler than usual and her eyes wide and glassy, she looked up at the man tormenting her and saw that he was now pointing his rifle right at her face. Before he could pull the trigger though, her hand shot out, grasped the barrel and wrenched it away from her. The gun fired once, a deafening roar that made her left ear grow numb, and sent a bullet smashing into a nearby wall engraved with strange, discoloured images of long extinct creatures and forgotten kings and heroes. With a sharp jerk, the Rusalka then tried to pull the rifle out of the man’s hands, but instead only managed to bring him down onto herself. As the man struggled to get back up, kicking her broken leg several times in the process, the Rusalka was able to draw her trusty knife from its sheath. She then drove it up under the man’s ribcage and cut downwards through his belly.

The man screamed in pain, and Ludmila felt blood stain her jacket and trousers. Her now mortally wounded attacker then flopped over onto the side and lay on the floor trembling, moaning and drowning the floor with his blood until Death finally took him into Its merciful embrace. The Rusalka stood up gingerly and gazed at the man’s corpse for a moment. Yet another dead man on her long journey through life and the world.

“People don’t kill me”, she panted, her voice hoarse and filled with cold savagery. “I kill them.”

Balancing on her good leg, the Rusalka retrieved her Mosin Nagant and her machine-pistol from the floor. Where there others like him? She was beginning to have some serious doubts about her current mission and its chances of success. Wouldn’t it just be simpler to try to get back to the surface and reveal this place’s existence to her comrades? Her action definitely would be rewarded.

The Rusalka shoved those thoughts away. She couldn’t give up, and she couldn’t let the world run such a great and terrible risk. This dead city was the tomb of a millennial secret, and mankind was not yet ready to discover it. Her train of thought was interrupted by the pain she felt from her now bruised and bloody face. She had not suffered such physical abuse since the Great Patriotic War. She spat blood onto the floor before getting her bearings. She wasn’t sure where she was in this great city, and couldn’t remember the path she had taken from the house in which the Professor was hiding.

Hesitantly she went into the street outside. It was deserted, and yet she could feel a sense of dread and horror still tainting the area. Mental images conjured up by her tired senses and her memory assaulted her mind and made her shudder. Running into the Thing she had seen earlier would drive her over the edge, so she proceeded cautiously. The silence in the dead city was like a heavy, crushing shroud, and the Rusalka soon got the unpleasant impression that she’d been buried alive (which, in a way, she had been before). After what seemed to be an eternity spent limping through deserted streets, the empty doors and windows of houses around her staring like empty black eyes, and the strange light emitted by the crystals and their rune-like conductors bathing everything in surreal, funerary light, the Rusalka arrived at a huge esplanade. The esplanade was circular and paved with pure white stone, and statues lined it. One of the statues caught Ludmila’s eye: a large, alabaster construct showing a sphinx-like creature whose pure, white eyes stared enigmatically off into the distance.

Ludmila had seen the sphinx before, in the 1950s, back when the Soviet Union and Nasser’s Egypt were on good terms. It had been an unpleasant trip rife with excessive heat, sunburn and flies, but the sphinx had fascinated her. Now she was looking at a statue so strikingly similar to the sphinx that she found it hard not to see a kind of influence. Had the Ancient Egyptians been in contact with or known of this ancient, lost civilisation? Or did the sphinx predate Ancient Egypt?

You would be right on both accounts, my child.

Ludmila almost leaped out of her skin. A deep yet smooth voice had spoken, seemingly from nowhere.

“Who goes there?”, she said. Was the city haunted? “Show yourself, spirit.”

And then, as she turned back to the Arctic Sphinx, she saw an elderly-looking man standing before her. He was dressed in what looked like priestly robes, although said robes seemed to be like an amalgam of many different styles used in the Orient. The old man himself, although normal in general appearance, had a strange, ethereal quality to him which Ludmila attributed to the fact he was quite possibly a ghost.

“Who are you?”, asked the Rusalka.

My name is not important. In fact, I have forgotten it. It has been many aeons since anyone walked these streets, and now, you are here. I can see in your soul that you live among the new race of Men, but yet you are not one of them. You are a daughter of death and water, but you have turned your back on your world and kin to follow the ways of Man…

The apparition slowly nodded as it observed Ludmila intently.

I was once one of the priests of this city, one of the greatest in Hyperborea, only outdone in splendour by its neighbour, Gorinium. It was a rich and green land, a time long forgotten by those who now inhabit the Earth. What you call the Sphinx, my child, is a sculpture made by children of Atlantis, whose race had been entrusted with knowledge of Hyperborea. When the great wastes of the Sahara were still green and rich in life and water, Atlantis’ children, fleeing from the disaster that befell their homeland, carved the Sphinx out of rock before settling in the Nile Valley.

“-Whoa, wait a second”, said Ludmila, who had taken the opportunity to light herself a cigarette and sit down on a block of stone which had fallen onto the esplanade. “The last time rain fell abundantly in the Sahara area was in the Stone Age…”

You have a sharp mind, my child, said the apparition. I wish to show you Hyperborea’s downfall.

“-Why show me?”, asked Ludmila. “I’m no historian or archaeologist.”

You will know…in time…, replied the apparition before stepping forward and passing his hand before her eyes...