I Am Zeus - Chapter 254

Chapter 254: “Storm-Bringer?”
The world moved on. It always does.

The Age of Gods didn’t end with a bang, or a war, or a prophecy fulfilled. It ended with a slow, quiet fading. The prayers became fewer, the festivals less lavish, the belief less certain. The wells of divine power, once deep and roaring, ran dry. Olympus didn’t fall; it was forgotten. Its marble halls, once thrumming with immortal life, stood silent and empty, their grandeur slowly surrendering to ivy and weather. The same happened to every golden hall, every celestial palace. The gods didn’t die; they receded, becoming patterns in the static of reality, their stories morphing from lived history into campfire tales and academic footnotes.

They became myths.

Centuries bled into millennia. Humanity, once cared for and terrorized by capricious immortals, now looked to science and to themselves. They built cities of steel and light over the bones of ancient temples. The world was mapped, explained, and digitized. Mystery was a commodity, sold in books and movies.

But echoes remained.

Dr. Elena Petros wiped the sweat from her brow, the Greek sun beating down on the excavation site. They were deep in a previously unexplored chasm in the Peloponnese, a place so geologically unstable it had been deemed unreachable until now.

“Anything?” she called out, her voice echoing in the sterile silence of the gorge.

Her intern, Leo, a young man with more enthusiasm than sense, scrambled over a pile of scree. “Just more rock, Doc. This place is a bust. The seismic scans must have been wrong. There’s no ‘anomaly’ here. Just a hole in the ground.”

Elena refused to believe it. The energy signatures from this location were off the charts, unlike anything ever recorded. It wasn’t radioactive, nor was it any known geological emission. It was… a hum. A silent pressure that made the air feel thick.

“We keep looking,” she said, her tone leaving no room for argument. She was a woman in her forties, with sharp eyes that had seen too many dead ends and a stubbornness that had pushed her through most of them.

It was Maria, their quiet geologist, who found it. Not with technology, but by tripping over it. Her boot caught on a rock that wasn’t a rock. It was a piece of obsidian so perfectly smooth and black it seemed to be a hole in the world itself. As she fell, her hand slapped against the cliff face to steady herself, and the loose soil gave way, revealing a surface beneath that was not stone.

“Elena,” Maria said, her voice a whisper of disbelief. “You need to see this.”

They cleared the earth away, their tools scraping against something impossibly hard and cold. It was a door. Or rather, a seamless, circular slab set into the mountain itself. It was made of the same void-black obsidian, but etched into its surface were intricate, glowing symbols that pulsed with a faint, silver light. The symbols weren’t Greek. They weren’t anything Elena had ever seen in all her years studying ancient Mediterranean cultures.

They were angular, complex, and looked less like writing and more like a schematic for reality itself.

“Holy…” Leo breathed, pulling out his camera. The light from the symbols didn’t reflect in the lens; it was absorbed.

“It’s not a door,” Maria said, running a gloved hand over the surface. “There’s no seam, no handle. It’s… a plug. Or a seal.”

Elena’s heart hammered against her ribs. This was it. The anomaly. The source of the energy. This was the find of a lifetime, of a dozen lifetimes.

“The stories,” Leo muttered, scrolling through a tablet. “The locals talked about this place. The ‘Mouth of the Underworld.’ They said Hades dropped the key to his realm here and that men who searched for it were never seen again. I thought it was just another ghost story.”

“Maybe it is,” Elena said, her mind racing. “But this isn’t a key. This is the lock.”

The problem was getting it out. Their diamond-tipped drills didn’t scratch it. Thermal lances barely warmed the surface. It was as if the object actively rejected their attempts to interact with it. After three days of futile effort, they made a decision. They couldn’t study it in situ. They had to take it back to the lab in Athens.

Using a combination of controlled explosives to loosen the surrounding rock and a crane of monstrous strength, they managed, after a week of back-breaking labor, to extract the obsidian disc. It was about two meters in diameter and unnaturally light, as if it were filled with helium. The moment it was free from the mountain, the strange pressure in the air vanished. The ‘hum’ was gone.

The disc was crated in a special non-conductive material and flown to Elena’s university lab under the strictest secrecy. For weeks, they ran every test they could think of. They bombarded it with X-rays, sonar, particle beams. Nothing penetrated its surface. The symbols continued their slow, silent pulse, indifferent to human curiosity.

It was Leo, the history buff, who made the connection. He’d been cross-referencing the symbols with every ancient alphabet and cosmological map he could find.

“It’s not Greek,” he announced one evening, his face pale under the lab’s fluorescent lights. He had blown up a high-resolution image of the symbols and projected it on the wall. “Look at the angularity. The repetition of certain knot-like forms. This is… well, it’s a long shot, but it bears a resemblance to Proto-Norse sigils. Specifically, the kind associated with Odin, the All-Father.”

Elena stared at him. “Odin? In Greece? That’s like finding a Coca-Cola bottle in a Roman fort. The timelines and geographies don’t match.”

“I know!” Leo said, excited. “But look at this.” He pulled up images of runestones from Scandinavia. The style was undeniably similar—a language of power and binding, not of communication. “The myths say Odin sacrificed his eye for wisdom. He learned the secrets of the runes, the building blocks of reality. What if this is one of them? A really, really big one?”

The implications were staggering. It suggested a level of interaction between ancient pantheons that modern scholarship had never seriously considered. It wasn’t just trade routes; it was a collaboration on a cosmic scale.

They needed an expert. The best in the world for obscure Norse linguistics was a reclusive professor named Dr. Arne Larsen, who taught at a small university in Oslo. Getting him to Athens took a sizable chunk of their grant money and a lot of persuasive emails.

Dr. Larsen was a tall, gaunt man with a wild beard and eyes that held a fierce, intellectual light. He was led into the sealed lab where the disc lay on a reinforced table. He didn’t greet them. He walked straight to the object, his breath catching in his throat.

For a long time, he said nothing. He just circled it, his fingers tracing the air inches above the glowing symbols, muttering to himself in Danish and Old Norse.

“Where did you find this?” he finally asked, his voice a raspy whisper.

“In a chasm in the Peloponnese,” Elena answered. “We think it might be-”

“-a binding seal,” Larsen finished for her, not taking his eyes off the disc. “Yes. And you are correct, young man,” he said, nodding at Leo. “This is the work of the Ginnregin, the Great Powers. The Aesir. This is Odin’s handiwork. But the power within it… the energy it’s containing… that is not his.”

“What is it?” Elena asked, her mouth dry.

Larsen leaned closer, his nose almost touching the cold surface. “The runes speak of a prison. A fold in time and space. They speak of a ‘Kraft af intet’… a ‘Power of Nothing.’ They created a lock, using the very essence of their home as the key, to contain something that should not be.” He pointed a trembling finger at a central, complex knot of symbols. “This cluster here… it doesn’t just say ‘danger.’ It says ‘annihilation.’ It’s a warning that whatever is inside is not just a threat to life, but to existence itself. That it is… ‘other’.”

A cold dread settled in the lab. They had been treating this as a historical artifact. It was becoming clear it was something else entirely. A weapon. A tomb.

“Can you open it?” Leo asked, the question hanging in the air like a held breath.

Larsen looked at him, and for the first time, Elena saw genuine fear in the old scholar’s eyes.

“The runes are not a combination lock,” he said slowly. “They are a statement of condition. They are saying: ‘This shall not be opened until the world is unmade.’ Or…” He frowned, squinting at a smaller, almost hidden set of markings near the edge. “…until the ‘Storm-Bringer’ returns to claim his own.”

“Storm-Bringer?” Elena asked.

“A common kenning for Zeus,” Larsen said absently, before the weight of his own words hit him. His head snapped up, his eyes wide with a terrifying realization. He looked from the Greek archaeologist to the object and back again. “You found this in Greece. A prison sealed by Odin… for something belonging to Zeus.”

The pieces clicked into place with a horrifying finality. They weren’t just archaeologists anymore. They were custodians. They had found the most dangerous secret the old world had ever kept, a secret the gods themselves had buried at the root of their own power.

And they had brought it right into the heart of the modern world.