Heart Of Atlantis

Alaric know he shared his dismay, “what else is new?”
    Alaric smacked himself in the forehead, and Conlan’s mouth fell open.
    “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you do anything so uncontrolled in your life,” the prince said.
    “My life is so far out of my control right now, I don’t even recognize it.” Alaric smashed another energy ball into the sand next to the intricate glass sculpture the first had formed. “The most important thing of all, and I’m only now mentioning it. My apologies.”
    “Mentioning what?” Conlan said with elaborate patience.
    “There is a pretender to the throne. He calls himself Ptolemy Reborn and claims to be descended from Alexander the Great. He stole Poseidon’s Pride, and he plans to crown himself king of Atlantis.”
    Conlan blinked once and then bared his teeth in a grim parody of a smile. “This? This I think we’d better sit down for.”

    Quinn didn’t need much persuading to go to Atlantis. She’d been anticipating this moment since she first learned her sister was in love with the Atlantean high prince. Plus, she had a tiny nephew she was dying to meet. She’d ignore the insane high priest and his magic-giving-up lunacy for as long as necessary, and then she’d escape and make her way to New York, hope Ptolemy was still there, and confront him. Or else find a way to go get him. It was a plan.
    Not a
good
plan, or even much of a plan at all, but it was a start. If her heart would only stop aching so much at the thought of it.
    She stepped into the portal again, wondering how many trips through a magic doorway it took before a person became blasé about it. Whatever that number was, she hadn’t reached it yet. Maybe she never would. She certainly didn’t anticipate traveling to Atlantis very often, in what was left of her sure-to-be short life.
    The magic doorway deposited her on a grassy space, and remembering Noriko, she turned around to face the shining oval. “Thank you for the transportation, and for not dropping me to my death in that tornado. I appreciate it.”
    The armed guards standing in a loose semicircle around the space stared at her with varying expressions of amusement, until the portal flashed with a brilliant blue light and a deep male voice emanating from the center replied.
    “You’re welcome.”
    Then the guards’ expressions changed to astonishment, and it was Quinn’s turn to be amused.
    “It never hurts to be polite,” she said loftily to the one who looked like he was in charge.
    He bowed, a grin quirking at the edges of his lips. “Yes, my lady.”
    “I wondered about that,” Alaric said, but he tightened his lips against saying anything further when she deliberately turned away from him and toward Conlan, who was staring at the portal with slightly widened eyes.
    “So is this it? Is this the famous . . . oh. Oh, holy cow.” She stopped talking; she almost stopped breathing, as she looked up and up at the crystalline structure curving gently above her head. The dome. It was really true.
    A scattering of twinkling lights swam past the outside of the surface of the dome nearest her, and she walked closer, fascinated, until she was close enough to realize they had done just that—
swum
by—because it was a school of some kind of tiny iridescent fish whose bellies lit up like Christmas lights. It was beautiful and breathtaking, and Quinn finally allowed herself to calm down and simply enjoy the moment.
    When she slowly turned away from the fish, and looked up, she realized that the twilit sky inside the dome sparkled with starlight, but in patterns she didn’t recognize.
    “Are they representations of constellations you saw before? Back when Atlantis was still on the surface like the rest of the continents?”
    Conlan nodded. “Yes. It’s a self-perpetuating magic, created more than eleven thousand years ago. We understand the stars have shifted since then.”
    “And of course you’re here in the Bermuda Triangle, which might affect any stars you see, too, right?”
    “Yes, but we hope that changes when we rise and take our place on the surface again. We believe the magic required to sustain and hide us so far beneath the waves is what causes the temporal disturbances above.”
    She didn’t even want to tackle that. Sounded like physics or science fiction, and she was too tired for either. In the meantime, she’d noticed something else.
    “There’s no moon.”
    Alaric shook his head. “No. Never a moon.