The air in the remote corner of the Fakahatchee Strand was thick with the scent of wild vanilla orchids and something much older. Monty Tiberius Beauregard-Hayes was following up on a local story about a digital AI virus that was working to systematically categorize and delete all of the magic left in the world. Monty pushed through a wall of waist high ferns and stopped dead. In front of him sat a perfectly preserved marble statue of a 1920s land surveyor. The figure came complete with a transit level and a look of absolute frozen terror etched into his pale features.
Monty adjusted his Petrification Parity Meter. The needle jumped into the red zone immediately. “It is not limestone,” he noted into his pocket recorder while kneeling to inspect a marbleized palmetto leaf near the surveyor’s boot. “The molecular structure is high grade Italian marble yet the DNA traces are human. We have a Class 5 Gorgon Class Infestation. The conversion is total. Even the cotton of his shirt has been replaced by cold and heavy stone.”
Monty was not alone in the humid silence. Standing near the statue was Gator Gabe, his partner on this AI anomaly research mission. He was a local guide who claimed he had been hunting a lady with very noisy hair for weeks. Gabe was currently staring at a particularly dense thicket of mangroves with his eyes wide and his breath coming in shallow hitches. The usual swamp sounds of cicadas and bullfrogs had gone completely silent.
Suddenly the thicket parted with a sound like grinding teeth. Out stepped a woman who looked like she had walked straight off an ancient Greek amphora. Her skin was the color of moonlight and her eyes glowed with a soft and dangerous amber light. But it was her hair that commanded attention. A dozen Pygmy Rattlesnakes writhed and hissed around her face like a living crown. Their rattles created a frantic and overlapping staccato that made the very air feel pressurized.
“Mere mortal,” she hissed. Her voice sounded like dry leaves skittering over stone. “You dare intrude upon the sanctuary of Stheno? I have watched civilizations rise and crumble into the salt. I was old when the first hill formed. I was weary with life when the first drop of sea fell into the sands that became the ocean. My name was ancient when your kind first crawled from the water without eyes to see or wits to comprehend the possibilities the gods had granted you. You dare question me about something as insignificant as time?”
Stay tuned as next week we continue this, another misadventure with Monty Tiberius Beauregard-Hayes…
