Chapter One

Her hair was filling the room.

Hip-length when she was captured, she could only guess at its length now. She could stand on it, folding it back to the top of her head and down to her feet again, half a dozen times. Arms full of the slippery stuff would slide out of her grasp, making the folded count unreliable, and the ends always drifted free; she didn't know how much more there was than what she could hold folded in her arms.

No matter how she twisted, she couldn't escape the tendrils. Her hair followed her as she moved, invisible spiders whose subtle brush were the only contact she had with anything living. She'd broken it off at first, tearing great handfuls apart and letting them go in the little prison. It had not taken long to realize the folly of the tactic: at least while attached to her head, she had some control over the impossibly long strands. Those torn free wound their way around her legs and arms, almost lazily, constricting her movements.

It was those broken lengths that made her realize that someday the room would be filled with her hair. The thought terrified her. Captivity for eternity was hell enough. Captivity wound motionless in a secondary prison of her own making was enough to set her screaming.

The sound carried to the walls of her prison, bouncing harmlessly back to her, distorted by water. Only exhaustion stopped the screams, hours or perhaps days later. There was no way to count time's passage, in the black oubliette. Neither light nor tide passed into the deeps, leaving her with no idea how long she had been trapped.

Only the first few hours were clear.

She'd wakened with a surge of pain, screaming air into her lungs, thrashing wildly in salt water. Her skin was raw, and the salt stung it viciously. That pain faded as panic rose. She swam across the room, fumbling in the absolute darkness for the door. The wall curved inward slightly just above the water level, turning from wall to ceiling. She pounded frantically on the curves, the stone not even reverberating with her efforts. Finally she dove for the door, searching with blind hands. The floor lay several feet below her, smooth, but her frenzied hunt found no exit.

Shoving back to the surface, she reached up, trying to gauge how much room there was between the water and the ceiling. She couldn't reach the ceiling, which afforded her some scant relief. There was air, for a few hours, at least. Maybe there would be time to find a way out. There had been windows. If the door was gone, perhaps the windows were still there. She dove again, and again, until she had touched every inch of the walls surrounding her. There was no way out.

Someone was screaming. It was long minutes before she realized it was herself, screaming for her gods, for her mother, for her lover; for anyone at all to save her. Silence answered, and the patient lapping of the water as she caused it to slosh back and forth in the free space in the chamber. The adrenaline was leaving her system, panic replaced by despair, and she slapped her hand against the wall, whimpering. "Please, please, please." It became a rhythmic sob, growing more distraught as she realized the ceiling was curving more steeply than it had been. The water level was rising. Soon the air would be gone, and she would drown with the rest of Atlantis.

The water level was rising!

Somewhere, there had to be a fracture, a break in the stone that let the water in. Again, she dove, running her fingertips over the stone, looking for the flaw. Time and again she floundered to the surface, gasping for air, only to drive herself back under the water, determined to find the passage where the water flowed in.

She couldn't find it. The water continued to rise, terribly slowly, but inexorably. The break allowing it to seep in could only be a hairline fracture, too small for frightened fingers to find, too narrow to break further apart for escape. As she pushed her way back to the thin layer of air, she could taste it going bad, stale, with no replenishing breeze to finish it. Fighting despairing tears, she lay on her back in the cool water, trying to breathe shallowly. She lay still for hours, fading in and out of consciousness as the air continued to thin.

Panic regrouped only when her nose bumped the ceiling. A horrified scream tore her throat, the faint metallic taste of blood pooling at the back of her mouth from the force of the scream. She smashed her hands blindly into the ceiling, wasting the little air that was left. In the barest moment of time, the water closed over her head entirely.

Sinking into the quiet tomb, she held her breath, desperate to extend her life just a few more seconds. The physical desire to simply open her mouth, to breathe deeply, was nearly impossible to resist. Surely if she could not breathe for only a little longer, there would be miraculous escape. Pale stars danced behind her eyes, and the conscious decision to hold her breath failed before the instinctive reflex to breathe.

A fit of coughing, the attempt to dislodge water from her lungs, doubled her over, sobbing in the darkness. Not until it passed, and she lay floating in a fetal position, did it slowly dawn on her that she was still alive. She did not need to breathe.

It took much, much longer for the implications of that to settle in. That she, like Aroz, was Immortal.

Like Methos.

She would live here until she escaped. If she could not escape, the room would be her prison, but never her grave.

She screamed. She screamed until her throat was bloody, folded tightly in on herself, biting the knees that she held crushed against her chest. She could feel the sting of salt water in the cuts, and she could feel them seal closed again within moments.

It triggered motion, making her unfold from the painfully tight fetal position she'd floated in. She kicked towards a wall, and began working over every centimeter of the room with terrified, unseeing fingers.

It was no longer shaped as it once had been. The walls were melted smooth, a uniformity to them that the architects could only have dreamed of. There were no cracks, no imperfections that might be exploited. Even the fracture that let the water in was too fine to be discovered. The door was simply gone. No hollows or changes in the stone's texture hinted at what might have been the way out.

Only in two places did the texture change at all. The stone turned to metal slag, short rough spots on the floor. Recklessly, she scrabbled at them until her fingers bled, trying to gain some purchase in the two small flaws. That she failed each time she tried did not stop her. There was no other choice.

Nearly five thousand years passed.