"I might be able to help with that."<br/><br/>The soft voice came from behind the group. The words were in English but with a strong Arabic accent. When they looked, they would see a young man, no older than nineteen or twenty, dressed in ripped blue jeans and a button-down shirt that had once been white but was now beige from dirt and sweat. A torn brown fedora covered his curly, short black hair and shaded skin that was soft brown of the desert sands at dawn. He had at least a week's worth of tangled beard and smelled as if he hadn't seen a shower in a while. Despite his battered appearance, there was an otherworldly handsomeness about him that attracted the eyes of many a passing female, and even a few males, though far more covertly.<br/><br/>He took a seat unasked, half-melted tennis shoes squeaking heavily on the airport's gleaming floor. "Anoushirvan Al-Ahmed, son of Anahita." He released a deep breath. "If...Mother...still lives that is." He looked at the others. "Mother told me that you would be coming and that I should help you. Sorry to be eavesdropping and rude, but it's been a horrible week. I'm...not really sure how this all is supposed to work." He wiped his forehead with a smudged handkerchief, pounded his complimentary glass of water in a gulp, then took a deep breath and began.<br/><br/>"About two weeks ago I was in New York City, part of an exchange program my university has. Then Mother appeared to me. I didn't know that she was my mother. If you'd asked me a month ago I would have told you that gods belonged in mythology class. I'm...I<em>was</em>a Journalism major. But...well...she knew things. She was insistent. She gave me some weird stuff, and Awrang, my<em>Peri</em>, and demanded that I come back here to help fight a group she said was trying to release something called Azhi Dahaka." He raised his hands in a warding gesture. "Don't ask me what exactly it is or why we had to go there. I have no idea. Mother just dropped me off with a bunch of strangers and we went to some weird place that I don't think is on any map. Armagan, the one who opened the way, called it a Terra something-or-other and it was beneath a mountain. We traveled for quite some time, and then we ran into the problem Mother described.<br/><br/>There's a cave far beneath the mountain, or wherever we were by then, and in it there's a pit. In the pit, there's a three-headed thing. A snake? A dragon? Maybe a lizard? I didn't get a good look. Truth be told, I didn't really want to know. We'd fought some strange things on the way to the place. And by we, I mean the others. I'm not a fighter. I'd kind of lost track of all the weird stuff by then. But there was a<em>ton</em>of the creatures near the edge of the pit. There were people too, dressed in funny robes and chanting in something that kind of sounds like Arabic but there were a lot of other words in there. Phrases and words that I don't think have been used in a long time. Linguistics wasn't my best class but some of those words sounded pretty ancient and they seemed to spook Christophe. He was the guy who knew about all the magic stuff and he said it was some of seal-breaker or anti-curse or something. Something that would unleash the creature and we had to stop it." He looked away. "Well...we tried."<br/><br/>He sighed. "It was a damned massacre, and that's putting it mildly. We didn't have a chance against all those monsters and cultists. Farzad, Fereiba, and Arma, they were our toughest. Demigods, they called themselves. They held out the longest. I don't even want to remember what they did to Asai once they got over being stunned by her prettiness. Christophe and I...well, we tried to get them back for that but Christophe got speared and Awrang died saving me. I don't know what happened to Farzad and Fereiba, but Arma covered me. Said someone had to get the word back to our parents. I'm, I<em>was</em>, the fastest of all of us. She covered me all the way back to the gate and told me to start running as soon as we got to it. Start running and never stop until someone on our side knew what was about to happen. So I did." He bit his lip. "I...I heard her scream, just as the gate closed behind me. I don't know what happened, and I didn't look back. I just kept running until I got to Tehran, and Mother showed up. She said that someone named Mithra was sending for help, but that her home was being overrun. She wanted me to help you guys when you get here, and guide you back to where the creature was. I don't know how to get into the portal, but I know how to get there and remember the way from the other side. I made a map on the way down, in case we got lost." He patted his shirt pocket. "So, yeah. Mother said that it's kind of important we stop this thing from getting loose, and I'd like to do something to make sure the others didn't die for no reason."