Mirror World Publishing and Sapphyria's Book Promotions present the 1-week virtual book tour for
.png)
Waking up on the beach in Greece after a midnight party, Cleo, a British-Greek tourist, sees a stranger sitting next to her. The stranger has a giant spider on his forearm.
So begins an incredible odyssey through the nine levels of the mysterious mountain populated by an odd assortment of monsters, demons, and avatars of dead gods. Still grieving the unsolved disappearance of her twin sister Cora, Cleo is thrust into the world whose rules she does not understand and whose inhabitants confound everything she thought she knew about Greek mythology. Confronted by Woven Women, masked huntresses, sentient graffiti, and Mother of Monsters, Cleo has to make sense of it all. And meanwhile, a mysterious Call reverberates in her brain: You have to go up. You have to find your sister.
A story of self-discovery, courage, and breathtaking adventure, Nine Levels is a highly imaginative, innovative, and engrossing retelling of familiar legends with a twist you won’t see coming.
.jpg)
Instead of the shallow slope dotted with white buildings, an enormous peak rose into the brightness, so tall and so massive that Cleo’s brain refused to accept its dimensions. Surely no mountain outside of Everest could be so large! And the pictures of Everest Cleo had seen showed a mountain range, craggy summits piled up on top of each other. Here there was a single symmetrical mount, impossibly large, sticking out of the azure immensity of the sea and dissolving into the azure immensity of the cloudless sky. It was as if the modest cone of Syros was somehow stretched up and blown out, creating this geological monstrosity. She could not even see its top; it dissolved in the glittering sky.
Cleo realized she was hyperventilating, so she closed her eyes, counted to twenty, and tried to control her breathing. With her Apple watch, she could turn on the Breathe app to help her calm down, except her left wrist was bare and her mobile must be in the same place as her backpack, which was nowhere she knew of.
“Are you okay?” a woman’s voice asked.
Cleo gratefully turned toward the source of the voice, trying to hang onto reality, but the impossible peak was still there on the margin of her vision, the sunlight piercingly bright on the bands of sage-green vegetation and bare limestone rock.
The woman was middle-aged, with untidy black hair and wearing a bright pink sundress. She reminded Cleo of a magpie or a crow, the way she tilted her head to the left, staring at her with curious round eyes. To Cleo’s relief, there were no arachnid pets on, or around, the woman.
“Not really,” Cleo confessed, letting go of her stiff upper lip. “I don’t know where my phone is, and…”
She realized that her voice was trembling and coughed to save herself the embarrassment of going to pieces in front of a stranger.
“You are dehydrated,” the woman declared. “Drink!”
She pulled out a battered metal thermos from her enormous handbag, unscrewed the top, filled it with murky liquid, and gave it to Cleo who stared at it dubiously. She had expected a plastic bottle, so ubiquitous in Greece that they seemed to generate spontaneously from thin air. But the copper taste in her mouth told her she needed to drink if she was not to pass out. Water was life in the Mediterranean.
She took a long draught. It was water, lukewarm and with a strange aftertaste like ammonia, but at least it was no retsina. Cleo promised herself never to touch anything stronger than lager again.
“Where are you staying?” the woman asked.
“In a tourist hotel. It’s called Villa Pharos.”
Cleo vaguely pointed toward the end of the promenade where a narrow winding alley led into the huddle of whitewashed buildings. It did not look very familiar, but then nothing did anymore.
