The Tower of the Winds is one of the main locations in The Maelstrom Mission.

The Tower actually exists – you can go and see it if you happen to be in Athens.




It’s located not far from the Parthenon, at the foot of the Acropolis (‘The Sacred Rock’) in what used to be the Roman agora, once a bustling marketplace, but now deserted and rock-strewn.

The Tower was built around 50BC by Andronikus of Kyrrhos, a Greek architect and astronomer. In The Maelstrom Mission, we discover that Andronikus was also a ‘Weatherman’ – an ancient bloodline with the power to predict the weather with complete accuracy. Andronikus, we learn, predicted an apocalyptic disaster that would strike the Earth in modern times. We now know the disaster he foretold was Global Warming.

The octagonal, white marble Tower stands over 12 metres high, has a diameter of about 8 metres and was built by Andronikus as a weather station – probably the world’s first – and originally featured sundials, a complicated internal water clock, and a weathervane. In this, it spookily echoes Freddie’s own weather station.

The ancient Greeks believed that the winds of the world had divine powers. Wind Gods criss-crossed their world bringing gifts of bountiful harvests – or of rain and storms. Andronikus decorated each of the eight sides of the Tower with a relief sculpture depicting the wind that blew from that particular direction, to celebrate these sacred deities.



One of these was Boreas, a noble Wind Warrior who becomes one of Freddie’s allies in the fight against Maelstrom.



It’s in the Tower that Freddie meets his other companions – Lips, Skeleton, Eden,  Zodiac and, of course, Sirocco. Using the Tower as their HQ, they gather to plan their strategy to defeat Maelstrom.

Although it isn’t long before the Tower itself comes under attack from his mega-destructive Super Hurricanes, unleashed from the Warehouse of the Dead …