They moved through the buildings next to the tracks and were forced to halt progress a couple of times to listen to distant footsteps and sounds that they could not even identify. This sent shivers down Max’s spine; he stared to wonder if coming here was the wise course of action.

Pelos continued to lead the way with Pater right behind him. Occasionally, Pater would put a hand on the suited man’s shoulder and force him to stop at a corner. Pelos would always dust himself off after this and look back with a slight bit of contempt. The halls were all short and dark. Without their guide, they would never make it through here. It seemed like it was designed as a maze, but at one point their guide whispered that a maze was not the intention, but the city was compacted into this as he called it, asteroid.

They finally wound through another featureless hallway and the sight before them was finally different. The chamber was deep and tall. It opened up at a gradual slope and the floor also gradually sunk down so that the room was quite tall at the end. There was what Max would describe as furniture, but it was not like any that he every sat in or ate off of before.

The suited man stopped at the entrance, “This is it. I will wait here with Phaedra and Pater. Take your time with the Scion. We will watch for the servants of Krakulath.”

Phaedra ruffled Max’s hair and wished him luck, “I hope you find all the answers that you seek. With your gift, I’m sure you’ll get more than you could hope for.”

Max crawled through the small archway and into the expanded chamber. The chairs there looked like something that a multi-legged creature might benefit from. He almost giggled inappropriately, thinking of how something with hind legs and fore legs would sit in chair.

Max shivered, looking around the chamber at the finely crafted works of art. Chairs, tables, a bed, tapestries and other exotic pieces that Max could not even begin to imagine a use for littered the room in an organized chaos.

Then, a figure floated out of a tub near the taller part of the room. He watched as a massive, grey head moved higher. A thick neck with heavy pulsating veins followed and then shoulders that appeared weak and sleek, but also quite broad. Max let out a gasp as the rest of what must have been the Scion’s body floated into view. The face and skin lacked many features that Max considered regular, but perhaps such features belonged only to humanity and other such creatures.

Separate lights, like stars floated around the now hovering giant. Coronal emissions fired off between the lights providing reflections of color on the otherwise quite plain skin of the Scion.

Max’s nervousness forced his hand before the Scion could do more than flex his expansive facial muscles. “There really should have been a script for this meeting. I,” Max hesitated but continued, “should have prepared a list of all the things I need to ask you. What the shlup, I don’t think I’d have remembered to use it anyway.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Max stopped and watched the features on the floating Scion. Again, before any response to the immature greetings could be leveled, Max spoke, “its just that all these people think I’ve got some destiny. I don’t know what to tell them. Do I have a destiny? Are these people really my friends? Do I belong in this world? I was taught growing up to avoid the outside and that it was dead. Should I have taken those lessons to heart?

Max cocked an eyebrow and looked up at the Scion, mouth hanging open and shoulders slouching. This was his chance to get to answers to all the questions burning inside him. He needed answers to so many grand things and sought answers to very personal ones and yet he just had to stop and hope that the Scion would feel generous enough not to simply squash him.

The other worldly form waited patiently for him to finish. The being’s head tilted sideways ever so slightly as if to curiously hear him. Once Max finally stopped for a considerable few seconds, the being finally responded.

“What you must realize is that you have no destiny. All of these people have used soothsayers and fortune finders to learn about you. They weren’t looking at the time for you specifically, but they were looking for that which would determine a significant part of their future. In this way, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. By asking the questions they did, they learned of you. They learned that you would be important to their causes and their efforts. It was these very predictions that made you important, so it really had nothing to do with anything you will do or had done. You could say that in a way, they created a specter of you, one that would be involved in their future, and then they all assumed that you had some greater purpose. There is no greater purpose. They latched on to something, something that ended up being in common with all of them. If none of these foolish mortal fellows had ever asked of their fortunes, you’d more than likely still be sitting in the hamlet getting kicked around by your fellows. So, in a way, you could either blame them or thank them for your current circumstance.

“As for some of your other questions, I had best not answer them. If I do, events may unfold as I have said simply because you seek to make them so or you seek to avoid them. I am not attempting to use my superior knowledge and my place of power to change the events that will unfold. If I say to you what I see, or what I believe the answers to be, then my will shall be forced upon the world. I do not wish this to be the case. It is this world’s choice and this world’s power to be allowed to take its own path. And besides, I do love surprises. Your path has many turns that I do not wish to deviate.”

“You could probably ask questions until the end of time. Unfortunately, time is what we are short of,” the snobbish Pelos said.

Max started to ask another question of the Scion, but was interrupted by a soft but yelling voice, “Max we’ve got to go. Those things are getting close. We’ll be trapped if we don’t hurry.”

He looked to the strange being on the screen, “I better go. Thank you. I feel as though I can go live my life for me. I can make any choice, I can be happy with any life I want.”

Since he could not read the Scions emotions, he felt a little blind. So the look on the face of this semi-divine being almost confused him. He didn’t spend any time trying to figure it out. The being had been around for probably thousands of years. It would take more than the few minutes that Max was given to figure out the emotions of such a thing.

His companions ran into the room. All three of them started to yell various things, and he could not understand a single one of them. Great axe and sword were drawn. The snobby well-dressed man looked as he always did, confident but nervous. “We’ve got to fight our way out. We can’t let them come in here and get too suspicious of this room.”

The four of them were side by side, facing the exit, in ready position.