I dreamt of Edrona. I dreamt of the Nagari tearing down all of my people one by one, adults, children, and elderly alike. A deep crimson red, the color of blood, filled my vision as horrified Edronan faces flashed through my mind. The faces cycled through everyone I knew; even the rush of Dorian and his cronies’ faces that presented behind my eyes made me feel sick. Even they hadn’t deserved the death that had befallen them.
Soon, the cycle of the dead faces landed on Priest Kane’s, his self-satisfied expression distorting to a split second of pain before the water sword I had stolen from him with my Tier 2 Skill had lopped his head right off of his shoulders.
Then I saw Sarina. The image of her beautiful, peaceful face filled my mind as I rewatched her die in my arms, killed by Priest Kane just before I had killed him in return. And then my dream shifted to Drayek. I could almost feel my body squirming in my sleep, instinctively trying to wake myself up as the scene of his death by the hand of the Tier 4 Nagari played in my mind over and over again.
“I love you, son.”
Drayek’s strained final words repeated in my dream more than I could count. I could feel the tension in my shoulders as I had to relive watching the life leave his dark eyes.
“No!” I screamed.
I was awake now, my shout still bouncing off the small cave's tight walls. I clutched a hand to my pounding heart and tried to catch my breath.
“It’s about time you woke up.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, afraid to look up and find the source of the voice that had just spoken. It was the same voice as before, soft yet full, and it filled the entire space with an eerie, inhuman strength.
I could feel the presence of someone else in the cave with me. I didn’t even have to look. But, after slowly opening one eye at a time, I looked anyway.
I blinked rapidly to try to adjust my vision to the bright light my visitor emitted, so it took me a moment to even see her. Once I did, my heart plummeted to my stomach, and the dryness in my mouth that the cave’s water had remedied returned with a ferocity.
Let me tell you, seeing a living, breathing god in person is not something I could ever imagine getting used to. And I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. Lady Euridice was the first god to visit me. Yes, I had met Lord Solomon, but only an AI made to represent who he had once been. This… person before me in the cave exuded godliness in all manners of the word.
Lady Euridice stood at the wall opposite where I sat, hands clasped firmly in front of her stomach. Every part of her glowed in a brilliant, hot golden yellow. I could feel the hairs on my arms beginning to singe away from the heat that emanated from her. Her lengthy robes billowed around her bare ankles and rippled in a rainbow of soft yellows and oranges. Her blond hair, so platinum that it looked almost white, reflected the orange and yellow from her robe in a harmony of blends. She looked like a human flame.
Thin lines of blue essence danced all around her in hoards of tens of thousands–no, hundreds of thousands, at least. And the conglomeration of lines seemed to bend with her body as she moved, as if the essence and the goddess were one.
Though there was so much essence, more than I’d ever seen, amassing in the little cave, I couldn’t bring myself to remember how to use my Tier 1 Skill and draw the essence to me. I knew gods were unimaginably powerful, but just the fact that Lady Euridice could attract so much essence, the matter that made up all of existence, was something else entirely. But then again, she stole essence from every person she Marked in the Erudition Collective. Of course she’d have a constant plethora of essence ready to heed her every beck and call.
The goddess’s full lips tilted downward into an almost imperceptible frown, and her eyes, sometimes brown, sometimes green, sometimes blue… in fact, I even saw purple and gold in her irises… studied me with a fiery intensity. I couldn’t look into her intimidating gaze for longer than half a second.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
I opened my mouth to try to say something–anything! Something like, “Oh, I guess you’re here to kill me.” Or, “Well, living was nice while it lasted.” But nothing but a high-pitched, very unmanly-like whimper escaped from my lips.
“Rayden Grim.” She tsked at me with a slight shake of her head. “What am I to do with you?”
I tried to swallow, but my throat felt just as frozen as the rest of my body.
“I had wanted to kill you,” she said, the word “kill” bringing a slight uptick of her lips, “but I have something else in mind.”
I finally refound the ability to open my mouth and speak. “Uh, goddess–Lady–Euridice. Do you visit all of Lord Solomon’s clones, or am I just special?”
Lady Euridice quirked a thin white eyebrow. Even as she did, her forehead and the rest of her tan face still remained wrinkle-free.
“I’m not actually here, boy. I am projecting myself as a hologram for you to see me. If I was actually here, my presence would burn you to a crisp before you could even blink.”
My eyes widened, and my ability to speak left me again. If just a hologram version of the goddess could attract so much essence, I couldn’t imagine how much I’d see if I stood before her in person.
“You are but a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things… as all Solomon’s troublesome clones are,” she declared, pacing about the length of her wall. “But an annoyance all the same.”
I didn’t know whether to feel pride or absolute terror.
“I have a plan for you. Do not misunderstand–you will die, but I have decided to use you as a sort of…” she tapped a long finger against her pointed chin, “experiment.
“So, if you want to live just a while longer, you will not bring me more problems, like killing my Priests, for instance.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Of course, I didn’t want to obey her! Though I’d worshiped the Goddess of Knowledge, the Lady Euridice, for most of my life, discovering secrets about the god I had been cloned from, Lord Solomon, had revealed her deceit. She was truly the Goddess of Lies, having stolen the Knowledge godhood right from Solomon and taking over the Erudition Collective, where I lived, and other universes under false pretenses. And the more people she could deceive, the more powerful she got.
No, with every part of my being, I wanted to defy her, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that to her face.
“What sort of experiment?” I asked instead.
She turned her nose up at me and laughed, a melodious yet ominous sound that rang through my ears both pleasantly and bone-chillingly at the same time.
“You’ll see, boy. You’ll see. And don’t forget…” She looked down at me over the finger she had pointed in my face. “Don’t forget to stay out of my way.”
And with that, the goddess disappeared in a flash of golden light.
***
Instead of catching up with more much-needed sleep, I repeatedly mulled over the entirety of Lady Euridice’s strange visit in my head. My arms and legs still shook from shock, though it had been at least two hours since her hologram had disappeared. And Codex could offer no insight into her cryptic warnings and bizarre behavior.
I rubbed my face with my hands and groaned. “What can I do, Codex? How am I supposed to avoid getting killed by Lady Euridice? She told me to stay out of her way, but I have no idea what that means!”
“I do have a solution, Master. At least a temporary one.”
I rested the back of my head against the wall behind me. “I’ll take any solutions–even temporary ones.”
“After we reach Facility Number 106, we will travel to a planet with certain protections against those Tiered 11 and above.”
Despite everything, a sliver of excitement pulsed through my blood. “Another planet? I’m leaving X-47-14? I mean, I knew I would someday, but not so soon. I thought we were going to another facility of Lord Solomon’s to have me train with his AI or something.”
“Facility Number 106 is not like the one where you met the Lord Solomon AI, Master,” Codex said. "This planet has two Lord Solomon facilities; the one I am guiding you to is a cosmodrome."
I sighed, really wishing Codex could ascertain that I didn’t know half the words he usually said. “And a cosmodrome is…?”
“A place to house and launch a spaceship.”
I frowned. “What’s a ‘spaceship?’”
End of Book 1