Chapter Twenty: The Fall of Gods
Year 1991, Washington DC, United States of America
Dr. Jonathan Thorn, PhD
The room became eerily quiet as Sara glared at Carla and Carla looked back at her in confusion. The prolonged silence was broken when Sara spoke in a voice as cold and desolate as the most frigid winter.
“Why didn’t you stop when I told you to? Why did you kill her after I told you not to?”
“She was an enemy so I killed her, what’s wrong with that?”
“If I wanted to kill her, do you think I couldn’t have done that at the beginning? Didn’t that small cat brain of yours ever consider that I could have sent a dagger through her heart as easily as sending it through her foot?”
“How would I know what you were thinking? Besides, why would I even care?”
“I needed her! Because of your idiotic actions, I got screwed over!”
Carla looked at Sara with curiosity and asked, “Why did you need her so badly?”
Sara’s eyes flickered for a moment before turning away from Carla. “That is none of your business.”
As her eyes wandered around, they landed on me.
“Hey Jonathan, you really saved our collective asses this time. How did you get rid of those fucking ribbons? I didn’t catch what you did to them. They just seemed to fall off.”
She used a flame dagger to incinerate the ribbon binding me and waited for an answer but I didn’t answer her, or rather, I couldn’t answer her. After I had used my power to free Sara, my body had frozen in place, unable to move a single inch. My lungs stopped inflating and deflating to pump air in and out of my body, my heart stopped beating, the rhythmic thump thump of contracting muscles falling silent. If I was in a hospital, I would have already been pronounced dead and on my way to a morgue, but despite the fact that all the bodily functions necessary for my survival had ceased, I remained alive and conscious. Sara looked closely at my current state and noticed that something strange was going on. She waved her hands in front of my eyes and when she didn’t get any reaction, she felt for a pulse. Finding nothing, she grew observably distraught.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! How did this happen? How the fuck did this happen?”
Carla sounded fed up as she said, “What’s wrong now?”
“He is not breathing! His heart has also stopped!”
“Well then what are you waiting for? Try to administer CPR!”
“I’m trying but I can’t move him no matter how much I try. How am I supposed to administer CPR if I can’t get him to lie down?”
“What do you mean he won’t move?”
“He is stuck in place like an insect stuck in amber.”
“Then there is a chance that he is just in a suspended state of animation. There are a lot of things that could cause that but most of them are temporary and nonlethal. The only thing we can do is to wait and hope for the best.”
Sara turned to look sharply at Carla. “What do you mean ‘we’? There is no ‘we’. This has nothing to do with you.”
“You are dreaming if you think I’m going to just leave without him.”
“Well, you are dreaming if you think that you can just take him.”
Carla made a frustrated noise and pointed at Sara. “This man is the only way I will be getting my father back. He is just another paycheck to you but I need him.”
“Frustrating, isn’t it? When you need something but the other person deprives you of it? What was it that you said earlier? Ah, that’s right, why should care?”
Carla’s claws which had been retracted after the end of the previous fight shot out like switchblades. Sara grabbed two flame daggers, one in each hand, after making them materialize midair. The two of them looked like they would start ripping into eachother at any moment.
What kind of nut job was I sharing my mind with? Could his insanity rub off on me?
That is what an insane person would say.
I stood there helplessly watching the two women about to break into an all-out fight. They kept slinging insults and provocative words at each other until both of them started emitting bloodlust that managed to chill my blood even though it was frozen in place at that moment. As the tension built and things were about to come to a head, I started to regain some mobility in the tip of my fingers. The small innocuous movement should have gone completely unnoticed but Sara somehow caught it from the corner of her eyes. If the cumulating tension and impending conflict was like a runaway train with unstoppable momentum, what happened next was like that train hitting a metal wall and coming to a complete stop. The way that Sara suddenly disregarded everything and came to my side, leaving Carla confused and deflated was kind of funny. They were obviously on the verge of tearing each other apart but after Sara abruptly turned her back on her, Carla seemed to grow a little sad and lonely.
“It seems that he is thawing out. Jonathan, can you hear me?”
She looked worried as she checked me for any signs of life but contrary to her concerned attitude, her actions weren’t very gentle as she poked my finger with her flaming dagger, cutting and searing it at the same time. The pain I felt would have made me scream if I still had the use of my voice, but all I could do was to just stand there in excruciating agony with the sound of my newly liberated heart pounding away into my ear.
“Hmm…It seems like you still can’t speak. Well, at least your vitals have returned, that’s a relief. I would have hated to return you back to your family as a statue, partly because that might ruin my stellar reputation as a mercenary but mainly because your mom would flay me alive.”
Sara’s lighthearted joke was somewhat undermined by the very real fear that made her voice tremble when she talked about my mother. She started out jovial and playful but her comment about getting flayed alive sounded serious, as if she truly would have been skinned in the event that something would have happened to me.
I couldn’t completely discount Darky’s opinion but I didn’t have the time to think about it because Sara had forgotten to take her dagger away from my finger and it continued to get incinerated causing searing pain to shoot up from the rapidly blackening finger straight to my head like there was a direct line connecting the two. At that point, my voice came back just in time for me to scream and wail as complaint to the way I was being treated. My high pitched screech finally made Sara realize that she had yet to remove her flaming dagger and she hurriedly withdrew it with a sheepish smile.
“Oops. Sorry about that.”
“Oops? Oops? That is all you have to say for yourself after nearly burning my finger off?”
“Don’t exaggerate, it was one sixth of a finger at most. Besides, it is not like you use the tip anyways.”
I held my hand gingerly and blew gently on the finger whose tip now resembled a piece of charcoal but it did very little to stop the pain. My attempt at relief having been unsuccessful, I settled for angrily glaring at Sara in accusation as a form of mental relief. She just shook her head dismissively nudged me playfully, setting off another wave of pain from my hand.
“Stop milking it so much, it’s just an itsy bitsy injury. You’re not even bleeding because it has been cauterized. Look on the bright side, we are alive and free. That is worth more than some lousy finger, isn’t it? By the way, how did you set me free from those annoying ribbons? Those things have the ability to restrict any magic or divine ability. How were you able to do whatever you did?”
I tried to explain my new found powers to the best of my ability and Sara was suitably impressed.
“Doesn’t this mean that you are omnipotent? From you explanation, you can change the nature of anything. Doesn’t that make you all powerful?”
“Hell no! Didn’t you see what happened when I changed something as small as that ribbon?”
Sara sighed disappointedly then shrugged. “That’s fine, it is still a useful thing to have when we are in a jam. You did well back then and I’m sure your ability will come in handy if we get in trouble. Now, it is best if we leave as quickly as possible. We don’t know how many people might know about this place.”
She pulled my hand, thankfully it was the uninjured one, and led me to the only exit of the basement but our way was blocked by a fuming Carla.
“Where do you think you are going?”
And with that comment, the tense situation from before was restored but before the two women could lunge at each other, I squeezed myself between them and kept them apart.
“Wait a minute. There is no need to fight, right? I mean, your objectives aren’t mutually exclusive, are they? Carla, you want to take me back so that you can free your father. Sara, you have been commissioned by my brother to do the same thing. Why don’t you just work together to take me back?”
Sara raised her hands up in exasperation and said, “Fine, we will team up or whatever. We will work it out later. Right now, I want to leave this place. Something about the whole situation is making me uneasy.”
Carla grudgingly agreed and all three of us headed to the exit. On our way, we had to step over the bloody corpse of Aphrodite which made Sara frown and nearly made me throw up in disgust.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
I had not really looked at the face on the corpse because I found all the blood repulsive but I saw what Darky meant when I took a second look. The face on the corpse was constantly shifting and changing forms. Some of the faces that appeared were faces that I recognized like the faces of famous actresses. The rest were unfamiliar to me but all of them had one thing in common, they were beautiful.
“That is the fragment leaving the body. The dead body is unable to sustain the piece of Aphrodite that had been inhabiting it, so the fragment is being expelled. Aphrodite has probably used this body for a long time so this process is taking a little longer but there is nothing to be afraid of.”
Sara reassured me after seeing me glance at the body with the thousand flashing faces. I dragged my gaze from the corpse and smiled at her only to see her turn away from me without making eye contact. Infact, now that I thought about it, she had been avoiding making eye contact since she burned my finger. Even when she had pulled my hand earlier, she had pulled back immediately afterwards.
I thought about that but I immediately discounted that idea. Sara wasn’t exactly the shy type, if she really had developed any fondness for me, she wouldn’t act like a smitten high-schooler. No, there was something else going on. I considered asking her but something told me that was a bad idea, so I just did a mental shrug and decided to ignore her peculiar behavior.
While I was having these thoughts, we left the basement and went up a rickety set of stairs leading to a derelict house that obviously hadn’t been habituated in quite some time. There, Sara found her many weapons and her leather jacket stashed in a corner and she happily rearmed herself. After she was satisfied that all of her guns, knives and other strange looking gadgets were properly stowed away, we left the house through half boarded, rotten wooden door hanging on one hinge. After all that had happened, I was glad to put the house and the memories of my time there behind so I was in a rather good mood when I saw the outside world through the door, but as walked through the doorway, the world in front of my eyes rippled like a mirage and changed into a completely different setting.
Sara grabbed my arm and pulled me back in a hurry but the old rotting door we had passed through was gone and instead it was replaced by an ancient looking marble archway with cracks running throughout the structure.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! I knew something was wrong! I just knew it!”
“Sara, where are we?” Sudden shifts in locations weren’t anything new to me at this point but judging from the way that Sara was reacting, I didn’t think that this particular instance was a good thing. The place itself didn’t seem very threatening. A brightly lit mountaintop wasn’t very menacing. The giant marble structures that dotted the landscape were in ruins and the fact that the ancient crumbling buildings had overgrown weeds and vines creeping upon them like they were slowly being consumed by the vegetation was obvious proof that no one had lived in them for a long time. From what little was left of these ancient structures, I could see glimmers of what was once a grand city filled with splendor. The remains of statues made entirely of what looked like gold and jewels told of extravagant opulence that one would be hard pressed to see today, but however decadent it might have been in the past, what was once a magnificent metropolis had become an abandoned ghost town forgotten by history, the only inhabitants being some birds flying high in the sky above our heads.
“What is this place?”
When I repeated my question, Sara finally decided to stop throwing a fit and answered my question. “This crumbling piece of shit is what is left of Olympus.”
“Olympus? As in the home of the gods, that Olympus?”
“What home of the gods? It is just the place where a group of delusional idiots gathered to stroke each other’s egos. Now that those morons with delusions of grandeur are gone, it seems to have become a roost for stray birds and I say that the new inhabitants are far better than the original ones. I wonder who brought us here? I’m sure the birds didn’t bring us here to keep them company so who would want to bring us here? ”
Carla who was kneeling on the ground and examining something looked up with a frown on her face. “It’s Janus. I can smell the residue left after he opened a portal here.” She looked up at the sky and her frown only got deeper. “Those aren’t birds.”
The so called “birds” in the sky rapidly descended, growing larger as they did proving that they were much bigger and farther away than I initially thought. By the time they landed around us, they were no longer tiny white specks but fully grown women clad in shining silver and gold armor and white feathered wings growing out of their backs. Each and every one of them looked identical with the same heroic looking faces, blonde hair and blue eyes, and cheekbones that completed a classic Scandinavian appearance.
“Are those angels?”
Sara snorted in derision and spit on the ground. “They wish. These pigeons are angels the same way a firecracker is a weapon of mass destruction. These wannabes are just Valkyries.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t Valkyries part of Norse mythology? What are they doing here if this is Olympus?”
“I was just wondering about that myself. Janus is one of the Olympians so him bringing us here just barely makes sense but the Olympians would never work together with Asgardians. The two despise each other.”
“That is true. Given a choice, we would never work alongside each other, but that decision is no longer in our hands.”
An ominous voice rang out from all around us, making it difficult to discern the location of the speaker. The words it spoke in a distorted timbre were laced with obvious rage and they were made even more menacing by the way it sounded like the words were being spoken by two different voices speaking in tandem while slightly out of sync with each other creating an unnerving reverberation effect.
“Zeus? Is that you? You’ve always had a flare for the dramatic but this voice trick is new. Where did you learn it?”
I was nervous because of the encirclment of the winged women armed with what looked like very sharp swords and my mounting anxiety only increased because of the unfriendly voice but Sara was unconcernedly picking at her fingers when she answered the ominous voice.
“Trick? Do you think this is a trick? Look at us! Look at what we have become! Does this look like a trick?”
The source of that eerie voice finally revealed itself and after seeing the things appearance, I couldn’t help but to recoil in horror. The thing that appeared could be called a man in a very loose definition of the word. His body wasn’t that abnormal. His posture was a little crooked and his body structure was a little off, his right leg was slightly longer than his left, his left hand was more muscular than his right, even his torso wasn’t put together evenly making him a little deformed but nothing that couldn’t be passed off as just abnormal. The real problem was with his face. It looked like a child took two different faces made out of play dough and mashed them together haphazardly. It was truly disgusting.
“Look at what has become of us. Our looks were once the envy of countless men and the object of obsession of any woman who lays their eyes upon us. Look at us now!”
“I don’t know what you are talking about, I think that this is a big improvement from how you looked previously. At least now you look as twisted on the outside as how twisted you are on the inside. And why do you keep referring to yourself in the plural sense?”
“You have the nerve to make fun of us? You were the one who captured us like a wild animal and sold us to the Seekers. You were the one responsible for those maniacs experimenting on us like guinea pigs. Do you understand what they did to us?”
“Hey, I was just the delivery guy.”
“You delivered us to hell. They took our souls and mashed them together in one of their twisted rituals. We were once two paragons of our own courts, gods among gods. We once held the titles of the father of man and the all seeing ones. We were once known as Zeus and Odin but now we are neither. We are just an abomination. We…”
I would never find out what he would have said next because he was cut shiort by a loud bang. The loud noise coming from right besides my ear made me jump in fright. I turned around and saw that Sara had taken out a gun at some point. Said gun was pointing forward and had smoke rising from its barrel. I followed the direction it was pointing towards but the winged warrior in that direction was gone and all I saw was a couple of white feathers floating down forlornly.
“Jesus Christ. Can’t you control yourself? At least warn me before you do that. You nearly gave me a heatattack.”
“Oh come on. I wasn’t going to listen to his sob story. I hate sob stories.”
“I noticed.”
“Besides, this was all going to end in a fight anyways. Might as well get it over with.”
“You do realize that we are surrounded right? There is also Mr Ugly over there and two of his best friends who have just appeared. Why do you look so laid back?”
“Because we have you.”
“What? What do you think I can do?”
“Don’t sell yourself short. He might whine about me and how I did him wrong but the main reason they are here is for you. That means that they will hold back not to kill you.”
“Wait, I’m a human shield?”
“Precisely.”
Zeus or Odin or whatever the weird amalgam of the two gods called himself gestured to a thin beanpole like man who was only a blur as he moved and Mr beanpole lanched himself at us. Sara unceremoniously pushed Carla towards the flickering silhoute coming at us and commanded, “Hermes is yours. Take him down as quickly as possible, I don’t have enough ammo to kill all the Valkyries.”
Carla and the blurry silhote clashed against eachother and both of them vanished as their struggle quickly turned faster than the human eye could follow. That seemed to act as a signal because all of the winged warriors launched their attacks at that point. The simultaneous omnidirectional attack didn’t make Sara flustered. She was cool as a cucumber when she shoved at the Valkaries coming from the front and vaulted over my head by bracing her right hand on my shoulder, her left hand held a gun that had lines running down the barrel glowing bloody red and it rained down a hail of flaming bullets straight down at the hesitating warriors who were desperately trying to reign back their attacks. By the time she landed, she landed on a pile of dead bodies. She stood atop the dead bodies, looking at the Valkyries like a queen surveying her subjects. She was obviously not very pleased by what she saw because she spat out in disgust.
“You are just a bunch of pigeons. What makes you think you are even worthy of attacking me?”
Her words riled up the Valkyries and they charged at her with bloodshot eyes but as they got close, she grabbed my arm and draped me over her like a shield, once again forcing the Valkyries to pull back their strikes although some weren’t quite fast enough and I got a couple of scrathes as a souvenier for the experience. Sara, who was now crouching low beneath me once again unloaded a flurry of bullets but these time her aim was kneecaps instead of heads. The legs of several Valkyries were swept out from beneat5h them, making them fall face first on the ground. Sara didn’t miss this opportunity and capitalized on their miserable states to brutally stomp on their heads with her boots which had brutal flame spikes sticking from their soles.
As Sara was massacring the Valkyries, I was being thrown around like a rag doll while screaming and cursing indignantly but nobody paid attention to me as the battles only grew more heated and bloody. Sara obviously dominated the fight by using the unconventional and highly objectionable tactic of using me as a human shield but all that changed when a couple of black chains sprung up from the ground and wrapped around my hands, holding me in place. The second man who had stood behind Mr Creepy, a large stocky black man who was nearly as dark as the pitch black chains he held had made his move. He had somehow used his chains to bind me in place. At first, I thought the purpose of the chains was to restrict my movements and stop the tactic that Sara was using but I quickly found that I was being naïve. Mr. Ugly shouted, “Do it Hephaestus.”
The black chains grew red hot and I smelled the scent of my own flesh burning as they dug into my arms. I felt the chains penetrate not only my skin but also somehow enter that strange metaphysical place that I had entered when I used my ability. I felt the chains slither like snakes as they wandered through that large dark space. For a moment, I thought that the chains were heading towards the only visible object in the large space, the shining star, but the chains that were wandering around aimlessly straightened out well before they reached the small solitary star. They darted forward like a snake striking its prey and the tips of the chains seemed to vanish. That is when I noticed something strange. I had assumed that the metaphysical place where my powers rested was a vast empty space with that one small shining speck but I suddenly realized that what I thought was empty space had somehow turned into a sea of viscous liquid and the once innocuous sea that I hadn’t even been able to precieve was now fluctuating violently, the small ripples being created by the chains started turning into giant waves as they crashed around. The chains that were red hot in the beginning started turning black as that acted as a conduit for the strange black liquid. The effects of the liquid spread up ythe chains in my physical space and then became visible in the physical world as it spread up the chains that had dug deeply into my arm.
“Sara, something is happening and I don’t think it is good!”
Sara hesitated for a second while she continued to weave around me and shoot down Valkyries. She bit her lips like she was having an argument with herself but then she seemed to make a decision and her face hardened in determination. She used her free hand to raise her eye patch and for the first time, I saw what lay hidden beneath it. Instead of an eye, only a red crystal was visible and once it was no longer hidden away by the eye patch, it burst into flames. A narrow beam of light shot out from the flaming crystal eye and wherever Sara turned towards, anything that came in contact with that ray of death was incinerated. In the space of a breath, the Valkyries closest to us had turned into noting more than ash after which Sara replaced her eye patch looking incredibly pale and tired.
“We don’t have much time. I’m almost out of ammo and I’m at the end of my leash. Carla is too busy to help us. They are using those chains to suck out the power inside you. I need you to trust me John. I need you to use your ability, Don’t hold back or be conservative, just use your ability at full blast.”
I heard her voice and it was like a guiding light as I suffered through increadible torment that was akin to having my insides getting yanked out. I desperately held on to that familiar voice and struggled to follow its instructions. Eventually, the small star that still shone ami8dst the writhing sea of darkness started to pulse along with my heart beat and a warm current of energy shot up through my spine and into my brain. My vision shifted to the strange pencil sketch stop motion animation version of the world. I was wondering what the best way to employ my power was when I was destracted by what was happening in that metaphysical space at the depth of my being. The shining star that was providing me was wave after wave of warm current came into contact with the chain draining the dark liquid and faltered. The star and the chain revolved around each other in a standoff with neither one willing to give ground. In the end, ther black chains struck the star from two opposite directions and plunged into it. For a second, it seemed like they were going to suck up the light from the star but the star wasn’t willing to concede just yet. It fluttered weakly putting up a struggle and although the black chains still managed to suck up some of the light, it was only enough to light up one side of the chain. The two chains now resembled a black and white snake twining tightly with each other. The besieged star was unable to sustain itself and started to dim down. I thought that the star along with any hope I had was about to get extinguished but when I was just about to givfe up, the star compressed itself and then exploded in a blinding flash of light. The two chains which looked like they were celebrating their victory were caught unaware by what they thought was a vanquished foe. The star managed to win back some of the light they had extracted and along with the light, it also got some of the darkness. The once bright and warm star suddenly turned a chilling purple color that burned with a cold ghostly flame. The newly transformed star latched onto the chains that were struggling to escape and started using them to siphon off the dark liquid from its surrounding.
This struggle felt like it took forever when I was in that metaphysical space but when my attention returned to reality, practically no time had passed at all. The warm waves of power that were travelling up my spine were now replaced by an almost arctic river that was infinitely bigger than the tiny stream it was before. The power entering my head was intoxicating. I finally knew what it felt like to be a god, an omnipotent existence with everything at his fingertips. I felt a smile spread on my face and with a simple shake of my hands the chains holding me to the ground shattered, only leaving the length of chain wrapped around my arms which were now glowing with the same purple fire as the star in my soul.
I flexed my hands and at the same time I flexed my powers to see what they could do. The first thing I was going to do was to refill Sara’s ammo but midway I changed my mind. Why go through all that trouble if they were only going to run out anyways? With some mental concentration, I permenantly distorted the laws of the universe so that the number of bullets just looped and when it reaches zero, it would go straight to a full cartridge. Pleased with my work and the ridiculous amount of power I was able to weild, I turned my attention to the next order of business. Now that I had a hang of my new abilities, I waved my hands and the pesky Valkyries around us vaporized into their constituent molecules. I guess all the king’s horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t be able to put them back together again.
For my next trick, I made the superfast Carla and the god who I think was named Hermes slow down to a crawl. I could see the bewilderment on their faces as I snapped my fingers and snapped Hermes’s legs into pieces. I took pleasure in the sweet sweet agony dying his screams but it didn’t matter how much he hollered, the god of speed couldn’t outrun this pain.
I cracked my knuckles and prepared for the big finale. I had saved the best for last because I wanted to enjoy making the maggots who thought they could take my power from me realize how stupid they were. The poor fools couldn’t understand that I was the one who did the taking, not the other way around, and now they were going to pay the price for their idiocy.
I started out by making them both kneel before me as was appropriate. I looked at the black chains that now laid limp around the large black man and smiled.
“Those are very interesting chains. I never thought there was anything that could handle the immense load of my power but I have been pleasantly surprised. Would you like to experience these marvels for yourself?”
With a simple gesture, the chains wrapped around him from head to toe making him look like a metal mummy. I released the spatial restraint I had put upon him just so I could see his futile struggles as the chains feasted on his flesh, his power, and finally his very soul, leaving nothing behind. I picked up the chains containing the soul of the deceased god and clenched my fist, shattering them into powder.
Done savoring the horror of the soul that just realized that it had been permenantly erased, I turned to the twisted wreck that called himself a king of gods and I was pleased to see the terror in his mismatched eyes.
“Are you scared Mr. ‘god’? Do you finally realize how stupid you are?”
He shook in fear, his eyes silently pleading for mercy.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you.”
I laughed inwardly at the relief that showed on his face. I waved my hands around and collected the twisted remains of the two gods inhabiting his body. I tampered with them a little and returned them to him.
“There, you are truly immortal now. You couldn’t die even if you wanted to. Unfortunately, sustaining your immortality will use up all of your energy and you can’t use your powers to ease the pain that torments you because of your twisted soul. I guess you have to take the good with the bad.”
I released him and he fell to the ground and started writhing in pain. He clawed at his own face and neck, ripping away flesh and skin but no matter what he did, he couldn’t die.
I stood there admiring my masterpiece and enjoying the show when the entire mountain top we were on shattered like glass and above me appeared a woman in a golden and silver mask covering her face and an iron crown on her head.
“How dare you kill my son?! I will kill you! I will kill you all!”