Alice spun around, chanting ‘what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck,’ under her breath. There was nobody else at the top of the pyramid. She was completely alone.
‘I said, rejoice!’ the voice boomed out again. ‘This isn’t rejoicing! You are panicking, stop that. I demand it.’
It was a male’s voice, deep and rumbly. Kind of staticky, too. Like a storm cloud. Alice wondered if she should revisit the whole insanity deal. Sane people didn’t hear voices, after all. Especially not ones with delusions of grandeur.
The voice scoffed. ‘Are you simple? Have the mortals gotten stupider in the last thousand years? Stop panicking and speak, woman.’
Alice gathered her nerves. If she was just hearing insanity induced voices, at least there wasn’t anyone around to judge her.
“H-hello?” she said, still looking around as if it would materialize whoever was speaking.
‘Ah, so she speaks to me at last! Greetings, little one. Introduce yourself,’ demanded the voice. It was...very arrogant. Alice could almost taste the conceit. The question was whether entertaining the voice would make it more or less bearable.
‘Did you not hear me? Have I chosen a deaf vessel? Heelllloooo…’
…It had serious younger sibling energy, too. She got the feeling ignoring the voice would leave it to pester her at all hours of the day. She’d eventually give in, and they’d be back at the start again. For the sake of expediency, she skipped the painful parts and decided to converse with the strange, annoying voice. What was the worst it could do? Annoy her?
“Shouldn’t you be introducing yourself first?” Alice asked.
The voice…laughed. Uproariously. Alice didn’t think it was that funny.
‘Ahh, a good jest. Go on then, speak. I wish to know my chosen vessel.’
“Riiight. Well, I’m Alice.”
‘Alice! A good name, rich with meaning and history!’ interjected the voice. She waited for it to stop speaking before continuing, more annoyed than before.
“I live to the east,” she said, pointing down the pyramid’s steps. “In Anchorage. My parents are divorced? June Nakamura and James Blackwater,” Alice trailed off. She wanted to ask the voice about whatever that vessel business was about; but she was also unfortunately well acquainted with his type of person. They tended to get their way by annoying the people around them into it. Asking was a recipe for causing offense. Those sorts always wanted to go at their own pace, on their own time.
‘Yes, I will be sure to reward those two later for doing such a great service,’ the man's voice idly commented. Her parents? Why? ‘What of your work? What purpose do you serve?’ he asked.
“Erm, I’m an electrician. Part of the union.”
‘Ah, I am familiar with the modern lightning worshipers. It is a good work you do, spreading my domain so wide! It is no wonder, then, why your soul called me so clearly.’
Lightning worshipers? Alice wondered.
‘Nothing else to say?’
She shook her head. Volunteering information to the voice was starting to feel like a bad idea.
‘Very well. Know this then: You speak to Zeus. Born of Rhea. Nursed by Amalthea. Reared by Gaia. Lord of the Sky, Father of All. I have chosen you to be my vessel on these mortal lands. It is a great honor.’
Ah.
Needless to say, that probably wasn’t great. Alice almost instinctively took a step back. Her thighs hit the stone table.
‘You seem confused. Speak.’
“It…is a great honor,” Alice said, picking her words very carefully. No matter the truth of ‘Zeus’s’ claim, playing along didn’t hurt anybody at the moment. But neither did she want to encourage anything. “I suppose that I am a little confused. Surely there are better…vessels, ones who are not me.”
‘And yet I chose you. We will do great things together, Alice! Commit deeds spoken of thousands of years later! All it requires is you letting me in. I can show you a grand time.’
Alarm bells started ringing. Alice decided humoring the voice—’Zeus’—had gotten too dangerous. He wanted her to ‘let him in?’ She’d read those stories before, thanks but no thanks. They never ended well for the host, or vessel.
She picked up her pack and donned it once more, its weight settling painfully on her back. Zeus quickly realized what she was doing.
‘You would spurn my gift? When I could shed light on the changed nature of your reality? I could see you safely back to your Anchorage. Remove all obstacles in your path. Just let me in. Embrace your destiny.’
Alice winced. She had a plan already. Knowing the cause of the changes wouldn’t alter that plan. It would only satisfy her own curiosity.
She wasn’t going to listen to Zeus. She’d heard the myths. He was bad news.
‘So you intend to refuse. Regrettable,’ he said, and for a second Alice thought that maybe Zeus would be reasonable and find someone else to be his vessel. ‘Unfortunately, you do not have that option,’ he stated. Fuck.
Alice tensed up. The air gained an electric charge. Something immense was standing in front of her. It had no form.
Her headache sharpened. It was becoming visible.
Zeus looked like storm-clouds.
Something dripped from her nose. Alice wiped it off. Blood on her hands.
“S-stop that,” she said to Zeus. He was doing something. She felt pressure inside her head.
‘Rejoice, for I have chosen you as my vessel. Would it be that you had only said yes, little Alice…’ he said, storm clouds spitting lightning. ‘Working together would have been wonderful.’
He…twisted, clouds forming a vortex pointed right at Alice. Her headache redoubled. She tasted metal in her mouth and it felt like her brain was pouring out her ears. She stood upright to prevent it. Glared impotently at the funnel pouring into her.
She was already full, there wasn’t room for anybody else in her body. Zeus didn’t care. He fell into a part of her she hadn’t even been aware of, something which had already been wounded and hurting. He shoved it aside to make room for himself. The thin membrane of her sanity popped without a sound. The headache vanished.
She was scattered all over the place, and a storm was rolling in.
Alice gathered the bits of herself and carefully kept them away from the invading god. A fragment drifted too close. The storm swallowed it easily and she felt a little piece of herself, emotion and memory intertwined, die. Subsumed. The vortex outside her body was only a little smaller. Zeus was being a poor guest and spreading himself all over, leaving no room for herself. He wasn’t leaving any room for the rest of him either. Mindful of the quickly vanishing space, Alice bundled all her pieces together. They fit one another, still remembering the whole. She needed them to be smaller, though, and squeezed fragmentary components tighter together. They were used to taking up the whole space as well, and had spread inefficiently. So many loose connections and drifting memories. They'd been recently disturbed, and still in disarray. She found the core of whatever allowed her to function as a broken, loose mind and carefully placed it in the center of everything that made Alice who she was. Everything else wrapped around it like layers of steel, slotting into place as a jigsaw puzzle would. It was missing a piece.
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Alice reached an ephemeral limb out and plunged it into the diffuse clouds of Zeus’s existence. They rumbled ominously but didn’t react quick enough. Without even thinking about it, Alice scooped out the missing memory, tearing it away from the parts of Zeus that had been digesting it. The lightning shrieked but she was already gone, the piece reclaimed.
The storm compressed itself, further away from Alice’s mind. Or maybe it was her soul. It shone brightly. Something was reasserting itself around the tight ball of Alice’s self. A defense of some sort, a film crawling over all the parts of her mind. It held them together automatically. She remembered it being torn apart when Zeus poured himself in. Good to know that it healed.
The headache came back.
Alice was laying on her side atop the pyramid. She tasted copper and her ears were ringing. Rain was falling and she was already soaked, but it washed away the blood. Her nose had been bleeding. Maybe her ears, too. She couldn’t hear the rain. The stone table was smoking. Her hair had been turned into a frizzy mess.
She tried standing up but fell back down immediately, her balance shot. She felt like puking, but on a spiritual level. Like the aftermath of a large family dinner where people kept shoving food at her. The headache had turned into a full-blown migraine, and Alice felt…fragile.
At least the rain was warm.
Consciousness slipped away.
Hopefully the world would make more sense when she woke up.
Except she woke up in that weird inside-space again. The bright-dense structure of her self greeted her. It was strange, looking in from the outside. Like a little star, but one that was also a person. It was backed into a corner of whatever the space was, surrounded on all other sides by the storm clouds. They pulsed angrily, like it was the default state for Zeus. She could see his being straining at the walls of the space, cracks already forming in places. Oddly, despite the lack of room, Zeus still left a span of emptiness between his clouds and Alice’s star. It didn’t seem like he could get any smaller, not like Alice had been able to. So why the stretch of nothingness?
Alice formed a small avatar of herself in that no-mans-land. It was something she instinctively did. Opposite her, Zeus did the same.
They stared at each other.
Zeus wasn’t wearing anything. His avatar was anatomically correct. This was annoying to Alice.
“I want you out of here,” she said. Her voice was dead calm. Her friends and family would have known this was a very bad sign.
Zeus didn’t know.
“Too bad,” he said. His voice no longer carried the booming, oppressive quality she’d heard before. Maybe he’d been trying to impress or intimidate her before. “You are my vessel. I will not abandon this body so easily.”
“Tough nuts. Find someone else,” Alice retorted. She was feeling more alive. More human. Defiance sat well in her psyche.
“No,” Zeus said.
They stared at each other some more. Zeus looked like the stereotypical paintings and sculptures that had been created throughout the years. Wild white hair, groomed beard, intense blue eyes. She’d have been impressed by his sculpted body if it weren’t blatantly obvious that their little mental avatars could appear however they wanted. Alice was wearing her interview clothes, for example. They made her feel better equipped to handle the hostile god hogging her headspace.
“I am heartened to see that you survived,” Zeus finally said.
“What.”
“There are so few people capable of containing divine essence within their mortal bodies,” he remarked, waving a hand at the cracks running along the metaphorical walls hemming them in. “It was a close thing. I was even happier to see that you made it through the experience with your mind intact. Such flexibility in thought and enduring willpower is certainly the mark of a great hero in the making!” he said, smiling winningly at Alice.
She wanted to punch him.
So. Bad.
“You mean to say. That there was a chance I could have died?” she asked. Calmly.
“Many things have a chance of killing a mortal, fragile as they are. You survived this one. I certainly chose my vessel well.”
“Congratulations,” she ground out.
Zeus rolled his eyes. “Be more thankful. We inhabit the same body now. I can give you access to my own considerable power and authority. It would make your journey back to this Anchorage of yours much easier. And in return, I have gained a foothold in the mortal world. When you grow stronger, so shall I. And when I grow stronger, so shall you reap the benefits.”
“I am not going to use a single thing you give me,” Alice stated.
Zeus looked slightly taken aback before grinning. “Ah yes, but you have fire!" he said, nodding. "Use my gifts or disdain them, I already got what I wanted from this deal of ours,” he said, dismissing her conviction.
Alice punched the god straight in the jaw.
His head barely moved, and Zeus continued staring at her, lightning dancing in his eyes now.
“I know you, Zeus,” Alice said, fist still extended. She shook a finger at him. “I’ve read the stories. Zeus, who always thought with his cock. Who never cared about the devastation his ‘mistakes’ left behind. How many wives have you had? How many actually wanted you? What about all those other woman you went after? None of them thought you a god. You were the shadow in the dark, the fear we hold for men standing in dark alleyways and waiting out in the parking lot. Nothing but a monster. Get off your fucking high horse.”
Zeus took a step back, suddenly dressed. Bronze armor peeked out from under a long white cloth draping across his shoulder and down his body like a toga. His expression was calm under thunderous eyes.
“I will excuse that strike," he said, evenly. Anger tightly in hand. "You’ve obviously had a hard day and tempers ran hot. It’s understandable. And I will admit to having handled things somewhat…poorly. I…apologize. Here, as a gesture of goodwill, and a stride towards future cooperation,” Zeus said, waving a hand. Clouds of his storm-wall separated from the thundering representation of his inner self, directed towards the cracks which had formed on the walls restricting them both. The clouds pressed against the cracks, quickly sublimating into strands of electrical light, pouring into the wounds present at the boundaries of what had been Alice’s inner world.
The cracks healed over, and Zeus nodded at her and she found herself abruptly flung back into the waking world.
Her head spun for a moment at the quick dismissal. At finding herself back in reality.
She was still atop the damned pyramid. The rain had stopped, but it left her laying in a puddle, her clothes fairly soaked. It was still decently warm out for the moment, so the damp wasn’t immediately concerning.
Alice got up and knew that Zeus fixing the cracks had also abated the headache she’d had, and wiped away a lot of the aches in her body. She could hear again, and no longer felt like someone had stuck her in a washer and banged her body about for a few hours. She didn’t know what connection existed between those cracks and physical pain, or what made fixing one heal the other.
Asking Zeus about it was entirely off the table. The less she interacted with the bastard, the better.
So, she needed to get off the pyramid, first.
Then, she hoped one of the ruined buildings nearby would have an intact fireplace, providing both shelter and warmth. Alice really didn’t want to build a fire out in the open with unknown mutations affecting the local wildlife, potentially turning them into horrors like the moose.
She started clambering down the oversized steps, taking great care to not slip on any of the slick, weather worn stone. It only took a few steps for her to start hearing laughter from the worst god.
Alice glanced to the side. Zeus lounged on the stone rail, taking the same form as earlier with his armor still on. Looking at him caused her eyes to burn a little, and things seemed hazier around him, almost less grounded in reality.
“Whoever designed this place knew the proper order of things,” he remarked. “Steps for the gods, not the mortals. It must have amused the local pantheon, watching their clergy struggle to the top. Reminding them that they serve something greater than they ever will be.”
“Fuck off,” Alice said. He vanished without another word. His smile lingered like old socks.
She huffed, continuing down.
At the bottom, Alice stretched out, keeping an eye open for buildings intact enough to suit her purposes. She’d seen a few on the way in, but hadn’t thought to check for fireplaces.
As expected, the first few buildings were uninhabitable. Trusting the structural stability of a building cracked in half by the root growing under it was a fool’s dream, and most the others had collapsed roofs or other tree-related problems.
And then Alice found the perfect hideaway.
It was an inconspicuous little hut, halfway sunk into the trunk of a great-tree. Round in construction and with a sturdily constructed roof, it had withstood the pressure of the tree’s growth admirably. The roof had a hole in the middle, and there was a pit at the center of the building perfect for building fires in. It should heat up pretty quickly, and make for a comfortable stay. The sky was still light out, but her watch confirmed that it had already become evening. And to think, she’d reached the top of that pyramid an hour or two after noon. She’d been unconscious for a while, evidently, and it had sapped her energy something fierce. Alice wanted to rest.
She sorted out her backpack, taking out everything and repacking almost all the food. Everything else, she bundled to one side of the building. The tent was laid out, but only to dry. It wouldn’t be needed with a roof overhead. She left with the pack of food on her back, intending to stash it up in another tree. Hopefully mutated bears weren’t any better at climbing, though Alice wasn’t counting on it. She’d considered hiding it in one of the other buildings, but there wasn’t exactly anything left to keep wildlife out. Any wood used in the buildings had been rotted into uselessness, which unfortunately included all the doors.
It was more difficult than expected, finding a branch to sling a rope over. The great-trees were truly gigantic, and most their limbs started further up than her rope reached. The one she eventually found was still thicker than the trunks of most normal trees. It was probably possible to build a city upon the branches near the canopy—the limbs up there were easily thick enough to support stone houses. It was daunting, standing at the bottom of so many silent giants.
As for the fire, Alice gathered up a bunch of the rotting wood. It burned just fine, though some of it produced the characteristic blue flame she’d seen in driftwood. The color was normally caused by salt, which was a curious thing to see in aged, rotting wood from a dead town.
Regardless, dinner got heated up and eaten in short order, and Alice felt much better afterwards. She stripped out of her clothes and lay them by the fire to dry. She didn’t touch any of her books, instead curling up inside the sleeping bag and drifting straight to sleep.
She dreamed of eating a dark-haired, many-formed woman who was wiser than most.