“That’s a lot of prayers.”
“Yeah,” Dante said, smiling and nodded at Mea, “yeah, it is. Can you imagine? It’s a lot, a lot of prayers. Some people pray daily—sometimes more than once. And each person prays to their version of god—whatever they imagine that their god looks like, whispering their hearts’ desires. Then it comes in like a gentle breeze: let it end, just please let it end… let the world burn… just let it be over with, all of it.”
Mea dropped her head, and a tear ran down her cheek. She really couldn’t disagree or argue with Dante because, deep down inside her, she believed him. She knew that he was right. “But they don’t know; they don’t know that what’s to come will be worse, much worse.” Mea’s face became stiff and stern, and she sniffed her nose and wiped the tear from her cheek. Then she said, “But I do. I know what’s coming.” The prophecy. The marauding demons, burning burnt-down cities, the corpses of angels and mortals alike, the rivers filled with their bodies, the blackened sky. “I’ve seen it, and trust me, if they knew what was in store, they wouldn’t be praying for the world to end—consciously or subconsciously.”
Dante raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean, you’ve seen it?”
“An angel gave me a pocket watch. And it… it showed me the future. It showed me what will happen if the Cleansing comes to pass.”
“You…” Dante sounded confused, trying to decipher what Mea was talking about. “An angel gave you a pocket watch?”
“Yeah.”
“And you saw the future?” It was a real question, but Dante said it in a heavy, sarcastic, almost sardonic way.
“Yeah. I had a vision. I saw what’s going to happen. The prophecy.”
“The prophecy?” Dante smirked as he studied Mea’s face. Is this a joke? Is she screwing with me? She’s got to be—she’ definitely screwing with me. But she wasn’t and Mea’s face was unwavering, hard, and as serious as stone. “You…” he groaned. Then it hit him like a ton of bricks. She’s not joking. She’s dead-serious—she seriously believes in prophecies. Dante burst out laughing—laughing raucously, like a madman—and he started clapping—banging his hands together hard, like they were a pair of symbols. “A prophecy? That’s ridiculous.” Seeing that Mea was still very serious, Dante toned down his laughter. Now his demeanor was suddenly serious, and his voice was stern. “No, that was a memory.”
“But…” Mea couldn’t find the words for her shock. Everything she’d done so far had been to avoid the horrors she’d seen in her vision, from her prophecy—a fake prophecy, some horrible memory that was buried so deep in the past—and so deep inside her—that she wondered if anyone else knew the truth.
“If I had to guess, it was when the Crystal City fell, the first one. The angels—some of them at least –would remember that. That time, that Cleansing, if I’m not mistaken… that was when you were born… born or selected, a bit of both, I guess.” Dante stopped speaking and smiled at someone behind her, the blurry-faced waitress.
The waitress arrived and set down her tray and unloaded two more of the frothy green shots. “And a beer for you,” she said before smiling at Dante and replacing his empty glass with a full one. And all the while, she was leaning halfway over the table and ignoring Mea as blatantly as possible. And the waitress, while her face was still blurry, the rest of her wasn’t. Her body was a sculpted hourglass wrapped in a silky, black, backless dress that sparkled. Her movements were slow, slithering, and eerily elegant; and her attention was solely reserved for Dante. After a few flirty comments and some giggles, the waitress stood back up and slid her hand over Dante’s shoulders, seductively and inappropriately, then giggled before she finally left.
Watching the waitress while she was being ignored, Mea took notice of her inappropriate flirting as well as intended slight that was meant for her. Bitch. And it wasn’t so much that Mea liked the blue-eyed devil (Dante), that bugged her, but the waitress’s blatant act of disrespect was particularly irritating. And whether it was a dream or not, Mea didn’t like the cocksure, blurry-faced waitress with the tight ass. She didn’t like her at all. Mea shook it off and returned to the conversation at hand. What’d Dante say? When the Crystal City fell, that was when you were born? “Wait,” Mea said, holding up her hand. “You said, ‘born.’ What do you mean born?”
Her question was met by Dante sliding another shot glass in front of her. “Drink,” he ordered. “Drink first. Then you’ll get your answer.” Dante winked at her and was smirking all the while. Again his eyes glinted like sapphire shards.
While an eye roll, Mea sighed, snatched the shot glass, slammed the shot, then slammed down the now-empty shot glass. Now even more irritated, she held down a burp then said, “There. Happy? Now talk.” Then she held down another burp.
“Very well.” Dante smoothly lifted his up his shot glass, bumped it a little higher (toasting to Mea), and then smoothly poured it down his throat—keeping his eyes locked on Mea the whole time. “There,” he said, smiling and setting down the empty shot glass. “Happy?”
Dante cleared his throat then began speaking. “When I said born, I meant that… Look, sometime after that Cleansing—that one or the one before it—who knows which one it really was. There’s been so many of them, I mean, who can keep track of them all? Anyways, during one of them, the old Lion of Elysium bequeathed his powers, his essence, to you. And the Lord of Eagles did the same with your brother Asher. Although, if I recall, he was more of a package deal. He was like the afterbirth—the free gift that you never wanted in the first place but that comes with the thing you really wanted—if you will. Of course, that thing was you. But your brother, yeah, he was born—reborn—on that day too.”
Mea bit down on her lip, containing her anger towards Dante insult. Afterbirth? Her nostrils flaring, and she took a sip of ice water to cool down. “What do you mean?”
“Blood and power. I mean, it’s the same thing that Nisha did, with Lilly’s help of course. She took Fenrir’s power. She took the old wolf-god’s power, and she became the new wolf-god. Same goes for your friend, your… lover, Vincent Blackwell. He was once... someone else. Now he’s stuck in that reaper’s body—like two souls welded together.”
Mea’s dress was now sticking to her sweaty—not glistening—skin, and she wobbled side to side to adjust it, still thinking about what Dante was saying. Then, still thinking, she folded her hair behind her ears. So many questions, she thought. Too bad that they’re all jumbled up inside my head. Then one of those questions broke free from her jumbled thoughts. “Hey, what about my friend Anna? Did you do that to her?”
“Who? Your friend Anna? Oh! The sulking, depressed, self-hating half-breed? No, I didn’t do anything to her. Her fate was sealed—from all of her sulking, depressive self-hating. There wasn’t any happy ending waiting for her. That just wasn’t in the cards, not for her at least.”
“Then how’d she become a storm dragon?”
Dante smiled and nodded somberly. He waved his hand in the air—two fingers—and was clearly gesturing towards the waitress. “The, ah, the storm dragon… the last storm dragon. The poor, sulky, self-hating storm dragon; the last of its kind. Self-exiling herself and suffering, condemning her own soul to the earth, to a lake, halfway across the world… halfway across the world from her dead lover, her soulmate. The last of the storm dragons, she fled as far as she could, to the ends of the Earth.” Dante took a long drink of his beer. “No, I didn’t stick your dead friend inside the soul of the last storm dragon, but I did arrange the meeting. The rest went as I expected.”
“Kindred spirits,” Mea said, “I guess. Thank you.”
Dante nodded respectfully. Just then, the waitress returned. Then she started up with her antics again.
This time Mea didn’t let it slide. “Here,” Mea said. “Hey. Hey, you.” She started piling the empty shot glasses onto the waitress’s tray. Then she put the full ones, the one the waitress just brought, onto the tray as well. “You, take these awa
y and bring us back something with a little more kick.” Pausing, Mea finally said, “Tequila. Two shots of tequila.” Though she said the words with authority, she was faking it. She wasn’t a drinker, not even a novice drinker. Still, she was hiding it well. “And take this,” she added, putting her glass of ice water on the tray with the other drinks—purposely spilling it as she did so. “Oops. Sorry. And bring me a strawberry daiquiri.” Though the waitress’s face was blurred, Mea was sure that she had succeeded in her mission, in thoroughly pissing off the disrespectful waitress. Sweet revenge. “Thank you.”
“And a scotch,” Dante chimed in, “neat. Twenty year or older. An Islay single malt if you got it. If you don’t, Speyside’s fine as well.” With a wink and a smile, he added, “I’m not picky.”
The waitress left, and Mea saw Dante smirking, approving of Mea’s assertiveness. But Mea was still fuming, still huffy, and she told him: “What? This is my dream, and I’ll drink what I want to drink. And I don’t have to put up with some… woman, coming to my table and disrespecting me, now do I? Right? Is that okay with you?”
Still smirking, Dante held up his hands. I surrender. He leaned forward and said, “Here.” He waved his hand over the small glass table. It became cloudy then turned blue. Oceans. A large green and gray mass emerged in the middle of it. A supercontinent. “See that.” Dante jabbed his finger in the middle of the map, at the mountain in the center of the land mass. “Watch.” The tabletop shook, and the mountain erupted. A geyser of flames and molten rock followed. Everything shook again, and the great mountain began spitting out rivers of lava and black smoke, scalding black trenches all around it. The ocean thrashed and steamed as the rivers of lava finally reached them and began emptying into them. The giant land mass broke apart and drifted across the table in craggy, irregular chunks. “That was the beginning,” Dante said. The massive supercontinent broke apart some more and turns, spinning and splitting into chucks of smaller, drifting continents and island chains that looked like crumbs. “See.”
“And then…” Dante snapped his fingers. “That happened.” He pointed at the table. Mea could hear a screeching sound start up. It felt like it was coming from somewhere inside her, somewhere between her ears. It amplified and became deafening, overpowering the music of the club and every other sound. Mea realized that it was coming from the table. Looking down at the tabletop, she saw a giant stone swiping across it. That was followed by a trail of flames and black smoke. The table rippled as the meteor exploding into the massive ocean. A giant tsunami shot across the oceans and the table, emerging on the other side of it, swallowing any of the tiny bits of land that got in its way. The black smoke from the meteor bloomed into a cloudy, pitch-black mushroom cap. The black smoke swirled around wildly and quickly—like black boiling water. Then it quickly thinned and dissipated into fading streaks of black, revealing a different set of landmasses and islands, a set that was no longer green or gray; they were now covered in red and black—lava, fire, and ash. Clouds drifted by them, above them—some were small and thin; others were massive white swirling masses that ballooned in size and shrank repeatedly and all over the table.
“Here. Let me speed this up.” Dante spun his finger around, just above the table. “This is… One… two… three billion years ago.” Three billion years of evolution condensed into seconds. The clouds raced across the table—growing, shrinking, and disappearing over and over again, all within split-seconds. The broken land masses shifted beneath the clouds, growing and shrinking and disappearing. They slid across the table while others crept across it, bouncing into each other. Eventually the continents all met in the center and lumped together again, forming another supercontinent.
Dante lifted up his head and looked at Mea as she stared at the table, in awe of the whole world’s history. He smiled then put his hand on top of hers—the one holding onto the edge of the table, near the railing. Though it felt strange, she didn’t flinch and remove her hand from beneath his. “And here you come,” he said, nodding at the table. The clouds dissipated. A shooting star came in from the edge of the table—from where their hands were. The shooting star was silver and wrapped in a sparkling blanket of sapphire lights, like an azure aura. Its tail left a long sparkling paint stroke of sapphires and glittering silver as it passed by. Finally it crashed into the landmass. “Here.” Dante tapped his finger on the table, twice, and the image on the table began zooming in, zooming in to where the shooting star would land, the crash site of Mea’s birth. “That way you can get a better look.” The impact was quite gentle. Instead of hitting like a meteor, the star splashed across the land; snow and rain fell across the sky and across the burnt, craggy earth. As the pieces splashed down, grass grew and trees emerged. The snow covered the burnt mountains and gave birth to trickling water. The trickling water carved trenches into the mountains and became bubbling streams that fed the forests. The streams grew stronger, carving deeper creases between the cracked rocks, chipping it away and growing into mighty rivers. The deep ones turned into lakes. Others became icebergs and glaciers.
“There, right there, where you landed, I think it’s called the, ah, the Great Lakes—or something like that. Dante felt Mea’s hand twitch beneath his own, and he gave it a comforting squeeze. With his other hand, he swiped his finger across the table, like it was the touchscreen of his cellular phone. The images on the table slid away and were replaced by new ones. Snow-capped mountains, fields of green, sand, the beach, the ocean, a rock shoreline. “There.” Dante jabbed his finger at the table, stopping the sliding images and settling it one area, a rocky plain where grass and trees were beginning to sprout. A blue-green star came crashing down—less graceful than the prior one. “That one’s called Baikal Lake. It’s in Russia. It’s the largest freshwater lake in the world. Well, second largest. That is if you include all of the Great Lakes and the Canadian lakes that sprouted from them… all from you.”
Dante released Mea’s hand, leaned back, and smiled—watching her take it all in.
“You mean…”
“Yes, you are the source of all life—life as you currently know it anyways. Before you, life was just… primal. Large, wild beasts roaming the Earth. The largest, wildest ones controlled the ocean—as some still do.”
Aghast and wide-eyed, Mea hands rose, and she instinctively covered her mouth.
The waitress brought Dante and Mea their drinks. Two shots of tequila, two lime wedges, a small cup of salt, a strawberry margarita with a sugared rim, and a single malt scotch—a 20-year-old Islay. It seemed as if the waitress had learned some manners, and this time she said little more than: “here are your drinks.” Then, with heavy thumping steps and a blurred glare, she left.
Mea darted a look over at Dante and grabbed her shot of tequila, not completely sure about the order—salt, tequila, lime… or was it: lime, tequila, then salt—she faked it. “Here. Drink.” Mea drank the shot straight—no lime, no salt. It hurt. Playing it off, Mea gritted her teeth as she felt the tequila burn through her throat like acid. Restraining the urge to get rid of the pain, she forced herself to slowly reach for her strawberry daiquiri then took a slow, repressed sip. Yet the tequila was still burning. “Drink,” she said, nodding at Dante’s still full shot glass.
Dante sipped his scotch and slid the shot over to Mea. “Thank you, but tequila and scotch don’t mix.” Then he took another sip of scotch, gave his glass a swirl, swirling around the scotch within it, and then sniffed it.
Mea’s lip curled, and she glared at him, feeling slighted. “Fine. You don’t want it; then I’ll take it.” Dante looked like he was going to say something, but it was already too late. Mea had already snatched up the shot and drank it. This one burned worse than the prior one. Mea’s face shriveled up, and she was waving her left hand up and down rapidly—like a bird flapping its wing, as she tried to flap away the tequila eroding her esophagus. When Dante held out a lime wedge, Mea snatched it out of his hand without thinking and sucked on it until t
here was nothing left of the lime.
Dante smirked. “All better?” He sighed and shook his head. “I think you’re going to regret that.”
Mea huffed. “It’s my dream and I’ll drink as much as I want to.” Then she grabbed her strawberry daiquiri and took a long, hard pull from the curved straw peeking out of the top of it. When she finished, the bent straw came wobbling around the top of her glass like a rotating periscope. “So what’s the point of all this?”
Mea’s lips reached for the straw of her strawberry daiquiri, but it was still wobbling about, and taking a sip of her drink was becoming infinitely harder than it should have been. Going in for a second attempt; Mea’s eyebrows crinkled, and she finally reached the straw and took a sip of her daiquiri.
Watching Mea, Dante chuckled at her half-buzzed efforts. Cute, he thought. He was beginning to like her. “What’s the point to all this? I don’t know, to get to know each other? To show you that I’m not a monster?” He shrugged. “I mean, what’s going to happen is still going to happen but I just… I just wanted to meet you first, to thank you.”
“Thank me? For what?”
“Mea, you know… You know what the difference is between gods and mortals? Mortals are always looking for something. A better life, happiness, relief, wealth, love. The gods, we’re always looking backwards, for what we lost. I think it’s because we know what’s going to happen. So, we have no choice but to look at what we lost, what we will lose. Then, of course, humans are quite the ambitious dreamers, aren’t they? Immortality, eternal bliss; I mean, even the gods don’t get that. And dead gods, the ones in the Valley of Forgotten Gods, they’re dead. They don’t even have names. They did, but they died, and their deceased names were spoken out of existence. Now... now they aren’t even memories, not really—but the mortals want to live forever. The audacity.”
The Awakening of the Gods (Forgotten Ones) Page 46