by Diana Tyler
“And what is that?” he replies, his eyebrow lifting with curiosity.
BOOM!
The patience of the storm has run out. Thunder rolls across the sky, covering the moon and saturating everything below it in a pale, green, gossamery tint. The light rain that had been for us a refreshing mist transforms into a torrent of icy water and relentless wind that sends us retreating down the path to the temple where Diokles is waiting.
As we pick up our pace, I feel Titus place in my hand what can be none other than the green gem. I cannot wait; I stop only for a moment and carefully open up my palm to get a peek of Carya’s promise to me: a perfect emerald oval, no larger than a pomegranate seed, and filled with a brilliance that, indeed, I’ve only beheld in the Moonbow’s arches.
I secure the emerald in my pouch along with my jasper stone, one a token of forgiveness and flourishing life, the other a symbol of strength for storms, both above and within, and of hope for the breaking day.
CHAPTER TWENTY
APOLLO
We make it to the temple, out of breath from the storm’s fierce chase. The sentries at the steps salute their general and direct us toward the cella, its door cracked open allowing the spicy smell of laurel incense to drift out of the blackness.
I follow Titus into the room and make out Diokles’s silhouette lying supine on the floor. His fingers are spread wide, the whites of his eyes almost aglow in the dark as his lips move soundlessly and his body jerks in startling convulsions. I nudge the general’s side.
“What’s happening?” I whisper. Titus doesn’t answer me, but steps toward Diokles.
“Diokles,” he says. “It’s General Titus with the young Soukina.”
Diokles doesn’t respond but continues to writhe like a man underfoot of the Minotaur.
“A…poll…o…” Diokles groans in a fearsome voice, his arms and legs flailing in all directions. “Speak to your oracle…”
Diokles’s body goes rigid. His lips tighten and eyes close as he takes a big breath through his nostrils and exhales with a horrifying wail that seems to make the lamplight grow dim with fear as all warmth escapes the room.
I feel Titus’s lean into me as he turns to leave. I follow him out, shutting the door securely behind me.
“What was that about?” I ask Titus as we make our way a safe distance from the cella onto the portico.
“Believe me when I tell you, I have never witnessed such – such insanity,” he says, shaking his head, evidently ashamed of his leader’s frenzy.
“He said ‘Apollo’,” I think aloud. “An Alpha deity, god of prophecy, healing, and the sun. Eusebians pray to Duna alone.”
“How do you know so much about the pagan gods?” asks Titus, trying hard to conceal his suspicion.
“Acheron had many scrolls. And I had many idle hours while he was away,” I confess, remembering the long summer afternoons I sat beneath a myrtle tree, sacred to Aphrodite, and read and read again the myths of the conniving gods and the heroes of old with whom they meddled and spawned the hemitheoi, half-gods, like ravishing Helen and matchless Heracles.
Had Acheron kept in his library a single Eusebian scroll about the true Creator and the patriarchs of our faith, I would have read it a thousand times instead of filling my head with pagan filth and heresies, a pastime that would have earned me thirty days in the tannery kneading dung-soaked animal skins with my bare feet.
The longer I learned about the wars, the affairs, the murders and lies of the Alpha pantheon, the more I wondered if such evil truly was the product of men’s imaginations, fantasies no more real than the disjointed dreams and dreadful chimeras that disappear when light hits our eyes.
What kind of mind could conceive of these atrocities? I’d asked myself.
Apollo, the lyre-plucking god of music and a friend to swans and dolphins, was also a vindictive murderer whose bow slayed innocent children and whose pride hung a musician of lesser skill from the limb of a lofty pine, flayed him, and let him dangle until dead.
In another story, Apollo tried to seduce the princess Cassandra. As a youth, the maiden and her brother spent a night in his temple. As they slumbered, enchanted serpents of the god entwined themselves with the children and used their wily tongues to flick the gift of soothsaying into their ears. Years later, she visited the temple again. But this night, she was not met by magical creatures but by their master, the destroyer-god himself. Apollo tried to seduce the nubile princess, but she refused him, provoking the wrathful deity to curse her prophecies so that no one would ever believe them, a curse that led ultimately to her murder at the hands of a jealous queen.
How could anyone love this god enough to find him worthy of offering bloody sacrifices and throwing men from rocks for the god’s good pleasure? How could Alphas worship a god who makes sport of tormenting helpless mortals?
But it occurs to me… Apollo and the other gods were never loved – they were feared. There was a time when a man or woman would do anything to appease or win favor with the gods, even let their newborn infant burn within the belly of a brazen bull while they drowned out its screams with drums and dancing.
The recurring question of whether it was merely gifted storytellers – with nothing more than human experience to inspire them – who invented the grisly Alpha myths and the abominable rituals of their religion continues to itch at the back of my mind. Maybe Diokles has the answers I’m looking for…
“You did not take me by surprise, my friends.”
Titus and I glance at one another and slowly turn toward the cella from whence the honeyed words ooze toward us. In the midst of the portico stands Diokles, sparkling white from head to toe, magnific as a marble statue. Even his wavy locks are light as ocean foam, but his eyes are still cerulean as they ever were, the striking color of the sea below a sky indwelled by the sun god…
“Apollo,” I whisper to myself.
“Apollo, you say?” asks Diokles, a hand cupping his ear as he takes a few steps forward. “You are correct. But I am not the god. I – ” He quickly pivots around and back again, surveying the portico for any guards, then grins at us like a misbehaving child gloating in his defiance. “Come with me. I will tell you everything.”
I feel I have no other choice but to follow the general as he obeys his would-be emperor. We return in silence to the cella, and I try hard to suppress the visions of serpents and the hissing sound my mind insists is flowing from the lamps around the room.
Those are only made-up myths, Iris. Not one word of them is real, I tell myself.
“Come. Sit with me,” says Diokles, his tone uncharacteristically calm, his manner unusually relaxed.
We follow him to the front of the cramped, cave-like room near the niche that houses the sacred scrolls. I sit down, stretch out my legs, and lean back with a deep breath, feeling so at ease that even the sudden drop in temperature lends itself to my restful state as I stare at the godlike leader and marvel at a glistening light, like a living fire, dancing across his marble skin. My eyes move slowly over to Titus who stands at attention against the wall.
“Good general,” says Diokles. “Do make yourself comfortable. There are guards outside, and… we’re in the middle of a desert!” he laughs. “Let’s not be silly!” I join him in laughter until Titus finally sheds his soldierly demeanor and takes a seat on the cold stone floor. But he doesn’t crack a smile.
“You know something of Apollo, do you, Iris?” Diokles asks nonchalantly.
“Only a little,” I reply, looking around the room for the source of the strong laurel scent, but I see no reflective sheen of an altar. “I know that the laurel tree is a symbol of Apollo, consecrated by him after one of the maidens he pursued became one, just to escape him.”
“Yes. And the spattering of Apollonian worshippers that are left still burn its leaves as offerings to him,” Diokles adds. “General, do you smell the laurel fragrance of which I am sure the Soukina is reminded?”
Titus nods, “Yes, sir
.”
“And do you think that I, your Eusebian brother and sworn rebel against the Alpha tyrants, am one of his worshippers?”
“I couldn’t say, sir.”
“You couldn’t say.” Diokles gives a condescending smirk. “But I suppose I too would be sitting there emulating the manner of a stupefied eunuch if I were as unenlightened as the rest of you.” Diokles turns to me with an apologetic, downward tilt of his chin. “Soukina, forgive me – you are a rarity. Your knowledge will make the truth much easier to accept.”
Diokles stands up and walks in front of the niche. His statue-like skin regains its normal, olive complexion as he bends down and reaches into the niche, pulling out an amber tablet.
“The hallowed scrolls,” he says, “have their place. But they are just threads, just a small, almost imperceptible segment of wisdom within a tapestry much grander than I ever imagined!”
I lean forward and sit cross-legged like an enraptured child, intrigued beyond measure to hear more of this mystery, to learn of the things which have been hidden from me, and perhaps from everyone who has been too distracted to notice, or too prideful to learn.
“Do you want to know more?” asks Diokles, taunting me.
“Yes sir!” I reply without hesitation.
“Sir, I should leave. I have training to – ” begins Titus.
“You will stay!” Diokles barks. “It is time you heard the revelation, general. I will need military men of your caliber to also have at least an elementary grasp of what and who we’re really fighting for.”
“Who, sir?” Titus asks.
“So you do want to know,” smiles Diokles. Titus remains seated, but cracks his knuckles nervously until a deep breath calms him down.
Why is he being so odd? I think. But I feel too content, too disconnected from any care to concern my thoughts with him for more than a moment.
Why are you being so odd? An inner voice asks. Again, I don’t pay the words any mind but keep my wide eyes fixed on Diokles.
“I am Eusebian as each of you are. But we can also be more, much, much more,” Diokles begins again. “The Alphas are no more special, no more favored by the gods than we. But they were, at one time, the recipients of esoteric knowledge – because their eyes were opened, their spirits attuned to the will of watching immortals.”
“So the myths are true?” I ask.
“Their origins are true. And that is all that matters. There is a grain of truth in every myth, but their intended function is to forever remind us of what’s always been around us: powerful entities with the ability to help us ascend to greater heights and achieve our full potential, or to destroy us should we resist.”
“And Python, then?” Titus asks. “Does he serve himself, or Apollo?”
“Apollo and Python are one,” Diokles says coolly, as though the answer was obvious.
“Then he is an enemy of Duna, sir. We cannot serve him!” asserts Titus as he stands in protest.
“Shhh…Calm down, general. I was once groping about the darkness like yourself. I was skeptical, too, the first time Apollo appeared to me in this cella.” A blinding flash of light shoots across Diokles’s skin. “But he has made all things clear to me.”
Diokles’s voice is low, peaceful, free, welcoming as the ocean waves that lapped the cliffs beneath my home in Eirene.
“Please tell us more, Diokles. What things did the god tell you?” I ask.
Diokles smiles, turning his back to us. “I would like to tell you, sister. And perhaps I shall. But we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves.” He stands idle for a moment, then violently stretches his arms wide like Gryphon wings and spins around with a beastly snarl.
Titus and I watch as Diokles’s blithesome expression melts from his face like cocky lcarus’s waxen wings when he flew too near the sun. His golden eyebrows narrow. A swarm of shadows creeps out from the walls and begins to brood over his face, sucking the color from his eyes and replacing them with wide black spheres of onyx. He whips his head toward Titus like an owl who’s spotted a mouse, then points a finger at me.
“First, young Soukina, we have a bit of business to discuss,” Diokles says, his voice deep and cavernous. “General, tell me where you found our brave young warrior. Was she with her friend?”
“Sir? Her friend?” Titus’s feigned confusion even convinces me that he is unsure what his master means.
“Come now, general. Was she with the one for whom she so courageously risked her life? The one for whom she continues to risk her life?”
“With Tycho, sir?” Titus says, sounding only a little less muddled. “Yes, sir. I found her at the southern wall just after – ”
“I care not for any wearisome details, general. I know that the traitor killed Patroclus. He was no match for Tycho. And now he will be stoned as I said he would be, and the girl will be in the Gryphon’s jaws by sunrise. Speaking of the Gryphon…” Diokles presses both forefingers contemplatively to his lips and faces the wall. “Did you know she has a name?”
“No, sir,” I reply.
“She has a very beautiful name, one fit for an Asher like yourself. Corinna… Perhaps you know it?”
Corinna. My mother’s sister who went missing when she was just a little girl.
It’s impossible… Isn’t it?
The silence is deafening. The eerie, dreamlike peace I’ve been immersed in sinks into the floor and recedes into the roof, leaving me wide awake, trapped inside a wolf’s den. I feel the color drain from my face, my heart beating fast, pumping fire through my veins.
“What have you done to my aunt?!” I try to yell, but my lungs feel weak. All my energy is concentrated on forcing the doma to work. It must work!
“Iris, don’t overreact,” Diokles says, still turned away. “I see you clenching those unruly fists of yours. I only granted her wishes, helped her master her wings and learn to fly. Well you know this – you’ve experienced it! Quite a gift, isn’t it? Apollo was gracious in bestowing to her a form better suited to her disposition.” He turns to me with a nauseous smile.
“She does more than fly, sir. She’s a killer,” says Titus, his jaw set, his voice oscillating between tones of rage and sadness.
“She was always a killer, general. She’d been a vagabond for decades, killing for food, for self-preservation… Her whole life had been spent fleeing from Pythonians who sought to sacrifice her for their own selfish gain. But Apollo had greater plans for her, and he entrusted me with the task of helping her realize them. And now she is unrecognizable to the other, misguided Pythonians. Those without the vision for the coming age.”
“Selfish gain…” I growl. “And what you’ve done to her, turning her into a monster, stealing her humanity and keeping her locked inside a cage, is not for your profit?” My arms sting with the surge of fire. My palms start to tremble as they secrete tiny yellow bubbles of heat. “What you would do to me you would do expressly for your selfish gain!”
Feeling the fire boil, ready to unseal my skin and send flames speeding toward their target, I raise my hands toward Diokles, but they immediately collapse back down to my thighs under the weight of an invisible force, a freezing gust of wind that causes my sweat to crystallize and my fingertips to shrivel and darken till they appear as wizened grapes hanging dead at the ends of my hands.
“What are you doing?” I cry out, my breath like smoke in the numinous wall of winter around me.
“I am sorry, Soukina. I wanted to teach you about your doma, as I taught Corinna about hers. I wanted you to have the pleasure of killing Acheron in Eirene. But, I’m afraid you will not receive the truth, or the vengeance, you are seeking. Alexa will be very disappointed. You showed such promise…” Diokles turns back to Titus. “The traitor is in the prison?”
Speak, Titus! my head screams, causing my temples to throb.
“Tycho escaped,” Titus says, rushing to my side as I fall to the floor, shaking and coughing as I did the night I was pulled from icy Enochos by Acheron, a
man whose evil I once thought unsurpassed.
“And no one has gone after him?!” Diokles yells, his eyes completely overcome with smoldering blackness.
“No one was with me. I can dispatch the psiloi now. Just don’t hurt the gir – ”
“There will be no need to dispatch them now, general. Time is up.”
Diokles steps out of the room and leaves the door open, the warm, fresh air and bright light too tempting to resist…
My body finally thawing, I break away from Titus before he can say a word, and follow Diokles out the door. I tiptoe as quietly as I can in the opposite direction, then start to run across the portico, faster and faster, wishing my doma would manifest, that wings would sprout from my shoulder blades, or that heroic Pegasus would swoop down from the clouds and carry me back to Limén, back to Gennadius and Aspasia.
But I have no such fortune. Waiting for me at the edge of the temple are six armed guards on horseback, with nothing but sheets of rain and not one shred of hope between us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ESCAPE
I didn’t struggle as they arrested me and bound my hands behind my back. I didn’t scream as they began pulling me along behind them with a rope around my neck like an animal headed to slaughter. I didn’t cry out for Titus to rescue me or for Diokles to have mercy.
All the way to the Soukinoi prison, my eyes were transfixed by the Moonbow, barely distinguishable within the dampened light of the moon; I doubt the others even noticed it. But I did, because it, or more likely its creator, has proven worthy of searching for in the vast expanse of heaven. Since I first witnessed it at my mother’s death, it has been a constant shadow, a silent companion, one I chose for so long to denigrate and ignore. I see now that it is no shadow at all, but a reflection of something true, something eternal, something Jasper understood and prayed for me to embrace as well.
Held aloft in the dark chamber of night by a phantasmal web of wispy clouds and timid stars, the Moonbow, too, seemed trapped in a prison cell. Every arch, from the scarlet first to the violet seventh, appeared pale and oddly distant from one another, almost as if they were being pulled apart, unwelcomed by this oppressive sector of Petrodian sky stretching over Ēlektōr. But seeing it there, even if it seemed but a ghost of its usual form, was an ineffable comfort to me. And as I was dragged into the rose-colored cave and made to watch as Titus was flogged and beaten until his eyes swelled shut and the sandstone walls around us were covered in his blood, I clung to the jasper and emerald stones and whispered another prayer: