The Heir to Elysium

By Edward LeMay

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel…fine? Have you ever asked yourself what your imagination is lacking? Well, we do have the solution for you! Welcome to the end of the world, the one stop shop for all your post apocalyptic America cravings and needs. Do you wish you had cyborgs in your life? Are you longing for the vampire of your dreams to come bursting through the pages? Is the knowledge of other realities and the afterlife something you’ve thirsted for? Perhaps taking a long walk on the beach with immortal beings with immense unexplainable abilities is your forte. If you answered yes to any of these, then you are in the right place! Though we employ relatable emotional moments a person goes through, like that of heartache and grief, or that of horror and action-packed excitement, we don’t always intend for to weave a tale so fantastic and unbelievable, you’ll finally have that itch of imagination scratched at last! Ask for Kris, you may remember him from our first installment of The Last Kings of Elysium, and he’s returned for an even more amazing encore performance! Doctor, storyteller, anguished lover, hero… folks, when we say he’s the whole package, we mean it! You don’t wanna miss out on the magical story of a lifetime. Act now and we’ll throw in a heartfelt reclamation story arc that may or may not lead to a “happily ever after.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662440571

Book preview

Chapter 1

Aftermath

When a child is born into hardship, why is the blame never placed on the parent? The more specific question should be, if you know your child is going to be battling an uphill struggle, why choose to bring him or her into this world? Granted, we don’t always choose the time or place for the conception—people are often blinded by the power of lust over the mind—but if you know the chaos which consumes the world, that it would only swallow your child up whole, why would you do nothing to prepare yourself? he had said. It was another tirade he had gone on, usually around the same time every day for the past few months.

I can’t imagine you would understand, he continued. You represent the privileged, pompous people of the world. You are their speaker, the symbol that their perversion on the world is just and right. You’re the reason this all happened, Kris. You see that, don’t you?

I held my tongue, fighting back the angry response I had brewing up within me. I had learned after the first time when I lashed out at him that giving an answer of any kind meant another bone-rattling backhand to the face. We hadn’t left the island following the explosions on the horizon. My eyes had gone completely dark when he forced me to sit and watch the magnificent fire display in the distance, so I didn’t have much of a chance to defend myself when he decided to take his anger out on me.

Anger wouldn’t exactly be the best way to describe his outbursts. In fact, he didn’t have much emotion at all. He was more representative of a walking and talking wall. He had insisted that my eyes would heal given the right amount of time and given my heritage.

The continuous emphasis that I was, in fact, immortal and more resilient to the forces of the world compared to that of any normal man or woman had settled in over these past few months, mainly because I was tired of hearing it. Tell a person the same lie over and over again and the person goes one of two ways: they believe it or they accept that it will continue on and, thus, learn to ignore it.

Going the latter of the two, the notion that I was some long-lived writer who walked alongside the gods of Olympus some few thousand years prior, that I had written for some of the most notable figures in history, like Caesar, Arthur Pendragon, and William the Conqueror, was preposterous, to say the least. I guess I didn’t want to believe that I was a part of some grand scheme to recreate the world. I wanted to be normal, to have a boring existence where I woke up, ate breakfast, went to work, rubbed out one after another episode of late-night Jeopardy! reruns, then went to bed, only to do it all over again the following day.

It was the sort of pressure nobody really wanted. Tell someone they were a part of some elaborate cosmic plan that dealt with a hard reset of the human population and you would tend to freak out a bit. I didn’t have the luxury of average, and as far as I could tell, based on what I did witness in the sky, neither did anyone else.

Regardless, I did feel my vision slowly coming back to me. It was a sort of healing factor we immortals apparently had according to my jailer. When my eyes went, I had to use what I could to try and make sense of what had actually happened, what this man had really done, or if he had done it at all. I had seen enough sitcoms of men who tried to play God, citing natural occurrences of the world as works of art from their own hands—not to say that this was a natural thing but the comparison still stood.

I did witness a man in Ian create an entire facility from a source of magic from the time of the old gods. He had tapped into an infinite wellspring of power that he could mold and manipulate with ease. My prison warden here had maintained that it was no trick, that it was the reset button he had been prepping for years. He called himself the Prince in the national light, using propaganda and scare tactics to get his name in the paper. He had warned the world about the impending demise, reminded them of the reasons behind it, and in the end, like myself, nobody took him seriously.

To everyone else, it was no different than the numerous end of days prophecies that had riddled the Interweb throughout the past two decades. There was that one in 2000 where the entire world went into a frenzy because of computer programming not being able to adjust to an inability to read four-digit years rather than the two we had grown accustomed to seeing or that Mayan prophecy that stated in 2012 that the marked end of a Mesoamerican Long Count calendar would spark some cataclysmic event culminating at the end of the world. I wouldn’t even get started on biblical end of the world prophecies where a new person a week would misinterpret the text to read it as the end of life as we knew it. The point was, cry wolf so many times and people would tend to ignore you when the actual wolf came knocking at your door.

You’re the man Ian warned about, aren’t you? I had worked up the courage to ask on the first day following the explosions. That was the first backhand slap I had been gifted. He made it clear that I would know all I needed to in time. It was more like, If you need to know, then you will. If not, shut the fuck up and accept what I deem. In the meantime, I was subjected to daily sermons and talks of reckonings, do-overs, and apocalyptic recreation due to a complete level of ignorance shown by the mortals of the world, or so he eloquently put.

From what I could gather based on the many times he had cited the lazy nature of all humans, he had been born into a society that used laziness as an excuse for poor decision making. He skated by on a concept that stated humans, by using up all the resources, had found a way to survive, even at the behest of a world that had never been theirs in the first place. Rather, it was a playground being supervised by the real powers of the world: the gods. They had grown angry at the way their children had treated the kingdom they had allowed mortals to play on.

The gods were the hosts of a grand party, the human existence were the guests they invited in, the house was the world itself, and the guests treated it as if it were their own home and trashed it. Because of their actions in choosing to essentially suck up all the natural resources of the world, something had to be done. That was where the Prince came in. He was the spark that lit the fuse of rebirth. He was the reshaper of a world starving for healing. He was the face of the gods and their grand plan for the world they had created.

Four months had passed before I was able to sit down with the man who called himself the Prince for longer than a few minutes. When I reluctantly chose to leave the confines of the bedroom I had been shackled up in, I found my captor on the overlooking cliff face of the island, the place where I lost my vision. He had fashioned a walking stick for my own traversal, my blind man cane, so to speak.

Ah, the good doctor has decided to leave his bedroom today. I expected you to heal faster. I guess when you’ve grown as lazy as the rest of the inhabitants of this world, you pick up on their ailments and inability to adapt to the changing conditions.

His voice startled me but also kept me from taking the one last step over the side of the ledge, the one that would allow me to escape the prison I had walked into when I decided to get aboard the boat in the first place. Truly, if I had found myself alone and blind in a foreign place such as this, I feared my choice would have been an easy one to make.

Reliant was I on my eyes that any life without them would be of no worth. As morbid as that was, I had to keep in mind that there was a vast population of the blind community that got along just fine. Nonetheless, his voice kept me grounded in a masochistic sort of way. We established a routine where we relived the same process day in and day out: I would go to my room, come out when I got too tired or complacent and reluctantly chose to palaver with the mysterious man of the island.

You said we would talk when I got my vision back, but I don’t know when that’s going to be, and I’m tired of just sitting on my ass every day, waiting for something to happen. I hate lingering in limbo for something I don’t know will ever come, I nervously said. It was the first time I had chosen to take a step forward out of the darkness that he had adamantly kept me in.

I conserved my distance from the man, afraid that he would strike out at me again. He didn’t move, though, that much I could tell. I had seen a good amount of movies about blind men and women who had overdeveloped other senses to compensate for the loss of another. I admit, my hearing had somehow improved drastically.

The mind did have a way of playing games with oneself, though. I could have forced myself to think I was learning to overdevelop my hearing so as to try and find some limelight in the situation. It was enough to convince myself that I could make out sounds that I couldn’t before, like the faint whisper of what could have only been brushstrokes as if he was painting something.

There was a cool breeze and the blurred smell of smoke in the air. It wasn’t the normal kind a person smelled when they were burning wood in a bonfire; this was a more pungent, sour aroma. I assumed it came from whatever had caught fire in the explosions across the ocean, the burned flesh of millions wafting into the heavens, a new ingredient to the abundant atmospheric conditions that allowed for the possibility of life in the first place.

Sit. We have much to discuss, he said.

When I was in college, one of the earlier memories I could recall was finding myself classifying others based on their eyes. When I did further research on the idea, I realized I wasn’t the first. There was an entire study behind it, but I felt my reasons weren’t the same. To me, I felt that the color of a person’s eyes were the real first impression anyone ever needed in knowing whether any further conversation was necessary.

I sort of categorized those with unique and colorful eyes with those who were different and special in the world, whereas the basic colors, like brown or a dull blue, were associated with a sense of normalcy, the more boring persona. Granted, this wasn’t an exact study. I had learned that fact from some of the more interesting individuals I had overseen during my time as a doctor for the state. Kelli had purple eyes, Ian had green, Polemistis had a red-and-blue eye, and this man in front of me had them all. Their unique pigment forced me to associate their differentiation as an escape from the mundane; in other words, I had generalized them.

Blind as I was, I could feel those eyes fixed upon me as if being drilled into my soul. I was whisked back to the moment of genuine fear, the one I had felt that day in the library. For the most part, his eyes remained on the brighter spectrum of orange; but as his expressions changed, so did the color. It happened three times during that very conversation. It was like watching a mixing pot of random colors being thrown together, and as the pot spun, we caught a glimpse of random variances of every color possible. It was magical, to put it mildly.

I sat in the wooden lawn chair overlooking the peak, mulling over that particular day, the moment I first met him, a time that would resonate with me for years to come. I couldn’t see his face now, but I could still remember what he looked like as if it was yesterday. He looked so much like Ian that he could have been his twin.

Ian’s hair was longer and darker by far, and his skin complexion was a bit more olive compared to the man sitting in front of me. I chalked that up to the hundreds of years beneath the sun. Their build and stature were similar. The Prince was a little over six feet tall, maybe 185 pounds, primarily of muscle. The vascularity of this man was that of someone who worked out every single day of his life. Despite all his physical intimidation, at the end of the day, it was his eyes that were the most commanding.

I did as he asked, awaiting for him to drag me into whatever tale of fantastical violence he had in store for me. We sat in complete silence for a few minutes before he finally worked the courage to speak up.

Chapter 2

The Son

She named me Arsenikos. The day I came into this world, I had immediately felt the corruption. It wasn’t a smothering, consuming feeling the coddling I had been privy to. My mother saw to that. Not that I didn’t welcome her love, of course, but the way in which I was sheltered from the world had made me resent it. As babies, we didn’t know the difference, at least we were not supposed to. I was different, unique in ways that no other person was subjected to. She reminded me of that fact daily, that I was unlike anyone this world would ever see.

I never cried, never wanted attention, and never craved any level of love and compassion parents often showed their children. I studied and learned from afar. My father was the first to see it, the path I was set upon, the unavoidable route I was destined to take. She tried to convince him the day he tried to murder me in my sleep that she could prevent it from happening, keep me from the grand plan the Family had mapped out for me before I was even a twinkle in my father’s eye. Perhaps that was why he left in the first place. I couldn’t blame him. He was stuck in a struggle between his love and the boy who would inevitably end the world.

I grew faster than normal boys did, mentally and physically. My mother said it was because I was a product of two divine beings created from an even more divine creator. I was the first son of a new generation of immortals, so likewise, I was kept from interacting with the outside world. In fact, I didn’t see another person besides my parents until my fourteenth birthday, the day I left this wretched island.

Sure, this was really the only place left in the world that captured the true definition of beauty, the image the Family had created in the first place so many centuries prior, but a person would grow bored of the same thing day in and day out. Plus, the voices and nighttime premonitions I had been bombarded with told me that if I didn’t leave, my life would essentially cease. Dealing with things like that would put a whole new definition on childhood experience.

I spent the entirety of my juvenility under the education of my mother. When my father left us, she had needed to improvise her syllabus. He was the more learned individual of the two, having apparently experienced the world in ways no other person in existence had. He walked alongside some of the greatest rulers this world had ever seen, had even influenced them in ways no one knew about. He knew languages, societal customs, and ideals and knew the laws of the world and reasons for their corruption.

Not to say that my mother didn’t know her fair share, because she absolutely did. As the years away from her taught me when I did leave her tutelage, I realized she was the most formidable and dangerous yet intelligent woman in the entire world. Her resources had just limited her teachings when it came to bringing me up. We stuck to the confines of the wooded area surrounding the interior part of the island. We learned to hunt for food and skin the hides of deer and rabbits, primarily, utilizing them for clothing. We used the trees for housing and weapons, we fished, we talked of the old and the new ways, and then we fought.

If there was one area where she excelled above all others, it was her ability to kill. I had learned that she came from a time where women were supposed to do nothing but tend to the needs of her family via cooking and cleaning as well as emotional support for their husbands when they returned from war. She was far different than any of the women she had told me about. Her harsh upbringing taught her the art of war and deception. This was where I had paid more attention than anything else.

Our hours of endless training—the exchange of wooden swords, the occasional smack to the face here, and a sweep to the back of the knee there—she was inevitably grooming me to be the perfect fighter. She never let up, wanting me to experience suffering and pain as well as failure. It was her more predominant lesson, for if we never failed at the things we were passionate about, then we would never learn to prevail in all other aspects of life.

This was the one thing I was grateful to her over anything else. She had prepared me for the hardships of the world, knew I would end up walking among mortals, who spent so many hundreds of years destroying it. Her goal was to make sure I walked with them in peace rather than the violence my father had feared would overcome all other matters of human behavior. She had never known about the hatred I had already for the greedy populace of the world.

I suppose I could thank the other parent for that one. He had apparently given up on the people of the world long ago. His numerous attempts at dominating them into submission said as much. He had an idea, one that could recreate the old world into what it was always meant to be. His mistake came in the choices of choosing others to realize that image. He had it in him the entire time to be the ruler, but he chose to back mere mortal men, ones who lacked the fortitude and willpower to do what was necessary. That was the problem with mortals, too influenced by emotion and their inability to control it.

My mother had worked strenuously day in and day out to keep the darkness from taking over. She knew it was only a matter of time, though her naivety told her that maybe she could sway me to a more proper course. Now when I said that I felt the corruption at birth, that didn’t quite paint the picture I had started; rather, it was a sort of pollution a person knew was there.

When you walk into a room of smokers, you are bombarded with the secondhand poison their cancerous sticks can produce. Granted, you can’t see it, not unless you’re at the source of the smoke, but you know it’s there. It dissipates into the air like a ghost, affecting anyone who dares to walk through its deadly invisible cloud. That was what it was like when I entered this world.

My mother had succeeded in calming the inner storm within me for the most part, knowing how to mix in the right amount of nurture with space. She provided her parental lessons only when they were necessary, afraid, perhaps, that by overdoing it, she would push me over the edge. Truly, this was the closest I had ever gotten during my life to essentially growing to accept the world as it was, to chalk it up as, This is how things are regardless of interference.

Granted, I didn’t have any interaction with anyone outside the island, which had a lot to do with that level of acceptance. She knew that the longer she was able to keep me here, the more I would just be permanently convinced that I would learn to love the world as she did. It was strange, listening to the way she talked about them as if everything they did was somehow redeeming.

She did live alongside them for a couple of thousand years, learned the intricacies of their mortality and the various mundane ways in which they chose to spend their short life spans. Perhaps it was envy seeing people who had such a short existence learn to love everything as if they would never experience it again because most wouldn’t. When you had lived as long as she did, the exciting things for others were nothing more than a passing, meaningless moment.

On the morning of my fourteenth birthday, I had woken up to a cake. As much as I hated the parties she had thrown me over the years, I couldn’t help but smile at the few gestures she had made simply to express her tenderness. Given our circumstances, there wasn’t a whole lot she had at her disposal. She loved me more than anything in the world, that much I knew. She would have died for me, killed for me, and protected me by any means necessary, and as much as I knew that fact, I couldn’t fight the nagging feeling that I simply didn’t belong there. I suppose that was why she was so sad, using our training as outlets for her frustration, knowing that it was only a matter of time before she woke up and I would no longer be there to say Good morning! to her.

As I sat there eating my cake, she slid me a box wrapped in bright decorative paper, a red bow sitting atop the encasement. I shot my mother an inquisitive glance, one of those You shouldn’t have sort of looks. This was the first time she had given me an actual physical item as a gift, reminding me that our training was more valuable than any material object could provide. I hesitated, trying to prepare myself for the impending disappointment I was bound to show my mother. I didn’t care for materialistic things knowing the influence it had on the people of the world outside the island, or so I was reminded sporadically. I had told myself numerous times that I would never be someone who looked at items as something that would define me.

When I gave in to the temptation, I slowly pulled the ribbon that made up the bow, meticulously tore the paper from a small rectangular wooden box, and lifted it open. Within was what looked like a metal handle, nearly reminiscent of a flute, in fact, minus the numerous holes. It was long enough for both of my hands to clasp with a little wiggle room at the top and bottom. It was almost perfectly proportioned to my grip. I hefted it from the box, studying the intricately woven designs of animals within the white metallic grip. Eagle, boar, lion, tiger, owl, turtle—they were all animals that represented the Family from the old world.

That weapon was given to me by Athena herself on the day I left Olympus, she said, noticing the intense glare I was pouring on the handle.

What sort of weapon is this? I asked, still turning the object around in my hand, looking for any possible dagger exit point. If I didn’t know better, it was nothing more than a small baton of sorts.

It’s an adaptive weapon, a multitool instrument of war. In its normal state, what it currently is in, it is nothing but a fine piece of art. It transforms based on its need. In a close combat situation, a dagger will puncture the end of the handle, giving you the advantage you need in those close quarters. She held her hand out, nodding for me to relinquish it to her. As if on a thought, a sharp piece of metal shot through the bottom end of the handle. She twirled it gracefully, spinning it fast within her nimble fingers.

As it came to a stop, she pulled back as if readying herself to impale someone. The dagger disappeared, and a split second later, a blade shot out of the front of it, about three feet in length. She danced with it, twisting it easily from side to side in arcing motions. She was the perfect instrument of war. By far, one of my favorite things to watch was her dance with the blade.

She stopped her motions and held the sword horizontally in front of her so I could see the full length of the weapon. It disappeared into the handle as if there was some wellspring of magic at work. The blade was nearly four times larger than the handle itself as if the weapon had willed the edge into existence from nowhere. A brief second passed before both ends of the handle exploded outward. A thick reinforced staff now sat spread out from her handgrip in the middle. It was nearly six feet in length and perfectly solid and unwavering. Another second later, it went back to its original home, like a turtle fleeing from danger within its shell.

She smiled and handed me back the small metal handle. That was what got me through so many years of hardship. Men are cruel creatures, only thinking of themselves and how their actions benefit them. When you flash some steel in their direction, they back off and remember themselves, especially when it’s a woman putting them in their place. The smile turned into a pained one.

As the words left her mouth, I thought she had realized the mistake she made. She had spent so much time trying to dig out the hate festering away at my heart so as to control it and mold it into something positive. Within a single sentence, she had shoveled the hate right back in. The look of disdain and hate I shot back at her was evident of that fact, though it wasn’t aimed directly at her; rather, it was like gasoline being thrown into an already burning bonfire.

Thank you, Mother. I will cherish this until my final day, I responded, trying to change the subject. She nodded, tears of her own falling down her cheeks. I did feel bad for her. Her love for me would never have been enough to keep me cooped up there. Truly, I was thankful for the gift. It was the most marvelous thing I had ever seen.

We had studied the art of war while using the vast array of weaponry she had in the armory, stored in the cellar of our home. We spent hours upon hours throughout the years mastering each of the many choices of death, and she had managed to capture each and every one into this one small, inconspicuous piece of metal. I felt the tears brimming in my own eyes as I rushed in to hug her. It was the most loving gesture I had shown my mother, and it would be the only one.

I went outside as if I was a boy playing with his new gift on Christmas and practiced the many different weapons I could make. It was amazing, to say the least. The weapon could somehow read my mind and knew what exactly to turn into when I needed it. I sprinted through the trees, gracefully jumping from stump to stump, stabbing a sword stroke into one tree, smashing a smaller one into splinters with my staff, severing the branches of overhanging leaves with my dagger, spinning flails into a larger tree, and destroying the thick wood as if it was no more than a twig.

Amid the magic the weapon carried, it was the sheer destructive capabilities it possessed which made it so much more formidable. It was sharper than anything I had worked with and thicker and more deadly than anything in my mother’s arsenal. I practiced for nearly an hour, easily changing and shaping the weapon in my hand time and time again. Before long, I felt like I had mastered the weapon, unlocked its innermost secrets and tricks blind to everyone else in the world but me. It was something I had realized about myself, the ability to pick up something and instantly be good at it, sometimes perfectly so. It was a direct contradiction to my mother’s edicts on the need to fail in order to appreciate perfection.

I started my walk back, ready to take a break from my unintentional training for the day. Something off to the side caught my attention, beyond the trees in the distance, forcing me to veer off my path home. At first, I thought it was an animal, a deer that had moved too close to its human predator. A second glimpse told me that it wasn’t a deer at all, or an animal, for that matter.

It was a person, a woman to be exact, and most definitely not my mother, and it was moving away from me. It had succeeded in grabbing my now engrossed mind, coaxing me to follow. Without hesitation, I took flight, my level of intrigue at a maximum. Her skin shone like rays of the sun piercing through the gaps in the trees as I labored quickly to reach her. Her form seemed to disappear, then reappear beyond another tree farther along the way as if her form of transportation was teleportation of some kind.

I chased her for what felt like an hour before I came upon an open clearing. In the middle of a vast field, very much far away from my mother and our home, the woman stood staring at me with her hands clasped behind her. She had a relaxed smile on her face as if her features could speak words resonating louder than her actual voice could. It was one that said she was waiting for me to come to her.

I looked at her from the edge of the clearing, thinking about my next move. A part of me thought she would attack and that this was nothing more than a bait system in order to separate me from my mother, but another part also told me that she was merely trying to show me something with no maliciousness intended. Her skin was translucent, the grass and trees beyond her just barely visible, as if looking through a fogged glass window. Examining her, it was as if she was born of the rays of the sun, and the light stabbing through the leaves above us, jumping across her flawless figure, exemplified that. She seemed only to exist as long as the sun did.

As I moved closer to her, I realized her form shimmered in and out of the visible spectrum as if she was a radio frequency struggling to stay on an unperturbed station. She wore a gray robe that did little to conceal her beautiful naked form in the sun. The handle of my adaptive weapon concealed tightly in my sweaty palm vibrated with energy.

You have nothing to fear from me, my child, she said as I stood within a dozen feet from her. As she spoke, her body flickered, each word coming out as different pitches of sound.

Who are you? I asked hesitantly, still keeping my distance from the spectral woman.

I have gone by many names in many different lifetimes, but you can call me Mother. Her voice seemed to emanate from the confines of the woods like her words were echoing from tree to tree as if the real version was broadcasting from somewhere else, using speakers positioned on tree branches to convey her words.

I have a mother. She awaits me as we speak, I responded.

She shook her head, a smile clear upon her pale-white face. She was the vessel that carried you. You are the son of the old gods, the creators of the worlds, the harbinger of power upon this earth, and it is time for you to leave this place.

No. This is my home. I don’t know who you are, but you don’t belong here. Even your body fights its reality as we speak.

She smiled at me in response. Close your eyes, my child. I will show you what your home truly looks like.

I didn’t move for nearly a minute, going over my next choice, mainly because I hadn’t accepted the notion that I was hallucinating the entire event. Either I was bound to flee back to my mother—she would know about this and who this woman was as well as the magical elements that controlled the order of the world—or go along with the ghostly woman and see what she had to show me.

If there was one fault I had given myself, it was my insatiable need to know that which I did not already. My mother called it an ever-expansive need to know the workings of the world and the things that made it so. That curiosity made me move closer to the woman, inclining my head as if giving in to her request. If it were a trap of some kind, I knew the inner perfectionist within me would find a way out of it whenever and however I wanted. I would be the puppeteer in someone else’s grand play rather than be the puppet itself. I closed my eyes for an instant, then a whoosh of hot air smacked at my face as if the wind had taken a physical form to strike me.

Chapter 3

The Creator

I fell on my back and tried to wipe away the dirt caking my closed eyelids. When I cleared them, I found myself in an even bigger field than the one I had walked into when this all started. The strangest-looking flowers stretched for miles in every direction. Though their color was too discernible to tell, I knew they were white, but they seemed to be melting, as if they were wax figurines caught in the sun’s torrential heat.

I bent down to grab one, plucking it from the graying grass beneath it. As I stared, it exploded into ash, mixing with the wind, which seemed to have come from nowhere. A mountain range dotted the horizon, barely visible amid the ashes drifting through the air. A lone stone table sat a few hundred feet away from where I found myself, twelve chairs surrounding it. Just behind it sat a dead tree. Massive as it was, it was clearly a monstrous piece of foliage in its heyday. A man sat motionless on the opposite end.

As I moved closer, I could see the literal fire that made up his eyes, gleaming bright red over a barely visible shade of black. He had a half-black, half-gray beard that looked unkempt and dirty. By all indications, he looked like a man who hadn’t slept beneath a roof in quite some time, resorting to the confines of the streets as his bed. It was a topic that my mother and I had discussed in length many times, why a person chose to live a life as such.

Her kindhearted nature often defended them, remarking that it wasn’t something they had a say in sometimes, that not all people should be judged similarly, that some were not privileged with the luxuries afforded to others. Regardless, the man in front of me looked skinny and run-down, and his clothes resembled that of something that had been dug out from a trash can. He motioned for me to sit in one of the chairs.

Hello, Arsenikos. His voice was eerily deep, and it didn’t match his withered frame. It also came out as a low rumble, like it was being channeled from somewhere lurking within his bowels. I stood motionless for a long while, going along with the unintentional staring contest with the mysterious old man. As you insist, he finally spoke up, noticing the reluctance.

He picked up a stone goblet in front of him and took a long swig of something that smelled like honey. He smiled when he noticed my glare at the cup. It’s called ambrosia. Essentially, it’s the reason you even exist. It’s the nectar of the old gods. The ground you walk upon is the very breeding area of the magnificent fruit. He lifted the cup and extended it toward me, offering a drink.

I shook my head immediately. It doesn’t exist. None of this does. You play tricks, and I will not go along with your game. Send me back home, I responded, slowly stepping away from the table. In truth, I had been warned of this precise moment by my mother some years prior. She had told me about the tales of this place, called it an illusion to trick mortals into thinking they had achieved some level of immortality and eternal life, though the one she described was more beautiful and bright while this one was dark and evil.

The man laughed hard. You’re perceptive. I suppose you get that from your father. He sat at this very table once, you know? Albeit briefly, he suspected this a farce as well. He lacked the mental fortitude to accept the power this place could grant. His mind had decayed too much by that point. You, on the other hand, are a different case.

You knew my father? I asked, finally moving to take a seat opposite the man.

He nodded. He was a very powerful man once upon a time. He could have done amazing things for the Family. He refused to listen, distracted by his feud with the other outcast of the Family. I’m sure your mother has told you the stories.

Briefly. She spends more time trying to keep me from repeating their actions, scared I’ll follow in their footsteps. She had told me about her childhood, how she was trained by the immortal creators of Olympus, how she was pursued by two boys, and how their pursuit led to one of the most violent rivalries the world would never really know.

She’s parenting the right way, then. She is much more formidable than anyone will ever know or give her credit for, though I suppose the two go hand in hand. The only two which would know of her true power would be your father and the other one, the former being disqualified for obvious reasons. She is the biggest roadblock in this plan after all. He let out a laugh as if finding humor in his attempted joke. I didn’t agree with the sentiment.

What plan? I responded, ignoring his attempt at trying to control the conversation.

The plan created for you long before you were born. You’ve been hiding long enough. It’s time for you to open your eyes fully and do what you were always meant to do.

And what is that exactly?

You’ve already felt the sickness, haven’t you? It may not be as compounding as it is for myself, but you feel it nonetheless like a slow wave, barely touching at your consciousness, telling you that things in the world are just not right.

I inclined my head, staring at the dull stone of the table. It was old, perhaps ancient, judging by the weathering of the stone from hundreds of years of naturistic exposure. What clung to me was that the fear I had been harboring within me for so many years had finally been given a name, a purpose. It was like getting an itch that you had been scratching away at agonizingly for hours or, in this case, years. Every time I brought it up to my mother, the worry that latched on to my very soul, she would quickly try to send it away as if I shouldn’t worry about something so trivial. It did little to actually relinquish the fire burning away at my very core, the one that seemed to be devoid of any extinguishment.

What does it mean? I asked after a minute of contemplation. He was the only person who knew what I was feeling and what it was I could do about it.

You are ready to leave your mother and venture out into the world to begin your journey.

What journey is that?

He smiled wickedly. You are to give birth to a new world as seen fit by the old gods.

But I’m just a child. I wouldn’t have the slightest clue about running anything, let alone an entire world.

It isn’t just this world but all, and I will show you. The place you see before you now is the nexus point of all worlds. It was once in control of a different entity, one who sought to keep the worlds as they were, leaning on the prospect of love and forgiveness as well as the ability to adapt and change as reasons to keep humanity intact. That entity hoped it would be enough to keep the balance of all worlds healthy. His foolishness became his downfall. Your version of reality, the one you were born into, the one you live in with your mother, is the oldest yet latest experiment gone wrong, though I will admit it lasted much longer than the others did. I suppose that’s why he clung to it so deeply. Nonetheless, I took this place from him and made it mine as well as the gateway to all things possible.

I imagined some divine clash of beings going head-to-head, causing chaos amid the cosmos for control of the heavens. My mother would cite a war between heaven and hell, good versus evil, and control over humanity and existence itself. She didn’t believe in one particular ideology; rather, she saw the truth in all of them, connecting the dots here and there based on similarities in origin tales and coming-of-age stories depicted in those scriptures. Something told me that I wasn’t too far off from the truth in my own line of thinking.

You say experiment, I started. You’re not one of the old gods, are you? I said it more as a statement than a question. I had heard my fair share of recounts from my mother to know he was not among the Family that sat upon Olympus, ruling the mortals of the world beyond the realms.

He smiled in return. Not in the way you would know, or your mother, for that matter. He kicked a leg over the other, crossing his hands in his lap. He turned his head up and to the side as if collecting his thoughts, contemplating how he would explain what he meant. Do you know the origin story of your own creators?

They were born from the Titans, elemental powers coming into existence when the world was born, I responded. It was my favorite part of the history my mother often talked about. I often imagined myself as a Titan, an all-powerful being ruling over everything in the world, big and small all bowing and strictly tuned in to my every word.

The man laughed. "You’re still a baby even if you refuse to accept that. In time, you’ll learn to rid yourself of that part. Only then will you be able to harbor the power that is to come. Things don’t just come to life as if poofing into existence. Your Titans had creators just as I had a creator. The difference is the amount of power each pantheon of rulers is given.

"The family came from us, creations we had planted into your reality, of your world. We gave them a certain amount of dominance with which to rule you and told them to use it to control the plan we had laid out for them. Their fathers were our first failed experiment, the Titans. The family was our second attempt, much more manageable and moldable. Unfortunately, we didn’t account for their instability and inevitable insanity. When they went away, mortals were given an open playground, free-roaming upon a created ball of dirt, churning up mistakes left and right because they had lost their direction and their respective chaperones.

Give a toddler a lit match, set him on his way, and watch him burn himself. Give a toddler a lit match and tell him it causes pain and he learns reluctance and choice. If the toddler still burns himself, he never does it again, in theory, at least. When the Family left, mortals became the toddlers that never learned how to stay away from the lit match. They continuously set themselves ablaze, reproduced and killed, warred with one another over ownership of land and people, of ideals and religions that never really existed in the first place. They butchered each other over created constructs, delusions created to provide solace at the end of their life span. Anger danced across his fiery eyes as he shook his head in disgust.

If you speak truly, then you’re eliminating all notions of the existence of Elysium, the final resting place of those who survive the horrors and trials of the world, something I refuse to accept. Even as we speak, the very ground we sit upon serves as evidence to something mortals have been questioning since the earliest years even if you call it something else. The fact that I can see this place now and here knowing it isn’t an illusion, I have meaning to a life after death. Call it childish if you will, but I reject your claim of it being anything else.

I half expected him to lash out at me, strike me down for going against what he had said, but he acted as if he hadn’t even heard the slight. "As hardheaded as your father but with so much more potential. Even in that statement alone, you see the point of it all, something the Family never quite got. You know, when they failed, we looked to their offspring hoping to find some perfect mixture of chromosomes and DNA, forming the perfect being we had intended all along. That was when we knew we had truly failed.

"Your mother and father were the last to taste the ambrosia we had supplied for that reality. When it went away, so did their sanity. We kept a close eye on the goings-on of your parents. Much to our surprise, they did exactly what he had originally planned, though there was something missing, a link that just wasn’t there until you were born.

Arsenikos, you embody everything we had created, the plan we had written out for the Family well before their intervention into your world. That is the precise reason you stand before me now, but I would be stupid to think you could just accept my words as truth unless you saw it for yourself. In a blink of an eye, he lunged across the table, his hands gripping at the sides of my face, squeezing my head inward as if willing it to explode into a million bloody pieces.

You will be granted gifts unlike anything your imagination can muster, more powerful than your mother and father combined. You will have the capability to move through worlds and realities at will all to make your own destiny come to fruition. You will be the new god of the sick world you call home. I felt my head shrinking into nothingness as his uncanny strength continued to smash his palms together.

Fret not, my child, for in Elysium, you will be the king this world should have had all along. Darkness consumed the light, and then I knew nothing.

Chapter 4

The Failed World

I expected to enter a realm of light filled with harmony and peace and tranquility to calm my troubled soul. Perhaps expected was the wrong word; hope would be more fitting. I fell among a wide array of the human population who genuinely hoped for an afterlife, according to my mother, of course. It wasn’t an abnormal thing to hope for, for us to just not exist anymore, for us to know nothing at all the moment our bodies expire. It was the dominating reason all people feared death.

As my head was squeezed to a pulp, I welcomed it, thought I would be rid of the evil lurking in my heart, the likes of which continued to grow into a manifestation of something catastrophic. What I was actually met with was buffeting darkness and more water than my lungs could handle.

When I sifted my near-dead body to the surface, I realized it wasn’t water I was choking on—it was blood. I struggled to eject the red fluid seeping down my throat as I tried to understand what had actually happened. The cake I had eaten for my birthday this morning represented the last remnants of whatever worked at my dying chest cavity.

When I cleared my vision, I looked upon a wasteland of trash and blood as far as the eye could see. The sky bled a bright crimson as if the sun had somehow decayed into a duller glow rather than the bright ball of fire that dominated my own world. It was as if it worked on an adjustable light switch where one could change the intensity in a room, and it was currently set to a dimmer tone.

Dark, graying, red clouds eliminated the possibility of an open sky, and waves of heat jumped from the huge hills of trash that dotted the horizons. It seemed to pulse as if a fiery dragon was fast asleep, snoring bouts of heat every few seconds into a dead world.

How I managed to get there was a mystery in its own. The old man thrust me into this place via some magical forced squeeze. He wanted me to see this to realize his words were truth as if the very thought of being doubted was more terrifying to him than death itself. He hadn’t said that much outright. It was a sort of aura he gave off, a character trait trying to push beyond the confines of his interior shell.

I knew I wasn’t on my earth anymore. I was somewhere else, something they had tried to create long ago, then gave up on, if I were to believe the man’s story. For all I knew, I was looking upon a desolate, abandoned area of my own world. I paddled through the piles of endless trash only to realize that it wasn’t exactly trash I was wading through. I plucked a metallic ball slightly bigger than my hand from a stack.

As I turned it over in my hand, I realized it was a human head, part of it, at least. Wires and chunks of metal seemed to make up the bulk of the skull while bone finished off the rest. One of the eye sockets contained a cracked, dead glass sphere, as if the robotic life-form that existed within it had died away long ago. I pulled spinal cords, robotic arms and legs, and hands that seemed to be Swiss Army weaponry beneath each finger. I had awoken amid a graveyard of cybernetic human castaways.

I fought to climb the hills of dead metallic remains, and a decaying odor seemed to pour from beyond one of the directions of the hills, the tallest, to be exact. It was as if I had been planted into the middle of some crater, a mountain of death blotting out the exterior part of whatever existed beyond. I followed the smell to the top of the hill and nearly felt my lungs collapse. In the distance, there was a vast city. When my mother described skyscrapers to me, I had remarked on the impossibility of something that tall being able to stay upright for longer than a few years, asserting that eventually, the weather would change and the winds would simply knock it down as if it were nothing but mere branches caught in a storm.

I formulated my own image of swaying massive steel structures stretching beyond the clouds, and it wasn’t until now that I truly understood the grandeur of the architecture. Granted, the enormous buildings I was looking upon now atop this hill seemed to pale in comparison to the ones I had concocted in my head. Something so amazing would look the part, the likes of which would draw crowds of people from far and wide just to gaze upon it. Perhaps that was how it was when the first one was erected. Things tended to lose their luster when you repeat the same feat over and over again. Nevertheless, what I saw in front of my eyes now didn’t quite have the effect I thought it would. I chalked it up to the fact that I was walking through a dead reality.

I felt my drenched and squishy tennis shoes soaked in the blood of thousands of mechanized corpses move down the cracked pavement of the streets of the city. Cars, or what seemed to look like cars, had rotted into heaps of broken glass and steel, littering in the hundreds down each and every street. They didn’t fit the mold of the cars I was told about. These didn’t have tires; rather, they had a set of round plates that seemed to once exhume energy as if meant to hover off the ground. There were more mechanical wirings and parts strewn about than anything I had read about in any of the books I was privy to, another concoction of otherworldly technology clearly at play.

As I continued my journey through the vacant city, I was surprised at the lack of life. I fancied that when the end of the world did come, the survivors of the fallout would be insects or some sort of adaptive animal that had the ability to fly away before being affected by any destruction. Not even a rodent or cockroach seemed to want to show their faces in this dead place. There were no sounds of birds chirping and no crickets singing their various tunes. Only the polluted, burnt-smelling wind and the rusting swaying of crumbling skyscrapers made up the sounds of the world.

I half feared that one of the structures would collapse on top of me, a sort of defense mechanism controlled by some maniacal, powered-up version of Mother Nature, a kamikaze final weapon against the life-forms that created it once upon a time. Someone had taken the time to move the corpses into the landfill I had woken up in, so there had to be someone left who could possibly explain what happened to this world.

Moving from building to building, I kicked through rubble in search of newspaper articles, anything