Allen1996
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Rage against the Heavens: Chapter 21: here beneath a purple sky
🕑 Added 2025-04-19 01:27:37 +0000 UTCI woke up gazing at a different sky.
I wish I had been metaphorical, that it had been allegorical but it was not. A purple sky welcomes my vision with dark stars doting the horizon seemingly as endless as the grain of sand on a beach.
I honestly hadn’t expected to wake up. With slash emperor being what it was, with how close I had been to the epicentre of what I released, I hadn’t expected that the current me would have survived.
In any case, I had made sure that Alexander Chambers would have survived, not necessarily this version of me though.
Now, I guess the best thing to do would be to try to see where I was if I was still in some way or another in a sticky situation.
I mean, I would not be surprised if Hecate hadn’t a possible fuck you card in case things went wrong for her.
At least, that would be the logical and smart thing but again gods were not necessarily that too.
“You’re awake.”
Of course, as if things could have been this easy. I turned toward the origin of the voice, of the familiar voice, one that was honestly the last thing I wanted to hear right now.
“You and your kind are truly cockroaches aren’t you all?”
Hecate didn't look as poised as she did before the beginning of our fight. If anything she looked humbled which sent a course of satisfaction running through my veins.
She looked as if she went to fight with an industrial shredder and lost. It was still bullshit though.
Sure, my version of Slash Emperor had not been complete in the sense that I had limited it to only powering itself by using the life on the island we had been fighting on and my own mystical energies but still, that was bullshit that she had survived.
Even then, the sight of hers didn't bring fear, anxiety, apprehension or anything the like unlike before our fight.
I was sure I didn't know why but that if this time we fought, things would be much harder for her and easier for me.
Her appearance was kinda a confirmation of that case. Spidercracks ran all over her body as if she had been broken into a thousand pieces and tried to be reconstructed but was unable to do so whole.
Gold shimmered between the cracks on her form. It kinda reminded me of the concept of Kintsugi, using gold to fill gaps in broken things.
“We would not be gods if it was so easy to get rid of us,” she said.
“Once, this place was different,” she said, to me and for a moment, one so short that it might be a delusion, I saw three faces instead of one turned ever so slightly—a flicker of profiles in the half-light from above.
“A graveyard of choices. A theater of almost. Once, it bore no name. Mortals called it the Threshold of Endless Paths, as if labels could bind its nature. But names are spells, and this… this could be said to be a spell gone feral, beautifully.
She lifted a hand, and our surroundings seemed to change. It made me think of a video going in reverse. There was a darkness now, a complete one, one that shuddered.
I saw Torches flare, something akin to life along the walls, their flames green as drowned moss. Shadows pooled at the goddess’ feet, twisting into shapes: jagged peaks, valleys choked with mist, a labyrinth of stone and starlight.
“Imagine a mirror,” she continued, “not of glass, but of longing. The Carians built their afterlife in the image of their homeland—wild, unyielding, a place where even ghosts carried swords. Warriors and wanderers came here clad in the armor of their regrets. They thought death a second campaign, a chance to correct the battles lost. Fools,” she said yet there was something that sounded like endearment in her voice, almost like a parent remembering with fondness the past awkwardness of their child.
Her laughter was a dry rasp, like parchment unravelling. One torch detached from the wall, floating to her outstretched palm. Its light spilled over her face, revealing eyes that were not green but voids rimmed with silver—a night sky stripped of stars.
“I was queen here. Not a consort draped in Hades’ pallor, nor Poseidon’s brine-soaked trinket. Queen. They carved my face into pillars where roads split—hekataia, they called them. As if stone could contain me. As if through stone, they could reach me and salvation. What I liked about them is that the Carians knew better than to pray for mercy against the cruelty of the world. They prayed for clarity.”
She turned fully now, her three forms shifting like smoke. One face young, lips stained with a deep red akin to blood; another ancient, skin mapped with cracks; the third veiled, a silhouette of knives.
“Death here was not an end but a… negotiation. The dead arrived steeped in their lives—mercenaries with hands still clenched around phantom spears, mothers clutching invisible children. My torches—” she raised the flame, and it split into three, each hovering above a path that materialized at her feet “—showed them their roads. One led to the Hall of him.”
Her mouth twisted around the word, a thorn plucked from flesh, something hurtful to remember.
“A god who fancied himself my equal. Boisterous, kind like a mom bear, kind in the way fire is kind—warm until it devours. His hall reeked of mead, joy and in the end of lies. The dead feasted there, retelling their battles until their throats cracked. They retold their lives, and their experiences and no matter what they may have been, servant, slave, noble, King, father, mother, children, sisters, brothers, they were all equal, all listened to, all satisfied. This was a pantomime of glory, an endless tribute to both life and death, to strength and weakness.”
The second torch dipped toward a yawning pit, its depths sighing with whispers.
“The Wells. Not the gentle oblivion of the Greek Lethe. This was a drowning. A swallowing. Some chose it—those who could not bear the weight of their own names. Those who were too exhausted to go on, who wanted to finally sleep. I let them sink. Mercy is a blade, and all deserve its edge.”
The third torch soared upward, illuminating a staircase etched into the air itself, its steps shimmering like frozen starlight.
“The Stair of Stars. For champions of things greater than themselves whether it was deities or ideas. This was reserved for heroes. Better heroes, not the mewling brutes Olympus hymns. Those who died defending hearths, not hubris. A lot climbed it. A lot lingered here, gnawing on their grudges like dogs on bones.”
She snapped her fingers. Shapes coalesced from the dark—hounds with eyes like smoldering coals. One bore the gaunt muzzle of a wolf, the other a serpent’s flickering tongue.
“Hekabe. Gale. Did you hear their tale? A queen and a witch, now my… companions. They followed me here too. They sniffed out the restless dead. The betrayed. The avaricious. I gathered them, poured salt on their wounds and honey on their sins. It was atonement through willful agony. The Carians understood—that purification is not peace. It is scouring.”
Her voice faltered, the first hint of fracture.
“I held keys to doors even Zeus could not pry open. Not that he tried. The Olympians feared this place. Feared me. They let me play queen in my shadowed corner, so long as I did not… aspire. In the end, like everything does, it all ended and I decided to change it to what it is now.”
The torches dimmed. The paths dissolved. Hecate’s forms collapsed into one and slowly but surely, my surroundings began to fade back to what they were before this let's say demonstration.
Even though she looked like a mess, she didn't look worried at all, speaking as if we were old friends talking about the weather.
It sounded good and all but three were one little thing, sure, what she was saying was kinda interesting but I didn't care about her. If anything, I was kinda hoping that for once, things were on my side and that without doing anything, the cracks left by Slash Emperor turned worse for her.
“Have you ever been told you talk too much?” I asked the goddess.
“I believe that people only show their true selves when everything is stripped bare, when they are on the verge of undoing, of losing everything and you showed it admirably with your actions. They spoke louder than the words you gave to my son at least,” she spoke as if she didn't hear me at all.
Fucking goddess.
“Did they?” I asked her. Our gaze met and for a moment I lost myself in fractal green. “Do actions when born of despair show true nature or does it show what a person cornered, scared, vulnerable would do when feeling that the world is at their throat?”
Kindness seemed easy, simple even but it was not, it had never been. It would not be a kindness if it was the case. It would not be something with any worth yet I hope that one day, I would make it so.
It was easy to be kind when you didn't have much to lose, it was easy to be kind when you had plenty. It was easy to be kind when it was a gesture as easy as breathing.
It was not easy when you had nothing but your flesh, skin, sinews, bones and marrow. When you hurt people, when you corner them, how can you expect them to show you something admirable?
It was like the concept of alpha wolves. Many wolves from different packs had been put together in an enclosed space where they had no other choice but to interact.
Due to that, a hierarchy based on dominance emerged between them. The results of it became widespread and people saw it as gospel when in truth, wolves in the wild didn't act like that at all.
They had put together scared wolves in an environment that was foreign to them and had expected to find how they would act normally in nature to reproduce itself while they were caged.
“The only thing you made me do was show my worst,” I told her.
She laughed at my words.
“Maybe you're right. Maybe. Even then, If that is your worst, I wonder what is your best.”
“I am old,” she continued. “Older than islands, mountains, what mortals call civilization. I am older than Olympus. I was young when Othrys was young too. I was young and I had believed in so many things, most that I don’t anymore. Once I thought similarly to you.”
“This is why when the scions of the Titan king and the Titan Queen rose in rebellion against their forefathers, when they rose against the world with all the chances, odd against them, I still joined them.”
“You sound like you regret it,” I told her. “It sounds like treason you know.”
There was still something between the two of us. I didn't know if it was animosity or distrust or hatred or maybe anything else but even with it surrounding the two of us like a pack of angry wolves, I could not help but relax, speaking, listening to the one who had tried to kill me, to the god I had tried to bring down.
“I do regret it. I don’t think that there is any deity as old as me that in a way doesn’t regret the golden age over this one ruled by Olympus. The golden age was far from perfect. If it was, so many would have not defected but the same way many defected, the same way many stayed on the side of our elders, fighting to maintain it. It was not perfect but it was better than this, than all of this. The Titan king even at his worst can not compare to his spawns.”
“Truly?” I asked her. The percy Jackson books had indicated once and once again that the golden age of Kronos had not been a good one and with Kronos acting the way he did in canon, it was hard to believe otherwise.
What Were the words of Chiron in the books? Ah, yes, something akin to the golden age being one of barbary and cruelty.
“The titan king may have eaten his children but he didn't physically hurt his queen.”
“You’re speaking of the first queen, of the war goddess’s mother.”
Metis had been Zeus’s first wife. She had been his advisor, a goddess of wisdom if I remembered well but there had been a prophecy about her son by her husband dethroning him and the bastard in bastard fashion had decided to take a play out of the book of his old dad but worse by eating the child and the mother.
“That's still the bare minimum though,” I said to the goddess.
“It should be but isn’t.”
“You all suck.”
“Unfortunately.”
“Do you have other examples?” I asked her kinda curious.
“The old king never raped any of his direct relatives.”
I felt one of my eyebrows raise.
“Let me guess, it doesn't mean that he didn't rape anyone.”
Her only answer was one word “Chiron,” which was fair.
“In any case, I'm still sure that it was not heaven for human beings.”
“Compared to what the Olympians brought and did, humans of the golden age lived like kings and queens.”
“Kings and Queens but still playthings. Am I wrong?”
“Aren’t we all in a sense playthings? Fate, obligations, stronger and more powerful beings.”
“I don’t believe so. Even if it is true, I won’t believe it, I won’t accept it. It’s just that the orders built by your like had been rotten at their core since the beginning. Without them, without the chains coming with them, the world would not be like that.”
“You see the world since its inception as wrong.”
“Do you believe otherwise Hecate?”
“Not really but I see it as a feature instead of a bug. The world may be wrong but in a way, I don’t think it is because it was made with wrongness in its heart. I think that it would be more accurate to say that the world is.”
“It means that it could become a was. Things may be repeating, maybe rhyming but I believe that it means that they can change slowly but surely. It just means it is possible if a good touch is given.”
“You’re not only talking about the world.”
“Did we ever talk only about it?”
“You truly are an anomaly. You were able to strike at me in ways that should not be possible. I am a Greek goddess and unlike our lesser peers, we are immortals in all sense of the term. We can’t be killed by using violence, by hurting us yet two of your strikes were able to crush that truth. You struck at my essence itself, you made me break. Had I been a lesser goddess, one with less knowledge, I fear what may have happened.”
“You were playing with me. You were not taking me seriously,” I told her. “It’s as if it had been a game for you.”
Had she taken me seriously, I don’t think it would have been easy for me. Sure, slash emperor was broken as hell but what would be the point if I was unable to attain her, if she had dodged?
She had been holding back and paid the price. More than that, even in the case we began to fight again and she went all in at the beginning, I still would take my chance.
The two stars in the back of my mind devoid of potential waiting to be shaped. They were already enough in my opinion of a countermeasure.
I had been able to make a planet-destroying weapon with the anti divine charges I had already invested.
What would happen if I added on top of that something to strengthen my true magic or my anti-divine weapon specialisation?
In all cases, it would not be wrong to say that the cards were on my side now.
Now, she was on my turf and if she thought I could be a nuisance, she would see me as a plague if we were to clash.
“Yeah,” she answered. “I had not taken you seriously until the end and it had been a capital error. After all, even though I believe that it is only when cornered that one shows their true selves, it could not not be said that beings no matter their nature, their level of strength were at their strongest, were the most dangerous when they were cornered.”
“I had fought you by using a quarter of my raw power, without using the specificities, abilities given by my domains, by my authorities and none of my most dangerous and grievous spells. It’s only at the end when you summoned that thing, when you swung at me that I had needed to truly act and even then here we are.“
There was amazement in her voice, amazement and fear. She was talking of Slash emperor and she spoke of it ironically like an unbeliever who she just had found god was real and didn’t know if they should be glad or scared because of it.
“I saw it for less than a second yet just by peering at it, ideas, concepts of spells and magic applications I never thought before were possible sprung into my mind.”
I kept my eyes on her as she continued to speak. She honestly looked unhinged.
She looked mad.
“There is one thing I don’t understand though,” I told her. “Why are you speaking as if you would have any chance to live long enough to test what you possibly learnt?”
My voice didn’t change tone. It was devoid of hostility or anger. It was matter-of-fact like.
Zeus was a cheating bastard, most gods were cancers on existence and I would kill you.
I most likely would.
Things may have not been hostile, pleasant even but I could not forget how she had threatened me because she had similar been able to, the way she had toyed with me.
“I normally would have laughed at your words. Another god may have cursed you. You probably could even if it won’t be a task you would find easy but even without that, I could teleport at any moment out of this place. You could summon that thing again, maybe something alike, maybe something worse but none of this would matter if I am able to reach you before you strike. I underestimated you one time. I won’t make this error again,” she told me.
“More than that,” she continued, “you were unconscious, helpless again anything I could have done. What tells you that I didn’t? What tells you that the odds are not on my side?”
I tasted the words. “Odds?”
“I am used to things, to odds being against me.” More than that, what I didn’t tell her was that a discreet self-analysis by a synergy of my true magic and its theory of everything, my alchemy and the C’tan star in my mind made sure that I knew that nothing was wrong with me.
I would honestly be surprised if it was the case and even if it was the case, I would still take the odds because of the stars in my mind and because even if I hated, feared the possibility, death would not be the end of Alexander Chambers and his crusade, just of my life, just of this version of me.
“Odds would not be what stop me from killing you goddess of crossroads.”
Hecate was the goddess of crossroads too. In a way, it made her a goddess with power over prophecy, and fate. Some texts said that a crossroads if I was not wrong were possible futures.
I knew that she understood the meaning behind my words. She could look in whichever way she wanted. Any fight between the two of us would be one where I would try, no, ensure to make her lose.
It didn’t matter if I lost too as long as she didn’t win. I was human. Being petty was in my nature.
Her lips rose in half a smile “Until the end huh?” She spoke the words as if she was repeating them.
“I am human. I can’t help my nature,” I told her with half a shrug.
Something changed in her eyes as I said the words. Some forms of levity disappeared, something calculating, almost harsh entering in them as if she hoped she had heard something she wished she had not.
“You seem since the beginning to call yourself human. I thought that it was because you clung to your cover, that maybe it was because you wondered too much amongst them, gone native to say but I am realizing it is not the case. You truly think so don’t you? You truly see yourself as human.”
A flash of indignation surged into my veins at her words. She was speaking to me now as if she was speaking to a mad dog instead of a person. She spoke as if I was the fool in a play that I didn’t realize I was part of.
“Of course I do. I was born human, completely so. You may not believe it but it is true. I am truly losing my interest in whatever all of this is.”
The harshness in her eyes diminished and I wished they didn’t. I think I preferred it over the pity in her eyes.
A deity pitting me. I was going to get rid of her.
“It had happened many times in the past that Mythological beings be reborn with human parents without losing any of their attributes in the long term. Sometimes, one in a billion chance, they are not reborn into mortal parents. They are simply born more.”
Green mist bloomed into her fingers like a half-exhaled toxic breath before it coalesced into a mirror. She threw it and it lodged itself centimetres away from my head.
I didn’t know why but I felt dread at her actions, as if I was before something important, not good, not bad, important.
I took the mirror and after an exhale, I looked at myself in the mirror. I wished I had not.
The mirror in my hands felt too light, as if it might dissolve into mist at any moment. Hecate’s magic held it steady, but the image it showed was anything but.
This isn’t me.
The thought slithered through my mind, cold and undeniable. My hair, once dark as a midnight storm, had bleached into something wrong—not silver, not white, but the color of ashes left after a fire that had burned too long. The kind of grey that made you think of forgotten things, of ruins. It framed a face that shouldn’t have existed outside of marble or dreams.
I had always been more than good-looking in this life, courtesy of the biological parents of this body. In a way, it had been their only true gift to Beryl and me. All of that to say that I knew that I was attractive. People had told me often enough, some with envy, some with hunger. I knew this, but this? This wasn’t beauty.
Beauty had flaws—a crooked smile, a scar, pores, goosebumps, freckles, the like the faint unevenness of living, not what I was seeing.
This was perfection, the kind that didn’t belong to anything mortal. My features were too symmetrical, too smooth, like a statue carved by hands that had never known hesitation. The kind of face that made you stop and stare, not because you wanted to, but because something in your bones demanded it. Worship or terror. Maybe both.
I ran a finger along my cheekbone, half-expecting the skin to be cold. It wasn’t. But it didn’t feel like flesh either. Too flawless. Too still. Like a doll’s. Like something that had never known sweat, exhaustion, or the slow creep of time.
And then there were the eyes.
They say the eyes are the window to the soul. If that was true, then whatever looked back at me from the mirror had no business wearing my face.
Blue was gone. Not faded, not changed—erased. What stared back at me now was something else entirely.
The irises were black. Not the black of pupils, not even the black of night. Deeper. The void between stars, the kind that made your stomach drop when you looked up and realized how small you were. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Within that darkness, the light moved.
Not reflections. Not glints. Threads, like veins of molten gold, winding through the abyss. They pulsed, slow and rhythmic, like distant lightning behind storm clouds. Like something alive beneath the surface.
Those weren't my eyes. Those could not be my eyes. I had blue eyes, eyes I shared with my sister, eyes the same colour as my niece, no whatever that was.
Those were not the eyes of a man. Those were the eyes of something monstrous just like the monster that had killed the demigod weeks ago, like the goddess who had attacked me only because she could, eyes like the ones of Zeus, the god who ruined my family and now they were mine.
I exhaled, and the sound was too sharp in the silence. My reflection didn’t blink. The gold in its eyes flickered, as if amused.
What are you? I asked myself silently hoping for an answer, proof that none of this was real, that this was not me.
I didn’t expect an answer yet one came. It was the kind of answer that came not in words, but in the slow, creeping certainty that whatever I was now, I had crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed. The body in the mirror wasn’t human.
Hecate’s voice cut through the stillness. “Do you understand now?”
I used my structural analysis on myself trying to understand why. In barely the blink of a second, I had my answer.
My skeleton wasn’t made of bones anymore but of Necrodermis. All my nerves had been turned into magic circuits. My skin like I had guessed was different too. It might look like flesh but it was not and slowly but surely I understood why.
In my fight against Hecate, the only goal had been to survive a little longer. The Necrodermis I had created didn't need active commands, spoken words even it would follow if I gave them.
It was linked, controlled by my mind. My magic even more. Taking all of this together, it was not surprising. I had become such because if I hadn’t I would have not survived and survival didn’t care about ideals, only itself.
I didn’t turn. Couldn’t. My fingers tightened around the mirror’s edge. It was the height of the irony. There was no point in lying to myself anymore.
“I wasn’t human anymore.”
Comments
Arsylvos
Huh is he turning into a C'tan mix with Xerath from LoL?
Silver flare
He's part way into being a c'tan magus mix, He's a baby c'tan at best and that's stretching it, a full C'tan would have required all of hecate's power to even slow down as they could delete star systems with a snap of a finger. He's not fully mortal anymore but he's got the soul and perspective of a human and that ought to be enough.
