Legend of Axiatés Episode 2 Read online

being the carapace if you will.

  ‘What is your stance on this?’ Delegan asked the Commander.

  ‘I don’t have a stance against a Goddess, I just want you talk to her before anyone opens fire or before she loses her temper!’

  This was not quite how Delegan had imagined his first night would pan out.

  ‘Approach warily,’ advised the Commander as they grew near.

  Delegan felt himself grow pale coming to the room. The antechamber was quite huge, and it was here where the lord of mansion had the most chandeliers of singing crystals. It was apparent then that Delegan had arrived too late to instil some sense into the situation. He was to witness the very last of a stand-off doomed to conflict. From his point of view, he entered the room from what could be considered the back, opposite to where visitors to the lord’s manor might come through the doors at the far end to make a petition to lord Charlan. Where he would sit, in the middle of the chamber, was a gilded chair, the only piece furniture on the large oval shaped marble floor, the room spacious and bare. But at this moment and at this early in the morning it was Axiatés sitting in the chair, Delegan spotting her long raven dark hair flowing over the backrest of the chair. She was sitting perfectly still and she seemed to have an audience of Mortar soldiers in front of her, some pointing weapons at her, some pointing weapons at each other.

  ‘We will not kill innocent men who might very well have saved your life!’ cried the man Delegan assumed was the Commander's second in command.

  ‘Decide now if you want to be known as traitors in my eyes. I will take the life of every man here if you do not obey my command!’ Her voice rang out.

  The second in command made a dreadful mistake, turning his weapon on the Goddess right then. His choice was made.

  The situation could not be more alarming, and the misunderstanding culminated right then into a massacre. A hum came across the room, and then a rumble. The chandeliers came crashing down, their chains cut by invisible forces. The many crystals suspended from the circular metal frames crashed spectacularly all around the Mortars and the unflinching Goddess. The men were seemingly showered in glass shards. They hunkered down in the turmoil and came out unscathed, except for a solitary man who had taken the brunt of a chandelier's impact. Just when things had gone quiet, the room was swept up in a stranger chaos still. The thousands upon thousands of crystal shards that had smashed on the floor were pulled toward one corner of the room like a retreating tide - they rose in a heap and then coalesced into the figure of a giant serpent, moving in a convincing imitation of a snake. Everyone knew who the puppet master was here; no one other than the Goddess could invest her power into what was effectively a lifeless substance and gather it into an entity as lifelike as this. The glass serpent, composed of so many particles was mainly featureless, yet there was an aggression to it that was tangible. Delegan had seen three horrible events in his lifetime. This was the fourth.

  The serpent of glass lunged with force, the head changing shape as it went, and pierced the Mortar like a needle and thread, the hundred tiny wounds that the glass caused creating an erratic pattern of blood across the floors and walls. The Mortar men opened fire on the glass, the bullets passing through as it did not have any real substance. Where Delegan tried to stay out of sight, the Commander rushed in, shouting wildly to try and diffuse the situation and save his men. The serpent on one of its rounds across the hall seemed very corporal as it rammed the Commander senseless against the chamber wall like a giant fist.

  It spared not one of the Mortars, guilty or innocent. Finally it decided to finish the rest of them in one terrifying moment. At the mouth of the snake, it grew red, as though a fire was lit there, rapidly heating the glass participles. The next moment it roared and a spray of superheated glass swept over the last six men, leaving them burned and mutilated. Delegan found himself sitting on the floor, looking aghast at the carnage and the snake slowly slithering around the room and circling the Goddess now that no other threat existed. Delegan himself certainly was not a threat. The Goddess had still not moved except for the most indistinct breeze that passed through her hair.

  To the end of his days Delegan could not say why he approached through the carnage - it was not the cancer ravaging his stomach that made him approach so recklessly. No, it was something else. The Goddess had an allure to her. As he trudged through the chaos, the snake watched him, its eyeless head following Delegan's every movement, guarding the Goddess. Delegan very cautiously circled around the Goddess so that he could approach from the front. She was rigid in the chair, her hands wrapped around the armrests like she was shackled there. She had clearly undergone a great deal of anxiety just now. Maybe that is why he approached her, he had somehow sensed her fear. Her eyes were trained on him, the pupils dilated. She was fair skinned and wore a stunning green dress. She also had several pieces of jewellery; bangles, earrings and rings of elaborate nature. Her servants painted her face, but Delegan could see it was woefully unnecessary. She was a stunning creature.

  ‘The birds are going to sing soon,’ she said.

  Delegan could have guessed it, but the way she said it and then suddenly one chirp ignited the existence of others was eerie. She had been intent on proving to Delegan that she knew things only a Goddess could now.

  Delegan wasn't sure; was she a deity for real? Or was she simply the closest thing to a Goddess seeing that she helped power civilizations with the suns she created?

  That was the worst part for Delegan to try and process. For extended periods of time the girl seemed to appear very human, but within her lurked a power too terrible to try and comprehend.

  ‘They were going to kill me,’ said Axiatés.

  Delegan wasn't going to ask whether she could die right away. There would be many questions like these yet to be answered sooner or later.

  Delegan was very aware the Goddess could tear him apart at a whim, discard his being from existence without even a move of the lips, so he was going to talk using utmost discretion.

  She was a very strange creature and right then Delegan hoped she could not read minds. Why they had given him this responsibility was anyone's guess.

  ‘I like the birds. They sound hopeful, calling out the day, asking the sun to rise. And when it does I imagine them conferring like they are sitting around a great big table, with tea for everyone, and they could talk about good things, not interrupted by anything until the sun has come and gone.’

  Delegan had noticed she was shaking slightly and her hands were still trying to dig into the armrests. If it had been any other girl he might've tried to take her hands in a calming gesture.

  ‘Can I bring you a cup of tea Your Excellency?’

  ‘That would be very nice,’ she said softly. Her voice was haunting.

  Walking from the antechamber into the kitchen Delegan felt sick, his head spinning. Behind him he suddenly realized what madness had just transpired, the gravity of the situation starting to sink in. The kitchen was brightly lit, seemingly clinical compared to the chamber Delegan just left. When he stood there, waiting for the kettle to boil, his mind was scrambling on options. I should run, just go back to Athomos. ‘This is the most important period in the history of man,’ they had said to him. They were right of course, and Delegan could not turn his back on that.

  When Delegan brought the Goddess her cup and saucer he was shaking badly, managing to hand it to her without spilling tea on her.

  She grabbed him by the sleeve and his heart froze. Delegan was already dying, but he still had a great fear of dying by the hands of the Goddess.

  ‘You have cancer?’ she asked.

  ‘That is right Your Excellency,’ he stuttered. She did know things.

  ‘You outlived your wife? Did you love her?’

  Delegan was silent, his throat constricted. This night had been much too exciting to bring up conversations about his wife.

  ‘You did not?’ asked Axiatés.

  ‘I love
d her very much, Your Excellency. She was the light of my life and my days left on this earth since her departure are but a shadow of a life already spent and done. I used to bring her tea every night, just like... The pain of losing her returned to him, the kinds of pain revisited on him again of which he thought the worst were already over. He had to reach into his coat to bring a handkerchief to his eyes, wiping tears away like a fool not a foot away from the most powerful being on earth.

  ‘What did she look like?’ asked Axiatés.

  Delegan tentatively removed a folded photograph out of his pocket. He had others, better ones, but this one was the one he carried around with him. It was his favourite. It was a picture of his wife a year before she died, and when he looked at it, the smiling face still transformed the wrinkles and the grey hair into any stage of her life that was most beautiful to him on that day, drawing from a lifetime worth of memories. Sometimes, that mind as big as a vault did nothing but remember her many happy moments, honouring the times that she laughed and smiled.

  Wiping the last of his tears away he said, ‘You are almost as beautiful as she was,’ in a voice thick with grief.

  Delegan did not know where that came from, and if a Goddess was a vain creature then he might yet be sent to meet his wife in the afterlife right now. He had just implied to