The Irreversible Reckoning

  ***

  It was Janna who shared the prophecy of the last Athene with me. We had been onboard for seven months, so for six and a half months, we had been romantically involved. She had been hesitant to tell me, because she had suspected that I would be rightly furious to learn that all her ex-husband wanted was to impregnate me with his spawn who would apparently save the world from the plague of Old Spirits currently consuming it from north to south to east to west.

  “You needed to know, Brynna, because they want this child.” She told me tentatively, “They will do anything to ensure that they get it, and I do not want that. You already have one Athenian child. If you bring another one into the world…”

  I stood up, shock coursing through me, but what hurt worse than the shock was the recognition of my own utter stupidity. I had known Adam was not to be trusted when I had first met him. I had known that he meant me harm. After James had told me that Adam had sent him to collect me, I should have pushed Adam away, but I had grown closer to him. I had forgiven him for his part, while I had continued to punish James, when without Adam, James never would have betrayed me. Of course, without Adam telling James to collect me, I never would have been saved, but still. I had trusted him, and now, I was horrified to learn that the reason why he wanted me in the first place, the reason why he had sent James after me, was so he could get me pregnant with some sort of savior child. How could I not be horrified at that?! When he had wanted James to forcibly deliver me to him, it was so he could impregnate me!

  “I just wanted you to know.” Janna said softly from the bed. I could hear the emotion in her voice, and because my heart was beating so fast, my senses enhanced. I smelled the salt in her tears when they began to fall, and I heard her shuddering sobs echoing through my ear canal as though she were standing right beside me and crying directly into my ear.

  “Brynna, there must be a way to prevent it.”

  I had only begun to laugh. It began as a slight giggle, one that I tried to hide by covering my mouth with my hand, but it soon grew hysterical, and I had to lower my hand so I could grasp my stomach.

  “Fate has taken care of it, Janna.” I had said, “And I cannot wait to tell my husband just how resolutely Fate has ensured that he will never have his messiah-child.”

  Little did the prophecy know that my womb could not hold life, and I am glad. I was glad back then, too, and I am still glad that I never could conceive this little messiah-child, this little being who would have this boundless purpose thrust upon his or her tiny shoulders from birth. Besides, I would not allow some stupid prophecy or chauvinistic Fate to force me into the role of mother in order to make me more fitting with the conventions of my gender. I am by no means saying that all mothers are mothers simply because their gender says they must be, but for me to be a mother would be the direct result of the universe playing dirty tricks. Penny was the only child that I would ever have, and for the first few weeks of my imprisonment, Penny had been kept from me. It was not until I began to use my feminine wiles on the Warden of the prison, the so-called Lord of War, that I was allowed to see her again.

  It was this prophecy that first resulted in the warden, the so-called Lord of War, calling me to his office. It was around this time that my eyes began to change, that the blue disappeared in favor of the white and black, and when I sat down in front of his desk, and his eyes rose to meet mine, I saw him wince.

  “Mrs. Elohimson…” He said in a voice that was deep and slow, like molasses melting in the sun, “Are we going to have a problem?”

  In the reflection of his silver desk lamp, I discreetly looked, and it was then that I saw them, white swirling into blue in one eye, and black swirling into blue in the other. With those newly mutated eyes, I looked into him, into this fearsome man about whom I had been warned by Tyre. He certainly was fearsome, though he was younger than James and Adam. I would have put his physical age in his late thirties. His hair was parted and gelled stylishly, and his eyes were a dark, inky blue, like the sky at night. Like Tyre’s nose, the Warden’s was prominent, and I found my eyes drawn to it. My head turned on the side so I could observe him, his nose, his eyes, and his hair from a different angle, and he looked back at me, expecting an answer.

  “Mrs. Elohimson.” He said again, a little more firmly, and he stood, rising to a height that was just as intimidating as Adam’s, which I had not been expecting. “I asked you a question.”

  There was not a hint of anger in his voice, but only a strange, forceful calm. If I continued to keep my silence, he would choose between hurting me or killing me, though I believed very firmly that it would merely be the former.

  “As it stands now,” I replied, because honestly, I was sick of watching my bruises fade only to have them darkened again by another man’s fists, “I do not think we are going to have a problem. But I suppose the continued state of calm and rationality between us depends on us both.”

  I looked up at him, and he looked down at me. For a long time, we stared, playing in a battle of wills neither of us wanted to lose. When he chuckled to himself and sat down, I wondered if I was going to win myself yet another admirer. Because I was healing up nicely, and beginning to feel more like my typical feisty self despite my new rage at Adam, my longing for James, and my fear for Penny, in the children’s ward of the prison, and Violet, wherever she was, and my protectiveness over Janna, whose lips I could still taste on mine, I could easily see into his mind. Also, his skills at keeping me out were nowhere near as advanced as Adam’s.

  “Are you Tyre’s brother?” I asked, because I no longer had to focus all of my attention on prying into minds in order to do so.

  “I am.”

  “And they call you the Lord of War.”

  “They do.”

  “Why is that?”

  Standing at the front of over ten thousand men, he barked in their native tongue, demanding that they fight and kill for their God. Together, they marched on Adam’s city, burning it to the ground and killing any who stood in their way. It was the first time that Lumiere had burned, and in the battle, Adam had found him. In their fight, Adam had gained the upper hand, but instead of killing him, he had used his knife to cut him from his mouth up to his eye, to force him to wear the wound as a token of shame, of defeat, of being spared in the way one spares a mere civilian, not how one should spare the man known as the Lord of War. But Adam had spared his life, and left him to bear that shame for hundreds of years, and during those years, the Lord of War had fought and killed, always to absolve himself of that terrible shaming.

  “I have won every battle that I have ever fought.”

  “Including the one when Adam scarred your face?”

  “Are you invading my private memories, Mrs. Elohimson? How would you like it if I did the same to you?”

  “Are you an Athene?” I asked, and I was actually leaning forward now, totally enthralled. Adam had led me to believe that my kind were gone, but if the Lord of War was one of my kind…

  “No.” He said with a slight smile, “I am afraid not. But there are other ways for me to see into your mind, Mrs. Elohimson. Rather, there are ways for me to make you tell me what is in your mind. But I brought you here for other reasons.”

  “And they are?”

  “You have been made aware of the prophecy regarding yours and the First King’s child?”

  “Yes. The Second Queen made me aware.”

  “And you have surmised that we have an interest in this child?”

  “An interest in killing it, you mean.”

  “No.” He leaned forward now, “Brynna… Is it alright if I call you that?”

  “It is my name.”

  “Yes. But is it alright if I address you informally?”

  “Oh, you require my permission to address me informally, but you would not require my permission to fuck me right now, would you?”

  “Brynna!” He exclaimed, but he took a breath and looked at me, “I will have none of that, do y
ou understand me? Please refrain from…”

  “I know, I know. When I say ‘fuck,’ it tempts you to commit Offense. To sin. I do apologize.” I said, “And I apologize to tell you that there will be no First Child born from the union between the First King and Queen.”

  “Oh? Why is that?”

  “Because I cannot conceive. Two other men I knew who, like yourself, did not bother themselves with consent, made a bit of a mess of me down here.” I pressed my hand to my lower stomach, “The one child I was able to conceive bled out of me and more than likely would have killed me had my same-sex partner, Rachel, and two of my close friends not rushed me to the hospital.”

  For a long moment, he stared at me, eyes slightly narrowed, trying to determine if I was bluffing. I stared back into his eyes, wanting to laugh, because I was certainly not bluffing, and I was waiting for the moment when the disappointment, however slight, began to show on his face.

  “Well, we will see.” He said, “Many of your kind came here infected with various malignant growths all over their bodies, and they found themselves healed.”

  “Well, I have been engaging in unprotected sex with my former love, James, for two years now, and I have never once even skipped a period. My stars, if I think of it now, I was never even a day late.”

  I kid you not, this man, who was telling me with very little discretion, to screw Adam until a child had been put into my womb, flinched slightly at my mention of the biological process which would make the implantation of that child possible in the first place.

  “Like I said,” He replied softly, “We shall see. You will confer with our doctors here, and we will determine when your monthly visits with your husband will occur. Of course, they will occur when we feel you will have the highest chance of conceiving. Tyre has a great interest in this child.”

  “I assume it is by your decree that I have been allowed to see my real child, Penny.”

  “Yes. That was by my decree. She is a very special child, and she is of interest to Tyre, as well, because she shares your gift.”

  “Oh, but I thought it was a curse?”

  “It is a rarity, and that interests him. It interests me as well. But in regards to your daughter, if you would like to continue seeing her, I recommend you remain on your best behavior. If you do that, I will allow you to see her nightly, and that is quite generous, Brynna.”

  “So, by staying on my best behavior, you mean that I should stop cutting the throats of all those who step to me? You were a warrior, Warden. Surely, you remember how it feels to take a life. How the kill burns inside of you as their blood pours, and you feel like your soul is stealing theirs, like your life is drinking in their life… You would not ask to take that from me, especially when many down there want to rape and kill me simply because I am the so-called First Queen, and because James is no longer there to protect me. You would not deny me my right to protect myself.”

  “Oh, of course not. You will discover that we have a very different definition of what constitutes good behavior in here.”

  “So, from what activities should I refrain?”

  “Just make your husband happy, keep him as besotted with you as he is now. Stay away from James Maxwell, because he is Janna’s now, and he is ours now, as well. We have use for one who is so strong and prolific a Herculian, as you called him, and especially now that you have summoned him back from the land of the dead, and he is even stronger than he was before. He will be of great use to us.”

  “Don’t hurt him.” I said, and for a moment, my eyes were only blue, and that made him pity me, which had not been my intention. “Just don’t hurt him anymore.”

  He looked at me, seemingly surprised.

  “He thinks nothing of you anymore. Tyre ensured that. Still, you think of him. You wish to protect him from harm.”

  Before my eyes could turn back, my heart surged. I could not stop the sudden onslaught of memories, even though there in the Warden’s office was not the place to see them. That night in the city, him lighting my cigarette. His beautiful eyes. His smile. Us in the car, me sitting sideways in my seat, my head rested against the headrest so I could look at him as I talked. Him kissing me in that corridor of the ship, apologizing, and me pushing him, kissing him, wanting him, feeling something there with him that I had never felt before, something that I never wanted to lose, something that I wanted to feel every day for the rest of my life. Him laying me down on the Pangaean earth, his lips against mine, my hands on his face, on his neck, squeezing his back while his strong body pressed to mine. I remembered gasping the first time he slowly slid all of himself into me, how that gasp had dissolved into a moan, how I had held him so tightly, because I had never known how good it could be with a man, and God, he was good at it, at both the act and making sure that I knew I was safe, I was loved, I was everything. So many memories, all of them of him and me. Him and me. Him and me. My James and me.

  “God,” The Warden said with such surprise in his voice, “Your heart still holds him, even now.”

  “Yes,” I said back softly, and I looked up at him, “Even now. Now, and for one million years.”