Theros: Godsend, Part I Page 8

  Despite the late hour, there was nothing peaceful about him now. He grabbed a handful of metal skewers off the stone bench and stabbed the training dummy again and again. The metal skewers had been forged in a blacksmith’s shop in the high-end market near the harbor. They were intended to cook souvlaki over a brazier. It was one of Daxos’s favorite foods—pieces of lamb and vegetables grilled over the open fire. The artisans had given the skewers a silver patina that glittered under the Nyx light. At the end of each skewer—the part you were meant to hold—there was a tiny silver pegasus crafted in honor of Heliod. The other end of the skewer was as sharp and deadly as a weapon. Daxos had bought the entire set of twelve only to learn that the artisan had sold dozens of sets exactly alike. A specialty of the shop, or so they told him, after his coin was spent.

  He was still holding one skewer, but he hesitated before stabbing the dummy again. It had a vaguely humanoid shape with wooden poles for legs and arms and a large brown sack filled with sand for its abdomen. Now it looked like a body felled by the arrows of a dozen archers. Daxos heard a faint whispering and looked up at Nyx. Phenax skulked through the stars away from Thassa’s portion of the sky. Although Phenax had never wronged him the way Athreos had, he didn’t have much use for the God of Deception. As an oracle of Heliod, Daxos was expected to be a paragon of honor and truth.

  Well, the joke was on him. Daxos took the sharp end of the skewer and carved a weary smile into the sack where the dummy’s face should be. The burlap split and puckered as Phenax disappeared into the astral clouds above him.

  At night, Daxos could block out much of the god-speak that assailed him during the day. The noise of the god-realm became like a dull roar in the back of his mind. Given that the sun was Heliod’s domain, Daxos was inundated with sensations of the divine from sunrise to sunset. His eyes would water, his mouth would burn, and his ears would ring—all with the glory of the gods.

  Since he was a child, he’d been beholden to Heliod. Being claimed by a god meant certain things: knowledge, prestige, and honor. But Daxos felt as if he were leashed to the temple by an invisible chain. He couldn’t leave because Heliod would only reel him back. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to run. What would he be without his god? He would never get the chance to find out. Daxos wanted to scream. He wanted to destroy something. With his free hand, he grabbed one of the wooden training swords from the dirt and lashed the dummy with rapid, practiced strokes.

  When will it end? That was the question Daxos had asked the sphinx, Medomai, who was unimpressed with the gods. Never ask a sphinx a question you don’t want the answer to. He’d gotten the answer all right. The sphinx had told him he would not only die but be murdered: At the feet of an untouched city. By the hand of someone he loved. Daxos stabbed the last skewer into the burlap and gutted the training dummy. Sand spilled down onto the tiles. In his frenzy with the wooden sword, he’d broken several of the skewers. The tiny winged horses had broken off and now lay in the piles of sand. But when he kneeled down to pick up the metal figures, he heard a man’s voice.

  “Daxos?”

  Someone was standing under the portico at the far end of the courtyard. Backlit by torches on the wall, Daxos couldn’t tell who it was. But for a moment, he felt fear. Maybe Heliod had found a way to capture his time during the night as well. Daxos dropped the wooden sword and rose to his feet. He rattled the silver winged horses together in his palm. They reminded him of the bones that the cleromancers used to tell people’s fortunes.

  “Daxos, are you all right?”

  Daxos realized that it was only Stelanos, one of the young priests who lived in the temple. Daxos raised his hand in greeting, but he didn’t smile. Daxos didn’t have many friends in the temple. The other priests treated him either with awe or jealousy. Daxos knew he came across as aloof. He didn’t make the lighthearted banter that seemed to be the mortar between people’s friendships. He was happiest when he was alone. But Stelanos didn’t seem to notice. From the day they met, Stelanos treated Daxos as if they were brothers. Both men were twenty-two years old and about six feet tall. Each had shoulder-length dark hair and a lean, athletic body. People remarked that they could have been from the same family.

  “Just light training,” Daxos said. Given the ruined state of the courtyard, his explanation sounded sarcastic.

  “You should try sleeping,” Stelanos said. “Less bruises.”

  Daxos shrugged. He’d given up sleeping at night. Sometimes during the day he would grab a few hours of rest. But the night was too precious. He squeezed tiny winged horses in his fist and felt the broken edges dig into his flesh. Under the pressure of his fist, the soft metal twisted and bent into shapeless lumps. He tucked the ruined bits into a pocket in the folds of cloth around his hips.

  “Let’s clean the yard before the elders see this,” Stelanos said. “And then I need your help.”

  Together, they worked quickly to straighten out the chaos Daxos had created. There was not much time before sunrise, so as they hefted the last of the logs, Daxos said, “You seem troubled.”

  “Yes,” Stelanos said. “I’ve told you about Althea?”

  “I remember,” Daxos said. Stelanos and Althea had grown up together. They were childhood playmates who had grown up and fallen in love. But Stelanos felt the call to serve Heliod, and he’d left his rustic village to come live in Meletis and serve the God of the Sun. Althea believed that Stelanos was destined to be her husband, and she had been heartbroken at his departure.

  “Her father came to see me,” Stelanos said. “Althea is not doing well in my absence, and he is getting on in years. He’s asked me to come home and take his place running the farm. Althea and I could marry. I am torn, Daxos. I don’t know what to do.”

  Stelanos laid his hand on his friend’s arm. As soon as Stelanos touched him, Daxos had a vision of what his friend’s life would be if he left Meletis and went home. With his god-sight, Daxos saw a man he knew to be Althea’s father walking toward a dark river in the distance. Daxos saw Althea tending to fat sheep in the pasture with a sheepdog panting near the gate. And then he saw a stone cottage. The door opened, and Stelanos himself walked out. He carried a long pair of shears and hummed to himself. Althea waved happily at the sight of him. This was his life. This was where Stelanos was meant to be.

  “Daxos, did you hear me?” Stelanos asked.

  His voice shattered the vision and flung Daxos back into his mortal self in the courtyard of the temple. Although Daxos often faded away in the middle of conversations with Stelanos, it never bothered his friend. He would just repeat his question or comment to Daxos, and the conversation would continue. But this vision was relevant to Stelanos’s life, and it left Daxos feeling shaky and upset.

  “Would you read the signs?” Stelanos asked. “Would you commune with Heliod and ask what I should do? I don’t want to desert my duties here. But I don’t want to stay either, if that’s not my fate. I miss Althea so badly, I fear I’ve made a mistake coming here.”

  The two young men sat on the edge of the fountain in the fading darkness. Stelanos sat expectantly, waiting for his friend to speak.

  “What is fate?” Daxos asked after a long pause.

  “It’s what the gods want us to do,” Stelanos replied. “It’s written by the Triad of Fates on the day we are born. We can’t change it. Whatever we are meant to do, we must do it with glory and in praise of the gods. ‘What is, is, and ever shall be.’ ”

  That was the correct answer. That was what Heliod taught his followers to say.

  “But is your fate really like a path that you must follow blindly?” Daxos asked. “Or is life about the journey? Maybe fate is a destination with countless different roads that you choose among, but there is no a singular path to limit our exploration.”

  “But we don’t have to follow blindly,” Stelanos said. “Heliod will tell you the way.”

  Daxos felt anger rising in his chest. Why did everyone treat the gods as though they were pe
rfect when it should be obvious to all that they were not? Hadn’t Purphoros and Heliod fought over petty disagreements, like toddlers squabbling over a toy? Hadn’t Thassa and Heliod quarreled like an unhappy married couple finding every opportunity to dig at the other’s weak spots? The gods were as fallible as those who worshiped them. Why was Daxos the only one who seemed to see that?

  “I’ll read the signs for you,” Daxos said. “And we’ll implore Heliod for answers.”

  Daxos retrieved the ruined bits of metal from the cloth at his waist. No longer shaped like winged horses, they were just unrecognizable lumps. He jangled them in his hands. When will it end? He shook the metal pieces one last time and cast them against the marble. Stelanos looked surprised as they clattered noisily against the stones. But in the second before they came to rest, Daxos cast a silent spell, and the silver bits reformed into the shape of tiny winged horses: a perfect homage to Heliod, God of the Sun.

  Like a child, Stelanos gasped in delight at Daxos’s parlor trick. Daxos envied him the potential freedom of his life with Althea. He would not be bound to the temple the way Daxos was. He would be his own man, able to live his life however he chose.

  “What does it say?” Stelanos asked.

  “You are destined to be a great priest in the house of Heliod,” Daxos lied. “Your future is here, in Meletis. Your fate is glory and renown.”

  Stelanos’s forehead creased with concern, and Daxos watched him carefully.

  “Is that not what you expected to hear?” Daxos asked.

  “I always believed I was destined for something greater,” Stelanos said. “My heart breaks to leave Althea, but I will serve my god faithfully.”

  Daxos felt a rush of guilt. He scooped up the tiny horses and cupped them tightly in his palm.

  “I must go write a letter to her father,” Stelanos said, climbing to his feet. “Thank you, Daxos. You are a true friend.”

  Stelanos’s footsteps faded away, the sun’s first rays spread over the top of the red tile roof, and Daxos crushed the tiny metal horses in his fist. In the last minutes before dawn, he let the silence wash over him. Such moments when he didn’t notice the passing of time, when his mind was uncluttered and unburdened, was exactly what he craved. He wanted the times when he could perceive the world through just two eyes, just like other men. Already, his skin was opening up to the unseen world, feeling the tide of Thassa’s ocean through the morning mist. He could taste the acrid wind, which was singed and furious at Keranos for another of his searing storms.

  Daxos moved to the cistern at the side of the courtyard and washed his face and arms in the clear water. Ivy covered the wall above the cistern. He reached out and touched one of the delicate leaves. Through the veins, he could feel a heartbeat and hear the rapid breathing of prey fleeing through the forest. Nylea had returned to the mortal realm after a sojourn in the unknown lands. And now she was hunting in the Nessian Forest, which was leagues away but close enough for Daxos to sense her. But he did not call to her for fear of disturbing her. The hunt was precious to Nylea, as precious as these few minutes before sunrise were to him.

  Daxos crossed to the red-gold mosaic of the sun in the precise center of the courtyard. He fell to his knees and then lowered himself to his stomach on the ground. His guilt felt sick in his stomach, but he pushed it away. He’d done the right thing, he told himself. Heliod needed priests like Stelanos as much as he needed oracles like Daxos. Daxos pressed his cheek against the small pieces of colored tile, and the grit scratched his skin. Deep in the earth, he could feel the restless turning of the roots beneath the Nessian Forest. With her bow in her hands and her lynx padding a few paces behind, Nylea ran swiftly and silently over the leafy ground. She spied her prey, raised her bow, and readied an arrow. Nylea never missed, and it was said that each of her arrowheads was marked with the name of its eventual victim.

  But before she made her shot, the God of the Hunt sensed Daxos. She stopped and laid her hand on the forest floor. Despite the distance between them, he could feel the heat of her hand against his chest. His mind’s eye was filled with an image of a gnarled tree with millions of golden butterflies instead of leaves. This was the only temple Nylea would ever permit to stand in her honor.

  “Leave your bindings and come run with me,” she said. She did not speak in mortal language. Her voice was like the howl of a wolf in the far reaches of his mind, and he perceived her desire rather than comprehended her words.

  “You know I can’t,” he said, his face cold against the ground. “How were the unknown lands?”

  “Is that where you think I was?” she asked.

  “If not, then where?” he asked.

  “I was hunting snakes in the deepest pits, and fighting horrors you cannot imagine,” she said.

  “But … why?” he asked. “You’ve been gone so long. Why would you leave your forest?”

  Daxos tried to close himself off to all other noise except the presence of Nylea. The sun was coming, and he wanted just her voice alone in his head. But his god-sight was afflicted by an unfamiliar image. In his mind’s eye, the forest became like a flat tapestry hanging on a wall. The trees and animals were fashioned from cloth and thread so fine it could only have been crafted by divine hands. In his vision there were large sections of the tapestry missing, as if someone had burned holes in the fabric and left gaping holes where life should have been.

  “Something is wrong,” he said.

  “What do you see?” Nylea asked.

  “Before my mother was murdered, I couldn’t separate the mortal realm from the god realm,” Daxos told her. “Where the two overlapped, I was blind.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “But I’m listening.”

  “The blindness has returned, Great Hunter,” he said. “There are voids where I should be able to see your forest. Something strange is happening in the Nessian.”

  Nylea heard the urgency in his voice and grew to immense size. He could hear the leaves of the trees bow to her as she passed through the canopy on the way to the sky. She notched her bow and pulled the string taut. Her hair flowed behind her, and all the animals of the forest prepared themselves for danger.

  “Something crashes through my trees at the far edge of the forest,” she said.

  Then she was gone as she passed into one of the voids in his god-vision where he couldn’t follow. Daxos checked the angle of the sun above the red tile roof. The light eased across the courtyard now like a spear cutting through the veil of night. As was his daily ritual, Daxos beat his fist on the stones and whispered his daily curse against Athreos and Erebos for how they’d wronged his mother: “I turn my back on you false gods. May your power wither, may Heliod crush you into dust, and Kruphix salt the Underworld with the dust that was you.”

  Daxos saw his mother’s face in his mind, and his hatred boiled up and then slipped away with the last shadows of evening. The sunshine warmed his bare shoulders, and he felt the presence of his god.

  “I am here, Heliod.”

  If Nylea’s voice had been like the howling of a wolf, Heliod’s voice was like the light reflecting off the water of the fountain. His god’s voice shimmered in his mind, just behind his eyes. If anyone else were in the courtyard with him, they would have heard nothing at all.

  “There has never been an oracle like you in all the world,” Heliod said. “That is why it is fitting that you are mine.”

  “I am nothing but a vessel,” Daxos said.

  “You hear all the gods’ voices at once,” Heliod said. “Who else can make that claim?”

  “They speak around me,” Daxos replied. “I listen only to you.”

  “What is true power, Daxos?” Heliod asked. “If I cast the light of the sun down, you could not stop it.”

  “I could not stop you,” Daxos agreed.

  “If the light burned from within you, would you survive?” Heliod asked, and he gave Daxos a vision of all the burning power of the sun encapsulated inside his own
chest. Through the vision, Daxos saw his own body ripped apart as beams of light burst through his skin.

  “No, I would die,” Daxos said.

  “You could not make your skin like glass stone? You could not reflect me?”

  Daxos was silent. His lord already knew that he could not.

  “I have witnessed this power in a stranger,” Heliod told him. “She possesses Purphoros’s Sword. I cannot fathom where she found it, unless she’s had it all along.”

  Daxos knew that Heliod was talking about the broken girl, Elspeth. Skeletal and grief stricken, she had led him through the night to the summit. He’d thought of her often. She’d vanished abruptly. And so had Purphoros’s Sword. Although he’d wondered if the two things were related, he had tried not to dwell on it often.

  “You were there that day,” Heliod said. “What happened to the sword?”

  “I saw it fall, and then I only saw you,” Daxos said. He kept his face pressed against the tile.

  “Moments ago, she laid the sword on my altar, and I have claimed it. I transformed it into a spear-blade that honors me,” Heliod said. “The stranger believes her fate is bound with the weapon. She is bringing it to me—to us—in Meletis.”

  “She asked for an ordeal?” Daxos asked.

  “She did not ask,” Heliod said. “So I did not tell her.”

  “What will she have to do?” Daxos said. He felt pity for the girl. Like him, she was no longer a child, but she couldn’t have completely discarded her grief any more than he had.

  “Can you imagine all of Theros with causeways of light extending far and wide in every direction? My sight used to extend to every corner of my domain.”

  “I can see it,” Daxos said, even before Heliod affixed the image in his mind. His god-sight was a fraction of a second behind Heliod’s. Heliod saw, and then Daxos followed.