PORTALS
CHAPTER I: mythos (excerpt)
∆ ∆ ∆
- Brothers, sisters: hear me
He is coming and I cannot face him alone -
I closed my eyes and touched the watery stone. My fate would be sealed should I speak any further.
- I am forsaken
I am fallen -
I pressed my scar and spoke the summons.
I am yours
yours
yours
∆ ∆ ∆
A-P-H-R-O-D-I-T-E.
My father’s voice. My real name. Less of a greeting than an outcry, a universal decree. As if in its pronouncement it were forever tarnished, all things and entities in its association now banished, erased, having never existed at all.
A P H R O D I T E
His godvoice echoed endlessly in my mind, accelerating from a dull sensation behind the ears to a rattling of the skull. I gasped in pain and looked for him but knew better; he no longer took form. He could be everywhere and nowhere at once, a parasitic ether infecting and devouring his host without appearing before them at all.
Still there must be something. Some small shiny object conducting his presence. I scanned the chapel but found nothing.
INSOLENCE, he boomed. A hot tingle constricted my throat, hoisting me by the neck and lifting my toes from the marble. The air became hot, electrified. Grapevines withered to dust. My garb incinerated. I hung before him naked now, nothing between us - the deviant daughter and the imperial father. His mindvoice shot down my spine.
Faced with infinite power what do you plead?
But I knew his power wasn’t infinite. His lightning couldn’t reach beyond the gates, checked by equally powerful gods beyond them, clashing and exploding with him at the border in a fantastic display of cosmogonic balance.
There must be something here to offset his strength. I searched the chapel frantically for a source. The longer this went on the stronger he’d become. In mere seconds and with only godmind he’d entered me and taken hold of my essence, defying its gravity, raising it in the air like a ragdoll and draining its juices like a raisin.
“Father I can explain," I choked back tears of godblood.
He slipped out of my ear with a buzz and I fell crashing to the ground. The marble cracked beneath my knees and a shockwave of dust blasted the walls. He took pleasure in this, becoming the dust, reverberating through it, striking in circles at pillars and panels, ravaging the sacred space, disintegrating its matter into sparks with maniacal laughter.
He rode the winds from the chapel to the village, ripping off rooftops, sweeping up sheep, huffing and puffing and blasting and morphing, pushing outwards, blowing down, gusting and wheezing and booming until reaching the outer banks of the plateau, cliffs of sheer amethyst built by Hephaestus himself. Their stones held steady as he disappeared inside them.
- A moment of silence - A quiet possibility.
A chance they could contain his immortal rage
locking him inside their magic once and for all.
- Take him now - I supplicated - He is yours.
Slowly, tinkering ever-so-slightly, small purple chips began to fall.
Chip and fall. Chip and fall. Crystal dust spewed over the river below, evaporating in the steamy waters, filling the sky with lilac haze.
No, I thought, the blacksmith god was no match for his father, who was infiltrating progressively deeper, beyond the limits of self and mind, defying reason, unleashing a force paralleled only by Tartarus upon all who dared cross him.
The cliffs cracked in purple diagonals and broke with a deafening blast. The wind circled back with a vengeance, this time hotter. A vortex surrounded the chapel. My skin cracked and my hair became brittle and I was lifted again from my feet.
Athena, I thought, desperate for aid. Shine your favor on me.
Look, my father bade, taking control of my mind. I tried to open my eyes but couldn’t withstand the gale force winds.
Look, he echoed. An army of violet dust pried open my eyes, piercing an image into them. Before me a canvas cloth was sucked from an oversized mirror. Its smooth center held steadfast while the decorations of its frame swirled in hallucinatory delight. Demonic faces dashed across the bronze, eager to behold my destruction.
LOOK, my father's purple winds pushed me closer. The heat of his presence stung like knives. I tasted their metal. I felt them shred my skin. He was the only god to communicate not through one sense but them all - an attack on all fronts, of pain.
My limbs became heavy and my heart filled with dread. The thing now before me would certainly punish. The simple task to look was not a task at all but the twisting of a tourn-
iquet. My father beckoned. He forced. He commanded:
L
O
O
K
He maximized his aggression, pushing my body to the looking glass. I tried to avert my gaze but his dusty winds held it steady.
Paralyzed, pressed to perceive, there in the glassy reflection. I saw something I’d never seen.
-Myself- I saw myself.
Not as I once was but
as I’d become under his spell:
Floating feet, calloused and filthy. Waist engorged and varicose. Sagging deformed breasts obscured by thin silver hair.
Eyes bloodshot and coarse with electricity, stinging yellow-hot and disgusting, no longer those of a goddess of beauty but a heretic, a witch, a hag.
What you’ve become to me, he bellowed: an abomination.
-But he’d made a mistake -
In his quest to castigate he’d revealed the source of his power:
- The mirror -
It had to be the mirror. I reached toward it with all my might, pushing pink energy through my fingertips.
Foolish child, he scoffed, throwing my arms behind my back and binding them with invisible tethers.
Athena hear me, I thought. Descend on him now. It is you he favors most.
- Shine this favor on me and I will be your servant. I will do whatever you ask -
I tried to close my eyes, to pretend it wasn’t real.
- Don’t look -
-Don’t look –
- Don’t -
LLLLLLLLŁLLLLLLLLLLLL
OOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOO
KKKKKKKKKKKK
But he pressed on
searing my eyelids
imprinting the vision deeper.
Athena, I thought. Come.
As the phantasmic reflection etched into my psyche I lost hope, faithless in the face of my antithesis, failing to supersede it, succumbing to its destruction.
A great goddess would fall today, they’d say. She got carried away and had to pay. Take her, the filthy slut. And all that she stands for. Get her away from us and let her be gone.
My soul-essence escaped my mouth. My godtears ran dry. I heaved and coughed, doubling over and writhing in pain.
It would be over soon.
I was no match for Him.
It really was too late.
My existence was slipping away
and in its final moments
I thought of Ramesses,
my lover in a cave
wondering what had become
of his unborn child.
Of his wife the godwoman
who’d inspired and cared for
and loved the earth’s creatures
with endless abundance.
She wouldn’t be there for him.
Not anymore.
She’d die
- sprawled before the feet of her father, spilling her insides and stillborn belly to the earth, returning her powers to the source. And the terrible father would drink her entrails, sipping them back up, reigning supreme, exacting justice as he saw fit, taking back what was rightfully his, cleansing the sin, correcting the mistake, usurping the power.
I took one last glance to the mirror. I had to see, to truly see. I squinted and released. Squinted and released. I mumbled a spell beneath my breath.
And there -
beyond my reflection -
I saw him take shape.
- My father in the flesh -
Towering behind me, holding my limbs with Dolusian strings, manipulating me like a marionette, smiling sadistically, unmistakably Zeus.
His spell had defied him. The mirror revealed him and here was my chance. If I could muster one last shot, one last blast at the Gorgon glass and deliver the mortal blow.
But I was fading. I was losing. My heart and thoughts slowed, each moment more sluggish than the next. I became less and less, regressing through realms:
A goddess…
A demigod…
Most painfully a mortal.
The hot stings of electricity melted my flesh, shedding its layers.
An animal…
An insect…
A ghost.
Shrinking and regressing. Shrinking and regressing.
Finally and undeniably a pathetic pile of ash.
A devoured and discarded vomitus of cinder.
My mind left my body with a whisper. I summoned one last thought in the immense and overpowering heat, a messy pile on the floor before its master.
One last thought.
One last chance.
Athena.