Chapter 80:: Down Eros, Up Mars.

He finds himself again on that too-white plain — not the battle-field, this time, but the first place he had seen — the clearing, and the cave. He is inside the cave, this time, and, though he can see out of it, his feet cannot go where his eyes can. He is rooted, there, and slowly sees his so-white limbs turn to whiter marble, till his eyes are all that can move.

He hears footsteps, and this is a new kind of terror, to know someone near him but being unable to see them. The footsteps stop just outside his field of vision, and someone speaks. Calls him son, and heaps blame on him for deserting his cause, soothes his (imagined) guilt and (very real) fright, and insists, again and again, that he will find a way to escape his captors, and live and fight for his true gods, for his family, for his father. There is a hand — colder than his stone skin — on his face, and a face comes into view. A youthful face, radiant and glorious, and something like a bad imitation of love shining in the inhuman (godlike) eyes. He looks down, marble eyelids refusing to move, and thinks he glimpses wings. His eyes travel upwards, against what little will he exerts, and he finds himself looking again at that perfect-aloof-hateful face. His father’s face, and while he knows — knows, deep inside, bred into bone and blood and breath — that his life is an offering to his father, and his soul but a libation to be poured out at his altar, there is nothing he wants more than to be able to wipe off that calm serenity, that unquestioning awareness that the world and its inhabitants live and die at his whim, or if not his, that of his kin. And something of that hatred-confusion-devotion must show on his immobile face, because he smiles, this bastard god (half-god, really, ennobled beyond his blood) and pats his cheek and touches his sculptured hair, and vanishes. And he finds himself flesh, again, and steps out of the cave on tottering limbs, and falls, and shuts his eyes and opens them into the gloom of the two-room flat in which he has spent the best part of a week, now. He is trapped, still, he realises, trying to sit up, and struggles.

“Sleeping bag, Al’skandar.” He looks towards the voice, heart hammering fast, still. “Wait. Hold still, come on.” Someone’s hand fumbles at his side, and a zipper is pulled down. “There.”

He sits up, forcing his pulse to a normal speed. “Did I wake you?”

“No.” He can’t see Cadmus/Carlton as anything but an indistinct shape moving around the room, and then the lights come on, harsh enough to make him blink his eyes shut. “I was awake, already.”

“I…” Carlton looks haggard, and he wonders what the etiquette is, for inquiring after the health of your de-facto jailer. “Nightmare?”

“I do not know yet,” Carlton says, slowly, “whether it was a true dream or not. But, yeah, scared the fuck out of me.”

He nods. “I’m sure you’ve guessed it was much the same for me.” He reaches up a hand to push his hair from his eyes. “Bastards.”

“Athene visited me,” Cadmus says — hurrah, I can tell the two apart, isn’t that great for me? — eyes a little lost. “She accused me of turning against my gods.”

“Carlton…” he whispers, lost-frustrated-angry — how do you console a hero who is fighting his gods? How, when you have been taken against your will? How not, when you suffer the same plight?

“I am not so easily turned away from my path,” Cadmus says, the determination in his voice artificial, and shallow against the horror-shame-sorrow in him. “They seek to deceive us, to make us help them destroy all humans.”

“My father visited me,” he finds himself saying — what is it in this man, this boy, that makes him offer truth for truth? “Hermes. He held me immobile. He pushed my loathing for him away, and drowned me in belief. Yet I do not believe in him.”

“He is true.”

“Not by my belief,” he grinds out.

Carlton smiles, wry and rueful, and kneels by him and grabs his hand. “Your belief, my friend Al’skandar, might be difficult to withhold.”

He drags his eyes from Carlton’s face — his utterly unremarkable face — to the hand held in his. His injured hand, purple bruises mottling the flesh, a constant pain. But not, because Cadmus winds the bandages off, and the skin underneath is unmarked, and he bends it, large hand curved gently over his smaller fingers, and the agony he is expecting fails to make an appearance.

He drags his eyes back up to meet Cadmus’ terrified black eyes. “A true dream, then.”

“A visitation,” Cadmus smiles. “Is he still not true by your belief?”

“My belief is in me,” he says, forcing himself to pull his hand from Carlton’s.

“Mine…” Carlton — Cadmus? — falters, looks away, towards the door behind which Harmonia is sleeping, towards the one window, towards the door Eris pushed him through, five day ago, now. “My master should be apprised of this. But I have no way of reaching him, nor any news of him. I…” You’re as trapped as we are; mutual jailers. “Should we tell your sister?”

Here we go again, the Cadmus-and-Harmonia Show. Watch in how many ways Cadmus throws himself at Harmonia’s feet, and she stabs his face with her stilettos. It’s the most entertaining thing on T.V. Fucking masochist. “Let her wake of her own accord. No need, nor reason, to disturb her sleep because ours has been disturbed.”

“Indeed no,” Carlton smiles, sheepish, and guilty. “And should not we sleep, too? Hours left till morning.”

Looks like we’ll have to wait for the show to begin, boys and girls. Sorry for the delay, but it’ll be well worth the wait. In the meantime, let’s tune in to the Al’skandar Phillips Show, where our protagonist has added anxiety about his sexual orientation, and a hugely inappropriate crush, to his already overwhelming problem—how to save all humanity from the Olympians and still stay alive. “Yeah. Hours.” He lies back down and forces the bag zipped shut and turns away from Carlton and hopes for a dreamless sleep.