Scene 1
"Fucking Apollo."
The curse left me in a low breath as I stared down at the blackened flesh along my torso. Even now, fifty years later, I could still tell where the problem began. Not with Aether himself. Apollo was the one who led Zeus's hound to my doorstep. He ran, and the fallout became mine to endure.
Closing my eyes, I forced myself to calm down instead of feeding my irritation. Anger wouldn't help me heal. Not with the state I was in.
Using all three Domains together before I was ready had done more than win me time. It had torn into me from the inside out. My rank still sat at Middle Minor God, too low to fully balance direct usage of all three at once. Sun laws pushed against Death laws. Death laws pulled against Sun. And no matter how carefully I tried to maintain distance between them, the tension remained.
That was the danger of my path.
Death and Sun naturally wanted to slide toward Life if allowed to touch too freely. Darkness was the only thing keeping the structure from collapsing into something else entirely. It acted as glue. A quiet, devouring glue that held the contradictions together while I forced them to remain mine.
So I sat in the dark heart of the island and used the darkness around me to soothe the pain while I verified my concerns.
Aether had been an entire rank above me.
And his wind laws had not left quietly.
Opening my eyes, I looked down again at the deeper cuts along my torso and ribs. Thin lines of divine wind still clung to some of them like transparent hooks buried in flesh. They weren't just wounds anymore. They were lingering laws trying to remain inside me, trying to keep cutting, keep spreading, keep reminding me what it meant to be struck by a Major God-ranked force.
I clicked my tongue and raised one hand.
Black flames crawled over my fingers.
No hesitation.
No mercy for my own flesh.
I pressed the flames into one of the deeper wounds and burned away the section of flesh riddled with wind laws. The smell was immediate. Burnt blood. Burnt divinity. Burnt meat. My jaw locked hard enough to make my teeth ache, but I kept going. Better that than letting the foreign laws linger and burrow deeper.
Another cut.
Another patch of ruined flesh.
Another slow correction.
Each time I had to be careful not to overdo it. The real danger wasn't just pain. Pain was ordinary. The danger was burning my soul along with the flesh and worsening my condition beyond what even natural recovery could fix.
So I worked slowly.
Methodically.
Darkness first to keep everything stable.
Black flames second to purge the infected sections.
Death last to dull the pain just enough that I could keep going without shaking apart.
The island had long since grown used to me.
Its caves held the smell of salt, ash, and old blood. Outside, the sea kept crashing against the cliffs in long violent rhythms while the higher brush and trees regrew in the places not fully shredded by earlier battles. Birds had slowly returned over the decades. Small animals too. Enough life that the island had stopped feeling like a battlefield and started feeling like a place trying to forget what had happened here.
Too bad the gods hadn't forgotten.
I exhaled slowly through my nose and looked at the last stretch of torn flesh.
Then burned it clean.
This time the healing came faster.
Not perfect. Not instant. But clean enough.
The cuts finally began to close instead of splitting open under invisible wind pressure, and I leaned back against the cave wall, clenching my teeth while sweat mixed with dried salt across my skin.
Fifty years.
Fifty years of slowly removing the laws.
And only now could I finally stop long enough to breathe.
That was when I sensed it.
Ships.
Several of them.
Landing on the island.
I opened my eyes and stared toward the mouth of the cave.
Mortals.
Not one boat. Not two.
Several.
And from the feel of them, they weren't wandering by accident.
They had come here on purpose.
Scene 2
Abe POV
"Abe! Are you sure there are better food here?!"
I ignored the first shout and kept my eyes on the island ahead of us.
The sea around the boats rolled in uneasy swells, dark and deep enough to remind every man here why they had only now started doubting me after we'd already crossed too far to turn back without shame. Or worse, without anything to show for it.
The Trench of Heavenly Inverted Whirlpools was behind us now.
That alone should have been enough to shut them up.
Few men crossed that taboo region and returned. Fewer still did it twice.
I tightened my grip on the side of the boat and looked up at the island rising ahead. Green. Broad. Rich. The kind of island our people hadn't seen in generations. Trees crowded the coast in thick lines, and birds circled above it without fear. Even from this distance, I could make out signs of life too abundant to belong this close to our cursed waters.
Two years ago, I found it by accident.
Two years ago, I turned back because I came alone and had no right to gamble the discovery on one man's greed.
Then I spent those years getting home, convincing my clan, and watching more of my people die before we could make the journey.
So no, I didn't have patience left for their doubt.
"Yes, you fools!" I snapped, finally turning toward the men in the other boats. "We can't afford to joke about the survival of our clan. As long as we can secure enough meat to survive several trips, then our people will have another chance at redemption to King Poseidon. Trust me, my brothers."
My voice carried over the water and cut through most of the muttering.
Good.
It needed to.
The sea had punished us for fifty years.
Whirlpools that exploded upward and took boats with them. Water tornados that came every five years and drilled deeper into our already-collapsing island. Fish thinning. Game dying off. Crops failing. Children growing smaller. Elders dying quicker. Each season feeling like the world itself had decided our name no longer mattered.
I was sick of it.
Sick of watching my people slowly die off while even the beasts of our island seemed to stop giving birth with any strength left in them.
So when I found this place two years ago, I named it what it was.
Promise.
Hope.
Maybe foolish hope. But hope all the same.
I waved for the boats to keep moving.
"Land them. Fishing won't be enough for the journeys we'll be taking back here. Fish can remain our back-up. We need real food."
That got movement.
The men stopped talking and focused on the shore.
One by one, the boats reached land. Wood scraped against stone and wet sand. The younger men jumped out first, dragging the vessels higher while others checked nets, rope, and hunting tools. It had been years since most of us had stepped onto an island that didn't smell half-dead.
This place smelled alive.
Wet soil. Leaves. Salt. Animal musk. Thick green life under the warmth of the sun.
For a moment, just one moment, I almost believed the journey was already worth it.
Then I remembered where we came from.
And what men like us always had to pay before good things stayed.
Scene 3
"Good. Secure the beast to the boats and let's check out that pack of deer."
We had already brought down enough to justify the landing.
One large animal was tied and dragged back toward the shore while I sent the younger hunters with it. Let them handle the obvious work. Let them return to the boats and start preparing what we already had.
Me and a few of the older hunters stayed behind.
Not because we were stupid.
Because old men know when a land is still offering more than it has shown yet.
With most of the group already back near the ships, a sighting of a White Deer became our final target.
That alone felt strange enough to matter.
A white deer this far into a rich island, untouched and broad as a blessing.
I decided quickly what it would mean.
An offering to Poseidon.
A sign of respect before asking the sea to allow our journeys back and forth.
That thought settled the others too. A few of them even smiled for the first time since we landed.
So we followed it.
Further inland than I liked.
Hours passed while we tracked the herd deeper through the trees. The sunlight shifted overhead in warm slants through leaves thick enough to turn the forest floor gold and green by turns. We found droppings, hoof marks, broken brush. More than one hunter whispered that this island was too generous to be natural.
I told them to keep moving.
Then one of them froze and lifted a hand.
"It's there."
A hand pulled me back by the shoulder, and his other hand pointed ahead through the brush.
I saw it.
A large buck stood near the mouth of a cave, surrounded by doe. Grazing. Eating. Calm. The rest of the deer bathed in the warm sunlight pouring through a break in the trees like they had never known fear in their lives.
For a moment, none of us moved.
Then one of the hunters whispered, "Who's going to take the shot?"
The most experienced among us rose slowly and lifted his wooden bow. Around him, the rest of us followed, taking aim at our own targets in case the herd bolted.
That was when my skin went cold.
"Wait."
The White Buck had lifted its head.
It was looking directly at me.
Not in the way animals look when they hear movement.
It was watching me.
A single hard second passed between us.
Then it vanished.
No warning. No stumble. No startled leap.
It blitzed straight into the cave, and the rest of the deer scattered in every direction from the violence of its sudden movement.
"Chase the buck!"
The hunters were already moving before I could fully turn.
Then I felt it.
Wind.
Not ordinary wind.
Wind growing in speed around us with the same wrong pressure our people had learned to fear whenever Lord Poseidon's tornados formed over the sea.
"Wai-"
My warning died in my throat.
Because I saw them.
Two crimson eyes.
Deep in the cave.
Watching me.
Right before the excited hunters were cut in half.
The wind didn't push them back.
It erased them.
Bodies split. Blood sprayed. One man's upper half turned before his lower half even hit the ground. Another disappeared into red mist so fast my mind refused to understand it at first.
I dove down and tackled the only other fisher who had chosen to come deeper with us, dragging him to the ground just as the tree beside us split with a wet cracking scream.
For a second all I could hear was wind and my own pulse.
Then the tree started to fall.
Saving us by accident as it crashed between us and the cave mouth.
"R-Run… Run!!"
I grabbed him, dragged him up, and stumbled back through the brush as the world behind us howled.
We did not look back.
Not once.
We ran as fast as terror would let us, tripping over roots and stone, crashing through branches, lungs burning, ears full of wind that sounded too much like laughter.
By the time we reached the coast, it was already worse.
Several men were down by the boats, cut in half like the hunters inland. Survivors were screaming and fleeing toward the taboo region in blind panic, which only made the sight ahead of us even worse.
A whirlpool far larger than any five men had ever seen formed faster than the eye could follow.
Then a tornado of wind fell from the sky.
Not rose.
Fell.
It devoured ships, men, and sea alike as if the heavens themselves had opened and decided to shred everything beneath them.
I stopped because my legs stopped.
Because there was nowhere to run that still looked like escape.
That was when the voice came beside me.
"This isn't a place for mortals."
I turned.
A dark-skinned young man stood to my right as calmly as if the world around us was not ending.
His tattoos pulsed gold beneath his skin.
His eyes were crimson.
And when he looked at me, I understood in a single sickening instant that whatever lived in the cave, whatever owned the wind, whatever had turned this island into death—
it obeyed a scale of existence I had no words for.
"I can't say you'll be safe," he said, "but I can at least send you away. Pray to my Father Hades for safety."
My eyes met his for one heartbeat before he looked upward.
I followed his gaze.
Dozens of Gods stood below the clouds.
Watching.
Waiting.
I felt a hand grab my shoulder.
Then the world disappeared.
I was thrown so hard the island became a dot behind me before my mind even caught up. I saw my homeland pass beneath me. Saw the outline of the sea I thought I knew. Saw distance itself turn wrong.
And the last thing I remembered before everything went black—
was the island shrinking behind me like something the world itself was trying to hide.