Serpent In Love (🔞) - Completed

20. A Snake's Final Resolve

I lower the shard I clenched in my right hand then glance up at the red evening sky.

Not too many hours to go.

I feel my anxiety lessens as I walk out of the summit palace's side garden toward the marble front steps leading up to the palace's main entrance.

Two guards post to either side of the ground landing of the steps.

Neither of them sees me as I stride pass the pair to embark the marble staircase.

Obviously, I wear the invisibility helmet and now I'm invisible.

Reaching the top landing, I didn't enter the palace.

Instead, I saunter to the farthest section to the right of the landing. There, I turn and sit on the top step facing forward, to wait.

I'd visited this palace twice before with Aquila in the one-and-half-week I lived with him. Both of those occasions were him having private meetings with Zeus.

Right now, my gaze cast outward toward the front gate, my trembly fingers tightly interlaced in my lap.

All the while, my heart pounds away in my chest. I feel paradoxical emotions of anticipation mixed in with anxiousness.

Though, neither is comparable to the soul-deep longing to see Aquila I feel.

Deep desperate yearning to properly see his beloved face for one last time before we execute our respective task tonight.

More importantly, with my own eyes, I want to reassure myself that he is well. That, he hasn't suffered the heartache I had in the short time we were separated.

If I know that he's well, then perhaps it will alleviate the ache in my own heart a little?

I only dare to hope.

Thinking about him this way, it hits me anew just how terribly much I miss him.

Everything about him, I miss so much. To a point that my chest tightens from just seeing his face in my mind's eye.

It is a congested heartache akin to that of an emotional suffocation. Perhaps, I confused it with another wave of stress attack induced by strain and pressure I had subjected myself to these past few days. I can't say for certain which. But I feel such overwhelming sadness in my heart after acknowledging the dawning reality that I might never see him again after this.

Maybe I shouldn't be here, thinking this, I touch my cheeks. Tears. My fingertips wipe them away as my heart reassures my mind; No, it isn't a mistake, I wish to be here. To see him...even just briefly, it's enough...

To see him and to remind myself again what it is that I'm fighting for tonight.

For him and his future.

Hopefully, ours, even if the possibility is a prospect thinner than a hairbreadth.

I want to see you, I tell Aquila's loving face appearing in my mind, before my sight is forever lost...

For what feels like a miserable eternity, finally my teary vision catches sight of a large majestic eagle flying on approach against the orangey-purple backdrop of the sunset horizon.

My heart leaps to my throat as I jump to my unsteady feet. My left hand gripping the railing to stay my legs from running to him when his, touched the ground.

Upon landing, he immediately takes to his human guise to purposefully begin striding toward me.

No, not toward me, but to the staircase leading up to the palace where I stand mired in a whirlpool of paralysing yet contradictory emotions.