King of flowers and death

Chapter 2

The night was dark, but not as much as the darkness he was used to in the underworld, and the air was so different, he could smell flowers, not the stink of death and despair.

The thing was that he actually liked flowers and all their colors, but in his reign, nothing could grow, life was not accepted in the underworld.

He walked a little, breathing the air, touching the flowers and the grass with his hands, letting it tickle his fingers, and then he saw him, the human who was still in the meadow. He didn't want to scare him, the boy didn't have to see him, so he hid behind a big oak.

Now that he was closer to him, he realized that the boy was even more perfect than he thought him to be. He realized he was looking at him with an open mouth when his jaw started to ache.

The way the moon made him look like a nymph, making his chocolate hair shine, the way he was touching the flowers, as if he was in front of something beautiful and fragile.

Like him.

He never wanted anything. He never felt the need to own something, probably because everything inside him was dead, like the souls he looked after.

He never complained, not even when his brothers and sisters decided who had to control the different reigns and the other gods, jealous of him, of his power, his beauty, and the love some humans had for him, they obliged him to become the ruler of the Underworld. He hated that destiny, it wasn't what he wanted, but he also knew that not accepting it meant war, and a war among gods meant continents getting destroyed, humans dying, like it already happened in the past.

So he didn't have other choices.

He never wanted anything, but that boy. For the first time, he was speechless, for the first time he would have done everything to have that boy.

"You could have him, you just have to take a few steps forward and take him, you have the power to do it. You're a god, he's just a human", said a voice in his head.

Yes, he could take him. He could kidnap that boy and bring him with him in his reign.

And then what?

He would have had a human who hated him, a human forced to live among deads. A human who day after day would have probably preferred to be like those souls around him, dead.

No. He couldn't do that to him.

"I need to leave", he whispered. The more he stayed there, looking at that mesmerizing view, the harder it was to fight the need to kidnap that human and he couldn't allow himself to do it.

He had turned his back to the human when he heard them. At first, it sounded like the sound of howls, but he knew those were not howls.

"Strigs", he whispered, looking up at the sky where he saw three big shadows flying toward the boy who probably still hadn't seen them.

He knew they weren't three normal birds even before he could see them, he understood it from their smell, the smell of blood.

They might appear like howls from far away, but the nearer they were the easier it was to see the long, sharp, beak that they used to drink blood from humans, the red eyes and the four limbs, instead of two, that ended with claws.

Finally, the human, probably alarmed by strigs' strident screams, looked up in the sky and from his scarred face he understood the boy saw the creatures going toward him.

He was doomed.

No human could run fast enough to escape those bloodsucker creatures.

He could have just looked away and gone back to his reign, that was none of his business. The human knew the risk of being there at night.

But he couldn't.

"You can, you don't want to", told him a voice in his head, and that voice was right.

He didn't think, he just acted.

The strigs were very close to the boy who wasn't running away, maybe he also knew that it would have been useless. Suddenly the soil under his feet opened in a big hole where the human, screaming, fell right before the monsters could reach him.