The Last Ballad of Olympus: The Waltz of the Vulture and Owl

A Dark Dream and Flying Beasts

Hazy as the morning fog and blinding as the sun's burning rays. The heat was a pestilence, burning anything under its wing into a scorched and meaningless coal.

The desert was wide. The desert was empty. The desert sand was a blistering ember that slow wounds would surely appear when the skin kissed every particle.

Athena was at the centre of the vast range of emptiness as she pondered her predicament. Silver eyes darted at the sky, torturing her sight as the sun's rays ferally stroked directly on her face.

The heat rose with every passing second. The smell of burning flesh slowly merged with the air's scent. With cold rolling tears, that soothed her hot face, Athena then realized that she could no longer command her body to move as if some weight was pinning her down.

"Wha—what is—is ha—happe—ppening?" She struggled—forcing her swelling throat to let out even a slight word.

Gradually, like a haunted hand that reached forth for her—her body collapsed, surrendering to the punishment the fate had given. Skin now bore the scratches, matched with boils that screamed under the painful sunrays.

Her body disobeyed her. Every limb was sturdy and petrified like the rock pillar on a mountain cliff. Sadly, Athena was left to her own devices with no one and nothing to reach out to.

She was a butchered lamb only waiting for the expected death to crawl over her.

But death was the salvation, a better ending than the prolonged agony that nagged on every small fibre of her bones.

As she remained in the same vulnerable position, Athena's tears flowed with no restrain—overwhelmed to such torture that all battles she had won morphed into nothing but a blighted legend told by fools and the unwanted.

Her mouth then released a muffled scream. It was no battle cry to succeed but a desperate hope to end the suffering. It was her bitter prayer, hoping that someone or something would cease her misery.

"Oh, mortal life—why must you be so cruel to me?" She lowly moaned, humbling herself as a montage of her glory slowly faded in her head.

In time, an ecstatic imagination formed in her head once she accepted her defeat: a lance through her heart where blood and grandeur would finally leave her ailing body. However, despite such a notion, fate's tenacity ruled above all else as the heavens blew a mad breeze that carried the monstrous warmth of the heatwave.

Bolted from the blue, without any comprehension involved, the piteous lady could feel her stomach swelling into a ball. The touch of her belly was hard—bloated as if she had devoured a large rock that was never absorbed.

Athena did not understand what was happening to her. She even felt something inside of her—latching on her insides like its life depended on her.

Her body was a cornucopia of madness where answers to her baffling views were invisible. Her chest could not prevail against her vile sentence with labouring inhales that her lungs were about to crash.

Indeed, her judgment was correct.

She was a human chamber where the most brutal of all tortures were compiled. She screamed and screamed only to become deaf as a pillar—feeling her throat grounded into pieces while her soul sang hymns to find salvation among nuisance and pain.

Yet it was like a second nature without even knowing—

Her body responded to the swell, pushing something out of her as she, once more, let out a scream. Athena then heard herself, concluding with shame that she sounded like a howling wolf that rumbled both the desert plains and sky.