Cry of the Moon

Chapter 20: The Last Act of Helios

Everything feels as though I'm stuck in a flashback. After revealing herself, Medea snaps her fingers and the temple around us disappears.

"I've had lots of time to practice magic since you left," she tells me as a pair of hooded women tie me to the wall. She makes it sound as though I had just gotten up one day and walked out rather than nearly blowing the cave to pieces and leaving her with a curse that had kept her alive for over a century. "As it turns out," she says, holding her hand up to the light and wiggling her fingers, "I quite enjoy the art of illusions. People will believe what they went to believe and, if you know how to feed on that and use it to your advantage..." she snaps her fingers and the air around me shimmers until suddenly I'm lying in a comfortable bed in a small, brightly lit room. I blink and a figure appears in front of me. All the air leaves my lungs at once and tears spring to my eyes. Instinctively, I reach out and run a hand through curly black hair. His blue green eyes sparkle as his beautiful, perfect mouth lifts into a soft smile.

"Endymion," I gasp, trying to remind myself that he's not real. But he seems so incredibly real. His soft hair and warm skin feel just as I remember under my fingertips, almost as though Medea had reached straight into my head and yanked a memory straight from my subconscious.

"Good morning, my love," Endymion says and his warm, familiar voice sends shivers of pleasure down my body.

"You're not real," I murmur to him, although I'm already forgetting why I would think that. How could he look so real, feel so real, and not be real? Perhaps everything had all been a bad dream that I'm now waking from. Perhaps Hera's threat was the thing that wasn't real, and he is still perfectly alive and well.

He smiles softly, stroking my face with his soft touch. "Of course I'm not real. But you can change that. You can make me real. We can have our life back. All you have to do is give me what I want." He leans his head forward and kisses me softly. I melt into the familiar touch, suddenly willing to give him anything he wants, just so long as it means he never stops kissing me like that.

"Everything that is mine is yours," I whisper against his mouth. "What do you need from me?"

"Your soul." He bites down on my lip, sending a hot flash of pain through me as I feel ichor begin to drip into my mouth. I jerk my head back, my eyes flying open to meet his, but something is wrong. Instead of familiar, sparkling blue green eyes, the ones looking back at me are a golden brown and seem to be staring right into my soul.

Around me, the air shimmers and falls away until once again I find myself tied to the wall of a cave, Medea's aged face less than a meter from mine. The sorceress raises a small glass vial containing drops of golden ichor to my eye-level.

"You don't know what you're doing," I growl, trying to ignore the pain fogging my thoughts. "Remember what happened last time."

Medea grins, revealing a startling number of gaps in her mouth. "Last time you gave me the greatest gift anyone has ever given me: life. Your curse meant I would never die and never speak to another human again. So I started talking to the dryads of the woods - I do live in a forest, after all. After the first few trees that turned down my offer mysteriously burned down - and what a pity those losses were - it wasn't hard to convince the rest of them to serve me. As I aged, I had lots of time to deliberate on what went wrong the first time."

"And you came to the conclusion that it went wrong the second you kidnapped a Titaness?"

Medea laughs but there is no humor in the sound. "No, darling. I came to the conclusion that nothing went wrong."

I smirk at her. "Your mind must be addled with old age. The power that was supposed to go to you went to me instead. I escaped and cursed you to live a long, miserable life in solitude for your crimes. I'm pretty sure that's not how you planned it from the beginning."