Lifelight: Calypso Returns

2.

The chronicle, 3, 14:

The battle over, fighters screamed in the final throes of death. The plain where the fate of the world had been sealed was blood soaked.Nothing would grow there for a thousand years. Here Azmythica had fallen; their warriors still gripped swords and bows.

A squire walked among the bodies in search of the queen. He jumped from body to body with glee, the heat of battle affected him so, or perhaps it was shock at the victory his master had won. He climbed up the mountain to the temple, perhaps his find lay there. The earth was already taking possession of the Amazons, a princess's hair seemed to have sunk into the ground. They were of the earth, like the mountain,and their goddess.

No great fires burned in the temple. It too was dying with its people.The squire stopped at the great altar. All his joy bled out of him as he looked upon it. The high priestesses, the nymphs, the court witches, and the queen lay dead at the steps of the altar. In the queen's hands was a golden blade and each of the women had a cut on their palms. The fire there roared a vicious blue black. He dreaded his walk back down. They had been too late. Azmthica lived on.

Hera did not look good. Even after a herbal tea and long, hot shower. Her black, curly, impossible to tame hair lay limply above her shoulders.Her dark skin itched. Her eyes, well those were their normal charcoal black. She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror and tried to smile. People always said she had her aunt's smile. It was really a nice way of saying that she had nothing else in common with her aunt but she liked to believe that it was true.

The memory of what had happened on the cliff came back to her. She shivered and turned away from the mirror. The very first story she ever heard was that of The Chronicle of Saira. Her aunt told it to her every time she went to bed. She loved it until one night, she felt it, there was no other explanation. As her aunt got to the part about the last battle and the witches's spell, Hera was overcome with pain so horrible it made her scream.

But her aunt had never let her forget the story. She knew the chronicles by heart and reasoned that the flashes of grief were because she was too attached to it. She got dressed and started on supper.

***

Hera heard him long before he got to the cottage. His drunken humming and slurred lyrics echoed through the trees. Her uncle always sang when he was drunk.

Their cottage lay at the edge of the forest, where the lake lapped at the rocky shore. Really it was a bush that wrapped in a half moon around the cliffs. Her aunt's family had lived there since before time and now Hera shared it with her uncle. She would have liked to say that her aunt's death had made him the way he was but the truth was he had always been an abusive alcoholic with a knack for self destruction.

A storm was coming, the thought stole her away for a moment. She lived for the sound of thunder. He was close to the steps on the front porch, he always made it up the first, fell on the second, and dragged himself onto the third using the door handle to prop himself up. He did not seem to be making it up the second step though, a moment of contemplation perhaps- he had a few of those every once in a while.

She realized he was not alone, how had his friend managed to be so quiet?Not even the leaves cracked when he walked although he may have been out-noised by her fumbling uncle but it did not matter now.

She walked out of her aunt's room, when the sickness got worse she could not be in the same room with him. It had remained exactly the same, a shrine to the woman that had saved her. Once she was downstairs, she heard a low rumble that contrasted with the high pitched whisper of her father.