A Tale of One Deviant (Book One)

Chapter 120: Forewarning, Precognitive Dream

"I will call you, you must come to me. Why do you not answer? Why do you ignore me? You belong to me, you are my familiar, yet you disobey my will. I am Z-Z-Zuelis, I am your god, I am your everything. When I call, you shall answer. For I am your god-d-d-dess, TIYANA."

The dream glitched out all of a sudden, and my shoulder was moved. I was continuously moved, shifted. The image of a young man, golden blond hair and flowing white robes like a Greek with a cool face and slim features, one with his hands folded behind his back as he stood in a white space that slowly faded to silver. On his forehead and around his wrists appeared bands of silver, thin lines of color that's glistened as he moved. Who I assumed to be Tiyana appeared all of a sudden, replacing Zuelis. She looked exactly like Zuelis, but with feminine features, and those same silver bands around her ankles. Her golden hair was looped around and around until it reached the other side of her head and spooled all the way to her waist, over her left shoulder. Her snowy dress was billowing and perfectly crinkled, flowing in the soft, warm wind that flew by.

But that lovely image of a glowing woman with the kindest smile I had ever seen distorted all of a sudden. It was like someone hit the screen of an old TV, and it shuddered black and white before playing its original contents.

What appeared, in that brief black and white flash, was the image of a smoking woman who had tendrils of black coming off of her. Her skin was blacker than night, hair looking like swaths of dark cloth patched to her head with eyes that held the coldest, most demented look of all. Her eyes, they looked like they absorbed all of the hate and the pain and malevolence in the world just by watching, breathing, touching with those claws of hands and walking across the ground and the oceans with those cursed feet. They looked more like sticks than anything, ripped off a mad tree in some bedeviled land stuck right onto her legs.

I jerked back when I saw that scene, but then it changed. Instead of just standing still, instead of just watching each other, I was dashing backwards on a war torn battlefield and hopping over corpses, humans and Demons alike, all dead by my hand. By hers as well, since they got caught up in between us. Like in Basusda, that day the corpses pooled and their blood flowed like a few interconnecting streams, all coming together and showing the horrific reflection of the white moon in the red waters, looking like Moses and the Israelites watching over the seas he had parted as they crashed over the Egyptians. Oh, the mess.

The woman, or what passed for the woman flew at me with a silent death, her heart screaming that I should die as she twisted the chain on my heart, the one that she manipulated through the contract of Milo with Zuelis. The gold chain had become silver, and eventually degraded into black. It reached my own corroded, nonexistent soul that was but a sliver that had been left behind when I died...the second time.

"What's wrong? Are you af-af-afraid?" She stuttered, her teeth chattering from the cold she herself emanated. Arion's cold was like that silence in the night, the night itself that would claim all those that dared to cross it. Suck away at your life and leave you with nothing, take your everything. This cold was of loneliness, contempt, fear. There was no end to the feelings within it, the ugly and searing anarchy that was her restless self. "Can't stand a b-b-bit of cold?"

Her voice stumbled and dribbled over like a broken machine, the rasping and warning, faltering hisses at the end of each of her words being enough to set me on edge as I dodged and ducked, flew everywhere and warded off the blows of her gigantic broadsword, stolen off of a soldier from the joined armies gathered here today along with hundreds...no, thousands of other swords I'd bequeathed the military might of the world for this very day.