Serpent and Stone

Chapter 6

His pale blue eyes stared right at me and my stomach sunk like a rock. 

I hope you had fun playing pretend at helping people rather than killing them, a cruel voice in my mind hissed. Now it's over.

I curled my hands into fists at my side, glaring up at him with fierce hatred. It was not truly him I was mad at. I was mad at the gods. Athena, for damning me with this cruel curse to begin with. Poseidon, for doing nothing to help his daughter when she needed aid. Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite- they were all the same sick, soulless beings who delighted in watching mortals like me suffer. They were the ones I cursed in my mind, but the soldier in front of me represented my last straw. I didn't care anymore that he didn't deserve to receive the brunt of my anger. I only felt a burning outrage that I could hardly contain anymore.

Why? Why did the Fates give me any hope at all if they were only going to dash it like a ship against a rocky shore? I was a fool. Such a naïve, selfish fool. I should have left him on the battlefield to bleed out. At least then I wouldn't feel this crushing guilt, this shame and misery like a fire burning through my blood. At least then I wouldn't have had to see his horrified features for all eternity.

I glared up into the soldier's blue eyes, and I waited.

Sometimes it took a few seconds for the curse to take effect. I didn't know why it happened instantaneously for some and more slowly for others. There was no rhyme or reason to it, but the curse never failed. Not once.

The slow deaths were the worst. I could see the moment of realization in their eyes. They had just enough time to part their lips in the beginning of a scream, their pupils dilating in terror, before they were swallowed up by stone, frozen in fear and pain for eternity. Those were the deaths that haunted me most often in my nightmares.

I waited. And I waited. The seconds ticked by like years, the soldier still looking blankly in my direction, but the stone didn't come. It didn't creep over his fingertips, up his neck and over his eyes. It didn't steal the air from his lungs and the soul from his body. There was nothing.

For just a split second, my breath hitched in my throat. I dared hope- for just that fraction of a moment- that my curse had been miraculously lifted. That I was free. Perhaps the gods had rewarded me for my act of kindness in healing this man. Perhaps the curse had simply worn away, the magic fading and vanishing over the years. My mind conjured a million convenient explanations, a million outlandish and implausible reasons to hope against hope that I was no longer a monster. It was my fatal flaw: I never learned to stop hoping, no matter how much it hurt to do so.

"Hello?"

I was brought back down to reality once again when he spoke. His eyes looked towards me, but he didn't look at me. His gaze was unfocused, staring at a spot slightly to the right of my head. I stared back at the strangely pale blue of his eyes for another moment and it finally dawned on me. He was blind.

I opened my mouth to speak but no words would come out. I had never been confronted with such a situation before, never in all my years of solitude. A human being, a real life, talking and breathing human being, was standing right in front of me- and he wasn't turning to stone.

Tears pricked the corners of my eyes, even as he continued to frown and grasp out blindly into space to try and find me. I hadn't killed him, and I wasn't going to kill him. He wasn't going to die because of me. I almost laughed out loud at the wonderful absurdity of it. I hadn't saved his life in vain after all.

At that moment, my resolve hardened into an iron will. I would make sure that this person- whoever he was- left this place alive. I would make it my solemn duty, even if it was the last thing I did. To prove once and for all that I could save lives and not just end them.