FATE\Deus Decipit

Chapter 8: Like a Lion

11:45 pm, A car on a lonely road, travelling northwest of Athens

Yanni Iole drove down the lonely road by himself, only occasionally passing by cars moving in the opposite direction. Classical music drowned out the sputtering of the old navy blue Cadillac and the jostling of the wire cage in the trunk, but could never dream of touching the pouring rain or deafening thunder that defined the atmosphere. In the darkness of midnight it was impossible to tell where the storm clouds began or ended in the pitch black sky.

Beethoven's symphonies eased his lonesome self, only a small wooden box to keep him company.

Yanni appeared fairly typical for his age. Being middle-aged, he was pudgy, bald, and very clearly a native, having square features with a dominant nose. He even dressed his age, though it was technically just his uniform: a blue polo shirt and khakis. He was an archaeologist, though he didn't work in the field. Rather, he studied the artifacts and relics that were brought to him, or, more specifically, to the Archaeological Museum of Athens. He was rather good at his job too, in part thanks to his magecraft, a sensory art that dabbled in elements of Psychometry, though he was certainly no mage. No, calling himself a mage would imply that he came from a mage family, that his life was devoted to the furthering of magecraft in an endless search for power and immortality, but none of these things described Yanni Iole. He knew of magecraft, and possessed a magic crest of his own, but this hardly made him anything more than a civilian; he was just a normal person aware of things that others weren't.

His crest, which gives mages their power, was given to him not by his biological family, but by a 'found family' that he had only come across a mere decade ago. The group welcomed him as one of their own, but they were gone now. Most of them were killed in a desperate attempt at revolution, and the remainder fled, leaving only Yanni and the group's late leader, an elderly man in his last throes of life. After transferring the crest and leadership to Yanni, he died at the ripe age of 160 years, leaving Yanni to rebuild the family from the ground-up.

-But Yanni had failed.

He had failed to rebuild, he couldn't find anyone to join his family. This was in part because of his job and the other necessary time constraints, but also because of him- as a person. He simply wasn't an evangelist. He was too passionate, he couldn't recognize those that would welcome his lifestyle, and he wasn't an effective or charismatic communicator, nor could he simply put up advertisements. This was first because of the group's magical connections; if they openly talked about magecraft the Clocktower would immediately mobilize to silence them. Second, because of the aforementioned revolt, the group was irrefutably tied with terrorism in the eyes of the government.

Put more simply, revealing the group to the public would result in the group's immediate end. He was also forced to admit that his own cowardice contributed to his failure: he feared the social ostracization that would come from talking about his family in public. He didn't want people to look down on him, or call him crazy; he wasn't crazy. No, no, it was them who were crazy for being so dismissive and presumptuous.

Modern people- they were the problem. People nowadays didn't have any respect for tradition, or history, or even loyalty. It was all about themselves. Of course people as self-centered as that would refuse the very concept of family, or any manifestation of social unity or responsibility. They were cowards, and worse, they were stupid, arrogant cowards.

Yanni, at least, was just a coward, not a stupid coward like the rest of them. Only he understood, he and his family, the truth, the meaning of life. Only they knew the freedom of being beholden to something beyond yourself; something the modern man would reject as nonsense, or worse 'regressive'. That was their problem, they were so focused on moving forward, on being 'progressive' that they didn't bother to ask what they had left behind.