Chapter 329 - Whom Gods Destroy, Uroboros, 23,000 Years Ago part 2

The screams had come from the city below. I looked down, rolling my eyes in their sockets as I did not have a neck with which to turn my head. From my vantage on the city wall I had a bird's eye view of the tenements below, and I watched as emaciated mortals, mostly men, fled from a phalanx of the God King's warriors. The blood drinkers could have overtaken their quarry with ease, but they pursued their victims at their leisure, slaying all who fell behind or turned to fight. I watched as one of the advancing T'sukuru yanked a cowering mortal female from her decrepit shelter and tore open her throat with his fingertips. He held her body up over his head so that her blood showered down onto his face, his mouth open wide. He held her struggling form aloft until the shower had slowed to a trickle and her limbs quit flailing, then he tossed her aside like so much rubbish. Face red and slick, he shared a laugh with his compatriots. One of his friends grabbed his shoulder and licked his cheek in an exaggerated manner. Their laughter redoubled. I closed my eyes in disgust but I could not close my ears. A few minutes later, the rebels they were hunting attacked en masse, and the God King's soldiers engaged them in battle. I tried to ignore the war whoops and savage snarls, the smell of mortal bodies rent open, the howls of the dying insurrectionists and the laughter of their oppressors. The God King's warriors vanquished their foes easily. They toyed with the survivors, sodomizing some of them, torturing others, but they killed them all, one by one. None who defied them was allowed to live. This purge went on for hours, wending its way through the alleys of the Shol, but never beyond the range of my senses. And I hung there on my pike, the God King's vanquished foe, forced to bear witness to all of it.

If hell had already been invented, I would have said that I had died and gone to it, but Tartarus was as yet undreamt. Greece and its pantheon of debased gods would not arise for another 20,000 years. The Shol was the closest approximation to hell that existed in my world at the time, and I was already there, so any metaphoric references to the wonderland of the depraved would have been redundant.

I hung there, a spear shoved up the stump of my neck, bodiless, mad from the pain. I was so close to real death that it seemed I wandered back and forth between the land of the living and the land of the dead. I wanted to die. I craved the void. But always the Strix brought me back to awareness, drew me back to agony, snatching the sweet nectar of oblivion from my trembling lips.

How long I hung there I cannot say. Surely only a year or two. That is what Zenzele told me later. But it seemed an eternity.

Like the tragic hero Ixion, I had challenged the decadent gods and my defiance had brought me to ruin. My punishment could not have been any more terrible. I, a sentimental creature, who loved the living and held sacred the memories of my own brief mortal span, forced day after day to witness the torments of the God King's mortal slaves, to observe their torture, their murders, their rapes. I watched them toil in the quarries until they collapsed dead at the feet of their brutal overseers. I watched as they fought in crude amphitheaters for the entertainment of the upper castes, usually to the death. I bore witness as they preyed upon one another in desperation, murdering one another for scraps of food. The punishments heaped upon Ixion pale in comparison to the agonies I suffered.

I prayed to my ancestors. Soundlessly, I moved my lips, my eyes cast heavenward. I could not speak but I could pray: "Please, Fathers, free me from this torment! I can bear it no more! Cleave my soul from this selfish flesh! Do I not deserve respite? Have I not been brave enough, strong enough, honorable enough, to join you in the dwelling place of my father's spirit? How much longer must I suffer?"

And it seemed, from time to time, that my prayers were answered—but never in a fashion that I would have liked.

"Would that I could deliver you from this monstrous place," my father Gan answered me one day. I turned my eyes to see that his head was hung up on the wall beside my own, a pike thrust up through the ragged stump of his neck. I could just see him, his ruddy face, hanging a few inches to the left of my own bodiless head. He was not translucent, as modern popular culture portrays the spirits of the dead. He seemed a man of flesh and blood, so real I was certain I could reach out and touch him, if I only had the hands to do so.

It is fitting, I suppose, that it was only his head. He had been decapitated like me, if you recall, murdered by the fiend who made me what I am. Like father, like son, as the saying goes. Only he had died when his head was parted from his body, while my own spirit remained sadly earthbound.

His jowly cheeks were brightly flushed, his gray hair as wild and tangly as ever I remembered it. The sunny wrinkles around his eyes, the lumpy potato nose and roguish grin, missing a few teeth, were as familiar to me as the back of my own (missing) hand.

"Father, please help me!" I thought to shout, but of course I could not make a sound, only gape my mouth like a fish out of water. Still, it seemed that he could hear my words—I suppose, being a ghost, it was simply a matter of reading my thoughts—and he looked at me with an expression of great sympathy.

"Oh, Gon… Oh, my poor boy," he said, his eyes misting with shared pain, and then he said in a rush, as if he were forbidden to speak such things to me: "I do not have leave to free you from your cursed flesh, nor remove you from the God King's hands. You must suffer a while longer. But know this, son: your suffering shall end. Those who love you plot even now to storm the walls of Uroboros, to steal you back and return you to your rightful place. You will be restored. You will be reborn, and then you must destroy the God King once and for all."

"When?" I demanded to know, speaking the words with my mind instead of my tongue. "When will I be restored?"

He did not answer, only looked at me sternly, as he did when I was a mortal man, when I was behaving foolishly or pitying myself overly much.

"Can it really be done?" I asked. "Can I destroy the God King?"

But he vanished without answering, fading rapidly from sight with no fanfare and no lofty pronouncements. One moment he was there and the next he was gone, as if he had never been there at all.

And it went like that as I suffered, day after endless agonizing day, my mind reeling from lucidity to madness.

The spirits of the dead would come to me during the intervals of madness. Sometimes they came to comfort me, telling me to hold on, to be strong a little while longer, don't surrender, Gon, never surrender. They told me that I could not die until I had rid the world of the sickness that was Khronos. Sometimes they came to taunt me, like my maker, that old fiend. He did not speak to me, just stood on the earth below the wall, gazing up at my disembodied head with a cruel and gloating grin on his ugly face, eyes glinting, fangs jutting out over his bottom lip, reveling in my misery. But they never did anything useful or real, the spirits. Ghosts never do.

I dreamed of my wife and children. I dreamed I was a mortal man again, roaming the forested valley of my homeland, Brulde at my side, my faithful companion. I dreamed I was a child, battling my brothers for my father's affection. I dreamed I was helping the Neanderthal fishermen with their catch, the sun bright and warm on my cheeks, the river gushing cold and swift around my legs. I dreamed of making love to my wives. I dreamed of making war with my enemies. I dreamed of Ilio, poor doomed Ilio, always so headstrong and impulsive, how he had betrayed me, seduced by the God King's lies, and how Khronos had repaid him, tearing him apart before my eyes. But always I awoke from these dreams. Always I awoke to reality. Some cry or smell or sensation would jolt me from these hallucinations, and I would reawaken to a world in which I no longer wished to exist… and I despaired.

And then I began to notice a strange thing.