Chapter 2: The Sun-Drenched Cage

Chapter 2: The Sun-Drenched Cage

Month of Gamelion, 1945 B.C.E.

One hundred years.

A century is a lifetime for a mortal man. It is the span of generations, the time it takes for empires to rise and for memories of great deeds to fade into myth. For Lykaon, it was but a single, long, golden afternoon.

The raw, untamed world he had awakened into had begun to mature, and so had he. The ghost who haunted the Cretan hills was gone, replaced by a master of his own reality. He had left Crete proper and established himself on the nearby island of Thera, a jewel of the Aegean ring. Here, on a cliff overlooking the vast caldera, he had built his home. His sanctuary. His cage.

To the Theran traders and farmers who occasionally passed on the dusty road below, the place was unremarkable. A well-tended but modest farmhouse, surrounded by a thriving olive grove and a small vineyard, its stone walls weathered by the sun and sea spray. The inhabitants, if any were ever seen, were forgettable, plain-faced folk who kept to themselves. The locals felt a gentle, inexplicable urge to afford the place its privacy, their eyes sliding past it, their minds deciding there were more interesting vistas to behold.

This perceptual cloak was one of Lykaon's earliest masterpieces of magic. A ward woven not of force, but of suggestion. A whisper into the subconscious of the world that said, There is nothing for you here.

Behind this veil of mundane illusion lay a reality of impossible splendour. The farmhouse was a sprawling villa, an architectural marvel that defied the engineering of the age. Open-air courtyards were linked by gleaming white marble colonnades, their surfaces infused with a soft, internal warmth that kept the sea-chill at bay during the winter months. Pools of impossibly clear water, fed by springs he had coaxed into existence, reflected a sky untroubled by the smoke of the nearby city of Akrotiri.

The walls were not painted with the bulls and dolphins so favoured by the Minoans. Instead, Lykaon had adorned them with frescoes of his own design, images of breathtaking vividness. In one hall, the constellations moved in their true celestial paths across a ceiling of polished obsidian. In another, graceful, terrifying beasts from mythologies not yet born—dragons, griffins, and phoenixes—chased each other in a riot of colour. He had painted them himself, using pigments conjured from light and emotion, their hues unchanging, their vibrancy eternal.

His life fell into a rhythm dictated not by necessity, but by desire. He was utterly self-sufficient. Hunger was a distant memory, a concept rather than a feeling; while he could eat for pleasure, he had no physical need for sustenance. His connection to the sun provided all the energy he required. The fine linen robes he wore were not woven by mortal hands but spun from moonbeams and solidified mist. The wine he drank was not pressed from the grapes in his illusory vineyard, but created in the cup, a perfect duplication of a flavour he had once enjoyed, or an entirely new one he had imagined. His existence was one of absolute, effortless luxury.

The heart of his villa, and of his life, was his library. It was a circular chamber with a domed ceiling that precisely mirrored the fresco of the constellations in the main hall. Here, there were no clay tablets, no fragile scrolls of papyrus that would turn to dust in a few decades. His grimoire was a collection of hundreds of thin, flexible sheets of enchanted gold, each one impervious to fire, water, and the ravages of time.

Upon these golden pages, he chronicled his true work: the exploration of magic. Having spent the first decade mastering the physical—the control of fire, water, earth, air, weather, and the intricate workings of the living body—he had moved on to the metaphysical. Conceptual magic. The art of shaping reality not with brute force, but with the elegance of a perfect idea.

He had perfected the art of creation, Ex Nihilo. The intricate golden couch upon which he often reclined, the crystal goblets, the very stone of the villa itself—all had been pulled from the ocean of his power and given permanent, physical form. It was a level of power that would have driven any mortal witch to madness or ruin, the energy expenditure too great to sustain. For Lykaon, drawing from his symbiotic link to the sun, it was as taxing as taking a breath.

This mastery had a profound psychological effect. It divorced him completely from the world of men. He needed nothing from them. He did not need their food, their crafts, their labour, their protection, or their commerce. He was an ecosystem of one, a solitary godling in a paradise of his own making. And from this vantage point, he watched the world turn, his only true companion the ever-changing, ever-fascinating tapestry of mortal life.

He had created a scrying pool in the centre of his library, a basin of black marble filled with water that was perpetually still. By dripping a single drop of his own golden-infused blood into it, he could open a window to any place he could imagine. He watched the world as a man in his old life might have watched television, a detached observer viewing a thousand different channels.

He saw the pharaohs of Egypt's Middle Kingdom raising grand monuments to their own vanity along the Nile. He listened to the court intrigues, learned their language and their complex theology of the afterlife. He found their obsession with preserving their mortal shells ironic, given his own effortless permanence. He watched the warlords of Mesopotamia clash in the dust between the Tigris and Euphrates, their cuneiform messages of war and tribute a fascinating study in the burgeoning art of bureaucracy. He saw the first stirrings of a new, more aggressive culture on the Greek mainland—the people who would one day be called Mycenaeans. They were rough, bearded warriors, so unlike the elegant, almost effeminate Minoan men, and they buried their chieftains in deep shafts with golden death masks and bronze weapons. They were a people to watch.

For one hundred years, he learned. He accumulated knowledge as a dragon might accumulate gold, not for any specific purpose, but for the sheer pleasure of possession. He was becoming what he had intended: the single most knowledgeable being on the planet. And yet, for all his intellectual pursuits, he was still a man, with needs and desires that transcended the mind.

Immortality is a lonely condition. Lykaon had understood this intellectually in his previous life, but now he understood it viscerally. To watch the world from a place of perfect isolation was to invite a creeping, insidious madness. A century without touch, without the warmth of another body, without a voice to answer his own, was a trial he had no intention of enduring.

But connection was a danger. Love, friendship, attachment—these were anchors that would lead to the inevitable pain of loss. To love a mortal was to sentence himself to watch them wither and die, again and again. It was a wound he would not inflict upon himself. So, he devised a solution, one born of his immense power and his growing moral detachment. A sterile, controlled form of hedonism.

He did not seek out lovers. He drew them to him.

When the mood struck, a particular flavour of loneliness that his studies could not fill, he would cast his senses out into the bustling city of Akrotiri. He would find someone. A handsome potter with strong, clay-dusted hands. A lithe sailor with eyes the colour of the sea. A graceful weaver with a laugh that carried on the wind. He would choose them as a man might choose a fine wine for the evening.

Then, he would plant a seed in their minds. A gentle, irresistible suggestion. A sudden, overwhelming desire to wander, to walk the cliffs south of the city. An inexplicable feeling that something wonderful, something they had been missing their entire life, awaited them there. The compulsion was so subtle they believed it to be their own spontaneous will.

They would follow the path and, bypassing the perceptual filter around his home, find themselves standing before the villa. He would be there to greet them, a welcoming smile on his eternally youthful face.

For the duration of their stay—a night, a week, sometimes a month, depending on his whim—they lived in a state of perfect bliss. He was the perfect lover, attentive and endlessly creative. He could read their deepest desires with a glance and fulfill them effortlessly. He showed them wonders they could not have imagined: food that tasted like memories, music that could make them weep with joy, conversations that made them feel as if they were the only person in the world. To them, it was a divine encounter, a brief sojourn in the land of the gods.

Lykaon, for his part, enjoyed the physical release, the temporary abatement of his solitude, and the intellectual stimulation of their mortal perspectives. He learned of their lives, their hopes, their petty squabbles, and their profound beliefs. It was another form of data collection, albeit a far more intimate one.

This winter, his choice had been a woman named Ione. She was a lesser priestess of the snake goddess, a figure of some renown in Akrotiri for her striking beauty and her serene, almost unnerving, devotion. Lykaon had seen her during a scrying session, her dark, coiled hair and steady gaze captivating him. He had sent the call, and she had answered.

She had been with him for the past moon cycle.

"You are not like the gods in our stories," she said one evening, her head resting on his chest as they lay on a bed of conjured silk cushions by a crackling fire. Her fingers traced the impossibly smooth skin of his shoulder. "They are wrathful and jealous. They demand sacrifice and spill blood. You… you are only kind."

Lykaon smiled into her hair, the scent of her perfumed oil a pleasing sensation. "Perhaps your stories have the wrong gods."

"Or perhaps you are something else entirely," she murmured, a hint of awe in her voice. In her mind, she had rationalized her experience as a divine blessing. She had been chosen by a minor deity of the island, a spirit of beauty and pleasure, to be his companion. The alternative was too confusing to contemplate.

"Does it matter what I am?" he asked, his voice a low, soothing hum. "Are you not happy here?"

"I have never known such happiness," she confessed, her voice thick with emotion. "When I am with you, the world outside, the temple, the rituals… it all feels like a shadow. This is the only real thing."

He felt a faint twinge, a ghost of an emotion he identified as pity. Her feelings were real to her, but he knew they were built on a foundation of his magic. The intense connection she felt, the all-consuming love, was a tapestry he had woven to make her stay more pleasant for them both. He felt no love in return. He felt affection, as a man might feel for a favourite pet. He enjoyed her presence, but he was already calculating how many more days it would be before her novelty wore off and he began to crave solitude again.

That day came a week later. The intellectual curiosity was sated. He knew her stories, her beliefs, the texture of her skin, and the sounds she made in passion. The repetition had begun to bore him. It was time.

Their last night was as perfect as the first. He filled the air with the scent of night-blooming jasmine, conjured a meal of roasted figs and honeyed wine, and made love to her with a tenderness that brought tears to her eyes. He was cementing the memory for her, making it a perfect, flawless jewel in her mind.

As she slept, her breathing deep and even in the aftermath of their passion, Lykaon began the final part of the process. He placed his fingertips on her temples, his touch as light as a moth's wing. His magic, the golden energy of the sun, flowed into her, far more gently than any spell of compulsion. He wasn't ripping memories away; he was polishing them, editing them, reframing them.

He took the concrete realities of his face, his name, the location of his villa, and blurred them into a divine, faceless radiance. He softened the edges of her time with him, transforming it from a series of events into a single, overwhelming feeling of spiritual ecstasy and profound peace. He left the happiness, the pleasure, the feeling of being cherished, but removed the specific agent of that happiness. It would become a beautiful, sacred dream. A vision granted by her goddess.

Then, he gathered her in his arms, her sleeping form as light as a child's, and teleported. Not with a crash of displaced air, but a silent, seamless transition of space. One moment they were in his bedchamber; the next, they were in her small, stone sleeping cell within the temple complex at Akrotiri. He laid her gently on her simple cot, pulling her woollen blanket up to her chin.

On the small table beside her bed, he left his parting gift. He had spent an hour crafting it the day before. It was a small, golden serpent, its eyes tiny chips of emerald, coiled into a delicate bracelet. Unlike his other conjurations, this one was made of real gold, smelted from rock with his magic and shaped by his will. It was a tangible anchor for her dream, a proof that what she had experienced was special, and real in its own way.

He looked at her one last time, this mortal woman who had shared his bed for a month, and felt nothing but a serene sense of closure. No guilt. No regret. He had taken his pleasure, but he had given her a memory that would enrich the rest of her life. She would awaken more devout, more serene, convinced she had been divinely touched. In his mind, it was a fair trade. An act of mercy, even. It was the only way for a being like him to interact with a world so fragile.

With another silent step, he was gone, back in his empty villa, the scent of her perfume already fading from the air. The cage was secure once more.

With his solitude restored, Lykaon returned to his work. His primary concern, a thread of anxiety that had persisted even through the decades of peace, was the question of Nature's price. Qetsiyah's immortality had created Silas's shadow-self, Amara's mortal double. Had he, in all his power and arrogance, merely delayed the bill?

He spent an entire week in his scrying chamber, his focus absolute. He did not look for specific people or places. Instead, he cast a vast, intricate spell of his own design, a search pattern that scanned the entire living world. He was not looking for a person, but for a resonance. He flooded the spell with the unique energetic signature of his own immortal life force, commanding it to find any other signature that mirrored it, that shared its fundamental pattern. He was hunting for his own doppelgänger.

He scoured the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, the bustling cities of the Indus Valley, the cold northern lands of the proto-Celts, the sun-scorched kingdoms of Nubia, and the length and breadth of the Mediterranean. His magical senses swept over millions of mortals, tasting their life forces, analysing their spiritual DNA.

After seven days of unbroken concentration, the spell concluded. The result was absolute. Nothing.

There was no echo of his existence anywhere on the planet. No mortal man walking the earth who shared his face or was destined to live out a life he had forsaken.

A slow wave of profound relief washed over him, so potent it was almost dizzying. He leaned back, a genuine, unforced laugh escaping his lips, the sound echoing in the silent library.

He had done it. He had truly, unequivocally won.

His theory had been correct. The doppelgänger curse was not a punishment for immortality itself, but a reaction to the specific method. Qetsiyah had created an imbalance. She had made two beings immortal by drawing on an unspecified but finite power source, effectively stealing two lifespans from the natural cycle. Nature, like a fastidious bookkeeper, had been forced to create the doppelgängers to balance the ledger.

Lykaon's method had been different. He had not stolen. He had bargained. By linking himself to the sun, an effectively infinite source of life energy, and offering a piece of his own magic to form a symbiotic bond, he had not created a deficit. He had slotted himself into an existing, massive cycle. He was not a thief of life; he was a willing tributary to a greater river. Nature's books remained balanced. There was no need for a shadow self.

The knowledge was liberating. The last lingering fear was extinguished, replaced by an unassailable sense of his own supremacy. He was not just an immortal; he was a perfect immortal. An anomaly the universe had accepted.

He turned his scrying pool's attention back to the Greek mainland, a region that held a certain academic interest for him. He watched the small, fortified villages, the goat herds, the olive groves. He knew that somewhere in this rugged land, among these primitive warrior-farmers, the bloodline that would produce the first doppelgänger, Amara, was quietly propagating. A bloodline that was, for now, completely mundane. It was nothing to him. A curiosity. A footnote in a history that had not yet been written, and one he was now in a position to edit as he saw fit.

As the sun began to set, casting long shadows across his courtyard, Lykaon stepped outside. The Theran sky was a spectacular blaze of orange, purple, and gold. He reclined on a marble bench, the stone still warm from the day's light, and conjured a goblet of cool, crisp wine into his hand. He took a sip, the flavour a complex symphony on a palate that would never dull.

He felt the steady, reassuring thrum of the sun's distant heart beating in time with his own. He was powerful, knowledgeable, and safe. His desires were met as they arose, with no messy emotional consequences. He was the sole observer in his own private theatre, watching the grand, tragic, beautiful play of mortal existence unfold at his leisure.

He was utterly alone, and completely free. From within the opulent beauty of his sun-drenched cage, it felt like the same thing. For now, it was paradise.