8. OLYMPIUS

OLYMPIUS

The Past

T AKING to the air, Olympius cut through the star-filled sky, travelling at unparalleled speeds towards Rome, to a particular domus he had visited many times. The structure housed a small, sequestered atrium where Veturia sat alone before a shrine, beseeching divine intervention.

Upon reaching his destination, Olympius took great pleasure in seeing how distraught the mortal woman looked as she knelt before her candlelight vigil, extolling her reverence to a dark god. One she worshipped in secret, away from the prying eyes of the Roman nobility—citizens who publicly professed their preference for gifts and favours from the gods of love, war, and bounty. But just like Veturia, they called out to Olympius in whispers fueled by all-consuming, directed hate; these were dark nightly entreatments for private vengeance.

The god noted the woman’s beautiful stola, a long, sleeveless, pleated robe made from the finest silk, dyed green and embroidered with peacocks. It bore traces of moisture from Veturia’s countless tears of regret and shame. Tears cried as she prayed for a miracle only gods could grant: power over life and death.

Merging his godly form with the chamber’s shadows, Olympius sailed silently across the white marble floor to where Veturia worshipped in statue-like restraint. No emotion escaped her body except the fervour of her chanting, those pleas to her dark god to save her son.

Dispelling the darkness to reveal the solid perfection of his godhood, Olympius spoke in a booming voice. “You desire an audience, mortal? My patience is thin for triviality. Be quick and careful with your words!”

Veturia halted her praying and came towards Olympius. She bent down and kissed his feet with the passion of a lover, a devout disciple. She raised her head to lament her plight. Her wailing could have woken the dead.

Coriolanus may not have needed my help returning to living flesh after all. The god softly laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation .

“Please, oh great god of the night and stars. Aufidius will surely kill my son if he has not already met with a sword in the stomach. Please, my dark god, save his life. I beg of you. I made a terrible mistake. I would gladly trade all of Rome for his safety.”

“I would not bargain with what you do not possess, mortal,” Olympius sneered. “You have your strengths, woman, such as your cunning tongue, but you waste them all on frivolous matters and politics you do not comprehend. Save your son? I have done so, but he is mine now—my son—or whatever else I wish him to be in his new life, whatever role I desire from him. And I do desire him.”

The god smiled wickedly, pondering the many lascivious activities he would do with the son Veturia could no longer claim as hers. Olympius took in the distress on the woman’s face; her dull, wet eyes betrayed her delicious pain, her delectable torment.

“That is the price I demand to answer your supplication. Will you pay with your obedience and forgo your son, or will you deny your god? Be quick and careful with your words, mortal!”

Veturia hung her head in lamentation and assented.

The god knew there was never another choice, for a mother’s love is an all-consuming pyre despite being as twisted and perverse as Veturia’s. Her offspring was her creation, her joy, and her anger. Her earthly plans for control and power made flesh—male flesh, a potent element in the mortal world. She had turned nothingness into substance, gave life to lust and passion, a yearning deep inside her needing and receiving human form—and called him son .

And now he belonged to her dark god .

In his mortal life, Olympius had never known a mother’s love. Death took even queens in Alkebulan too early, especially in childbirth. And his Roman father was a bastard usurper who knew no love save for the adoration of battle.

The great uprising had occurred after Olympius’ sixteenth birthday when his father was overthrown by those finally tired of foreign tyranny. Though the spawn of a Roman, Olympius was the son of the late Queen Adiam and the only living soul who carried the royal blood of the matriarchal line. With reticence, the people placed him on the throne upon his father’s beheading and the ousting of the Romans and Greeks who resided in the kingdom. He had been crowned under his mortal name.

Olympius was the appellation assigned to him by Coeus upon his Becoming. Despite its nefarious origins, it was a Greek name he had grown to like—so much more than the Roman one given to him by his hated mortal father.

His rule over the kingdom, however, was short-lived.

Despite his advisors’ pestering and match-making attempts, Olympius remained unmarried during his short reign. He had no interest in female flesh—a future problem for royal succession but one that never got the chance to darken his doorstep.

Before his ascension to godhood, love was a stranger to Olympius; it was an unexplored, alien concept.

Sex? He understood that quite well, but carnal vices were for selfish pleasure; he knew it was not the same thing as love. He felt nothing for the exquisite male concubines who serviced him or the handsome sons of neighbouring tribes who sought to curry favour with conversation and cock when their daughters proved to be undesirable currency. Satisfaction was not connecting; the erotic was never tenderness shared.

A knife kissing an enemy’s throat was the only brand of love Olympius ever knew growing up, all his father taught him. Still, it made him strong—until a mysterious affliction with no name or cure gradually caused his body to weaken.

But all was revealed after Olympius’ Becoming when he discovered the cause of his mortal sickness. That hated weakness was his Maker’s doing; Coeus had betrayed him under the guise of Divine Saviour .

Vindictiveness, love, hate, desire—in Coeus, those dark passions were all one, distorted and barbed, and they swirled chaotically inside him, a maelstrom of perversity. The self-serving Titan had loved Olympius darkly, like the duplicitous beauty of the alluring rose bush whose brambles embrace its admirer tightly within biting thorns.

Oh, how Olympius hated his dark father, even in memory; he despised those kisses that tasted of death and deceit. The vitriol Olympius harboured took root on that night of revelation, and whatever emotion felt as a mortal, positive or negative, was increased a hundredfold as a god, magnifying the depth of his feelings.

The expansive and interminable contempt Olympius felt toward Coeus stemmed from discovering that the Titan had been draining his mortal essence at night while he slept, ignorant of the dark god’s machinations. Coeus was to blame for producing the young king’s physical weakness and mental confusion, creating an ineffectual leader so the Romans could easily invade and take back what they long considered theirs by the right of first conquest.

Olympius never discovered why Coeus had aided the Romans; the Titan displayed little interest in their inevitable victory.

That Coeus wanted Olympius for wicked, prurient reasons was vastly more apparent. The repetitive, nightly blood drainage made the boy-king the perfect vessel for the dark gift of his ichor: a slow bonding over time. Olympius was meant to be no more than a physical manifestation of his Maker’s lust and desire, made into an immortal plaything. He was Coeus’ creation—his property.

The self-loathing Olympius felt during his wretched malady, watching helplessly as his people mocked and ridiculed him, was crippling. And then, to take in their hatred when he could not assist them in the battle to save the city and his people was worse.

The guilt that ate away at him as he crawled along that desert floor, scorched daily by the heat of an unforgiving sun, caused Olympius to think of nothing but death. He wished for it. Only after giving up all hope for rescue and ceased moving, having become a dried-up husk, did Coeus come to save him, restoring and immeasurably enhancing his vitality and unparalleled beauty. Making him a god also preserved his youth eternally.

But youth, beauty, and strength without agency meant nothing, as the newborn god quickly discovered .

But fortune soon favoured Olympius in its most glorious form: the goddess Fortuna.

On a night black as pitch, she came to him when Coeus was absent from his side, an occasion that rarely occurred. Fortuna abhorred the enslavement of one god to another and offered her aid. Though she was not nearly powerful enough to defy Coeus outright, Fortuna sensed that Olympius was not just strong, as any offspring of a Titan would naturally be, but made exceptionally strong by his Maker; this enriched strength was a necessary ingredient to her scheme.

The goddess claimed that Olympius’ great strength and cunning, in league with her forbidden knowledge, would secure his freedom from seemingly endless bondage and servitude.

In a whispered voice that came not from her mouth but her mind, Fortuna revealed to Olympius a secret known to few: a terrible deed. This abominable act would mean destruction to any god found to have performed it. The Olympians’ wrath would be brutal, without mercy.

But Olympius cared not, for he bore no fear of anything anymore, numb to threats and persecution. They had done their worst, and yet he still lived. In defiance of the unending, strangling darkness Coeus wrapped him in, Olympius welcomed the bright light of clear understanding, dazzled by the knowledge of how to defeat his Maker—his adversary.

He told Fortuna he would enact her plan. What other choice was there ?

At that auspicious juncture, Olympius recalled a moment from his mortal past: a formative and now inspiring act that would set him on an irreversible course toward achieving his desired freedom.

As disclosed to him, during his mortal birth, he had clawed his way out of the Queen’s dead body, her ravaged orifice gaping yet still a hurdle to overcome. The scribes wrote, and the storytellers recounted how he, a newborn babe, retched in the stagnancy of her fetid blood while performing the scream of life.

Olympius believed this account indulged in hyperbole, but the point remained valid: nothing would deny him his right to exist, to be free of fetters. His rebirth as a free immortal needed a similar ritual: the ravaging of his dark father’s body.

Fortuna blessed Olympius with luck to prevent Coeus from discovering his murderous intent despite their occasional blood communions. The young god knew that, eventually, his luck would run out. Time was not on his side.

And so one night, not long after Fortuna’s visit, as he worshipped Coeus like a lover, a master, and a father, Olympius took his anger, hate, and manufactured love and bit and clawed his way through Coeus’ body toward freedom.

As they laid upon a sizeable patrician lectus amid the finest silks, Olympius made love to his Maker gently, a bite here, a nip there, ingesting his potent blood judiciously so Coeus would not realize the repetition that allowed the godling to take and take, weakening the ancient one. He did his best to deflect the Titan’s desire to drink from him, and his ability to produce ecstasy in his lover made the task all the more manageable.

Olympius performed this chore over many hours, even after the great Titan fell into a stupor, overcome by pleasure, the never-ending love-making session finally taking its toll.

After Coeus went unconscious, Olympius soon heard the voice of Fortuna in his mind telling him the time to strike the final blow had come—so the young immortal bit down on his Maker’s neck hard, savagely.

And he drank deep!

Coeus immediately woke from the pain and pressure. The situation he found himself in was startling; his weaker son-lover had taken him by surprise, asserting a wholly, never-expected dominance. Like a deadly anaconda, Olympius used every bit of his strength, which increased with every swallow of blood, to grip tighter and tighter to his Maker’s convulsing body.

Olympius needed Coeus’ power and strength to add to his own. The godling convinced himself that his Maker understood that. Did Coeus not adore him? Had he not opened himself willingly, allowing fangs to pierce impenetrable Titan flesh? Coeus’ violent screams were of joy, adoration, pure love, a gift of ravishment and rapture.

Olympius, in his twisted reality, believed this completely.

And though the weakened Coeus fought back, like a wild boar, tearing at the flesh of the hunter, Olympius considered it naught but simple instinct, nothing more. A struggle that would prove ultimately futile as the Wheel of Destiny turned in his favour. The reason for Olympius’ new life, this second chance, was now before him.

He needed to possess Coeus’ power to eradicate the Romans who had destroyed his world.

And so Olympius took that power with all the strength, will, and burning hatred for his Maker he possessed. He drank Coeus’ dark essence, that ancient, enchanted blood, and consumed his immortal body, the flesh the prostrated Titan could not remake invulnerable. As immense power flowed into him, Olympius felt the strength of thousands of years of life, experiences, knowledge, and abilities added to his own.

After the deed was done, like the afterbirth that washed over him as a mortal babe, Olympius swam in the carcass of Coeus, his Maker, his would-be-master. He relished the moisture of the remaining fluids as they coated his smooth skin. Olympius licked himself clean after cannibalizing the blood-soaked meat; his insides were glutted and could absorb no more. It was delicious sustenance beyond the blessings of Ambrosia; it was freedom!

As a final act of appreciation for his Maker’s hecatomb, Olympius crushed the Titan’s bones into powder and scattered the odorous dust to the winds. The cord of bondage between parent and child was irrevocably cut, liberating him!

Concerning his Maker’s final words as he succumbed to oblivion, Olympius ignored them, for they were nothing but the bitter recriminations of a defeated monster. And words, no matter how vitriolic or damning, held no power over a god.

Now, two hundred years later, in a Roman atrium, before a shrine to him, while looking down at Veturia weeping at his feet, Olympius felt ebullient. He had a great warrior-god at his command and a power inside himself strong enough to conquer nations. The other gods would come to fear him. Those petty immortals would rue the day they instructed their virgin oracles to guide Roman soldiers to his mother’s ancestral lands, his kingdom, to slaughter and enslave his people.

Coeus’ secret influence was irrelevant; they were all accountable for the evil deed, and his Maker had paid for his crimes.

Coriolanus, his warrior-god, would forge an unstoppable army, and he would lead them to victory over their enemies.

Olympius turned once again to his Roman disciple. Roman! The reality of it heightened his ecstasy. “What do you have to say to me, mortal woman, for what I have given you?”

Taking a dagger from the altar of the shrine, Veturia bled herself, soon lifting her blood-soaked arms skyward to be tasted in tribute by her dark god. She allowed the emotions killing her from within to hypnotize and control her actions. “Praise great Olympius, god of rage and retribution,” she exclaimed. “Praise Olympius, god of vengeance and wrath!” She sang his praises in a rapturous, methodical melody, a thrall to the Lord of the Night.

In the distance, Olympius sensed the presence of his love, his Coriolanus; their connection was puissant and unbreakable. The warrior-god’s power emanated outward, floating on the air, invisible, like the threads of The Fates.

He heard the faint drum beat of the heart of Coriolanus’ final victim. It was a familiar sound, like one he had danced to in his youth over the hot sands of Alkebulan. In its rhythmic frenzy, it pounded out one sumptuous word. Olympius knew it intimately.

Revenge.