The Fates (Book I) - 2014 Watty Award Winner!

2.6 - Living Death

Dear Readers: Let's see where Atropos has landed!

FYI - The names of the new characters in this chapter are true to history, not my own invention.

P.S. The crudeness expressed toward another culture's mythology here is from Atropos's standpoint, not mine - I personally think this ancient civilization and its pantheon are pretty cool ;)

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Scene 6: Living Death

2020 B.C.

She awoke, for the first time, beside a bed.

A sultry smile crept onto her lips. Her newly human lips, framing a mouth thirsting with newly human hunger. Nor was it just one form of hunger, Atropos realized right away—one was rooted in her belly, and the other… somewhere else.

This was just the sort of landing that she would have ordered, if she’d had a choice. Given that Zeus came down to earth mostly to bed his pretty whores, she reckoned, surely time on earth was best spent beside mortals in bed.

This bed was rather nice, to boot. Large and sumptuous, laid with lush linens, the four legs of its frame carved in the likeness of a lion’s. And sleeping in the bed, reclined upon a regal headrest, was a man.

He was not exactly gorgeous, as she might’ve hoped. Swarthy skin and sinewy muscles, a bizarre beard. Well, no matter—he would do.

At any rate, this man was powerful, Atropos sensed somehow. Insofar as any mere mortal could be. That was attractive, in itself.

Attraction. Power. Hunger.

Such things were all she could afford to think about.

Certainly not her home, her family. All the shadows of the Cave, left far behind, someplace she may never return.

Now that she’d landed on this earth, this was the only way she could survive. Forgetting where she’d come from, all the fears she’d buried there. Focusing on fulfilling hungers, feeling good, in every way she could, here in this fucked up form of life.

Fucked up, because it had been forced upon her. She had been craving a visit with the humans for so long. But on her terms—not like this. Not because hell had broken loose up on Olympus. Not by necessity, a mother’s desperate bid to keep her daughters safe.

This was unwanted human life; so she resented it. By all the gods. This was the mortal earth, and this was living death.

She had to live it now. The man was stirring from his slumber, as her shadow sidled closer to his bed. His eyes, lined with dark kohl, opened and widened instantly to see the striking stranger in his room.

Before he could so much as blink, she sunk her nails into the sheets and lunged toward him. Pressed her entire naked body into his and clamped her mouth against his parted lips, probed her tongue halfway down his throat.

And just like that, she had sucked out the pharaoh’s soul.

She drew back from the kiss, disengaging from the embrace to look upon his face. Smiled at him like she owned him—for she did.

It’d been the kiss of death. Not the same sort that she had wielded with her scissors in the Cave: death in the form of amorous abandon, the surrender of the soul to fervid fires of the flesh.

The pharaoh gasped for air—for more air from this siren’s lungs, more of her breath enlaced with his. “Where have you come from?”

She leered at him, lunged into him again, and found that she was fluent in his human language. How convenient. “Your dreams.”