It was a slow, ponderous walk. Ellen might have used the word slog, had she not been told by her mother long ago that it was not the kind of word a young lady should use. Later, in nursing school, she had learned that the word was perfectly fine for everyday use, and that all of mother’s admonitions about “bad words” had been utter bullshit. The woman had some very odd and prissy ideas of what propriety was and was not.

  Ellen didn’t know if she was shaking her head at the thought or not as her perception drifted down the hallway in pursuit of whatever Yriakos… Elgin Stark, but as he once was, a long time ago … sought out the dumpy little king.

  As her view of the little palace expanded and the two roved through the maze of a floorplan, Yriakos was unerring in the direction he walked. Ellen saw the look on the man’s face as he walked. It was devoid of any emotion she could readily name. It didn’t have the rage she had expected. Nor did it run and puddle with grief as she felt her own would have at the death of Di. He was stone.

  Each step moved him through the palace with the unstoppable and inexorable grinding of the Wheels of Time and Fate themselves. As she watched, the petite man came to a slow stop beside the crumpled form of a body. Long of limb, though not all of those limbs aligned as well as they should have been. Dressed as fine as a rich man who had suffered a mob’s justice, his fine silks and linens splattered with blood, and wine in equal measures.

  Kneeling, Yriakos places a thick fingered hand of the exposed forehead of the once fine featured face and long, gracile neck. Cinnamon kissed skin made filthy and befouled with too many noxious substances to identify.

  Yriakos spoke, a sharp, hard edged language that tumbled angrily from his lips. Not the Ancient Greek Ellen assumed they all had been speaking up to this point, but she understood this one just as well as she had the Greek.

  “Stupid child.” He rolled the form over onto its back, and straightened the arms and legs. One of the arms only went but so straight, and both legs had far too many turns and angles beneath their purple mottled skin. “You sold your sister, and were robbed by those who you thought would pay you.”

  The broken lips of Amra murmured an exhaled name, possibly a plea. “...Gebdu… he was to give me a fleet of ships, an army and gold… for the Bride Price.”

  “He lied, boy.” Yriakos said in the language of an Egypt that has not seen the Sun rise in a millenia. “When you first arrived, did you see a land that could trade you a fleet for a wife?”

  The torn fabric around Amra’s shoulders was gripped tightly in large, hard fists as a shaking voice asked, “Did you see a land flowing with gold and a surplus of soldiers? No. But, you decided to sell your sister regardless, in hopes you had not just been fooled by a bloviating fraud of a slovenly little manchild pretending to be a king.”

  “...but… they promised me…!... he…” A whine entered the voice. The buzzing of a gnat or mosquito at the edges of the snotty, tear-stained words whispered in pain and despair.

  “Sleep, stupid child.” And with the brushing of fingertips along his brow, Amra settled into a deep sleep. Yriakos straightened, and trod past the slumbering form, and into the wreck of a room where too much fun, or possibly several barroom brawls had transpired.

  Spoiled food on the floors, much of it beginning to show the signs of rot. Several bodies passed out with the sour stench of too much wine. Some of that wine returned to now stain the floors and rugs. Yriakos looked at each body. Some, from his expression, he recognised. Others he did not.

  But whatever and whomever it was that lingered in this room, none of it was what he now sought. Standing, he moved on to the hall beyond, from which the flickering light of more torchlight beckoned.

  At intervals, as Yriakos passed from one room to another, he placed his wide, calloused hands on either side of the doorways, and left a faint hand print there. One perfect hand on either side of each portal through which he moved. Ellen wondered at it after the third or fourth time it happened. He was not pausing to rest. He did not need to use the stone lintels to hold himself up, nor to push himself along.

  He simply marked each door with his hands as he went along.

  Salt and pepper hair, askew and filthy, bobbed about Yriakos’ head as he moved from one room to the next. Some people lay strewn about in such disarray that they looked like victims of violence. Others simply sat, or lounged in various states of satiation and inebriation. One room was filled with smoke, and fumes that Ellen had to assume were noxious, simply by dint of the scrunch-faced look Yriakos now wore. He had shifted his breathing to slow, shallow, intermittent breaths as he crouched over the fallen bodies of revelers.

  One woman was laying on her back atop a man wearing a guard’s cuirass of layered linen laminated with layers of glue and nothing else. He passed by without investigating, knowing by her pale skin she wasn’t the young woman he sought. She burbled at Yriakos as his steps took him past where, and upon whom, she reclined. And when he gave her no notice, she reached out a flaccid, languid arm, stroking his calf as he walked away from what were possibly her entreaties to stay. His steps never faltered, though he did look back at the woman, adorned in a ransom of jewels and little else. Her eyes red from her excesses, and one nostril caked with dried blood.

  He let out a loud sigh of resignation at the sight of the slovenly scene of such waste. But ever onward he moved through room after room of revelers who had stayed long past the end of the actual celebrations. Now was just the dregs of regret from overindulgences and lack of self control.

  Finally, a halt.

  Another matched set of handprints made on the stone.

  At the entrance to a large room Yriakos stopped, his body as still as a statue as he beheld what lay beyond. His face, from what Ellen could now see, was set in stony, simmering, anger. This was not simply rage, or the explosive relief of emotion. This was a slow, churning rage that would take eons to turn the base minerals that made up schist and gneiss, making from them the bloodiest of red garnets.

  Near the center of the room, on a low, ornate bench, lounged the torpid form of Mydius. He reclined in a stupor of idiot indulgence, eyes closed as his weak jaw slowly, like a cow with its cud, chewed at something that hung half out of his grease and spittle coated lips. His chiton stained with too many things to identify any of them distinctly. Though Ellen would have bet that some of those darker marks were dried blood.

  At the base of the bench, Yriakos’ granddaughter now lay, chained to one of the legs of the gilt edged furniture, her body covered in blood, her formerly smooth. caramel skin now mottled with purple and green edged bruises. Some were days old. The redness and swelling marking others as merely hours old.

  The girl wore nothing more than the blood that had been beaten from her very veins. Moving slowly forward, every step he took punctuated with a rumbling of thunder from outside the walls of the palace, the kind man she had met in a far distant future, in another land, moved like the harbinger of Death itself.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  The fat man on the sofa startled to alertness at Yriakos’ approach. Maybe Yriakos’ anger woke the repugnant little king, or maybe it was the ever growing storm that now battered the walls of the palace.

  His besotted eyes widening in comprehension. He tried to sit up straighter, to pull his flabby bulk up to some semblance of authority. Around his corpulent neck, wrist, and fingers wound the golden jewelry Yriakos had been forced to make by the king ransom the release of his grandson and companion, the handsome and gentle boy that Ellen now knew to have been known as Dionysus.

  Ellen knew, then, that where and when her body now sat, it cried slow, soft tears for the boy, dead so long ago.

  She was not certain why or how she now knew this, maybe the story laid out before her had given her just enough clues for her mind to make that connection. Or maybe she was just imposing her own expectations on Elgin’s narrative.

  A question for another day.

  “Inconceiveable!” He squeaked, half a sausage falling from his lips, wet with grease and unidentified oily stains. “Unacceptable!” His jowls quivered in rage, his entire body now shaking. “Retributionable!”

  Yriakos tilted his head to the side, and said in a deep, sepulchral voice, “That last one might not be a word.”

  “Petition me for redress! I don't care!” WIth that, Mydius let out a mad cackle.

  Before the king could react, Yriakos was at his side, one hand pulling the slug wetly up from his seat by the golden collar, the other broad fingered hand wrapped viselike about the matching bracelet.

  The fat man laughed then, his voice high and cracking, as he called out; “Guards!” He shrieked. “Kleodos! Where are you!?” Each shout punctuated by a mad tittering laugh.

  He then let out a loud bray of laughter as the sound of a heavy footfall came from behind. Turning, Ellen saw the oddly emotionless captain of the palace guards standing in the doorway, his ever present spear leveled at Yriakos, where he stood holding up the corpulent king.

  “Put him down, dead man.” The man said with no infection. “I killed you last week, I can kill you again.” He paused for a moment in thought.

  “I will kill you again. We both know Our King will demand it.” The man may as well have been describing a shopping list for all the surprise he had at seeing a man he had killed and then locked in a dungeon cell now standing before him, manhandling his liege lord.

  Turning his head slowly, as might a ship ponderously changing course in the sea, Yriakos looked back at Kleodos. He let slip from his lips a long, sibilant hiss of “Cheir.”

  As Ellen watched, the walls to either side of the door in which the guard captain stood sprouted hands of finely carved stone. In moments, Kleodos was held by his arms and legs in the immovable gripping clutches of the stuff of the very palace itself. Several marble and basalt hands on each limb, and one final hand that gripped the man’s neck.

  The spear he held was left to fall to the floor in an obscene clattering of metal and wood on rock.

  Kleodos looked, for the first time Ellen had ever seen any emotion on the man, mildly surprised. “Hecatoncheires…” He struggled then, testing his bindings. “Gyges?” He asked the name of a specific titan, expecting that he was now in the grip of one of the Hundred-Handed Ones of long ago.

  Tilting his head slightly at the captured captain, “Ouranos.”

  One name.

  Barely more than a whisper.

  And Kleodos fell silent. Staring at the little, muscular man he thought he had killed and had been intent to forget.

  A high pitched keening had begun.

  Mydius was now whining, or possibly screaming, with what little breath he was able to achieve past the strangling grip Yriakos, or possibly Ouranos, now had on the golden collar about the flabby, sagging folds of his neck.

  Turning his attention back to the king, “I made these for my granddaughter, they were to protect her. But, you put them on, instead.”

  Mydius’ wheezing voice, barely more than a whisper, reeked from his maw. “...I put … them on… and then ...I could not take them off… she would not tell me how…”

  Deep voice buzzing with authority she had never heard from Elgin, or from Yriakos, before. “She would not know how to take them off, once they were on.”

  “Ah… misunderstanding… I see now… we are all here now… and we can…”

  Whatever he had been about to say was shaken away from the world as Yriakos lifted the wretch high from the ground. “GAH!” he shrieked. “Zeus! Protect me! Please!”

  “My grandson, his wife and his father left these lands long ago. They all now wander in the far North, and have made for themselves new names and a new family. There is only me… and my great grandchildren in these lands now.”

  The man holding the king aloft said simply, “I give you these gifts… King Mydius.” The contempt rolled out of Ouranos’ mouth as he spoke, clouds of vapor borne by poisonous words obscuring the fleshy face. “ You wanted gold. You wanted riches. You were willing to kill those of your kingdom to have them. You will wear these forever.” And then a deep laugh flowed out from the wide lipped mouth of the Father of the Gods and Titans. “You will never leave this room. You will never die. Thanatos, Keres, Hades… none of them will ever breach these walls to claim you. And you will never leave this room to be able to seek them out…”

  Slowly, he lowered Mydius back onto his sofa, and planted one strong hand upon the futilely struggling chest. Bending low, he whispered, “Chrysos…”

  And the gold from the bracelet, rings and collar all bled across the writhing man, covering him from head to toe, his struggles growing weaker with every inch of glowing metal that encapsulated his slovenly form.

  Finally, a golden statue of a terrified king lay mid-flail upon the little padded bench.

  The legs of the bench groaned under this new stress.

  Reaching down, all outward signs of his anger now fled from him, Yriakos tore the chain that held his granddaughter captive away from the leg it had been secured to. He crooned to the whimpering child, grabbing a fine silk hanging nearby in which to wrap her body.

  His voice reverted briefly to that other, sharper tongue of far away Kemet. “We shall gather up your older brother, if he still lives, and I will take you both home.”

  At the mention of Amra, the girl cried, her tears showing the betrayal she felt. “No, Iahu, my little Eset.” His voice was now so gentle, Ellen was a little shocked at the shift.

  “We must all leave this island.” He smiled then, “I will sink it. So that no man will ever come into this room and think to plunder the hoard that lays silently screaming on that couch. Its people will flee. They will tell stories. Some might even be true. I may even tell a few, we shall see, little Sopdet. Now, where did I leave your useless brother?”

  He wondered that last to himself, as the girl was no longer conscious, having found some comfort from her injuries and shame in the arms of her most ancient grandfather.

  As he walked with his new burden toward another door, the voice of Kleodos came from where the man was still held by stone hands.

  Looking over to the door through which they had originally entered, Ellen saw that the hands now held the man at impossible angles. Some of the hands, where they grasped the man’s limbs, were edged with blood. The hands that held the guard were slowly tightening.

  His voice now coarse in the grip of the stone clasped about his neck, “Are you going to release me?”

  “Should I?” He said, pausing in the far doorway. “Would you?”

  Kleodos managed a shrug where he was held. “I guess not. Are you really Ouranos?”

  From the now darkened and seemingly empty doorway came the distant voice of Yriakos. “I was. Once. Long ago. But, if you manage to live long enough, you’re no longer who you once were. You no longer can be who you once were. We grow. We change as we learn. It is in our nature.”

  Kleodos now looked confused. And pained as the hands that held him pulled and pushed him further down to the floor.

  Ellen turned her attention back to the empty door that Kleodos stared at. It was indeed empty.

  There was a sound of shifting stone, and a wet gurgle.

  Ellen’s eyes flashed open where she sat in the little reading room in the jewelry shop on Carey Street. She inhaled unsteadily. She wanted to laugh.

  She felt the wetness on her cheeks where she knew she had been crying.