“But how is that… of course!” I cried out as it came to me.
“What?” he questioned quickly.
“The smoke, the face, all of it’s real, and what’s beneath is the illusion,”I whispered under my breath.
“Earth to Alex, you wanna share with the rest of the class?”
“It was all a lie,” I muttered in response, making him groan.
“What was? Gotta give me more here, little human.”
I ignored the unflattering nickname and told him, “Okay, so we know this guy must deal in spells, right?”
“Yeah, and?”
“Then it's obvious he cast some sort of spell on himself, not only to make him look different but so that he could hide his true nature. What he was doing, and for some reason, I must have seen right through it. I mean, I could see everything, Aster.” I said, my voice rising as my emotions caught up.
“What do you mean by everything?”
“I mean, I could see the darkness coming off him in waves, the way they coiled around him before branching out and reaching Lazaros on the throne. I could see it controlling him, like turning him into some fucking zombie or something. He was being controlled, but it was like nobody else in the throne room could see it but me,” I said, turning to him as I finished, and now I could feel his anger coming off him in waves.
After that, he put his foot on the gas without a word, and I could tell that he now that same urgency as me too. Minutes later, we came to a screeching stop outside the Capitol building.
“Aster?” I said his name, trying to calm him because his hands were clenched tighter around the wheel as if he was seconds away from crushing it in his fists.
I could see he was struggling with this. It was as if he had almost hoped that my first vision in the basement hadn’t been real. That in that prison, when speaking to Riley, I would have discovered that it had all been a ploy to trick me. But now that the threat was real, I could see that he, too, was as worried as I was.
“We have to go to him. We have to cross the Rift, you know that, right?”
He released a shuddered sigh as he let his head hang before nodding. Finally, I felt relief, but I knew that it came at a price, so I put what I hoped was a comforting hand on his shoulder.
“Whatever Demitrios has planned, it’s been a long time in the making, but now we have an advantage. We can stop this, Aster…we will stop this.”
He finally turned to me, his eyes blazing with hatred for the one who was behind this madness.
Then he took my hand and said the only words I wanted to hear…
“Let’s go kill that bastard!”
Ireleased a deep sigh after zipping up my backpack and looked down at the journal I had once called a lifeline, now lying on the bed. I had put it in the bag and taken it out again more times than I wanted to admit. It honestly felt like I was leaving a piece of myself behind as I heaved my bag over my shoulder and walked toward the door.
“Argh!” I groaned before storming back and grabbing it from the bed in frustration.
The truth was, half of me was convinced I wouldn’t need it. Because I knew that as soon as I stepped through the Rift, I would face things I had never seen before. It would be an alien world, and having Aster by my side would be the only guide I would need.
So, the excuses I made for taking it fell flat, but in the end, I decided to be honest with myself. I was taking it because it felt like having a piece of Atlas by my side. I remembered the way he handed it back to me, as if it had been something precious to him, something just as precious as it had always been to me.
And in that moment, it no longer felt like just a slice of me, but something more, almost like the fable of us both. For so long, he had played the villain in my story, only for me to realize that he had always been the hero. And now, it was like having his handwriting added to its pages was what the journal had needed all along.
He was always meant to be the hero I fell in love with, and now… well, now we had a new villain to face. So yes, it was silly, but the book represented far more than just comfort. It represented the fact that no matter what was written, things could change. Words held power, but actions…
They always screamed the loudest.
So, after one more look around the room, I left the journal, along with its memories of Atlas, who had once stood on the other side of the door. Who I had made stand out there for longer than he liked, just to get under his skin. The memory of the way he sat at my dining table before giving me the book about Theïkós. God, he had looked so devastatingly handsome.
And then there was the dream. The shared dream where we had begun to properly understand each other… when he had finally told me his name. That was the turning point. The pinnacle moment when he ceased to be a mythical figure and became a man I knew deserved to be loved.
I was shaking my head, trying to calm my thoughts of us getting closer. Those days spent traveling just him and me, and those blissful hours spent entangled on the forest floor. Christ, I missed him, and well, thinking of making love together wasn’t exactly helping.
