Kairos

Chapter 14

He transported us into cold stone room, one that looked strangely familiar. There were rusty chains dangling from one wall, a dark stain bruising the stones behind it. Apollo flicked his fingers and the shackles were silver snakes slithering through the air towards me. I stumbled back a step, but they launched forward and like liquid mercury, flowed over my hands. I watched in morbid fascination as the ends meet around my wrists and the metal hardened once again. Then I was yanked towards the side of the room where they first were, my hands held above my head as the chains became lifeless once again.

The shackles were tight, so tight that I could feel my skin bruising already and I get a weird sense of déjà vu from the sensation.

And that's when it hit me.

I was in my dream. This was the exact same prison.

I had had my fair share of crazy in the past weeks, or centuries, but this sent the hair on my arms rising. Something was wrong about this.

"Seeing as you wanted so desperately to stop history from occurring, I thought I would give you the best view in the house to it instead." He waved a hand and before I had time to think about what the hell he meant, one section of the wall disappeared completely, crumbling away like in the scene in Harry Potter. The battlefield of Cannae was revealed, and it looked like the armies had already met. It was as if we were hovering just above the battle, close enough that I could hear and see everything. If I had anything left in my stomach, I would have been sick again.

The blood–curdling squeal of a horse running chest first into a sword rang out shrilly, horribly across the plain until it was cut off suddenly as someone killed it to prevent the spastic kicks.

I tried to distinguish the armies and one seemed to fall back slightly, giving ground to the larger force. Oh no. It was a trap. Hannibal had ordered his men to allow the Romans to push the centre line back.

"NO NO NO NO! IT'S A TRAP!" I screamed, pulling against the shackles until my hands felt numb. I was full on sobbing as the Carthaginian cavalry on the wings charged inwards to surround the Romans. They were squeezed from all directions and there was no cohesion now.

I was hysterical, these men had families waiting for them and I couldn't help. I couldn't do anything but sit and watch it like it was a bloody movie. Their army was a pathetically confused mess of humanity, pressed shoulder to shoulder with no room to fight.

And the screams...god the screams

If I ever made it out of this alive, those screams would haunt me forever.

I could feel the agony in the gutturalness of them. Sounds wrenched from an abyss of never-ending pain and fear.

I felt my chest cave in with grief. Guilt.

I shut my eyes, but I couldn't block my ears. For the next hours, I listened to the mass execution of seventy two thousand men.

I didn't know how long it had been when silence finally descended. Apollo appeared again, though I hadn't even noticed he had left. I felt empty. Drained. I hung slack in the restraints.

Something within me had died on that plain with all the soldiers.

Nothing would ever be the same.

Apollo approached me, a grin on his face that would have made me scared yesterday but now I was indifferent . I didn't care what happened to me.

"Did you enjoy the show?" I didn't reply.

"Ugh you're no fun anymore."

"Do you not even feel slightly guilty?" My eyes had run out of tears, but they still burned as I stared at him. He was acting impartial, as if the deaths of those men meant nothing.

"Guilt is a matter of balance. When you need to feel guilty it will show itself, a beacon for you to become a better person. When you go too far with guilt it becomes a burdensome boulder, one that you cannot carry on your own. Forgiving yourself is necessary to enable further personal growth. That...is being human." He ended his dramatic monologue with a flourish.

"But I am not human," He noted with a wink, "I do not care." Anger scorched inside of me, the feeling a welcome distraction from the numbness of before.

"What do you know about being human? Thousands of men's lives were ripped away on that field while you did nothing but watch! You claim to be superior above all but you did nothing! What were you doing when their pale lips twitched in frantic prayer, begging for assistance? Where were you, when the unforgiving blade of the Carthaginians disembowelled them?"

"It is war, mortal." Apollo rolled his eyes, as if he were talking to a child.

"Do not patronise me!" I sobbed.

"Remember who you're talking to. You cannot order me to do anything."

"Who I'm talking to?" I repeated as an idea came to me, "I'm talking to a coward. A god that has so many AREAS because he cannot master one and gets bored. God of music, huh? But the lyre wasn't even your invention, it was invented by Hermes as a child. So, what is it you actually do? Perhaps you're more like a human than you'd like to be, that's why Zeus sent you to Nyx with me, you're clearly the most expendable god-"

"ENOUGH!" He boomed and before I could blink, he had driven a sword made from pure light into my chest.

His eyes widened as he saw what he had done but I felt darkness creep into me and I exhaled, receiving relief from the guilt that crippled me.