The Deluge Part 2

Well, it seems it takes more time and knowledge to post a video on this thing that I thought it did, but I'm trying now, so we'll see what happens. If I do manage to get it up, the video will appear on the last post where it was supposed to be. Eh, now I'm going to post some more poetry, per my promise. This is book three, maybe, I think? This part blows kinda. It's about Iesous wandering through the woods and being whiny. He eventually goes home and blah blah blah, stuff happens but it's not that tight. Initially, he had only had a father, but I thought a single mother made more sense, keeping all metaphors in mind. But yeah, of the crappy parts I think this is the second to last. The next one is silly, too, but.... it's smooth sailing through violent waters from there on out. Trust me.

Let us not with our special ability
to fend off shock lose the scope
of the occasion, for it is not even
infrequently that a man dominates
completely a god in arms. Never
is it that he achieves this unnoticed.
Yet it happened, on the banks of
a small bay just off the Aegean sea,
achieved by a young boy of unobvious,
yet readily apparent strength, achieving
the glory of Diomedes, Tydeus’s son, without
the subsequent curse.

Even while the Dethroned King
of the Sea was chasing his sanity,
and by all accounts trailing
miserably, the source of his suffering
crossed under the dappled eaves of
an enchanted wood. There the light
was a gentle blend of green and gold,
at least when dipped in Phoebus’ ink,
and silence was friendly. Most often
though, the air ran with liquid music,
the symphonies of varied birds or the
bow of the wind pulling over nature’s verdant
strings to provide a score for the forest.
Yet, for all the contented caroling and
sweetly blooming flora about him the self-titled
Arbiter saw it not, and though it usually warmed
his heart, on this day his heart was foundering too
deep under a darkling sea to make out any soothing
sound. As his feet stumbled unconsciously onward,
a single thought like a winged iron spike flew
around his head, another rooted deep in his stomach,
one thumping, in-out-again, the other held fast, a thick,
expanding root bearing fat, poisonous fruit.

“ That was a thing I had never expected,
But the rest aside, I didn’t kill him, I can
kill a god, but I didn’t kill him, and I don’t
think I can kill a hundred gods at once.
I don’t know what I can and can’t do, but
I am pretty sure of what they will do when
Triton finds them. It will be like a shower
of fire and lightning and whatever else
they can put into it falling down and down
on my home and my friends’ and neighbors’
homes until there’s nothing left of them at
all, not even the memories. They will hit
them so hard that they will erase our pasts,
and there’s nobody to blame but me. To think,
a spear, to think, me? I did it though, I did
what none of the ones they tell about could do,
not even Ajax, and I could have done more,
but I didn’t and now I will die more completely
than anyone ever has. Stupid! You live one
day at a time, you should take it one god at
a time, however impossibly silly that is.
Stupid, I don’t want to die yet, and I don’t
want anyone else to die because of me
being stupid!”



Occupied completely by these thoughts of self-
reproach, he wandered deep into the forest,
entirely mindless of where he set down each
foot, until by many a random step
chance found him at the secret gates
of his forest home. Reaching high into
the air before his unseeing eyes were
spires of cedar, their woody boughs conspiring
to form an interlocking grille so cleverly wrought
as to appear natural at first glimpse, but upon
closer inspection proving intentional and carefully
made. Continuing his aimless wandering, the youth
trudged on, neither knowing nor caring where he was,
even until the needly boughs of the gate scratched his
smooth face. Momentarily startled, he stopped short,
and stepped back, slightly surprised.

“ Uh-oh. Sooner or later, sooner or later,
but it’s just bad. It’s all bad. Still, I have to,
and later never did anybody any good.”


Then he pushed aside the boughs and with tears sparkling on
his cheeks he stepped into the hidden village. Just inside the
gate, he stopped, perhaps to imprint a memory of
this place, before the gods, as he was certain they would,
destroyed it. His feet stood on a path that
became a lane shaded by leafy olive trees, paving
the breadth of the village in lazy meanders. Simple
homes rested along the path, solid maple walls eaved
with handsome beech. Behind some of the houses
hung laundry lines, clothing gently swaying in the
little breeze that found its way into the secret clearing.
In front of the homes and in the soft lawns around them
children, little kids, played, their laughter sweet enough
to deepen the boy’s sadness to the color of
a growing bruise. Yet he was nothing if not
resolute, and though his stomach was busy
consuming itself in nervous acid, he forced
his feet to follow the street laid before them,
his gaze seeking at its terminus the humble home
of his mother.



She had been feeling the tremors for weeks, like
the preliminary rumblings of a massive earthquake,
and from the moment they began she knew there
was no way anyone could stop the eventual release
of pressure. She waited helplessly as she felt the
vibrations intensify, accelerating to an infinitesimally
sharp point before they exploded with terrible
force, seeming to tear the very air in rifts and great
rents of severed reality. She felt clearly the moment
the boy propelled himself through the mortal shroud
draped ‘round his being, a shroud not unlike one
a great sculptor would draw over a masterpiece to
keep it special before some predetermined
unveiling. She felt the moment the boy burst through
his shroud, and passed out from the shock.
When she found her reserves had again filled
enough for her to open her eyes, she perceived
the recession of the trembling; somehow the
boy had managed to gather the tatters of the
shroud around himself and knit them into
a coherent blanket, achieving once again
the concealment of his spirit from the world.
A subtle melancholy pulse was all that remained.
Even here, she felt her son draw nearer, the epicenter
of the great quake that split the sea.

He’s outside her door, and the vibration ceases.


A woman’s intuition is real, and a mother’s
intuition is fact, stretching over the wavy field
of the future like a morning haze over hilly
country, shifting sideways out of the air in
the early dawn and settling loosely upon the rises
and sinking into the valleys, taking in the topography
as if it were brail written in a language of misty
letters and half-dashed words and then gone,
burnt through and burnt off by the rising sun.
She could guess from the way the dew wet the sky
that something was coming, and there had been
that sense of impending bigness, of approaching
heights in a certain place in the air behind her
ears for the past few weeks, towering over and
evaporating around her on again and off again
while she watered her plants or sat in meetings
or when she kissed her son good-night. Then
she heard the door knob turning, and there it
was, no longer the impression of mist but
actuality locked up in dull metallic sound-waves.


Almost struggling against the resistant air,
the door creaked open and the boy walked into
his mother’s home, kneeling in front of his mother’s
chair, putting his hand upon his mother’s knee,
and speaking to his mother thus.

“Mom, I have to tell you something. Something
that will be hard for you to believe but is the
absolute honest-to-whomever-you-please truth.
Triton, the Triton, came out of a pool of water,
the sea where I go, and something has happened
to me. I did something. He made me so angry
and I speared him. I speared him and made
him cry, I know it’s impossible, crazy, but I did,
I cut straight through his shoulder, through the skin
I mean and all the way to the bone. Then I told
him to tell everyone that I did it to him, and I let
him get away. I could have killed him, I should
have killed him, do you hear me, but I didn’t.
Oh, No...... phew... I didn’t. Every time I think
about it I remember Odysseus, and if Poseidon
would put him through that for a few mere word
he will have me and everyone I know wandering
through the lowest levels of Tartarus
until the world ends. Mother, I don’t know what
to do, I don’t have a single clue, but if I do nothing
we’re all going to die. I need your help.”

From beneath delicate brows the boy’s
mother looked upon her son with
benevolent eyes, for she knew
that sometimes there are fates that
cannot be escaped, that sometimes
all roads converge upon the same
point, and the only way to differentiate
one from the next is by the scenery in
between. With this knowledge
in her heart she spoke to her son.

“ When you burst in here, your face so pale,
I thought you had lost the sheep in the forest
again. Collecting them all up took days,
searching for little puffs of white behind
all the green and brown and yellow, trying
to pick out the bleats from the whistles
of the birds and the creaks of the grasshoppers.
But in the end we found them all, and when
we did you said you would never lose them again,
and that you would learn to talk to the sheep
so that you could always keep them together.
You said you would be the best shepherd ever,
and I knew that you would, but that sheep
were too small. This day was bound to come
sooner or later, and the only question now
is not why it came but what to do now that
it is here.”

These words confused the boy in a way
that gave him hope, because he was worried
that he had pulled somthing out of nothing
in a way he could never do again, or that
he was nothing stumbled upon something
meant for someone, someone else, but if
his mother saw it, he believed her.
“I’m going to fight the gods,” he said.
“I’m going to fight the gods whether
I should or not because I have started
doing it, and with this sort of thing there
is no backing out, unless you mean dying.”

His mother was silent for a moment,
looking into her boy’s face for what would
be the last time.

“ My son, the road ahead of you could not
be more dark, because you are a little boy
in a world of angry gods. Not so little anymore,
maybe, but then again the gods are very angry.
I’m afraid you’ll need more than an umbrella
or a shady tree to weather the storm they
will raise against you. I want to sit you down
and make you eat a plate of cookies, but it makes
me old knowing that I have to direct you somewhere
else. When you have to put down a rabid animal
you must cut off the head, and so this is the same
with a rabid pantheon. You can do nothing but
cut off the head, the Olympian gods, children
of ancient Kronos, for they are in charge, and with
them removed the rest of the headless beast will
fall down dead. It must be Hades first, the
lonely Olympian beneath the ground, who sits
in the dark with the ghosts of the people we used
to be. You must go into the earth to prove your claim
to it, my child, you must teach it the goodness of your
heart from inside out so that it will know exactly who you are .”

A lesser soul would have cast aside his
gloves and thrown down his trowel, learning
that his life’s road could be paved only with the
skulls of the Olympian Gods, and further,
that the first brick was to come off the neck,
off the block of infamous Hades. What hit-man,
no matter how ice-cold, could help but blink
at the next name on his list were it to read
the “Steward of Death himself”? Yet now
resolved to the quest, nothing could deter
the boy, and with an almost uncomprehending
stoicism he nodded, quickly rising from his place
before his mother’s knee.

“Into Hades? I didn’t want to die until I was
an old man, but if I come out again then I
guess I will have been reborn. Whether or
not I will be a different person, only time will
tell, but you’re right, if I am to win this fight
I’ll need the earth on my side, and what
better way to start than by taking it back
from within? My eyes have been opened
mom, and who knows what world they
will see when I look out through them.”

His mother’s eyes were gray clouds sinking
in a quiet twilight, but she raised her hands
in a benediction, and spoke to the boy in
a voice like rain on a metal roof.
“ Your eyes have always been open, and
you see the world more clearly than I.
If you had not the thing which {necessitates}
this quest, I would do all that I might to keep you
here. It is a mother’s job to bring her boy up,
to lead him through tears and chubby cheeks
and cradles in the night to the doorsteps of
his own destiny. The doorsteps are his to walk
through, though, and when she can see their liminal
glow in the distance, she knows that she needs to let
go, and leave him with both hands free to wrestle
the world. Still, she’ll never forget the way the lines
of his palm fit into hers, no matter how time
stretches them out, and even when all I can do
is wave you on your way, I’ll be watching
the set of your shoulders and the bob of your head
as you disappear, even so I’ll be able to recognize
them in whatever world we meet next. Here,
one list thing before I see you off.”

And taking from a pocket deep within
her cloak, the woman brought forth
a gleaming talisman. It was cleverly wrought to
hold in the light that struck it and burnish
it as if with a rich and lustrous laquer. Displayed
upon the precious sigul was a bright flame
on a field of shadowy green, the deep red flame
emitting radiant streaks of brilliant white like
rays from a vibrant sun. Above the flame, the
green grew dark, and became a cap of sable within
which little diamonds hung like ornamental stars. A
single ruby shone in their midst, glistening like
blood.
Within and about the flame, like wood for
a campfire, burned an array of detailed symbols;
a giant three-pronged fork, a sceptre the color
of a deadly bruise, a great mithril axe, a giant
hammer, a staff entwined by two serpents, a slim
bow, and a few others which the intensity
of the flames obscured.

At its top, the flame blossomed out like a
rose, its petals reaching up to the stars above.

With a glint of reverence clear in his eyes, the
boy took the sacred pendant, and at his touch
it began to resonate, sending out brilliant shafts
of multicolored light that brightened the
already lit room of the house. It was hot in his hand but
he did not burn, and it seemed that as the light
escaped from the pendant it rushed directly
into his eyes, illuminating them with a beautiful
and terrible energy. Determination drawn
cleanly in every line of his being, he raised the
pendant to his neck, and clasped it there around.
As it settled over his chest it gave out a single
blinding pulse, and then went dim. It seemed
alive around his neck where it had been only a
piece of art in the hand of the woman.

He looked up at his mother and in his eyes gleamed
eternity. For a moment they were every color
and none, like darkness and light entwined and
melded, a shade and hue so radiant and impossible
that his mother faded away in the shower of not-quite-white,
and for a moment she was little more than an outline,
a small smile in the backwash of eternity. Then the boy
spoke two words to himself, “Not yet,” and willed it
to subside. In the breathless calm that ensued,
he bowed low to his mother of old, gently kissed
her forehead, and left the house forever.