Ode to the Queen (2 page)

And just like that panic sunk into my bones.

“Atlas-“ I licked my lips carefully, turning slowly back to him, “where are you taking me?”

“Oros Olympos.” He said calmly, his eyes never leaving the road. The car shifted, ascending a hill with assured steadiness. My mind raced as I tried to put his words together and make some sense though I couldn’t recall any town near Athens named ‘Oros Olympos’. Atlas could tell I was coming up blank he glanced over at me and grinned. His head tilted slightly to tell me to look out the windshield at the opening of a mountain we were descending into.

Casually he gauged my reaction as he said, “the mortals called it Mount Olympus.”

The rocks behind us moved themselves to seal up the entrance we’d entered and the darkness surrounded us like a blanket. An involuntary shiver went through my body as I turned to Atlas, thousands of questions flooding my mind but the words utterly forgotten.

He was already climbing out of the Range Rover and moving away, leaving me there. Panic entered my system and I stumbled to unbuckle myself and follow him.

“Wait! What did you mean by mortals? And did you mean Mount Olympus as in Zeus and the other Greek Gods?”

“In good time Savannah. Come along, I’ll show you to your new room.”

“In good time? I want some answers now! I’m supposed to be going to an exchange program at the University today. There are people expecting me and when I don’t show up-“

“I sent the acceptance package. You weren’t selected.” Coolness rushed over my body. I didn’t know what was worse: realising that I had been kidnapped for some psychopath’s Greek God fetish or the fact that I hadn’t actually been good enough to be selected for the program despite all the hard work I’d put into the last 2 years to get the placement.

Shock and fear became the adrenaline my body ran on as I forced myself to follow him, knowing that whatever he was going to do to me could only be a little better than freezing to death in the darkness of a cave crawling with God knows what insects and other creatures.

“Are you a sex trafficker?” He laughed, but his laugh sounded bigger than it should be. I assumed that it was due in part to the natural echo of such an enclosed space but even then, the startling noise was far more powerful than the average man and that worried me more.

“No, hardly. You’re not my type.” Sudden unprecedented disappointment wracked my body as I began to wonder why on earth I couldn’t possibly be his type. Unless maybe he went for acne riddled 500-pound women. But I had a hard time believing that was
anyone
’
s
type. Even 500-pound acne riddled men.

Back home, I had always been any guy’s type. Or if I wasn’t initially, I made myself their type, Atlas couldn’t be any different but… I shook the thought out of my head. Already my mind was being seduced by the idea of Stockholm syndrome, and I wasn’t even a captive yet.

Plus, as I reminded myself for the five hundredth time today, I wasn’t going to be as easy for guys as I used to be. Fraud or not, this was still me turning over a leaf and if he did want to use me for sex, well – he’d be hard pressed to find me willing to do it.

“Here we are.”

I wasn’t entirely sure where here was or how he even knew where here was and if we were there but he surprised me when light suddenly flooded the dark passage as he opened the door. Blinking, my eyes resisted the adjustment at first and I found myself standing in a corridor, lavishly decorated in ivories and gilded gold.

It was breathtaking and certainly fit for royalty of some kind, or Gods as Atlas wanted me to believe. I had definitely never been taken to a place like this before and for a moment my mind betrayed me, briefly becoming a willing participant in this fantasy if it meant I got to live in such a nice place.

Corinthian style columns decked the hallway elaborately carved with depictions of what I could only assume were ancient Greek myth scenes. Atlas caught my slack jawed stare and grinned proudly,

“I restored it myself.” I was momentarily awestruck, turning to him with praise in my eyes and my former panic forgotten.

“It’s gorgeous.”

“It’s just the entrance way.” He laughed as he started up the hallway. “You should see the throne room.”

Wow, this guy really took his Greek God fetish to an extreme by recreating a palace for the Gods. That was intense dedication that I didn’t even think ancient Greeks had possessed.

“This is a chronologically ordered account of the history of the Titans and Gods. From their inception to their downfall…” His finger pointed out the iconic scene of Cronos eating the rock that was passed off as Zeus and then further down the Olympians laying waste on the Titans and locking them away.

My eyes devoured every image I passed until I came to the end, to the part of the story that no one had ever written about because by then no one had cared about the Gods. My feet came to a standstill as I stared at the frieze showing how the Gods slowly began to lose their powers because of the lack of belief in them by people.

It showed Zeus had ordered a Titan from his captivity. This Titan took the main Gods, putting them into the core of the earth for safe keeping while the lesser Gods went to the sky and became the constellations we now know.

The earth continued to revolve and the Gods never made an appearance again. Then, just by the door at the end of the hallway there was one last image. The Titan holding Earth in his hands opened it up once more and released the souls of the Gods. The souls were sent into the world, pushed into humans on every continent. This Titan then set about gathering them all again and bringing them back to Olympus where they belonged.

My eyes shifted from the image and to the man beside me, who looked just like the Titan in the carvings.

“Atlas.” I said simply.

He nodded, a small smile lighting his face, “I am the Titan who was asked by Zeus to look after him, his brothers, his sisters and his children until the time was right.”

“Titan?” I repeated back incredulously, my eyebrows rising slightly.

“Son of Iapetus and Clymene, daughter of the Ocean, I once fought against the Great Zeus in the war but in the end turned my allegiance to him. Fair and mighty Zeus then tasked me with the weight of bearing the sky on my shoulders to keep him separated from mother earth so that they could not resume their primordial embrace.

When the power of the Gods began to wane, once more Zeus came to me and asked for my help. He asked me to lay the Gods to rest and watch over the earth as I bore the sky. When the time came that the world once more needed its Gods I was to return them to their rightful place in Olympus.”

My head spun at the onslaught of information and I shook my head, unable to believe what he was telling me. It couldn’t be true; it was too unbelievable.

“There is no such thing as Greek Gods, they’re just myths… stories.”

“You believe that because in your lifetime and in the lifetime of your forefathers there has not been any evidence of their existence. They’ve been erased from time and history but now the earth cries for its devout leaders. It’s time for it to be returned to the glorified state it once belonged to before it is lost completely to the augury.”

“Right…” I spoke slowly, my mind still reeling and trying to make sense of this. “So, saying I believe you – and frankly I don’t – you’re saying I’m one of those God soul-things you released into the world?” He nodded, an almost devilish smirk on his face.

“Yes. You are very much one of the Gods, one of the twelve Olympians in fact.”

“Okay… so you’re saying I’ve been living this crap existence for the last 21 years when in fact I could’ve been living in the lap of luxury as a Goddess. This is where you lose me because if I was really a Goddess shouldn’t have things worked out a little better for me?” I had moved my hands to my waist and raised an eyebrow at him trying to analyse what he was saying.

But he only calmly shook his head at me, “you’ve lived the life you have because of who your Goddess is. Your experiences and your life is what makes you the perfect vessel for who you are.”

“Sure… But then, who am I?”

“That, I’m afraid, I can’t tell you. But when the time is right, you will know and you will remember everything.” I found it hard to believe what he was saying. In fact the more I spoke to him the more I realised this guy was three fries short of a happy meal and had kidnapped me to fulfil some kind of sick, sex fantasy.

Atlas was completely oblivious to my disbelief as he pushed open the door and slipped through before pausing to hold the door for me. I cast a wearier glance on the frieze beside me before stepping through to whatever was waiting for me on the other side.

My anxiety and disbelief was short lived, however. If I had found the previous hallway to be elaborate and beautiful, no words could describe the next room but I was certain it had to be the throne room he had spoken about before.

The floors were tiled with heavy marble slabs, the outer edge carved ornately with flowers and foliage. From there they moved toward the centre in an elaborate diamond shape, accented with small golden tiles appearing like flecks in the design. In the very centre of the room lay a massive flat sundial, different from any I had ever seen in real life or in books.

It was white and gold, according to the colour scheme of the room and laden with small gold carvings of each zodiac sign – Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio and Sagittarius with smaller carvings in ivory of the moon cycle. Two hands adorned it, each pointing to the position of the moon in the sky as it currently was and the other to the astrological sign in which the moon’s position sat.

I stared in awe at it; fascinated by how it worked when I looked up at the scene before me. Two nearly identical chairs were at the highest peak of the room, enclosed by four Corinthian columns atop the main platform of steps.

At the bottom of the steps sat five chairs on either side. Each similar but uniquely different at the same time, no doubt each one meant for a certain God.

I turned, surveying the rest of the room and took in the illustrations on the wall. Lined with ornate depictions of each major God of the pantheon the wall was separated into twelve different friezes, each acting as an illustrative offering to a God.

Zeus, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Athena, Ares, Aphrodite, Hestia, Hephaestus, Demeter, Apollo, and Artemis; each had a tableau addressed to them, represented with a central statue carved in their likeness. But only certain statues bore faces, others were blank as though Atlas was waiting to finish them.

I realised that sunlight was streaming through a window somewhere despite the pillars of fiery incense burners lined behind the ten thrones. My eyes glanced around for the source and as I turned my head to the ceiling and gasped in surprised to see there wasn’t one.

At first I thought this to be impossible, but there were no glass panels to protect the room from the elements and certainly no support beams to hold any glass that could be up there.

It was simply an open roof allowing the occupants to view the sky in all its glory. Only to further my awareness of the open roof, dark clouds began to roll in and before I knew it raindrops fell into the room.

“Oh no!” I said quickly, looking around for shelter but Atlas only laughed at me and I realised the rain fell but I didn’t feel it on my skin. It was as though it lost its physicality the moment it struck a surface, leaving no trace of its former existence.

“How…?” I turned to look at him but he merely smirked. A man of many secrets, I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or intrigued.

“Zeus must be in a mood right now.” His eyes were cast on the sky still as the clouds grew darker and lightning threatened. Shaking his head he moved forward from my peripherals and stopped before the wall we had entered.

The door we’d come from was long gone, and Atlas swept his hands from the centre to the sides drawing the wall like a curtain with his hands. Before us was the biggest high definition screen I’d ever seen, that is – I assumed it was high definition because surely Athens wasn’t really on our doorstep as it appeared.

Atlas flicked his wrist once more and the image changed; we were looking at Times Square in New York City. And another flick revealed my mother, a small, excited gasp escaping my lips. She was leaving work and she looked tired, no doubt worried too about whether I’d made it okay to Greece.

“Do we get CNN too?” I joked but Atlas turned and there was no humour in his expression. I offered him a smile and then turned to take in the brilliance of the room once more. It truly was magical but surely some of these things had to be illusions.

“I told you so.” Atlas drew my attention to him and I nodded dumbly, no words were able to describe the sea of emotions flooding the flow of my thoughts.

“Anyways, if you’re done… I’ll take you to your room and you can sleep. I’m sure that nap in the car wasn’t nearly enough for you.” He stepped away, giving me another moment alone with the room around me. I followed slowly toward the passage he had revealed in the walls of the throne room, each step reluctant and worrisome.

As beautiful and magical as this place seemed to be, all I could think of still was the image of myself in the car. She had been so adamant that I didn’t come here, that someone – a male – would hurt me, that he wanted my power. Her power? Surely that had to be it. I wasn’t powerful. And who was he? Was she talking about Atlas? Or was there a greater danger laying in wait for me? But, despite my reservations, I still followed Atlas out of the room, taking in the next part of the mountain.

It was a maze of corridors, each lined with a few intricate doors before we entered one at the end of the hall. The layout of the ‘manor’ and mountain lacked any sort of logic. Although we had entered from the bottom, the throne room was located on the uppermost level in order to overlook the rest of the world as the Gods were meant to do so. We moved downwards through hallways toward the room I was meant to live in.

“Here we are. The penthouse.” I turned toward him, unsure if Atlas knew the meaning of ‘penthouse’ but dared not correct him because for all I knew I was back at the peak of the mountain again.

“It’s all mine?” I looked about the length of the wall and imagined what laid behind it for me. The wall itself was longer than any house or apartment I’d ever lived in. Hell, it looked bigger than the nursing building on campus.

He shook his head, “no, everyone shares a floor with someone else, but it’s still pretty big. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.”

He nodded toward the door, allowing me to go forward first and open it. As I reached for the door a lock clicked and the door opened before I even touched it. Surprise jerked my body and I stepped back in alarm, Atlas reached out urging me forward with the slightest touch to my lower back and reluctantly I made my way inside to look around.