Cursed [malexmale]

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Over nine thousand years ago, I fought alongside my brothers, my sisters, my pantheon, against the Greek Titans. It was a battle that still gnawed at my bones years later. After the Titan Iapetus had attacked Lea, Atlan had finally had it with the Greeks taunting us and launched a full scale attack against the Greeks.

The battle lasted only until I sunk Atlantis. But even then, it was several years of long hard fighting that killed off a huge percentage of mortals. We had disrupted the natural balance of the world, the death gods screaming for us to stop, but we didn't.

Atlan was on a rampage. He'd lied to our pantheon and claimed it was revenge for Lea's attack, when in actuality, Atlan wanted to start his conquest of the universe, starting with the one pantheon that refused to bend over backwards for him. The Greeks were a stubborn, powerful race with rooted that dated deep into the B.C.E. Their pantheon had existed for centuries before their people did, but back then, they weren't the Greek pantheon. They were just a tiny cluster of gods that had been spat up by the Source.

The battle against the Greeks had been bloody and hard. I was often paired with Xenon because his powers complemented my own. A god of protection and a god of rebirth went hand in hand, but despite our somewhat peaceful realms of rule, we had our darkest realms. The realms of retribution and death. For there to be protection, there must be revenge. For there to be rebirth, there must be death. Xenon and I cut a stormy path through the Greeks, and it only worsened when we met with the Greek's greatest trump card.

Hannibal.

Only back then, he was referred to simply as "the hybrid". His battles couldn't even really be called battles because he bulldozed straight through entire armies, tore them to pieces and bathed in their blood with a sick relish that had always terrified me. Xenon had insisted there was something inside him, something that didn't want to kill, but no one had believed him.

At least, I didn't until the day the hybrid had saved Xenon's life.

It was a hot sunny day on a beach when Hannibal's brother, Menoetius had attacked Xenon and I while we rested on the beach. He'd been intending to capture and take us to his father, but Hannibal had come out of nowhere and fought his own brother back. For many years, I had never understood it.

Even when Menoetius and I had fought again later on, without Xenon or Hannibal present.

It was another hot day in summer, two armies had clashed and I had chosen my champion in the mortal war and Menoetius had chosen his. We launched our own war within the fray of mortal bodies being tossed aside, hammered and beaten bloody, until death. Menoetius had fought hard.

I still remembered that killer gleam in his eye, his fangs bared as he slammed his sword against mine, such a loud crack that it echoed around us and a few mortals had the intelligence to scrambled out of our way to avoid being killed. Thinking us simply powerful soldiers, they had left us alone, and with good reason considering Menoetius's violence. He fought like Hannibal; again and again and again without a breath for break, like he was set to auto-pilot and had only one goal in mind.

Kill.

He'd slammed his sword against mine repeatedly, breathing labored and blood oozing from a gash in his brow, dirt smeared across a face that was far too young to be in war.

Atlanteans started training their men at the age of seven for war, however, they certainly were not sent into war until their late teens, even then it was rare. The fact that Menoetius was a god still should've meant he should wait, yet here he was, a wild jaguar of a beast slashing and attacking me as if he had fought for centuries.