Deliverance [malexmale]

Chapter Fifteen

"Back in my world, I was a priestess," she murmured, making me cock my head, trying to picture her as a reserved woman of religion, "The Atlantean people revered me because of my hair." She reached up to stroke the red locks that fell around her face in beautiful waves.

The Atlantean sacred color was red. Temples were decorated in the color, priests and priestesses only wore red. It was thought to be the blood of the gods that made everything, including the humans.

"Even when I took a husband and had four children with him," her voice choked and she placed a hand over her mouth for a moment before calming, "Even after that, the people continued to view me as a sacred gift from the gods. My life was good until the Greeks went to war with our people. The war took the life of my husband and my oldest son. Sickness stole my infant daughter and my other daughter was captured by a Greek army and never heard from again. I still tried to have faith in the gods. I still struggled to figure out why they were torturing me the way they were. And then the island sank and I realized they were preparing me for the worst. They were taking my family away from the horror that befell the Atlantean people. But I wasn't sent to Xandria. I never saw my family where I was. I was in some kind of hellish nightmare."

She closed her eyes, a single tear flowing down her cheek and I hesitated, suddenly feeling guilty for forcing her to talk about this when it obviously caused her an incredible amount of grief. She blinked her eyes open to look at me, her gaze haunted.

"When I was brought back, I thought I had been given a second chance. That my hellish existence in that cold dark world was punishment enough. Except it wasn't over," she whispered, clenching her fists, "I was dumped in an ocean so cold my lips turned blue in minutes. I was sure I was going to die, but I didn't. Something was keeping me alive... Days later, I woke up in the arms of men I'd never seen before. Men who tore at my clothes and touched me in places that, should they had done such a thing in Atlantis, they would've been killed for it on the spot. I could do nothing. It was as if they were demons sent by the gods to torture me further."

Her words sent a cold chill through me. My breath caught in my throat, my heart clenched so tight it hurt. Instantly I saw exactly what she'd seen. People she didn't recognize, and never would, leering and grabbing and treating her like nothing more than a play thing, as if she herself did not matter. That horrendous sensation of helplessness. No matter how much you screamed, no one heard you. No matter how much you fought, you couldn't protect yourself.

The feeling was all too familiar.

"You ask me why I am devoted to Atlan," Dianna breathed, making me snap out of my own thoughts to stare at her intense glare, "Because if it were not for him, I would still be on a ship out in the middle of the ocean surrounded by men I couldn't understand, couldn't speak to. It was as if they were speaking a warped version of one of the Nubian languages. I only caught one or two words and they were never kind. I woke up in the middle of the night to them all screaming, the smell of smoke choking me, the sound of an alarm. And before me stood Atlan. He took me in his arms and brought me here to his island." I frowned.

"You're devoted to him because he saved you," I concluded. Dianna scoffed, making me arch a brow as she turned to pick up the clay pot, pouring it through a chute in the wall.

"No, silly Greek. I am devoted to him because he chose to save me. Of all the people returned to this world from the Source, of all the humans, he could have saved... He chose me. Despite my loss of faith, despite my loss of purity, of my damnation in the Source, he chose me."

"Do you even know what he did to his children?" I challenged. Dianna narrowed her eyes.

"Not all gods are goodness, Menoetius."