I realized that I had not dreamed during all the long months of our travels because he had not allowed me to dream. And now that our journey was finished, he was amusing himself by invading my dreams and perverting them to his own enjoyment.
I seethed with hate all the time I spent in that dark scorchingly hot cell. Set’s servants fed me only enough to keep me barely alive: a thin warm liquid that tasted rancid, pulpy rotting leaves, nothing more. I was out of that stinging, lashing wind, but the heat down in this deep underground chamber baked the strength out of me, blistered my skin, and seared my lungs.
Every night I dreamed of Anya and the other Creators, knowing that Set was watching, digging into memories I never knew I had. The dreams turned into nightmares as night after night I tried to warn Anya and the others while before my sleeping eyes I saw the Creators being sliced to bloody ribbons, bodies slashed open spurting blood, faces torn apart, limbs hacked from their torsos.
By me.
Horrified, I was their executioner. I burned them alive. I tore out their eyes. I drank their blood. Zeus’s. Hera’s. Even Anya’s.
Night after night the nightmares were the same. I would visit the Creators in their golden sanctuary. They would scorn me. Mock me. I would reach for Anya, begging her to help me, to understand the message of terror and death that I was carrying. But she would run away or transform herself into some form unobtainable.
Then the killing would start. I always began with the Golden One, tearing at him like a ferocious wolf, ripping the smirking smile from his face, rending his perfect body with claws of razor-sharp steel.
Night after night, the same dream. The same horror. And each night it became more real. I awoke bathed in sweat, shaking like a man possessed, hardly daring to look down at my trembling hands for fear that I would find them reeking with blood.
Behind each nightmare I sensed Set’s lurking, menacing presence. He was clawing ruthlessly through my mind, dredging into memories that the Golden One or whoever created me had long since sealed off from my conscious recall. I relived life after life, hurtling from the very origins of the human race to such distant futures that humankind itself had evolved into shapes and powers beyond recognition. Yet each dream inevitably, inexorably came down to the same horrifying scene.
I confronted the Creators. I tried to tell them what was going to happen, tried to warn them. They laughed at me. I begged them to listen to me, pleaded with them to save their own lives. They thought it was uproariously funny.
Then I killed them. Slashed them while they laughed, tore out their entrails while their faces still smirked and grinned at me. I killed them all. I tried to spare Anya. I screamed at her to run away, to transform herself so that I could not reach her. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she became that glowing silvery sphere that was forever beyond my touch. But when she did not, I killed her as mercilessly as I butchered all the others. I tore her throat out. I disemboweled her. I crushed her beautiful face in my clawed hands.
And woke up whimpering. I had not the strength for screaming. I awoke in that oven-hot lightless cell blind and terribly weak, my body wasting and my mind being pillaged.
The worst of it was that I knew what Set was doing. He was exploring my mind, using the memories that had been sealed away from me to learn everything he could about the Creators. Most of all he wanted to find out how he could send me back through spacetime to the Creators’ own domain, that golden paradise of theirs far in the future of this time.
I could feel his cold cruel presence in my mind, searching, rampaging through my memories like a conquering army looting a helpless village, looking for the key that would allow him to project me into the Creators’ realm.
He wanted to send me to a point in the continuum before the Creators had become aware of his own existence. He wanted to plant me among them when their defenses were down, when they were not expecting to be attacked, especially by their own creature.
Set would accompany me on this trip through spacetime. His mind and will would ride within my brain. He would see with my eyes. He would strike with my hands.
The hell of it was that there truly was hatred for the Creators inside me. He found that vein of anger, of bitter resentment, that seethed through me. He hissed with pleasure when he realized how I hated the Golden One, the very person who had created me. He saw how I had defied him and tried to kill him, how I hated the other Creators for shielding him from my wrath.
And he found the blistering-hot fury deep within me that etched my soul like acid eating steel whenever I thought of Anya. Love turned to hate. No, worse, for I still loved her yet hated her, too. She had chained me to a rack that was pulling me apart, worse torture than anything Set could inflict upon my body.
But the devil knew how to use the torment in my mind, how to employ that hatred for his own purposes.
“You are being very helpful to me, Orion,” I heard him in my mind as I writhed in that utterly black cell.
I knew it was true. I loathed myself for it, but I knew that there was enough rage and hatred within me to serve as a murderous weapon for Set’s malevolence.
The nightmares returned whenever I slept. No matter how hard I fought against it, inevitably my eyes would close and my starved, exhausted body would drift into slumber. And the nightmare would begin anew.
Each time more real. Each time I saw a little more detail, heard my own words and those of the Creators with better clarity, felt the solidity of their flesh in my ravening hands, smelled the hot sweetness of their blood as it spurted from the wounds I slashed into them.
There would come, inexorably, one final dream. I knew that one of these times the reality would be perfect, that I would actually be among my Creators, that I would kill them all for Set, my master. And then all dreams would cease. My pain and longing would be at an end. The crushing, forsaken sense of abandonment that filled my heart with despair would at last be wiped away.
All I had to do was surrender to the will of Set. I realized now that it was only my own foolish, stubborn resistance that stood in the way of final peace. A few moments of blood and anguish and everything would be finished. Forever.
I had to stop fighting against Set and admit to myself that he was my master. I had to allow him to send Orion the Hunter on this final stalk, and then he would allow me peace. I almost smiled to myself there in the blind darkness of that searingly hot cell. How ironic that Orion’s final hunt would be to track down his very Creators and kill them all.
“I am ready,” I called out. My voice was cracked, rasping. My throat and lungs parched.
In response I heard a vast hissing sigh that seemed to echo through all the underground chambers of Set’s magnificent palace of darkness.
It seemed like an eternity before anything happened. I lay on the stone floor of my cell in total darkness and absolute quiet except for my own ragged, labored breathing. Perhaps the floor became somewhat cooler. Perhaps the air became a little moister. Perhaps it was only my imagination.
I was too weak to stand, and I wondered how I might do my master’s bidding in such an exhausted condition.
“Have no fear, Orion,” Set’s voice echoed in my mind. “You will be strong enough when the moment comes. My strength will fill your body. I will be within you at every moment. You will not be alone.”
So his magnanimity in allowing the Creators to flee the Earth had been nothing more than a ruse. He intended to strike at them, to destroy them, at a time when they were completely unprepared to meet his attack. And I would be his weapon.