Dear Readers: Let's pick up where we left off with #Cloder in the palace :) ♥

P.S. This soundtrack is one of my favorite sad/epic scores ever: "The Truth" by Audiomachine. The title and the song itself just suit this scene sooo perfectly... Hopefully you can give it a listen ^_^

______________________

Scene 5: Why

2020 B.C.

She had hoped to go to sleep. To never see the man again.

Against her human heart, she’d hoped. Against the passions that she feared, for how fiercely they burned—for it was fearsome to feel bound to him, a fleeting soul upon the mortal earth. Even more so to feel rapture at the thought of her immortal soul somehow entwined with his. To think that their paths had been fated to cross, and to feel that nothing mattered more, on the entire Loom, than one grey thread the life of which she’d touched, and wished she never had to leave…

But there was much that mattered more. She would always remember, even and especially when her heart forgot. Before she had been human, she had been a Fate. Would always be a Fate. The daughter of a deity. The force of destiny, in dire need of aid, her doom assured unless her daughters focused ever on their task. It was a duty from which Cloe knew that she must never stray. To light the darkness in the heart of humankind.

Even if it meant extinguishing the flame within her own.

She had hoped to go to sleep. But here he was. Already in her mind, she’d bidden him goodbye. Her heart had protested; perhaps he’d heard the thunder through the halls, calling to him across the palace, all across the world unto its end. Perhaps the sound had summoned him and he was here to silence her mad heartbeat, to remind her that she had no place beside him in this life. In any life.

It would be good, to hear him say it. Easier to leave him, knowing that he wouldn’t have her anyway.

At any rate, she had to speak. He didn’t seem about to say a word himself. Not yet. His eyes were speaking volumes, but she couldn’t really bring herself to look, from where she stood still at the doorsill.

She inhaled, more deeply than humanly possible. Spoke in a strained and tortured sigh, struggling to be above a whisper. The air in here was all too heavy. Hot. It hurt. “Thank you.”

Cloe braved a glance up into his bay-blues. She shouldn’t have. The floor was safer, or the wall behind him; anything to anchor her to solid earth. She feared what she might say or do while drowning.

“…for saving us today,” she continued, focusing just above his brow, hoping that it would give the illusion of eye contact. “We owe you our lives, the would-be sacrifice and I. As does this entire city.”

He came a little closer. Slowly. Not slowly enough, or fast enough. By all the gods, the lost gods and the few who remained, she was dying.

When he spoke, she could have wept. To think that she could never hear his voice again, after this hopeless, heartless night.

“You owe me nothing, Cloe,” he claimed. “I’d do the same a thousand times. It was the only thing to do.”

She struggled to stay focused on his forehead. To speak with some semblance of sanity. “That’s true. Saving a victimized maiden, a city of innocent people…”

Had she dropped her gaze below his brow, she might’ve seen an answer in his bay-blues. Saving you.

But she did not. She kept on speaking, scared of what might happen should she stop. “…I’m glad that you did—Perseus. I do thank you.”

She had halted a bit, before saying his name. Had nearly uttered the other, the first name of which she had grown so fond, but thought it would be better to call him by the name he’d given to the court.

He shook his head, though, with a faint smile. “Rider. Still Rider.”

While his gaze was cast down to the floor, for a second, she ventured finally to look upon his eyes, the lowered lids. She felt her heart rate steadying somewhat, falling back into their wonted dynamic together: the war of words, of wits, waged always between them, stopping just when the game seemed to come close to being serious somehow. Tried to forget that this moment was different, as it was to be the last. “Why?” she asked.

His gaze lifted again; she froze beneath the heat. “That’s who I am. Not who I should be. The truth, not the myth,” he replied, eyes sinking boldly, softly into hers. “Not the champion—just the man.”

She willed herself to keep his gaze. “One in the same, after today.”

He wagged his head again. “Not yet.”

Cloe canted hers, the curious tilt they knew so well. “Why’s that?”

Rider paused. Turned to the nearest wall, against which stood a humble stool. He went to take a seat, and Cloe’s heart hastened again—he meant to stay awhile? Why? She couldn’t bring herself to ask, or disinvite him, though she knew she probably should. So took a seat upon the bed herself, facing him from across the tiny room.

He sat with elbows braced against his knees, staring into his hands, as if reading the story from the lines upon his palms. “My mother named me Perseus with high hopes for the hero I’d become. She was a woman of vision, or so she believed—a woman of deep faith. However tragically misplaced it might’ve been.”

Cloe watched him closely. “And your father?”

His hands clenched into fists upon the instant; he glared at the floor, with a hatred that threatened to break it in half and release all the fires of hell. “I don’t like to speak of my father.”

The glare was nothing short of terrifying, though she did have to admit that Rider looked mightily ravishing like that. All riled up. Which made her not exactly sorry that she’d mentioned it.

She cleared her throat, both to hopefully snap him out of his rage, and to shut up her shamefully, passionately human reaction.

Neither had been achieved, but she spoke anyway. “So your mother had high hopes for you?”

Rider bowed his head, in a deep nod that seemed also a gesture of mourning. “She did. And I believed her, for as long as she lived, till I learned just how wrong she had been. About me. About everything.”

Cloe could have asked a million questions, but she bit her tongue. Afraid that anything she asked might unleash hellfire again. Besides, her passions for him just intensified with every word he spoke, with every little thing she learned about him. Best to keep it to a minimum.

Why was he telling her this anyway? Why was he here?

He shifted from the tangent of his mother’s dying day, returning to the question of her hopes for him. “She had foretold that I would be a hero of renown, to be remembered all throughout the ages. Set for a life of noble deeds, of fame and fortune. And…” his voice trailed into momentary silence, as he raised his gaze toward hers, “…an epic love.”

And at that, every vessel in her heart burst, every fiber breaking, bleeding brutally and beautifully at once. Was he trying to torture her? He knew how she felt, now. After what she had said today, before she’d bidden him that first farewell. She wished it’d been the last. She had survived, that time, but wasn’t sure whether she could anymore.

This had to stop. She would not let herself fall prey to foolish passions, to the hold that he had over her, tormenting her like this. Just by existing. Just by saying things, no matter how he meant them.

“And so you’ve found it,” Cloe stated, closing off the flooded channels of heat flowing to and from her heart. “With a royal bride.”

His brow furrowed, bay-blues darkening. “You believe that?”

“Why should it matter, what I believe?”

He almost flinched, to hear the bite behind her bark. It was the first time that she’d witnessed her words wounding him; she must’ve just imagined it. She shouldn’t worry, shouldn’t let herself believe she wielded any power over how he felt.

“You're betrothed to the princess,” Cloe proclaimed, tone blunt and passionless, more to remind herself than him.

Rider glared at the floor again. His gaze was bitter, even if not full of hateful wrath this time. “Or to her pretty substitute,” he spoke, his voice nearly a sneer. “Not that it matters—they're the same to me.”

“They are beautiful, though…”

“Pretty,” he repeated. Upraising his gaze again, all traces of bitterness vanished as it reached her face. Replaced with something else entirely. Something that threatened to storm down the walls of her heart, as she struggled to shutter him out. “There’s a difference.”

She concluded now that he was definitely torturing her on purpose. Fine. If he wanted to gloat in their last conversation together, she could grant him that small empty victory. “Well,” she muttered. “You will have to choose a bride, between the two.”

“I don’t have to do anything.”

“It’s what your mother would have wanted.”

Rider bit his lip, in the brief pause that followed. He clearly didn’t wish to answer, but her dark brown glare demanded it. “Between those two?” he sighed. “I’d choose the substitute.”

“Why?” she snapped. It was now Cloe’s turn to bite her lip. His answer had struck her far more intensely than it should have.

He didn’t answer. Not with words, at least, though her glare demanded it again, even more harshly now. She was sick and tired of trying to read everything inside those deep, dark eyes. She risked drowning to death every time. How dare he demand that of her?

She leaned forward a little in the bed, hands gripping the edge, as if holding on for dear life. Realized that she was fuming. Her passions were boiling over by now. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

He stayed still as a statue. Gods, she thought, if he ever felt anything at all inside that gorgeous soul of his, he hid it so damned well.

His lips parted to speak, the rest of him immobile, though she saw that blood was rising to his cheeks. “You know,” he murmured, scarce loudly enough for either of them to hear. “You always knew.”

She’d never known a single thing, with him. Knowledge was just a bold form of belief. She couldn’t let herself believe in anything she hoped, desired, let alone in anything she feared, with him—she couldn’t let herself believe a thing. With Rider, she knew nothing.

Cloe’s hands tensed into fists upon the pallet. “You want victory,” she told him. “The wealth and power to fulfill your ends. She’ll give you that; she is your victory.”

“She is nothing to me.”

“She’ll give you everything.”

“She can’t,” he refuted, the flush to his face deepening, or else the firelight guttering as this dark night neared its end. Voice lowered with the words he whispered next. “No one else ever could.”

Cloe rose suddenly from the bed, limbs animated with the lifeblood coursing from her broken heart, as it kept on breaking a thousand times over and over again. The part of her that actually believed him, and the part of her that couldn’t let herself, no matter what—for even if the Book of Fate itself decreed that he felt something after all, some part of her would never dare believe it still.

“Why say this to me now?” The words were flying like wildfire from her lips. “After taking me captive, setting me free only to tempt me to return—showing me no shred of respect or care, until today?”

The muscles of his jaw flexed, hard and tight, as she drew closer.

She bit back tears. “As if I were a thing to take and throw away.”

“I never—”

“Don’t,” she cut in. “Don’t dare deny. Just tell me why.”

His lips were trembling. Every part of him was trembling. “I…”

“Why?”

“Because I’m terrified of you,” he broke in, standing firmly on faltering feet, the stool nearly shattering from the violence with which he’d risen from it. Closing the distance between them in one heated instant. Nearly closing that distance. A sliver remained, a sacred space that neither dared to cross. “Because I tremble at the thought of you, and crumble at the sight. Because I hate the man I am for not deserving you, and yet desiring nothing more. Because I look at you, and I see the one thing I’ve always denied, but could never escape.”

She couldn’t breathe. She drowned, letting herself drown now; it was the only thing to do. Her silent gaze inquired deep into his soul.

His bored into her as if she were the only soul on earth. “My fate.”

The tears were here, pouring straight from the core of her immortal human soul. She bit them back again, though she was sure that he could see them, gleaming bright as day behind unblinking eyes. Fate. The sweetest and the bitterest word that she could ever hope to hear, from those beloved lips. Her silent gaze inquired why.

“Please…” he breathed, raising a gentle hand up to her cheek, his thumb catching the sole tear that spilled forth against her will, “…don’t ask why. Some truths are better felt than said.”

She forced herself to breathe again. To breathe him in a final time. To stop herself from drowning ever deeper in his eyes; surprised that she was even capable of stopping, surfacing from those dizzying depths. Shook off her tears, her passions, spoke against her heart. Against the truth that she desired and denied. “Not all.”

Cloe lifted her own hand, to rest it on his. Let it lay there a moment, clutching closely—and then lowering, loathly pulling his palm away, freeing her face from the touch that she knew she would never forget. “This I must say: that I can never be your bride.”

A world of pain, of anger, swelled behind his eyes. The bay-blue roiled, a storm at sea that surged in sorrow, putting out the hopeful fires in his heart. “Your words today… before you walked away…”

“That I would’ve been yours?” she recalled. Realizing that their hands, though lowered from her face, were still entwined. Not letting go. Not yet. “It is the truth. But one that we both must deny.”

The bay-blues burned with questions.

“Don’t ask why. Some truths are better buried than believed.”

His grip on her hand tightened. “I will not bury this. Not ever.”

“Even if I beg you to?”

“I couldn’t. Even then.”

A tear escaped, fell fast down to her lip. “Then I am sorry…”

He leant in, helpless against the urge to kiss it. “I am not.”

This had to stop. She pulled back. Fighting every human urge she’d ever had. Let go of his enamored hand. “Just let me sleep.”

Cloe could have sworn she heard his heart stop beating.

She looked down, unable to stomach the sound, or the sight of the deep surging blue standing still, a dead sea in the wake of her cold, careless words. She begged him once again. She couldn’t take another second on the earth beside this man. “Just let me go to sleep.”

Rider knew he had to heed her. Dared not stay against her will. Went to the doorway, halting for a moment, just to tell her why. “I choose the substitute because she knows how to stand in for someone else. As any wife of mine must do, once I lose you.”

She knew it and believed it, then: she loved him. It was the truth, the bitterest and the sweetest. And she buried it. “I won’t be lost. Just far away.”

A pause. An utter lack of understanding in his eyes, before he left. Not asking why.

His final words. “Just go to sleep.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

... *Eagerly awaits reactions from Camp #Cloder* ...

Anyhoo... Next scene, we'll revisit Cloe in modern-day Greece... And if you liked this one, please don't forget to vote! :)