Hello, guys!
Because of the holiday season, I want to celebrate with you in two ways.
The first is that, starting today, Monday the 22nd until Sunday, January 4th, I will publish daily chapters so you have plenty to read during these holidays.
After that date, I will return to my usual schedule.
The second surprise is that, starting December 24th, I will activate a 50% discount on all tiers of my Patreon.
The promotion will be active for 2 weeks, ending on January 6th.
If you wanted to read the advanced chapters, this is your chance.
Merry Christmas!
Mike.
Patreon / iLikeeMikee
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Chapter 35: The Feast of the Gods (Part 7)
The game with Hermes was a reminder. A reminder that although I had cheated the System, the universe was full of other players who would now try to figure out my own game. I left the courtyard behind, the messenger's frenetic energy fading, leaving me back in the silent, golden glow of Olympus.
My exploration was almost complete. I had measured the alphas, confronted my antitheses, and discarded the irrelevant. This realm of gods was an ecosystem of predictable egos, a hierarchy as rigid in its chaos as the court of Egypt. I was bored. The hunger for novelty, my primary engine, was unsatisfied.
I was about to withdraw, to dissolve into the first convenient shadow and leave this mountain of light, when I felt a new presence. Or rather, the absence of one.
Amidst the roar of power that was Olympus—Zeus's crackling, Apollo's hum, Ares' fury—there was a point of absolute and perfect silence. It was not the silence of the void I commanded, nor the tense silence of fear. It was a warm silence. Welcoming.
My curiosity, once again, guided me. I followed that strange calm, moving away from the great temples and training courtyards. It led me to the very heart of Olympus, to a great circular hall that seemed to be the nexus of all paths.
There was no throne in this room. No statues of great victories. In the center, on an unadorned marble pedestal, a fire burned. It was not a roaring forge fire nor a destructive flame. It was a single, constant, golden flame that burned without consuming fuel, without producing smoke. It radiated a soft, steady heat that did not warm the air, but the soul. It was the Hearth. The Eternal Flame.
And beside it, sitting on a simple stone bench, was the goddess.
I had seen her in the throne room, a silent and almost invisible presence among her noisier siblings. She was a middle-aged woman, dressed in a simple tunic of undyed wool, her hair pulled back in a simple bun. There were no jewels, no weapons, no aura of overwhelming power. Her beauty was not that of a queen nor that of a whore; it was the quiet beauty of a mother waiting for her children to come home. It was Hestia.
I emerged from the shadow cast by one of the pillars supporting the dome. She did not startle. She did not look at me with hostility or lust. She simply looked up from the flame she was contemplating, and her eyes, a warm brown like fertile earth, settled on me. And in them, I saw something I hadn't seen in any other god.
Acceptance.
There was no judgment. There was no analysis. There was no fear. She simply saw me, a creature of the primordial night, and accepted me as just another part of existence.
I approached slowly, my shadow paws making no sound on the marble floor. I stopped a few meters from the fire, the heat of the flame a strange and comforting contrast to my own cold essence.
She did not speak. Neither telepathically, nor aloud. She simply patted the empty space on the bench beside her, a silent invitation.
I hesitated. The gesture was so simple, so... human. But there was no trap in her aura. There was no hidden intent. It was a simple invitation to sit.
Instead of sitting, I lay down. My colossal form settled on the floor in front of the hearth, my head resting on my paws, my ember eyes fixed on the dancing flame. For the first time on Olympus, I did not feel like an intruder.
We stayed like that, in a comfortable silence, for what seemed like an hour. The only sound was the soft crackle of the eternal flame. It was not the boring silence of my dimension. It was a silence full of peace.
Finally, she moved. From a small basket beside her, she took out a piece of bread, still warm, and a small bowl of ambrosia. She didn't throw them to me. She didn't leave them on the floor. She held them in her lap, and then looked at me, a silent question in her eyes.
'Will you eat?'
My physical form needed no sustenance. But the act... the act of sharing food by a fire... was such an ancient echo of my lost humanity that it resonated in the depths of my being.
I couldn't eat like a wolf. It would be too animalistic, too... normal. Instead, I did something I hadn't done in millennia. I created.
A strand of my shadow slid from my snout. It wove in the air, solidifying not into a claw or a tentacle, but into a delicate and precise form: a human hand made of solid night. It floated in the air and extended, palm up, in front of her.
A genuine smile, the first I had seen in this realm, lit up her face. She understood the gesture. With infinite delicacy, she broke off a piece of the bread and placed it in the palm of my shadow hand. Then, she dipped a second piece in the ambrosia and placed it beside it.
The hand slowly withdrew and brought the food to my snout, where it dissolved back into my essence, not consumed, but absorbed. The taste was conceptual: the heat of the grain, the sweetness of divine honey, the warmth of a home.
"Every being needs a center," she said finally, her spoken voice as soft and warm as the fire. "A place to return to. A home."
"My home is the void," I replied in her mind, my voice, for the first time, stripped of its usual contempt.
"The void is a place," she retorted simply. "Not a home. A home is where the flame burns, where solitude is not a weapon, but a rest."
We watched the fire together.
"Do you not fear me?" I asked, curiosity finally overcoming my indifference. "I am the darkness. I am the end. I am everything your flame opposes."
Hestia smiled, her gaze fixed on the dancing flames. "The flame does not oppose the darkness. It defines it. Without the night, we would not appreciate the day. Without the cold, we would not yearn for the heat. You are not the end, Lykaon. You are simply... the other side. A necessary part of the whole."
Her simple acceptance, her fundamental understanding of my place in the universe, was more disarming than any display of power.
"You are a creature of solitude," she continued. "But even the loneliest wolf sometimes seeks the warmth of the pack before returning to the hunt. This fire... will always burn. And there will always be a place beside it. For anyone who seeks a moment of peace."
There was nothing more to say.
I stayed there, by her side, for another hour. Simply existing. Not as a predator, nor as a god, nor as a prisoner. Just as a creature, resting by a fire, in the company of another.
It was the only moment of true peace I would experience on Olympus. A silent interlude in a symphony of chaos.
Finally, I stood up. The conversation was over. The rest had concluded. The hunger, the need to move, to explore, was beginning to return.
I looked at her one last time. She simply nodded, a silent farewell.
"Your fire is warm, Hestia," was my farewell, the words a rare and awkward attempt at gratitude.
"And your darkness is deep, Lykaon," she replied. "Take care not to lose yourself in it."
With that, I dissolved back into the shadows, leaving the goddess of the hearth alone with her eternal flame. I took with me not a new ally, nor a new enemy, but the strange and lingering warmth of a moment of calm. And the haunting reminder of a home I could never have.
The warmth of Hestia's hearth was an anomaly. An interlude of calm in a realm of noise and ego. I left behind her eternal flame, the echo of her quiet acceptance was a strange resonance in my core of darkness. It was a power, yes, but a passive one, an anchor. I was a river, and my nature was to flow.
I dissolved back into the shadows, the peace of her sanctuary faded, replaced by the usual cacophony of Olympus. The distant music, the raucous laughter, the constant hum of divine power. I returned to my exploration, my mental map of this territory almost complete.
I had found power, structure, chaos, life, wisdom, light, and the hunt. There were few pillars left to measure. One of them found me.
It was not a confrontation. It was an assault on the senses. The air, previously clean and smelling of ambrosia, suddenly became thick, heavy, laden with the overwhelming scent of spilled wine, crushed grapes, sweat, and a joy so unbridled it was almost violent.
A sound of out-of-tune flutes and wild drums reached my ears, a chaotic rhythm that spoke of uninhibited celebration. I stopped, my wolf form materialized in the shadow of a colonnade. Curiosity, as always, made me watch.
In a sunken courtyard, a garden that seemed to have been abandoned to wild and lush growth, a bacchanal was unfolding. Vines thick as snakes coiled around marble statues, clusters of purple grapes hung heavily. Satyrs, their goat legs dancing with clumsy abandon, chased a group of crazed-looking women, the Maenads, their hair matted, their tunics torn, their eyes glassy with wine and ecstasy.
And in the center of this whirlwind of chaos and drunkenness, reclining on a throne made of living vines, was the god.
He was portly, with a belly that spilled over his wine-stained purple tunic. His face was flushed, his eyes unfocused, and a wreath of ivy tilted precariously on his dark curly hair. He held a golden cup that he constantly refilled from an amphora that never seemed to empty. It was Dionysus. The god of wine, of ecstasy, of madness.
He watched me, his unfocused eyes struggling to process my form. A silly, slack smile spread across his face.
"By my grapes!" he stammered, his voice a thick, drunken slur. "A... a big, dark dog. Have you come to the party, shadowy friend?"
He raised his cup in an unsteady toast, spilling half the dark wine onto his own tunic. "Come, drink! The wine here is the soul of the world! It makes the nymphs dance and kings forget their crowns!"
'A fool drowned in his own pleasure,' I thought, the contempt so absolute I didn't even bother projecting it. He was irrelevant.
I stood there, motionless, watching him. His power was not a storm or a flame. It was a mist. An intoxicating mist that numbed the will and dissolved reason into a simple, animal pursuit of pleasure. There was a form of power in it, the entropy of chaos, but it lacked direction, purpose. It was the power of decay, not domination.
"You don't drink?" he continued, his smile wavering into an expression of childish confusion. "Everyone drinks. It's a good party."
He shrugged, a movement that almost made him fall from his vine throne. "Well, more for me." He drank the cup in one gulp, wine running down his chin and staining his beard.
His gaze drifted from me, already forgotten, and settled on one of his Maenads dancing wildly, her tunic swirling to reveal her naked body. With a grunt of pure animal lust, he rose from his throne and stumbled toward her, his intentions as simple and transparent as the wine in his cup.
I watched for a moment longer. The scene was a more pathetic and less honest version of the orgy in the grotto. There, there was power, challenge, submission. Here, there was only oblivion. A group of creatures seeking to drown their existence in a tide of intoxication.
It was boring.
I turned around. There was nothing to measure here. There was no alpha. Only a jester on a throne of leaves. His power was a weakness, his dominion an illusion that lasted only until the wine ran out.
As I dissolved back into a shadow, I heard the beginning of his drunken laughter mixed with the Maenad's shriek. The sound faded as I moved away.
The god of the vine and ecstasy was not even a piece on the board. He was simply part of the background noise, an irrelevant distraction in my search for true power on this mountain of gods.
Chapter 35: The Feast of the Gods (Part 7)
The game with Hermes was a reminder. A reminder that although I had cheated the System, the universe was full of other players who would now try to figure out my own game. I left the courtyard behind, the messenger's frenetic energy fading, leaving me back in the silent, golden glow of Olympus.
My exploration was almost complete. I had measured the alphas, confronted my antitheses, and discarded the irrelevant. This realm of gods was an ecosystem of predictable egos, a hierarchy as rigid in its chaos as the court of Egypt. I was bored. The hunger for novelty, my primary engine, was unsatisfied.
I was about to withdraw, to dissolve into the first convenient shadow and leave this mountain of light, when I felt a new presence. Or rather, the absence of one.
Amidst the roar of power that was Olympus—Zeus's crackling, Apollo's hum, Ares' fury—there was a point of absolute and perfect silence. It was not the silence of the void I commanded, nor the tense silence of fear. It was a warm silence. Welcoming.
My curiosity, once again, guided me. I followed that strange calm, moving away from the great temples and training courtyards. It led me to the very heart of Olympus, to a great circular hall that seemed to be the nexus of all paths.
There was no throne in this room. No statues of great victories. In the center, on an unadorned marble pedestal, a fire burned. It was not a roaring forge fire nor a destructive flame. It was a single, constant, golden flame that burned without consuming fuel, without producing smoke. It radiated a soft, steady heat that did not warm the air, but the soul. It was the Hearth. The Eternal Flame.
And beside it, sitting on a simple stone bench, was the goddess.
I had seen her in the throne room, a silent and almost invisible presence among her noisier siblings. She was a middle-aged woman, dressed in a simple tunic of undyed wool, her hair pulled back in a simple bun. There were no jewels, no weapons, no aura of overwhelming power. Her beauty was not that of a queen nor that of a whore; it was the quiet beauty of a mother waiting for her children to come home. It was Hestia.
I emerged from the shadow cast by one of the pillars supporting the dome. She did not startle. She did not look at me with hostility or lust. She simply looked up from the flame she was contemplating, and her eyes, a warm brown like fertile earth, settled on me. And in them, I saw something I hadn't seen in any other god.
Acceptance.
There was no judgment. There was no analysis. There was no fear. She simply saw me, a creature of the primordial night, and accepted me as just another part of existence.
I approached slowly, my shadow paws making no sound on the marble floor. I stopped a few meters from the fire, the heat of the flame a strange and comforting contrast to my own cold essence.
She did not speak. Neither telepathically, nor aloud. She simply patted the empty space on the bench beside her, a silent invitation.
I hesitated. The gesture was so simple, so... human. But there was no trap in her aura. There was no hidden intent. It was a simple invitation to sit.
Instead of sitting, I lay down. My colossal form settled on the floor in front of the hearth, my head resting on my paws, my ember eyes fixed on the dancing flame. For the first time on Olympus, I did not feel like an intruder.
We stayed like that, in a comfortable silence, for what seemed like an hour. The only sound was the soft crackle of the eternal flame. It was not the boring silence of my dimension. It was a silence full of peace.
Finally, she moved. From a small basket beside her, she took out a piece of bread, still warm, and a small bowl of ambrosia. She didn't throw them to me. She didn't leave them on the floor. She held them in her lap, and then looked at me, a silent question in her eyes.
'Will you eat?'
My physical form needed no sustenance. But the act... the act of sharing food by a fire... was such an ancient echo of my lost humanity that it resonated in the depths of my being.
I couldn't eat like a wolf. It would be too animalistic, too... normal. Instead, I did something I hadn't done in millennia. I created.
A strand of my shadow slid from my snout. It wove in the air, solidifying not into a claw or a tentacle, but into a delicate and precise form: a human hand made of solid night. It floated in the air and extended, palm up, in front of her.
A genuine smile, the first I had seen in this realm, lit up her face. She understood the gesture. With infinite delicacy, she broke off a piece of the bread and placed it in the palm of my shadow hand. Then, she dipped a second piece in the ambrosia and placed it beside it.
The hand slowly withdrew and brought the food to my snout, where it dissolved back into my essence, not consumed, but absorbed. The taste was conceptual: the heat of the grain, the sweetness of divine honey, the warmth of a home.
"Every being needs a center," she said finally, her spoken voice as soft and warm as the fire. "A place to return to. A home."
"My home is the void," I replied in her mind, my voice, for the first time, stripped of its usual contempt.
"The void is a place," she retorted simply. "Not a home. A home is where the flame burns, where solitude is not a weapon, but a rest."
We watched the fire together.
"Do you not fear me?" I asked, curiosity finally overcoming my indifference. "I am the darkness. I am the end. I am everything your flame opposes."
Hestia smiled, her gaze fixed on the dancing flames. "The flame does not oppose the darkness. It defines it. Without the night, we would not appreciate the day. Without the cold, we would not yearn for the heat. You are not the end, Lykaon. You are simply... the other side. A necessary part of the whole."
Her simple acceptance, her fundamental understanding of my place in the universe, was more disarming than any display of power.
"You are a creature of solitude," she continued. "But even the loneliest wolf sometimes seeks the warmth of the pack before returning to the hunt. This fire... will always burn. And there will always be a place beside it. For anyone who seeks a moment of peace."
There was nothing more to say.
I stayed there, by her side, for another hour. Simply existing. Not as a predator, nor as a god, nor as a prisoner. Just as a creature, resting by a fire, in the company of another.
It was the only moment of true peace I would experience on Olympus. A silent interlude in a symphony of chaos.
Finally, I stood up. The conversation was over. The rest had concluded. The hunger, the need to move, to explore, was beginning to return.
I looked at her one last time. She simply nodded, a silent farewell.
"Your fire is warm, Hestia," was my farewell, the words a rare and awkward attempt at gratitude.
"And your darkness is deep, Lykaon," she replied. "Take care not to lose yourself in it."
With that, I dissolved back into the shadows, leaving the goddess of the hearth alone with her eternal flame. I took with me not a new ally, nor a new enemy, but the strange and lingering warmth of a moment of calm. And the haunting reminder of a home I could never have.
The warmth of Hestia's hearth was an anomaly. An interlude of calm in a realm of noise and ego. I left behind her eternal flame, the echo of her quiet acceptance was a strange resonance in my core of darkness. It was a power, yes, but a passive one, an anchor. I was a river, and my nature was to flow.
I dissolved back into the shadows, the peace of her sanctuary faded, replaced by the usual cacophony of Olympus. The distant music, the raucous laughter, the constant hum of divine power. I returned to my exploration, my mental map of this territory almost complete.
I had found power, structure, chaos, life, wisdom, light, and the hunt. There were few pillars left to measure. One of them found me.
It was not a confrontation. It was an assault on the senses. The air, previously clean and smelling of ambrosia, suddenly became thick, heavy, laden with the overwhelming scent of spilled wine, crushed grapes, sweat, and a joy so unbridled it was almost violent.
A sound of out-of-tune flutes and wild drums reached my ears, a chaotic rhythm that spoke of uninhibited celebration. I stopped, my wolf form materialized in the shadow of a colonnade. Curiosity, as always, made me watch.
In a sunken courtyard, a garden that seemed to have been abandoned to wild and lush growth, a bacchanal was unfolding. Vines thick as snakes coiled around marble statues, clusters of purple grapes hung heavily. Satyrs, their goat legs dancing with clumsy abandon, chased a group of crazed-looking women, the Maenads, their hair matted, their tunics torn, their eyes glassy with wine and ecstasy.
And in the center of this whirlwind of chaos and drunkenness, reclining on a throne made of living vines, was the god.
He was portly, with a belly that spilled over his wine-stained purple tunic. His face was flushed, his eyes unfocused, and a wreath of ivy tilted precariously on his dark curly hair. He held a golden cup that he constantly refilled from an amphora that never seemed to empty. It was Dionysus. The god of wine, of ecstasy, of madness.
He watched me, his unfocused eyes struggling to process my form. A silly, slack smile spread across his face.
"By my grapes!" he stammered, his voice a thick, drunken slur. "A... a big, dark dog. Have you come to the party, shadowy friend?"
He raised his cup in an unsteady toast, spilling half the dark wine onto his own tunic. "Come, drink! The wine here is the soul of the world! It makes the nymphs dance and kings forget their crowns!"
'A fool drowned in his own pleasure,' I thought, the contempt so absolute I didn't even bother projecting it. He was irrelevant.
I stood there, motionless, watching him. His power was not a storm or a flame. It was a mist. An intoxicating mist that numbed the will and dissolved reason into a simple, animal pursuit of pleasure. There was a form of power in it, the entropy of chaos, but it lacked direction, purpose. It was the power of decay, not domination.
"You don't drink?" he continued, his smile wavering into an expression of childish confusion. "Everyone drinks. It's a good party."
He shrugged, a movement that almost made him fall from his vine throne. "Well, more for me." He drank the cup in one gulp, wine running down his chin and staining his beard.
His gaze drifted from me, already forgotten, and settled on one of his Maenads dancing wildly, her tunic swirling to reveal her naked body. With a grunt of pure animal lust, he rose from his throne and stumbled toward her, his intentions as simple and transparent as the wine in his cup.
I watched for a moment longer. The scene was a more pathetic and less honest version of the orgy in the grotto. There, there was power, challenge, submission. Here, there was only oblivion. A group of creatures seeking to drown their existence in a tide of intoxication.
It was boring.
I turned around. There was nothing to measure here. There was no alpha. Only a jester on a throne of leaves. His power was a weakness, his dominion an illusion that lasted only until the wine ran out.
As I dissolved back into a shadow, I heard the beginning of his drunken laughter mixed with the Maenad's shriek. The sound faded as I moved away.
The god of the vine and ecstasy was not even a piece on the board. He was simply part of the background noise, an irrelevant distraction in my search for true power on this mountain of gods.
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If you liked the chapter, please leave your stones.
Mike.