'She is crazy!'
'She is crazy!'
'She is crazy!'
Cassian didn't dare scream those words aloud, so he screamed them inside, pouring every ounce of strength into his legs as he sprinted barefoot across the grass, vision blurring with panic.
Once he left the flower field behind, Cassian forced himself to weave between thick trees, branches whipping at his arms and nearly knocking him down. Still, nothing could stop him from fleeing as far as possible from the bed where the goddess had been resting.
'Damn it! How do I escape from her? She really is crazy.'
A single stray thought distracted him, and Cassian tripped over a root, tumbling across the ground.
Mud smeared his white shirt and black pants, and a sharp stone sliced his left knee. Dirt caked his face.
Yet, the pain and grime barely registered.
His mind was a storm of memories, Goddess Seraphyra's words echoing, her green eyes flashing red as she recounted everything she'd done for Cassian, including how she killed him and "saved" him, as she called it.
One memory haunted him most, making his stomach twist as he recalled the goddess's chilling confession.
There had been a female idol who once dated Cassian. Their relationship was private, but the goddess had watched every moment.
Seraphyra despised their bond, convinced that idol was a wedge between them, like a beekeeper standing between bee and honey, as she put it.
The goddess made sure that idol was erased from Cassian's life, in the most horrific way.
The idol had a stalker—an obsessive one who sent countless messages to her personal phone, never receiving a reply.
At first, the stalker was just persistent, until the goddess descended to the mortal realm and whispered in the stalker's ear,
"She is in love with you, but she's afraid of what society will say. The only way you can be together is if you take her away, far from everyone!"
Those mesmerizing words felt like fate, convincing the stalker they were destined for each other.
With the goddess guiding every step, she led the idol straight to the stalker.
When the idol was kidnapped and begged for freedom, the goddess whispered again,
"She doesn't love you anymore. She loves that idol, Cassian Johnathan, because you are ugly and he is not!"
The stalker, consumed by rage, grabbed a hammer and smashed the idol's face, screaming the same words again and again,
"If you don't love me because I'm ugly, I'll make your face ugly too."
In the end, the idol died, and the stalker took his own life. Both were lost to hell.
Goddess Seraphyra had laughed and laughed, rolling on the bed, delighted by the thought that Cassian was hers alone.
Cassian slammed his fist into the ground, anger and fear swirling inside him.
The goddess was a true murderer, willing to kill anyone for Cassian Johnathan.
'That crazy bitch!'
He slumped against a tree, tearing a strip from his shirt to bind his bleeding knee.
With the inside of his shirt, he wiped mud from his eyes.
After a while alone with his thoughts, Cassian drew a shaky breath and glanced to his right.
A massive, vertical mountain wall loomed before him, impossible to climb.
'There's no way to run from her, is there?'
A bitter chuckle escaped his lips, but calm was the last thing he felt.
His hands trembled, his legs shook, not from pain, but from terror. He was utterly alone, trapped with that monster, and saw no escape.
The only reason he'd run at all was because the goddess had left for a few moments.
Just before, Cassian and the goddess had been interrupted by a voice in an unknown language. He couldn't understand it, but it spoke to Seraphyra.
She vanished without a word, but the look on her face before leaving made Cassian's skin crawl. There was longing in her eyes, a sensation he recognized.
The last time he'd seen that look was when his mother waved goodbye as his father sent him off to military school for failing at everything.
Cassian swallowed hard, the bittersweet memory distracting him from his horror, but also reminding him of the truth:
He was not the idol the goddess obsessed over.
He was just a guy with the same face, the same name, and even the same weak body as idol Cassian Johnathan from the posters.
He'd never met the women or lived the stories the goddess told him about the idol.
But after seeing what Seraphyra did to others, all for getting close to idol Cassian, he didn't have the courage to tell her the truth.
If he confessed he wasn't the Cassian she'd killed for…
Cassian picked up a twig and began to scribble in the mud, imagining what would happen if he told her.
'Either she won't believe me, thinking I'm lying to escape, and she'll kill me. Or she'll believe me and kill me for not being her Cassian. In the end, telling the truth means I'm dead!'
'Dead! Huh! Death!'
A hollow laugh slipped out as he muttered,
'Even after death, I have to worry about staying alive! What a life. Can't live peacefully, can't die peacefully!'
He used the tree for support as he stood, surprised to see the bleeding from his knee had stopped. Usually, even a small injury would leave him weak.
'No need for this anymore!'
He tossed the twig aside and wiped away the scribble—a butterfly with no wings, poorly drawn and meaningless.
'Time to head back, before…'
Cassian's thought trailed off.
What would she do?
Would she really keep him forever?
Did her sad, slumbering face mean more than just the pain of leaving him alone for a few minutes?
Cassian limped slowly toward the grass field. As he stepped onto the flower bed, the wounds on his knee, the dirt on his clothes and face, all vanished as if they'd never existed.
The pain faded, his shirt was spotless, his pants whole, and the scratches on his feet healed with every step.
A strange calmness washed over him as he prepared to face Goddess Seraphyra.
"Welcome back home, my love. Did you enjoy the walk?"
The goddess greeted him with a gentle smile.
She sat patiently at a royal picnic table and chair where the bed had been, a teacup in her hands.
She took a delicate sip, her green eyes watching Cassian with a soft, unreadable gaze.
'She's back! I thought she'd send a search party after me when she didn't find me. At least she gives some space!'
Cassian forced a polite smile and sat directly across from the goddess.
He poured himself some tea and drank, while Seraphyra's gaze never left him.
Cassian struggled to find words, feeling lost as she remained calm, almost distant.
Suddenly, he remembered her sad face when she left. Without thinking, he blurted out,
"Are you going to send me somewhere, far away from here?"
Seraphyra answered without hesitation,
"Yes, my love."