Sparta - Greece
YOU ARE ERASED FROM THIS TIMELINE.
The words did not echo. They did not thunder. They simply WERE.
There was no pain, because pain required existence. Instead, the sky collapsed like a punctured eye. Stars screamed as they inverted. Causality itself shattered.
Axiomel felt the command tear through him like divine lightning. ERASE. INVALIDATE. OBLITERATE. This was no banishment. This was outright erasure—a metaphysical murder so total that even the instruments of murder would be unmade as accomplices.
And yet, nothing ended.
For a single heartbeat of impossibility, the universe didn't just stall. It choked.
You were never sanctioned by this age, the voice continued. It was distant, absolute, divine.
Zeus.
King of Gods. Bearer of Law. Executor of Finality.
Axiomel's consciousness should have been extinguished. He should have been less than dust, less than memory, less than nothing. And yet, in the howling void left by the command, a single thought crystallized. It was not a whisper. It was a blade.
NO.
Blood trickled from Axiomel's eyes, painting crimson trails down cheeks swollen purple with bruising. His right arm hung at an unnatural angle. Twenty paces in every direction, the ground lay scorched and empty, not even ash remaining where his companions had stood moments before.
The erasure slammed into him again, harder and deeper. Timelines ruptured. Histories rewrote themselves. Names were undone.
And still, the command failed.
High on Olympus, the air stilled as if the very winds had paused. In the marble vestibule where gods reclined on thrones of sunlit ivory, even the torchlight seemed muted. Ares leaned forward, the steel plates on his shoulders catching a dull glint. His lips were pressed into a thin, hard line. He watched a single point of light far below—the boy who had defied his father—and felt his shock curdle into something darker: a possessive hunger to either claim or crush. He closed his eyes and extended a thought sharp as a blade.
In answer, a living shadow slipped from the pillars and coiled at his feet.
"Bring me his body," Ares whispered, his voice low enough to rattle the embers in the braziers. "Dead or alive."
The shadow bowed, its reply a hiss in the dark, and then unfurled into nothingness. Around the great hall, other wraithlike servants vanished one by one, each bound for a secret errand dictated by a different, watching god.
Far below, in Sparta's predawn chill, the city lay under a blanket of suffocating silence. Even the guard dogs crouched mute in their kennels. Torches along the wide marble avenues sputtered as a rolling blackness crept down from the hills, swallowing their sparks.
In the palace, King Leonidas paced before a high lattice window. His silk robe clung to him, damp with a sweat born of dread he could not name. Each breath felt too heavy for his lungs. He stared eastward, waiting for a portent—until the very air trembled with a low, furious rumble.
Zeus stared down from his perch above the world. "Such strong tenacity," he mused, his voice weaving through the clouds. "If only you had agreed to serve. Oh well. An ant is still an ant."
A single crack split the darkness. Then an impossibly broad bolt of lightning, pale as a blade's edge, ripped through the heavens. At its center stood Axiomel, stone-still, his mouth opening in a silent scream.
The bolt struck the heart of Sparta's main plaza with the force of a collapsing mountain.
Stone fountains hissed into vapor. Columns liquefied into rivers of white-hot magma. Ash roiled skyward in a choking, black cloud. Leonidas, shield gripped in a white-knuckled hand, could only blink in horror as the blast wave swept outward. It hurled distant chariots like playthings, and the thunderous cracks he heard were the bones of villagers miles away, shattering in their homes.
High above, Zeus planted a booted foot on the rim of the world so hard the sky shivered. His voice boomed, freezing the storm in mid-roar.
"Mortals have grown fat on arrogance," he declared, his tone sculpted from lightning and disdain. "Believing their pitiful prayers bind us. It is pathetic." He raised a hand, and the darkness peeled away like a ragged sail, revealing charred ruins so vast the horizon itself seemed to quake. "We shall remake them as we please."
In a nearby alcove, Apollo pressed a trembling fist to his lips, his neglected lyre humming with discordant shock. Beside Ares, the war god laughed, a sound like striking metal that echoed off the columns.
"Father," Ares said, admiration sharp in his voice. "You knew this moment would come. You crushed it before it could even draw breath. Exquisite."
Across the wine-dark sea, beneath waves churned to froth, Poseidon rose from his coral-carved throne. Saltwater dripped from his hair like tears. Discarded sea nymphs and lesser mermen lay motionless at his feet, swept aside by the final blast's reverberation. He thrust out an arm, and a trident of storm-forged bronze appeared in his grip, the sea itself swirling around its tines.
A tremulous attendant knelt on the ocean floor. "My lord?"
Poseidon's glare was colder than the deepest trench. "Summon my legions," he ordered, his voice making the water pressure spike. "Ascend to Olympus. And prepare another batch of mortals." His gaze turned back toward the distant, smoldering land. "This one proved far too fragile."
"At once, sire," the servant managed, bowing so low his forehead pressed into the sand.
In his forge, Hephaestus stood hunched over his anvil. Sweat beaded like liquid bronze on his scarred forearms. The crimson glow lit his twisted form, casting monstrous shadows on the soot-blackened walls. Before him stood an apprentice—one of Zeus's countless bastards, this one with mismatched eyes that mirrored the dancing flames.
"Brother," the boy called out, his voice cracking. "Father didn't even raise his hand! The lightning just… appeared!"
Hephaestus brought his hammer down with a thunderous clang that made the boy flinch. Sparks flew. "Father needs no gesture," he growled, his beard sparking with tiny embers. "He is king for a reason."
The boy fell silent, turning to gaze through the forge's open archway at the vast, smoking crater that had once been Sparta. After a long moment, he whispered, "Could he… the mortal… could he survive that?"
Hephaestus's laugh was the sound of grinding metal. "He survived erasure through some fluke of fate, yes. But this?" He gestured with his hammer toward the utter devastation. "What you saw as cataclysm, I recognize as merely our father's… irritated exhalation." He fixed the boy with a hard look. "That, my little brother, is the difference between gods and men."
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Hi Guys, Author here. So, first chapter, big moment, more to come anyway. Your thoughts and ideas are highly appreciated. If you want me to improve something for future reads, shout out in the comments. The next few chapters we back track what happened.