Start Of Something Good
@mpchange
Forever. The word brings a bitter taste, like poison, to the god’s throat for recently he once more got reminded of how things don’t always stay the same. As an immortal deity Zeus knew full well how most things don’t last forever, yet there were some things he had thought -and hoped- would. “What happened to us, Hera?” The whispered words were an echo of the all-consuming question in his mind. Them being carried away by the waves of the sea into the wide beyond underneath the starlit sky.
There had been a time in which he had believed Hera and him belonged together. He remembered how he thought to find his sole reason for existence in her smile, in the way she spoke his name, ran her fingers through his hair and interlaced their fingers. He remembered how the look in her eye was able to color his day, it ranging from a clear sky blue when she was happy to a deep dark grey when she was mad. He had found her to be irresistible in every single way and had believed that they had it all and that it would never stop. But he was wrong.
Standing resolute dark rain clouds began to form above him, them blocking the light the moon and stars provided. What bugged him the most about Hera’s sudden disappearance was how all this time she had been free. Free to go but she had stayed. She had stayed for years on end with him. Loving him as fiercely as she had done from the start throughout all these years. Throughout all the good and bad things he had done. She even had become mad because of her love for him. Until recently that is. Since a couple of months ago she had decided to leave. She had decided to justify her own treason with saying the new promises they had sworn hadn’t meant anything much. And then he was supposed to be the dishonest one.
Tugging at the cuckoo necklace around his neck he easily broke the clasp. There was a time in which he believed he couldn’t go on without Hera. That an immortal life spent without her would be meaningless and most certainly bleak. But truth was Zeus didn’t want to go on without her.
Ever since she had left, the King had been a broken man who proclaimed nothing could hurt as much as a woman can. He had done his utmost best to deceive the world and to hold up the pretense that he was find. While in reality he reminisced about how he used to make her laugh, about how they used to be worth it and thought how he wanted to bring them back to that happy point in their lives. He even had fooled himself into thinking he could. Yet luckily it somehow had dawned on him that he couldn’t. The thought only had crossed his mind recently, however, but it was one of the biggest revelations of his life.
Holding the pendant in his fist the god pressed his nails into his own skin without drawing blood while the wind picked up and together with the temperature dropping severely it announced the downpour that was about to come. It was one of the most -if not the most itself- frustrating things that could happen in life to see the one you love slowly slipping away from you. Love. It was a power out of his control. He with all his might and power still could not control another’s heart and he certainly could not pick up the pieces of a crumbling one. He had been able to pick up tiny little hints of how Hera was slipping, like sand between his fingers, away from him in all kinds of things. It lay in her eyes, in the way she avoided his when he came home, in the way she forgot to smile when she saw him, in the way she passed him by as if they had never loved before and much more. The still sane part of him knew that she hadn’t done anything of this on purpose, but it damn much hurt as if she did.
Closing his eyes as the first rain drop touched his skin the god allowed the ice cold sensation of it to burn him. Zeus knew unlike any other how rain was able to come down like fire from the sky and this time the fire would cleanse his soul for once and for all. It would cleanse away all the things, the people, the memories, that weighed down on his soul. It would destroy everything he wasn’t able to let go of. It would all go up in smoke. All of this so he could start fresh. Anew. Reborn. Without the burden of his past which he still carried with him and beat himself up over. Tonight it would all finally come to an end.
Opening his eyes as the rain came crashing down upon him from the sky, thunder rumbling softly almost gently above him, the god lifted up his fist. Her face flickering before his eyes he thought of how she always would have a piece of his heart. But there was something he couldn’t ignore any longer. He had spent too much time with pushing it away and losing himself over it that it finally had become time to accept the truth. And that truth was that how much he wished he had her back, the more he knew he never would. Since she was not that woman anymore from eons ago. They would never love like they did before. He knew she had loved him, perhaps more than he ever deserved, and his love for her had known no bounds, but things didn’t last forever. Things changed. Most times for the better.
And then he threw the necklace, the symbol for his love for Hera, into the sea -the thing he despised the most on this earth- and allowed the waves and unforgiving water to devour it so it, hopefully, would be lost until eternity. Only able to catch a single shimmer of the necklace before it disappeared into the water the feeling that first came over Zeus was an apathic like emptiness. It remained for a solid couple of seconds before a calm dripped in. A calm he hadn’t possessed anymore in a very long time and which made him visibly relax. The thunder above him roaring in approval Zeus straightened his back, squaring his shoulders and stood everything alike a King was supposed to stand in the center of the storm he had created. And in that moment he looked carefree.
