With the last of my strength I jabbed both my thumbs at his eyes. He blocked my right with his free hand but my left found its mark. Set screeched in unexpected pain and threw me against the wall like an angry child tossing away a toy that displeased him.
I blacked out. My last conscious thought was a satisfied thrill that I had hurt the monster. Small consolation, but better than none at all.
How long I was unconscious I have no way of reckoning. I lay in darkness, huddled on the floor of Set’s throne chamber. Dimly I felt the sensation of being lifted up and carried somewhere. But I could see nothing, hear nothing. Then I was dumped onto a hard floor again and left alone.
From far, far away I heard a sound. A faint voice, calling. It was so distant, so indistinct, that I knew it had nothing to do with me.
Yet it kept calling, time and again, as constant as waves rolling up onto a beach, as insistent as an automated beacon that will repeat itself endlessly until someone turns it off.
Somehow its call began to sound familiar. From repetition, a part of my mind suggested dreamily. Hear the same noise long enough and it will become familiar to it. Pay no attention. Rest. Ignore the sound and it will fade away.
Yet it did not fade. It got louder, clearer.
“Orion,” it called.
“Orion.”
I don’t know how many times I heard it before I realized that it was calling my name, calling for me.
“Orion.”
I was still unconscious, I knew that. Yet my mind was alert and functioning even though my body was inert, insensate, comatose.
“Who is calling me?” my mind asked.
“We have met before,” answered the voice. “You called me Zeus.”
I remembered. In another time, a different life. He was one of the Creators, like Anya, like the power-mad Golden One who let the ancient Greeks call him Apollo.
Zeus. I remembered him among the Creators. Like all of them his physical appearance was flawless, godlike. Perfect physique, perfect skin, grave dark eyes, and darker hair. His beard was neatly trimmed, slightly flecked with touches of gray. I realized that all that was an illusion, an appearance put on for my sake. I knew that if I saw Zeus in his true form, he would be a radiant sphere of energy, like Anya, like all the other Creators.
I thought of him as Zeus not because he was the leader of the Creators. They had no true leader, nor any of the common relationships that mortal humans experience. Yet to me he seemed wiser, more solemn, more circumspect in his views and his actions than the other Creators. Where they seemed swept by their private jealousies or passions for power, he seemed to be gravely striving to keep events under control, to protect the flow of the continuum, to prevent disasters that could erase all of humankind—and the Creators themselves. Of all the Creators, only he and Anya seemed to me to be worthy of my loyalty.
“Orion, can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Set has shielded himself against us quite effectively. We can’t get through to you and Anya.”
“He is holding us prisoner….”
“I know. Everything you have experienced, I know.”
“We need help.”
Silence.
“We need help!” I repeated.
“There is no way we can get help to you, Orion. Even this feeble communications link is draining more energy than we can afford.”
“Set will kill her.”
“There is nothing we can do. We’ll be fortunate to escape with our own lives.”
I knew what he meant. I was expendable; there was no sense risking themselves for their creature. Anya was a regrettable loss. But she had brought it on herself, daring to assume human form to consort with a creature. She had always been an atavism, risking her own being instead of letting creatures such as Orion take the risks that they had been created to face.
The other Creators—including this so-called Zeus—were ready to flee. In their true forms, they could scatter through the universe and live on the radiated energy of the stars for uncountable eons.