Every night I dreamed of Anya and the other Creators, knowing that Set was watching, digging into memories I never knew I had. The dreams turned into nightmares as night after night I tried to warn Anya and the others while before my sleeping eyes I saw the Creators being sliced to bloody ribbons, bodies slashed open spurting blood, faces torn apart, limbs hacked from their torsos.
By me.
Horrified, I was their executioner. I burned them alive. I tore out their eyes. I drank their blood. Zeus’s. Hera’s. Even Anya’s.
Night after night the nightmares were the same. I would visit the Creators in their golden sanctuary. They would scorn me. Mock me. I would reach for Anya, begging her to help me, to understand the message of terror and death that I was carrying. But she would run away or transform herself into some form unobtainable.
Then the killing would start. I always began with the Golden One, tearing at him like a ferocious wolf, ripping the smirking smile from his face, rending his perfect body with claws of razor-sharp steel.
Night after night, the same dream. The same horror. And each night it became more real. I awoke bathed in sweat, shaking like a man possessed, hardly daring to look down at my trembling hands for fear that I would find them reeking with blood.
Behind each nightmare I sensed Set’s lurking, menacing presence. He was clawing ruthlessly through my mind, dredging into memories that the Golden One or whoever created me had long since sealed off from my conscious recall. I relived life after life, hurtling from the very origins of the human race to such distant futures that humankind itself had evolved into shapes and powers beyond recognition. Yet each dream inevitably, inexorably came down to the same horrifying scene.
I confronted the Creators. I tried to tell them what was going to happen, tried to warn them. They laughed at me. I begged them to listen to me, pleaded with them to save their own lives. They thought it was uproariously funny.
Then I killed them. Slashed them while they laughed, tore out their entrails while their faces still smirked and grinned at me. I killed them all. I tried to spare Anya. I screamed at her to run away, to transform herself so that I could not reach her. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she became that glowing silvery sphere that was forever beyond my touch. But when she did not, I killed her as mercilessly as I butchered all the others. I tore her throat out. I disemboweled her. I crushed her beautiful face in my clawed hands.
And woke up whimpering. I had not the strength for screaming. I awoke in that oven-hot lightless cell blind and terribly weak, my body wasting and my mind being pillaged.
The worst of it was that I knew what Set was doing. He was exploring my mind, using the memories that had been sealed away from me to learn everything he could about the Creators. Most of all he wanted to find out how he could send me back through spacetime to the Creators’ own domain, that golden paradise of theirs far in the future of this time.
I could feel his cold cruel presence in my mind, searching, rampaging through my memories like a conquering army looting a helpless village, looking for the key that would allow him to project me into the Creators’ realm.
He wanted to send me to a point in the continuum before the Creators had become aware of his own existence. He wanted to plant me among them when their defenses were down, when they were not expecting to be attacked, especially by their own creature.
Set would accompany me on this trip through spacetime. His mind and will would ride within my brain. He would see with my eyes. He would strike with my hands.
The hell of it was that there truly was hatred for the Creators inside me. He found that vein of anger, of bitter resentment, that seethed through me. He hissed with pleasure when he realized how I hated the Golden One, the very person who had created me. He saw how I had defied him and tried to kill him, how I hated the other Creators for shielding him from my wrath.