And he found the blistering-hot fury deep within me that etched my soul like acid eating steel whenever I thought of Anya. Love turned to hate. No, worse, for I still loved her yet hated her, too. She had chained me to a rack that was pulling me apart, worse torture than anything Set could inflict upon my body.
But the devil knew how to use the torment in my mind, how to employ that hatred for his own purposes.
“You are being very helpful to me, Orion,” I heard him in my mind as I writhed in that utterly black cell.
I knew it was true. I loathed myself for it, but I knew that there was enough rage and hatred within me to serve as a murderous weapon for Set’s malevolence.
The nightmares returned whenever I slept. No matter how hard I fought against it, inevitably my eyes would close and my starved, exhausted body would drift into slumber. And the nightmare would begin anew.
Each time more real. Each time I saw a little more detail, heard my own words and those of the Creators with better clarity, felt the solidity of their flesh in my ravening hands, smelled the hot sweetness of their blood as it spurted from the wounds I slashed into them.
There would come, inexorably, one final dream. I knew that one of these times the reality would be perfect, that I would actually be among my Creators, that I would kill them all for Set, my master. And then all dreams would cease. My pain and longing would be at an end. The crushing, forsaken sense of abandonment that filled my heart with despair would at last be wiped away.
All I had to do was surrender to the will of Set. I realized now that it was only my own foolish, stubborn resistance that stood in the way of final peace. A few moments of blood and anguish and everything would be finished. Forever.
I had to stop fighting against Set and admit to myself that he was my master. I had to allow him to send Orion the Hunter on this final stalk, and then he would allow me peace. I almost smiled to myself there in the blind darkness of that searingly hot cell. How ironic that Orion’s final hunt would be to track down his very Creators and kill them all.
“I am ready,” I called out. My voice was cracked, rasping. My throat and lungs parched.
In response I heard a vast hissing sigh that seemed to echo through all the underground chambers of Set’s magnificent palace of darkness.
It seemed like an eternity before anything happened. I lay on the stone floor of my cell in total darkness and absolute quiet except for my own ragged, labored breathing. Perhaps the floor became somewhat cooler. Perhaps the air became a little moister. Perhaps it was only my imagination.
I was too weak to stand, and I wondered how I might do my master’s bidding in such an exhausted condition.
“Have no fear, Orion,” Set’s voice echoed in my mind. “You will be strong enough when the moment comes. My strength will fill your body. I will be within you at every moment. You will not be alone.”
So his magnanimity in allowing the Creators to flee the Earth had been nothing more than a ruse. He intended to strike at them, to destroy them, at a time when they were completely unprepared to meet his attack. And I would be his weapon.
With the Creators permanently obliterated, all of the continuum was Set’s. He could colonize the Earth with his own species and destroy the human race at his leisure. Or enslave humankind, as he had been doing in the Neolithic.
There were depths here that I could not fathom. I remembered being told, more than once, that spacetime was not linear.
“Pathetic creature,” I heard the Golden One’s scornful voice in my memory, “you think of time as a river, flowing constantly from past to future. Time is an ocean, Orion, a great boundless sea on which I can sail in any direction I choose.”
“I don’t understand,” I had replied.