Under Aegis - Leigh Loveday

Mine is a silent existence. Caged once by cold bronze and again by unseen walls, one marred by fingerprints, the other by the patina of unreckonable age. I have heard not a word since the binding. I suspect it has been so long that should I hear it now, I would find the rhythm of language contorted beyond recognition.

I long ago stopped measuring time. Centuries lurch by, bovine, stupid. I know day from night only by the passing of crowds. This airless cell is dim; there is light, but not natural. I have no memory of how that would feel.

That I am held captive was never in doubt. Over time, while carried from place to place, I came to understand that I am also, unforgivably, a relic to be examined. People form flaccid clusters to leer at what remains, their terror of my influence now withered like a dead thing disgorged by the sea. This is the worst of it. Yet it is my lot, and has been my lot for longer than I lived, and I lived longer than most.

I am ever surrounded by other exhibits: scraps of unremarkable armour, sheared slabs of art, detritus of a civilisation so reckless and selfish it tumbled into the past without me. Small comfort, at least. Opposite me hangs a sword that I suspect, from its proximity, is thought a match for the contemptible blade of Perseus. It is not. It does not look the way it felt as it struck me from my body, on the last day of the life I consider my own, before callous Athena granted me undeath.

***

My acuity, of course, has suffered. Perception is blunted and time is inconstant, but I know from the way the ink fades on my memories that the duration has been profound. Each day, observers crane and nod as if they would have wished to be acquainted with me in my rosy-cheeked youth. Meandering couples, curious children, troubled elders seeking solace in the past. They all romanticise me, monster that I am.

In return, I lacerate their hearts with flint.

For despite it all, I am not yet spent. Feast your eyes, my suitors. Lock gazes with me. Prove yourself to a lover, a rival, your own ego, some higher force you feel you should by now recognise.

That latching sensation, the quick lurch of alarm? There I am.

Feel the pull, the panic, the ghost splinters embedding as you struggle free. Though now spurred to set urgent distance between us, you have nonetheless felt the bite of the trap, sense that something within you is numbing and petrifying. Deep and distant, a detachment too foreign to name. But it is there.

I see you all and give my gift freely. You, the wavering wife who, tonight, will be emboldened to choose a path of pain and abandonment. You, the cowed child who, tomorrow, will lash out without knowing why, lash out again at those who come to calm you, defining the bleak cyclical days of your future. You, the cherished grandfather who, in a day or a week or a month, will simply run dry of reasons to resist.

So many of you will care a little less now, resent having been tricked into your lives of colourless compliance. I divest you of compassion and humanity, one sharp fragment at a time, and I replace it with frigid stone.

It does not only happen here, with these people. In places innumerable, the gorgoneion in all its settings – armour and coins, mosaics and masks, Libyan wards and Italian indulgences – leeches a little to pay back what was taken. It does not discriminate. I sense each claim like a feather on an open wound, a teardrop in a depthless well. Marked on a tally of millennia I see all that has been siphoned from gods, heroes, innocents. But only here in this place, in my last blood remnant, can I act upon it.

***

The shield-bonding was agony. That I remember it only abstractedly could be called a mercy, if only by those of degenerate mind. Athena, eternal hypocrite, had no charity for those persecuted by her heroes, her itinerant death-dealers. She smiled her beatific smile as metal shrieked, as blood ran into scalding white seams and was absorbed.

But my blood has power. How little anyone knows of the things my blood has done!

Its stake on life is not limited to the taking. Those drops sealed in where bronze met flesh – her bronze, my flesh – have purpose now. In the days following my execution, I was drained near to nothing. By force, my gifts were bent to purposes not my own. But the grace I have since stolen from the hearts of others has warmed the ancient blood, loosened the bond, and from metal made porous it will emerge.

Encountering the air of this new world, it will hiss and fume; falling to meet cold stone, it will retch forth life one last time. Not Chrysaor or Pegasus, purposeless children of circumstance. No. My climactic child, this great, keening zealot born of desperate need, can never be named.

I have seen how it will be. Unseen walls shatter as my progeny stands tall, grounded on a great beast’s hooves, stooped even beneath the high ceiling. One arm is docked to a misshapen wing, its scars blooming with pearlescent feathers. While this limb trails my child like a fleshy shackle, the other resolves into a blade forged from materials I cannot and would not control in a furnace of black rage. The blade is pitted gold, bone and poison. It is potent.

My child learns to walk in a tableau of noiseless trauma. It reels through the emptying rooms, bulky and inescapable, a landslide of retribution. Where its blade connects, flesh darkens and calcifies. Fresh blood falls in clattering fountains of carnelian and schist. Snakes thrash free of ruptured torsos, sidewinding through human rubble. The monster, my child, swallows them by the fistful.

Through the streets it goes, into the wide and wicked world, a newborn enacting an old, old judgement. This is legacy enough. A tax on the descendants of those who passed sentence, those who celebrate base villainy as valour. A purge of diseased ideals.

Once it is done, my child will return to me and carry the aegis forthwith.

It will never before have been done with my blessing.

***

Motion and false light break the reverie. Another day, it seems, is beginning. At the edge of my eyeline the doors crawl open, tired as time, and the people return. My petitioners, my witnesses, back to claim respite through no merit of their own.

For now, as the well slowly fills, I will meet their gaze and tap what I can from their tarnished souls. For now, I will be sustained by the dream.

I will not be caged here forever. My ending is not for others to write.

In time, you will come to know it.

Originally published in the Spring 2023 issue of Aphotic Realm Magazine, May 2023

Leigh Loveday grew up in industrial south Wales and now lives in the English Midlands, besieged by cats and foxes. He edits videogame blurb by day and writes fiction aggressively slowly by night, with stories so far landing in the likes of Uncharted and Shoreline of Infinity. Find him loitering online at @leighloveday.bsky.social