2A: The Godmoot II

“The Nemean Lion is dead,” announces the Messenger from a throne of stone of his own, heads of rams chiselled into its arms and a goatskin beneath where his young flesh sits. The caduceus - a staff of intertwining snakes, crowned with a winged sphere - rests against one of the rams, tucked behind the wings protruding from his ankles.

“Then the trial continues,” the Highfather of this palace proclaims.

“You have yet to explain how this trial works,” the Falcon of the Moon says from his place at the head of his pantheon. “We seek a verdict against He who took our Sun. Instead all we get are myths and fables.”

“With all respect to you on your mountain,” Amaterasu - the Sun of the East - steps forward. “Horus may be blunt in his delivery, but mighty Zeus, think of his loss. You tell us tales of one son, but imagine that upon this morning another never rode his chariot across the sky.”

“Imagine further...” adds brave Baldr, framed by his inner light, and standing at the side of his own Father of the Skies. Hávi remains silent today, seemingly content to keep the vision of his one eye to himself. Baldr continues, “...that all your sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, each awaken. But as they take their rightful seats within this room, the room never fills. For their Father never takes his.”

“Thank you,” Horus dips his beaked head to both speakers. He turns his shoulders back towards the King upon his Sky-Throne. “Either of those scenarios may spell ruin for any of us here. On this day, we face both scenarios.”

With a commanding raise of his hand, and a perceptive nod, the Highfather asks for quiet.

“I understand your concern,” he says, directly to Horus. He turns to the woman seated several yards to his side, upon a throne of ivory. Her throne is the only one amongst the arrangement to be facing the same direction as the Highfather’s. “In matters of family, I trust in my wife’s judgement.”

“Then I ask to her,” the Falcon shifts his attention. The glint of Hera’s own moon hanging above - a symbol of her own connection to the Skyfather beside her - catches his eye. In it, the life cycle of a chattering crow expires. “Mother of Women, what purpose does this trial serve?”

All eyes fall upon her. She returns their gaze.





With a feigned demureness, her voice cradles Horus’s concerns in its embrace.

“The mortal stands accused of deicide,” she says. “Ten tasks, there are. Should the mortal survive them all, he will be found innocent. Should he perish…”

The rest is understood.

“The second trial will begin!” Hermes proclaims.

~~~~~

If the sun never sets, a new dawn never comes.
Where is the change in that?

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2B: The Lernaean Hydra





Over the course of several centuries, tales had been told of this beast in distant lands. The details varied as to its nature. To some it was the size of a large snake, dangerous to be sure but nothing out-of-this-world. To others, the reports stated that it was as large as a mountain, a force unlike any other. When first he had heard that, the man jested that it was the tale itself that had grown to the size of Olympus. Regardless, one detail remained consistent in each of the stories: This was a many-headed beast, capable of rending its prey to pieces from multiple sides at once.

The mystery was in the numbers. As the man trudged through the rancid marsh, he wondered just how many heads he would have to face. Six, seven, nine, as much as fifty had even been said. Beyond? The truth would be revealed. Soon.

Mud squelches beneath his foot. In contrast to the lion, the hydra was easy to find. ‘Go to the lake in the shape of a hand’, he was told. Only one such lake fit that description in the Peloponnese, and as he had neared the watering hole pronged by five inlets stretching into the swampy surroundings, the putrid, poisonous odour the villagers had warned him about grew to unbearable levels. Thus, he knew he had reached the hydra’s lair.

He tears a strip of cloth from his wear, and fastens it around his face, tying it behind so as to block out the noxious vapours.


The air was thick with obfuscation: a setting sun, a settled smog. He had dwelled in the mud for far too long, and now is the time to pull himself out.

He finds himself some dry land and takes refuge upon it. Creeping through the blanketing fog, he walks atop boulders, tree trunks and overgrown roots, all in an effort to stay out of the swamp. Even with his mouth and nose covered, the tang of the toxin hanging in the air stung at his eyes. He dare not close them though, for risk of slipping. He must walk through the pain and see it coming.

“ARGHHHHHHHHHH!” A scream pierces the air. Like a wild animal, he darts his head into the sky, training his ears upon the echo as it bounces off salted mangroves and willows who have long since wept their last tear.


“HELP!” comes a second shriek. With his ears attuned, he determines the direction and forges on at a brisker pace. No longer does he gingerly creep from safe space to safe space, he leaps! He bounds! The coat of the Nemean Lion flaps behind him with each jump, and in his animalistic instinct, he becomes the lion.

Gracefully… regally… he leaps through a branching fork in a trunk and without so much as making contact, and lands upon a dewed mound of long grass. A small woman with fair hair twirled in harlequin pigtails, clutches at her legs. Curled in a ball, she trembles as he steps forward towards her.

“Are you okay?” he asks, crouching to her level. She shies away, twisting her body so her ball faces to the side. “I’m not going to hurt you. I… I might be able to help?”

Her head lifts from where it was tucked between her knees. Her face is strained and pale. Once-blue eyes as big as a doe’s blink at him, reddened by the malevolent mist.

“Oh no!” he frets. “The fumes!”

Ripping at his clothing once again, he tears off another shred of cloth.

“Let me put this on you to keep out the poison.” He reaches with the cloth to wrap it around her face. She doesn’t say anything, but lifts her chin in quiet acceptance and he fastidiously secures it. Letting the tied fabric go, and checking that it doesn’t fall down, he steps back and lowers himself to a knee. “That should do the trick. What are you doing out here all by yourself?”

“The villagers…” she coughs. “They brought me here to feed to it! They said…”

More coughing as she expels the fumes from her lungs. The cloth across her face makes it difficult, but she does her best.


“It’s okay,” he says, reassuring her. “Take your time.”

“They said that if they gave me to it, then it wouldn’t need to attack them.” Between her sobs and coughs, the man understands what’s going on. A sacrifice. But an involuntary one.

“They’re wrong,” he says. Though his face is covered, the woman sees the anger in his eyes. “Beasts like this cannot be sated by one meal. It will keep coming until there is nothing left to devour, and then… it will move on to the next meal. The next town. The only way to stop it is to kill it.”

“How?” she asks. He brandishes his club. Standing, his statuesque frame cuts through the haze. A myth, familiar and comfortable, but known only through stories. From the mountaintop of his legacy, he looks down upon the young woman.

“Where is the beast now?”

She points, and with a squint he sees an opening to his left.

A cave.


Though the poison lays heavy in the air, his eyes adjust. A new clarity.

“What is your name?” he asks the young woman.

“Jennifer,” she replies.

“It’s lovely to meet you, Jennifer,” he half-bows. “I need you to do me a favour. Do you think you can?”

She cautiously nods.

“Good,” he smiles. “I need you to get out of here, okay? Run, and don’t look back.”

Jennifer doesn’t move. With a series of aggressive claps he urges her to her feet and ushers her towards the edge of the mound.

“Go!” he commands.

“I… I don’t know your name?” she stammers as she steps out onto an ancient root. She looks back towards him, but he has already turned his back.

~~~~~

With a strike against a metal plate upon his hip, his arrow sets alight. He notches it on his bow.

He aims.

He fires.

The arrow sails through the opening of the cave, bringing it its light.


A hiss. A rumble. A shadow looming large on the side of the cave’s rocky wall. He sees the silhouette of gnashing teeth. And then a head emerges into the open. Goat-shaped and radiating a terrible aura through the mist that somehow simultaneously both inspires and forebodes. Spirited by his presence, more heads follow: One, a phoenix painted in ash; Another, a wolf hued in blue. More! One corrupted in silver and black; another coloured red with eyes of vacant dreams. The head of a pale horse emerges. And then, a furious feline-esque muzzle. Seven in total they emerge from the man’s left. He charges.

Swinging wildly with his club, he waylays each chomping head as it tries to take its feed. The hydra stuns backwards, unprepared for such a direct assault. The man presses on. Blow after blow reigns down upon the wicked monster. It weakens. Trapped between the man and the mountain, its heads are exposed. One thundering whack with his club, and the head of corrupted silver and black bursts into a gooey, serpentine paste.

“One down, six to go,” he taunts the foul beast. The shrieks howled by the remaining heads curdle the blood of the gods themselves. The man gets back to work.

~~~~~

High atop Olympus, the puppeteers watch in awe. They see what he is capable of.

Uneasy eyes fall upon Hera’s throne.

She remains steadfast.

~~~~~

The process repeats itself. The next head, phoenixed and ashy, finds itself trapped. The man raises his club, but before he can land the devastating blow, his hand is taken in one of the hydra’s many mouths.

“ARGH!” he screams as he fights against the grip. His club falls from his hands in the melee. Unarmed, he continues his struggle and with a heavy pull, his hand comes free and he tumbles to the ground.

He looks at his hand, maimed and scarred. Lines of poison blackening the veins. Eyes agape, he looks up at where the hydra begins to close in upon him.

...six, seven, eight…

Eight! Eight heads! They’re regrowing.


“No…” he mutters under his breath. “How?”

He looks around, frantically. His club is too far, and he’d have to get past the now larger monster to get it.

Something to his right draws his attention. A shimmer in the dark.

A pearl! His pearl! The one he found when he first reached the Peloponnese. It must have come loose from its pouch in the battle.

Without knowing why, he claws his way through the mud in its direction. The hydra nears. He reaches the pearl and the revelation becomes clear. A dagger! Its golden glow the only thing that hints at its presence beneath the dirt. The man scratches at the ground, digging his way to it. He pulls it from the soil as the hydra comes upon him.

Small, but sharp. In his hands, the dagger deftly flits from neck to neck, slicing away at the hydra’s heads. More continue to grow in their place, when suddenly…

“Hey! Take this!”

The girl! She returned!


Jennifer stands atop a tree trunk and tosses something towards the man. He chops away an attacking head and twirls in the direction of the item. It falls into his hand, and one end sets alight. A torch!

The man cuts away the nearest head and immediately sets the neck on fire. As the hydra screeches, the wound cauterises. No extra heads regrow. The battle rages on, but the man finally has a plan. Each head falls to the ground, never to be replaced.

~~~~~

Hera grows weary and mutters a word underneath her breath.

~~~~~

A giant, cancerous crab scuttles out from the hydra’s cave. It joins the fray, in brotherhood with the hydra. The man pays it no mind, the battle already won, and crushes it under his boot.

All that remains is the final head. He swings the dagger at its neck. It breaks upon contact.

He is unarmed once more.

Save for his will to survive.

Though it does not speak, he hears the hydra’s deathly voice.

“Raise the left…”

“Shut the fuck up.”

The man steps to the right, as the head strikes. He catches it in his arms and wrestles it to the ground. He forces it towards a nearby boulder and jams it underneath. Holding it in place with his knees, he puts all of his remaining strength into the boulder. It rolls, crushing the hydra underneath it.

~~~~~

Eradication of evil is a poor goal.

~~~~~

Underneath, he can still hear the hydra trying to thrash its way free. Though he still hears its cries, eventually the thrashing stops.

The hydra is no more.

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2C: The Second Labour

“The Lernaean Hydra is defeated!” announces the Messenger of the Gods once more.

“Clearly this mortal is capable of slaying any beast we may present to him,” observes brave Baldr.


The impressed expression upon his, and others’ faces rankles Horus further.

“Then the tasks should change,” he demands of Hera.

“And so they will.”

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2D: Burn it Down

The man accompanied Jennifer back to her village. The residents watched in stunned silence as the woman they thought condemned returns to haunt them.

“Who was it that left you for dead?” the man asks as they stop in a small square in the center of the township.

“They all did,” she says. “They all agreed it should be me.”

He looks around at the terror-soaked eyes of the population. The sun beats down overhead.


He sets fire to it all.

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2E: Inspirational Me

“I was a bit crass last time, wasn’t I, Atty? I’d apologise, but… you know...

It’s war.

You know that’s what this is, don’t you? War Games may be a couple of weeks later, but we get a chance here to put in a shit load of reps on the bloodshed front before then. Who knows, maybe the stars will align and we’ll be on the same side in the coming war. Wouldn’t that be a treat? Or maybe we’ll get that round three a lot sooner than expected, without you even needing another one of your… back door… tricks. Hopefully not though. After all, what would a third failure then do to this little ‘revival’ of yours?

You know your mythology, so I’ll try not to mansplain right now, but I need you to know a couple of things about the phoenix motif.

See, I’ve been through hell. As close to literally as possible.

And I have a funny feeling I’ll be seeing those fires again.

I’d ask if you could catch my drift, but I know you do, Atty.

But the flames, they don’t tend to burn as much as they used to. My hand is what it is, but now I’ll walk through fire without so much as batting an eye. I emerge on the other side. It’s what I do. But the phoenix doesn’t represent me. It represents my fight. And just the start of it, at that. So chase the phoenix as much as you’d like - just as you and Oisra have indicated you’re going to try, but know that you’re not going to catch it. Because it’s gone. It’s done. The start of something new is over. We’re in the thick of it now.

Now, I could understand your want for the phoenix for yourself. This would be a break from the norm for you, wouldn’t it? This is, in your own words, the biggest match of your career. I don’t know you well enough to pass judgement on that, but it’s sure as shit a far cry from the consistently inconsistent Atty we saw just a few months ago, isn’t it? Big Britches Atty, in da house! That’s cool. That’s you. For me, however, it’s just another day ending in Y. And that’s not meant to dismiss you. Please don’t take it that way. It’s actually a pretty big thing to me. It means a lot more than you might think. See... I wake up, take a piss, brush my teeth, and then I fight. Every. Single. Fucking Day. Just ask Chris Chaos. But what this means, however, is that while you’re preparing for your big one-off fight, I’ve been preparing to do this day in, and day out. Forged in the fucking fires. As has been the case for fucking months now. You know this, Atty.

Experienced Atty.

You’ve been through it. You know what I fucking do. Tell me, was there something in our last encounter that makes you think that this time would be any different? A perceived weakness, of sorts? It certainly wasn’t the chair that you repeatedly rattled off my skull. Nor the baseball bat. I bounced back from those. It wasn’t the table. We both went through that. It wasn’t that knee of yours, either, because you never got a chance to unleash that. You missed your shot. Twice.

Do you see the parallels?

This facade that you’ve put up, it doesn’t mean shit when I punch through it. You can dream of phoenixes, but as you try to chase the sun, it always stays in the sky above you. I’m above you, Atty. Note, that’s not me saying that I can’t be beaten. It’s not me saying you don’t even belong across the ring from me. I wasn’t exactly quiet last time about how I think the way you got here was a load of shit, but if you were worth the effort the first time - and you were - then you’re sure as shit worth the effort the second time. I mean, Atty, that you just want your name up in lights. Above you. Where mine is. And, as I more or less said to Chaos, I’d fucking give it to you if I saw any other way to keep my own fight going. This championship isn’t my goal. The truth is. And with the truth, we can all do so damn much! That’s all I want, Atty. At its basest, I just want us all to be happy. Well… with notable exceptions.

Hope you’re doing horribly, Marf!

I know it sounds like I’ve been judging you for your love of shiny things. I’m sorry for that. It shouldn’t matter that you want to doll yourself up to be half as pretty as your sister. But you’re still missing out on being what I dreamed you could be, way back when I first stumbled into your dressing room in the desert. It’s probably not fair that I’m putting those expectations on you. That’s me projecting. But goddamn it, Atty, you can be so much more than a set of open legs! But as long as you keep trying to have your cake and eat it too, you’re not going to get there. That mindset that you had when you were targeting Betsy? That’s what you need. But the moment you got what you were after you… did what, exactly? Won the Freestyle championship? C’mon, you know that’s some bullshit. You hit the fucking ceiling, Atty. That drive you had? Gone. That desire to one up someone that showed us all - even those bobble-headed nutsacks you’re running with - what we all thought you were capable of? Gone. Unless…

Am I your new Betsy? Is that it? No, it can’t be. You wanted to beat Betsy. At best, it seems you want to be me. But I don’t need deepfakes and nipslips, dove. Gimme a task, and I do it. Raw. Unpolished. Real.

This is real fucking life, and in real fucking life there were two things that led you on your current path, and I hate to say it, but the desire to beat Betsy wasn’t one of them. Instead, you:
In extremely predictable fashion, broke up with Shawn Warstein.
and
Shared a ring with me.

Go ahead, bring up being a March Madness quarter-finalist, I fucking dare you.

Facts are, I’m a big part of the reason that you’ve started to take things a bit more seriously around here. I’m flattered. I am! But it’s a bit awkward for me to be such an inspiration to you. Any time people latch onto something new, there’s always the risk that they miss some of the key points. In your situation, I’m worried that you’ve missed the why.

Why do I fight?

You’ve heard, but you haven’t listened. So I’ll fucking show you. It’s only day one and I’m already rocking, babs. And like the sanctimonious shit-stain I am (thanks for the pet name, Chris!), I’m going to take you on a journey over the next couple of weeks. I’m going to share with you the view from up here. You’ll get to see yourself through my eyes. Lore. Myth. Allegory. Reality. And when all is said and done, if you play your cards right…

I’ll Eat Atara Themis once again.

If I haven’t had my fill on your fucking world, that is.”