The first time the god Ares appeared to me I was sitting in the school library, just minding my own business.
I think he had tried on at least a few other occasions. Once or twice I could have sworn the text I was reading turned blood red, though at the time I thought I was suffering from eye strain. More than once I woke up in the middle of night hearing whispering, even though I knew I was alone in my room. I had figured the whisper was just the echo of the dream from which I had awakened, though I couldn’t remember any dream.
Yes, those other times I could have been mistaken, but not this one, when the words of the Iliad swirled on the page in front of me, transforming into a reddish mist, then into an image of Ares, god of war, eyes flashing with the fire of burning citadels, features handsome but heartless, muscles tensed, sword dripping blood, terrible to behold, staring at me just as vividly as if I were seeing him on my cell phone.
Naturally, I jumped, and the sound of my chair scraping on the floor earned me the stare of death from Mrs. Curtis, the librarian. I nodded apologetically, she accepted my unspoken regrets with a nod of her own, and then she went back to her paperwork. I was a pretty regular guest in the library during the afternoon, and I think she decided to cut me some slack because she knew I was a “good boy.”
Hesitantly, I sat back down and looked at the fierce, unrelenting stare from the book in front of me. I was frightened and thrilled at the same time. It was possible my parents were right, and I needed therapy after all. It was equally possible, or so I wanted to believe, that something eventful was finally going to happen in my miserable excuse for a life.
“Alexandros!” Ares’ voice boomed at me, and I almost jumped again. I looked guiltily at Mrs. Curtis, but she continued her work as if nothing at happened. The voice must be in my head. Despite myself, I shuddered at the implication of that.
“Alexandros!” shouted Ares again, more insistently this time. “Alexandros! I have little time. Heed my words!”
I looked him in the eye. He had the look of a man who was not used to taking no for an answer.
“I’m listening,” I thought to him. It wouldn’t do for the librarian to think I was talking to myself. Fortunately, he could hear me as well as I could hear him.
“Alexandros, I have an urgent task only you can perform.”
Me? An urgent task only I could perform? Now I knew for sure—I was crazy. Even in my own daydreams I never managed to be the hero. What urgent task could a god possibly need done that I, of all people, could perform? Okay, so I wasn’t exactly a ninety-eight pound weakling—I actually weighed in at about a hundred and ten—but I wasn’t exactly equipped for epic feats. If there was a less athletic guy on the planet, I had never met him. Neither had the various bullies at school, who circled me like vultures, just waiting for a shot at me when there were not teachers around. It wasn’t as if I had any friends to stand up for me, though occasionally a good Samaritan did come to my rescue.
Still, even if I was crazy, I figured I couldn’t make my situation any worse by finding out what this hallucination wanted.
“What would you have me do, Sacker of Cities?” I asked, glad I remembered one of his epithets from the Iliad. There were others, of course, but somehow I didn’t think calling him “curse of men” or “raper of women” would get the conversation off to a good start.
Ares seemed pleased by my knowledge of one of his titles, but his pleasure only slightly softened an expression that suggested that if I didn’t do exactly what he wanted, he would leap out of the book, rip my head off and bathe in the blood spraying out of my neck.
“Alexandros,” I have an enemy in this place, though he does not yet know it. He is destined to thwart my plans. However, you have the power to stop him. You have the power to kill him.”
So there it was. I was so crazy I was hearing voices telling me to kill people. I should have slammed the book shut on him right then and there, but, drawn by the same impulse that causes people to slow down and stare at a bloody car wreck, I couldn’t resist finding out what he had in mind.
“Whom must I kill?”
“The one called Taliesin Weaver,” he replied, his voice oozing hatred.
Again I should have shut the book, gone home and told my mother to make an appointment with the therapist. Again I hesitated.
It wasn’t that Tal Weaver had ever deliberately done anything to me in all the years I had known him since kindergarten. Quite the contrary, he had been one of the good Samaritans who had rescued me from bullies a couple of times. And yet…I did feel a certain amount of resentment toward him. I probably shouldn’t, but I did.
Perhaps it was precisely because Tal stood up for me that I expected more. After all, he protected Stan Schoenbaum from bullies also, and they were best friends. Why couldn’t I become part of their group? I hung around him for a while, I dropped hints, I offered a couple of invitations. They were invariably turned down, though—not rudely, but it was clear Tal didn’t think of me as a friend. After Tal had a seizure of some kind and ended up in the hospital for a while, he became pretty secretive, still hanging out with Stan but not really with anyone else. I understood he must be going through something, so I gave him space, becoming more and more confident that, when he overcame whatever was bothering him, I could approach him again, and this time he would accept my friendship. Well, earlier this year, he did seem to get out of whatever dark place he had been in—and then he swept right past me as if I were nothing, befriending cool people, jocks mostly, and he went from being practically a loner to being the god damn prince of the whole school! I tried, I tried so hard to breech that wall around him by connecting with someone in his expanded circle, but his new friends were just as secretive as he was, and not a one of them, not even Stan, a fellow nerd if ever there was one, paid much attention to me. Then, somehow Stan was no longer a nerd but had been transformed into a jock himself so rapidly it had almost seemed as if Tal had worked magic on him. With that, the circle closed against me forever.
Did I want to kill Tal? Not exactly, but there something about the situation that made me not close the book right away.
“Alexandros?” prompted Ares, his impatience uncomfortably obvious.
“How does Taliesin threaten you, oh Great One? How could any mortal?” The flattery made the question more acceptable to Ares than it might otherwise have been.
“Taliesin is no mere mortal. He has powerful magic. Even he does not yet fully realize how powerful. In his hands he will some day hold my fate. That can never be.”
Magic, huh? Well, maybe I was crazy, but Tal’s having special powers would explain a lot. His transformation from athletic but otherwise pretty ordinary Tal in elementary school to someone who seemed to excel at everything, the guy with the golden touch, had always baffled me, as had Stan’s sudden change. But if Tal had magic, if he could reorder reality to suit himself…
Maybe I wasn’t so crazy after all.
“Oh, Ares, how can I kill such a one?” I wasn’t just speaking of the fact that Tal could undoubtedly beat me in a fight. If he had magic of some kind, that made him sound like an unbeatable opponent.
“Did you think, Alexandros, that the god of war would not have a strategy for this emergency? Taliesin even now is leaving soccer practice, alone for once. You can catch him just north of here, in the place you call the student parking lot. There you can confront him, and there I will provide a weapon suitable for the occasion.”
“I do not mean to question you, Lord of War, but I am so far beneath you in stature, I wonder that you did not decide to take on this worthy opponent yourself.”
Ares actually sighed. “Your time is not like the time of the Trojan War, when I could freely intervene in the mortal world. It takes tremendous energy just for me to speak to you, and even that speech would be impossible if you had not invoked me.”
Invoked him? I hadn’t…Well, maybe I had. Not in the sense of performing an outward ritual, but I had always loved the Greek myths, and I had often wished to somehow be a part of them. Had all that dreaming, all that longing for years and years to escape my own life and become part of something bigger, connected me with Ares somehow? So it would seem.
Will Alex give in to temptation, or will he try to resist? To find out, read “Destiny or Madness” (free to all subscribers, whether free or paid.)
(“Destiny or Madness” is a novella related to the Spell Weaver series and running parallel with the third chapter of Book 3.)
Paid Subscribers get some additional books for free. Founding members can eventually receive all the titles in my catalog, including all the books in the Spell Weaver series.
What a joy! As an Aries, I frequently get fired up about how my powers are underutilized. Thanks for lighting a spark.😊
Well done!