Sparta - Greece
Axiomel couldn't feel his left leg.
He knew it was there. He could see it twisted wrong, pinned beneath stone but it might as well have belonged to someone else. Everything below his waist was numb, drowned out by the pounding in his head and the burning in his chest.
Blood kept dripping into his eyes.
He blinked hard, trying to clear it.
He looked up to the beast of a god.
Zeus stood above the ruin like he belonged there.
Just… standing.
As if the world had rearranged itself so he could rest his feet.
Axiomel tried to move.
Nothing happened.
His fingers twitched uselessly against broken marble. His right arm screamed when he shifted it, pain ripping through him so hard he nearly blacked out.
Around him....
No.
He forced himself to look.
Bodies lay scattered across the plaza. People he knew. People who had laughed with him. Trained with him. Fought beside him.
They hadn't been strong.
They had known that.
But they had stood anyway.
Someone coughed weakly to his right.
"Ax… Axiomel…"
His head snapped toward the sound.
Theron.
Theron was missing half his chest.
Axiomel's breath hitched.
"Don't.." he tried to say. His throat barely worked. "Don't talk. Just..just stay..."
Theron smiled, blood bubbling at his lips.
"Told you," he whispered. "Should've… run."
His eyes glazed over.
Something inside Axiomel cracked.
"No," he said hoarsely. "No, no, no-"
He dragged himself forward with one arm, skin tearing against stone. Pain exploded through his shoulder, but he didn't care. He reached Theron and grabbed his tunic, shaking him weakly.
"Get up," Axiomel begged. "Please. We can still..."
Theron didn't move.
Axiomel's hands shook.
"I was right there," he whispered. "I was right there and I still-"
A shadow fell over him as it drew close
He didn't need to be told who it was.
The air itself bent under the weight of attention.
Zeus.
That bastard
His face striken with amusement
Axiomel wanted to scream.
He wanted to charge.
He wanted to do anything but lie there useless and broken.
Instead, he laughed.
It came out wet and ugly.
"What did she ever do to you, yet you hurt her first you took away my elder brother now her as well when all she ever did was pray to you all day and night"
"You hurt her," he said. His voice was hoarse, scraped raw by screaming. "You touched her."
Zeus's expression didn't change.
"She was pleasing," he replied mildly. "Until she wasn't."
Something inside Axiomel snapped so violently it felt physical.
"You think that gives you the right?" Axiomel screamed. "She was my mother!"
Zeus looked almost bored.
"She was mortal," he said. "Do not confuse ownership with importance."
Axiomel tried to stand.
His body failed him instantly. His leg didn't respond. His arm buckled. He collapsed back onto the stone with a broken sound.
Useless.
Too weak.
He laughed, hysterically and broken.
Zeus stepped closer.
The pressure of his presence crushed down on Axiomel's chest, the air halt still from entering his lungs.
"You are insignificant," Zeus said calmly. "Your rage is loud, but meaningless."
The sky darkened.
Axiomel felt something wrap around him. Like hands peeling him away from the world.
Zeus raised his hand.
He was commanding a divine decree, a show of power, a power he rarely used, but only for divine punishment. He was erasing something. As the king of his pantheon this was his divine authority as God-King used only when facing dire situations, albeit while not at full power this was erasure at a cosmic level for a mortal not worthy enough.
"You do not belong in this age," he said. "Your existence serves no purpose."
The light descended.
Axiomel squeezed his eyes shut.
I'm sorry, he thought.
I should have been enough.
White swallowed everything.
There was no pain.
Only a tearing sensation, gentle and horrifying all at once, as though reality itself was pulling him apart thread by thread.
NO!
He felt it in him, something just snapped and rejected the erasure meant for him. Like a voice in his head screaming out constatly NO NO NO.
Nothing answered.
Zeus' eyes narrowed.
"That shouldn't be possible."
He studied the boy on the ground—broken, bleeding, shaking—and felt something he hadn't felt in a very long time.
Resistance.
Zeus straightened.
"Interesting," he said.
Then his expression flattened.
"But irrelevant."
The sky darkened again.
Axiomel felt it coming, His hairs stood on end.
This time,
It was just destruction.
Zeus did not raise his hand, he stood above watching as the sky struggled to vomit the abomination it was holding.
He did not even look particularly invested.
WHAM
A single, perfect line of white tearing open the sky.
"A god does not need permission to destroy," Zeus said.
The bolt struck.
Axiomel didn't scream.
There wasn't time.
The light swallowed him completely, burning through flesh, bone, thought. Pain arrived all at once, overwhelming, absolute—then vanished as his senses shut down.
At the same instant-
Something snapped.
Wood cracking.
A cord tearing apart.
The necklace shattered against his chest, fragments scattering into the light.
It simply couldn't survive what followed.
The lightning did not stop at him.
It continued.
Downward and Spreading.
The world folded inward on itself as the strike hit the heart of Sparta.
There was no explosion.
No sound.
No rubble.
The city ceased to exist.
Stone, people, history, all gone in a blink. Not reduced to dust.
Erased from the map of the world as if it had never stood there at all.
Where Sparta had been, there was only a smooth, empty basin of land, untouched by time.
Zeus stood above it, unmoved.
"That," he said calmly, "is how you correct an error."
The storm dissipated.
The sky cleared.
-----
In his forge, Hephaestus stood hunched over his anvil. Sweat beaded like liquid bronze on his scarred forearms. The crimson glow lit his twisted form, casting monstrous shadows on the soot-blackened walls. Before him stood an apprentice, one of Zeus's countless bastards, this one with mismatched eyes that mirrored the dancing flames.
"Brother," the boy called out, his voice cracking. "Father didn't even raise his hand! The lightning just… appeared!"
Hephaestus brought his hammer down with a thunderous clang that made the boy flinch. Sparks flew. "Father needs no gesture," he growled, his beard sparking with tiny embers. "He is king for a reason."
The boy fell silent, turning to gaze through the forge's open archway at the vast, smoking crater that had once been Sparta. After a long moment, he whispered, "Could he… the mortal… could he survive that?"
Hephaestus's laugh was the sound of grinding metal. "He survived erasure through some fluke of fate, yes. But this?" He gestured with his hammer toward the utter devastation. "I've been with father for a very long time and that was him just merely swatting away something insignifican." He fixed the boy with a hard look. "That, brother, is the difference between gods and men."
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Hi Guys, Author here. So, first chapter, big moment, more to come anyway. Your thoughts and ideas are highly appreciated. If you want me to improve something for future reads, shout out in the comments. The next few chapters we back track what happened to this chapter