I Am Zeus - Chapter 257
Chapter 257: Lies
The city air hit him like a wall of static. Not the clean, electric charge he remembered, but a thick, grimy hum—a million machines breathing at once. Athens stretched out below, a jungle of concrete and glass where marble and bronze should have been. Streetlights cast a sickly orange glow on faces buried in glowing screens. No one looked up. No one watched the sky.
Zeus walked through the chaos, a king in a ghost town. Cars honked, their fumes stinging the air. A young couple arguing over a map never noticed the man whose footsteps made the pavement tremble. He was a relic, a forgotten signature on a contract the world had torn up.
He found himself climbing clean, modern steps to a temple of a different kind. The museum stood polished and cold, a mausoleum for his own memory. Guards waved him through, mistaking his otherworldly stillness for some kind of VIP status.
Inside, the air was dry and silent, the kind of silence that follows a death. He moved past cases of pottery and rusted swords, until he found the heart of it: a hall dedicated to him and his family.
There he was, frozen in paint and stone. A mural showed him hurling lightning at giants. A plaque listed his “exploits.” His life, his loves, his reign—reduced to captions under glass.
He stopped before a display about Metis. The text stated, matter-of-factly, that he had swallowed her.
A low sound rumbled in his chest. “No.”
A few tourists glanced over.
He leaned closer to the glass, his voice cutting through the hushed atmosphere. “That’s not how it happened.”
A man in a bright shirt chuckled. “You tell ’em, buddy. The audio tour’s pretty dry.”
Zeus ignored him, his eyes fixed on the words. “I did not devour her. She was my counsel. My equal. You’ve turned wisdom into a cautionary tale.”
More people were staring now. Phones were raised, little black eyes recording a performance they didn’t understand.
“You got the wrong beard, man!” someone called out. “Zeus had a proper beard!”
Zeus’s gaze shifted to the speaker. The man’s phone screen flickered and died. The laughter around him faltered.
“You build towers to the sky,” Zeus said, his voice calm but filling the entire hall. “But you’ve forgotten who lives there. You box our bones in glass and call it history.”
He reached out and lifted a bronze replica of his lightning bolt from its stand. It felt like a toy in his hand. A tinny alarm beeped once, then choked into silence.
“Sir! Put that down!” A guard rushed forward, hand on his radio.
Elena burst into the hall, Leo on her heels. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She saw him standing there, holding the prop thunderbolt like it was a key he’d misplaced. The air crackled with unseen energy.
“Lord Zeus!” she called out, her voice tight with panic.
He turned. The storm in his eyes softened a fraction. “Elena.”
She bowed her head slightly, moving between him and the guards. “Please. They don’t know. This isn’t the place.”
He looked at the frightened faces, the dead phones, the guards frozen in uncertainty. He placed the bolt back on its stand with a quiet, final click.
“They should learn,” he said, but he allowed Elena to take his arm and guide him away.
The crowd parted for them, a sea of confused whispers.
———
Outside, the night air was a relief. Leo fumbled with the car keys, his hands shaking.
“People think you’re an actor,” he blurted as Zeus settled into the back seat.
Zeus watched the city slide by, the unnatural lights reflecting in his eyes. “An actor,” he repeated, tasting the word. “So you still play our parts. You just don’t believe the play is real.”
The car’s electronics flickered the entire drive back. Streetlights dimmed as they passed.
Back in the wrecked lab, surrounded by the smell of burnt wiring and ozone, Zeus stood where his prison had been.
“You called a storm to wake me,” he said to Elena.
“It was the only key we had,” she replied.
He almost smiled. “Arrogance. And courage. The two have always been cousins.” He walked to a monitor showing frozen security footage of his awakening. “Do they truly believe I ate her?”
Elena nodded, unable to lie. “It’s in all the books.”
He let out a short, sharp laugh that held no joy. “Of course it is. It’s easier to paint a tyrant than to understand a king who loved his queen.” He looked at Elena, and for a moment, the god was gone, replaced by a man haunted by memory. “She was the first to see the end coming. She told me even kings can be forgotten.”
The raw honesty in his voice stunned Elena into silence.
Leo, leaning against a broken console, finally found his nerve. “So… what comes next?”
Zeus turned to the window. The city lights shimmered, and for a second, they all dimmed at once, as if in deference.
“What comes next,” Zeus said, his voice low and clear, “is I find out what’s left of the sky. And who’s been living in my house.”
Elena met his gaze. “And if it’s Him?”
A slow, cold smile touched Zeus’s lips. “Then I suppose I’ll have to evict him.”
He turned back to the night, and somewhere far away, thunder murmured a reply he hadn’t heard in centuries.
Leo sank into a chair, head in his hands. “He laughed. He actually laughed about the wife-eating thing. We are so, so dead.”
Elena watched the god’s back, a silhouette against the city lights. “No,” she whispered. “I think the world just ran out of time.”
A/N
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Now Zeus is on a hunt to find out what truly happened to the gods and if they are alive, find them and bring them back.