I Am Zeus - Chapter 258
Chapter 258: New Neighbour
The lab had become a strange sort of throne room. Zeus sat on a reinforced steel stool, the only piece of furniture that hadn’t been broken or scorched. For three days, he had barely moved, a statue of storm and silence, while Elena and Leo brought him pieces of the world he’d lost.
Books were piled around him—thick academic tomes, colorful children’s mythologies, translated epic poems. The air smelled of old paper and the lingering ozone that clung to him.
“According to Hesiod,” Elena began, reading from a heavy volume, “the Age of Gods gave way to the Age of Heroes, and then the Iron Age of man. The gods… withdrew. Their direct influence waned as humanity became more self-reliant.”
Zeus didn’t look at her. His gaze was on the wall, but he was seeing something else entirely. “Withdrew,” he repeated, the word flat. “We did not ‘withdraw.’ We were the sky and the sea and the earth. You don’t withdraw from your own body.”
Leo carefully placed another book in front of him. “This one’s about the Norse. Their end was… more dramatic. Ragnarok. A big battle. Gods and giants killing each other. The world burns and sinks into the sea.”
Zeus picked up the book, his fingers leaving faint, static sparks on the cover. He flipped through pages filled with illustrations of serpentine monsters and burning rainbows. “A neat story. An ending with fire and glory. Convenient.”
He dropped the book back onto the pile with a dull thud. “How am I to trust these? The people who wrote these… they got my own life wrong. They say I was a tyrant who ate his wife. They turned my brother into a cartoonish villain who kidnaps maidens. Why should I believe a word they say about how we ended?”
Elena knelt, meeting his eyes. Her own were tired from days of research and fear. “Because in every lie, there’s a seed of truth. Maybe the details are wrong. The motives are twisted by time and fear. But the pattern… the pattern is the same everywhere. The gods are gone.”
He was silent for a long time, the only sound the faint hum of a backup generator. “A pattern,” he murmured. “Like a single weed, you might call it a random flaw. But a whole field of the same weed? That’s a farmer’s doing.”
Frustration, cold and sharp, began to cut through his grief. This wasn’t natural decay. This was a harvest.
“Show me more,” he commanded, his voice low.
Elena and Leo exchanged a look. This was the part they’d been dreading. Leo hesitantly brought over a final, plain black book. It was older than the others, its cover worn soft.
“This is… different,” Elena said carefully, placing it before him. “It’s not a history or a myth in the same way. It’s a religious text. It’s called the Bible.”
Zeus took it. The book felt different in his hands. It didn’t carry the dust of academic curiosity, but the weight of genuine, enduring belief. He opened it, his eyes scanning the ancient language that translated itself in his mind. He read of creation in seven days. Of a single, all-powerful God. Of floods and commandments and prophets.
He read quickly, the pages turning with a soft whisper. He saw the love, the law, the wrath. He saw the Son, the aspect he had met, the one who pleaded. He saw the wars, the conquests in the name of this one God.
Then he reached the final book. Revelation.
His eyes moved down the page, taking in the visions of beasts and seals, of a great dragon thrown down to earth. He read about a final battle, a lake of fire, a new heaven and a new earth.
And he stopped.
A slow, cold smile spread across his face. It wasn’t a smile of joy, but of terrible, final understanding.
He looked up at Elena, his eyes blazing with a light that was both divine and utterly furious.
“There’s no devil in this,” he said, his voice dangerously quiet.
Elena blinked. “What? Of course there is. The dragon, the serpent, the beast… that’s Satan. The Adversary.”
“No,” Zeus said, tapping the page with one finger. A tiny spark jumped from his skin, leaving a small, brown scorch mark on the paper. “This is a story about a war in heaven. A rebellion. And the rebel loses. He is cast out. He is given a kingdom of his own to rule—this world, this age. He is the prince of the air, the tempter, the accuser. But he is a defeated enemy. A prisoner in his own domain.”
He closed the book with a snap that echoed like thunder in the small lab.
“I killed him,” Zeus said, standing up. The air in the room grew heavy, pressing down on them. The lights flickered wildly. “I unmade Lucifer in the dust of Hell. I erased him. There is no devil left to fight this war. No great adversary to throw into a lake of fire.”
He began to pace, each step a measured, rhythmic beat of growing rage. “This book… it’s not a prophecy. It’s a cover story. A script. It explains away the final, great conflict. It says the old enemy will be defeated once and for all. But the enemy was already gone. I took care of that.”
He stopped and turned to them, and the full force of his presence filled the room. He was no longer a confused king in a strange land. He was a general who had just seen the enemy’s battle plan.
“Don’t you see?” he said, his voice rising. “This ‘Revelation’… it’s the perfect excuse. When the world changes, when every other god is scrubbed from existence, when only one voice remains… this book will tell everyone why. It was the great final battle! We defeated the devil! We made everything new!”
He laughed, a sharp, bitter sound. “But there was no battle. There was just… cleaning house. After I did his dirty work and removed his rebellious son, He waited. He let belief in us fade. And when we were weak, when we were just stories… He folded our realms into His. He took everything. My brothers, my children, my wives… they didn’t fade. They were retired.”
The realization hung in the air, thick and suffocating. The simple, sad story of fading faith was a lie. It hadn’t been a natural death. It had been a silent, cosmic coup.
Zeus walked to the broken window, looking out at the modern world—a world built, he now understood, on the grave of his own.
“He didn’t just take my family,” he whispered, his knuckles white as he gripped the windowsill. “He took my sky. He took my thunder. He let them build these… these ugly towers into my clouds, and He never said a word.”
He turned back to Elena and Leo, his expression carved from pure, cold wrath.
“That’s why I’m still here. Metis knew. She always knew. She made me swallow the chaos, not out of fear, but to preserve a weapon He couldn’t predict. A piece of the old world that didn’t belong to Him. I wasn’t in a prison. I was in an armory. And you two… you just handed me the key.”
Outside, the sky, which had been clear, began to bruise with dark, roiling clouds. A low growl of thunder rolled over the city, a sound it hadn’t heard in centuries.
Leo stared, his face pale. “So… what now?”
Zeus’s smile returned, colder and sharper than before.
“Now,” he said, his voice the calm at the center of the coming storm, “I think it’s time I paid a visit to my new neighbor. It’s been a few thousand years. We have a lot to talk about.”
The first drop of rain hit the window like a bullet. Then another. And then the sky tore open.