ZEUS

For Zeus, something cracked in that moment. He couldn’t see enemies in those small, terrified faces. He saw reflections echoes of himself before he learned how to hide the light that flickered behind his eyes. The oath he had once taken to serve Linguardia began to feel hollow, brittle in the face of what was being asked of him now. He whispered to Gaelan, tried to make him see that this wasn’t justice but slaughter. But Gaelan remained resolute sure that this moment of mercy would wash over his lover so that the fearsome warrior would return once more. When a soldier raised his rifle to fire, power surged from within Zeus as he moved his body between his men and the children. A bolt of lightning erupted from his palm and struck the bullet mid-flight, reducing it to a molten droplet before it ever reached its target. For a moment, the world stood still. Then Gaelan gave the command to open fire.

Those bullets never landed either as the tethered storm finally broke loose. Divine lightning lanced through the air, crackling across the battlefield. Soldiers collapsed in waves, consumed by the wrath of a god who had finally stopped hiding. The children lived. Most of the soldiers did not. 

From that day forward, the Holy Army of Linguardia no longer spoke of Zeus as a hero. They called him only by the name he had earned in that moment: The Witch King.

 Zeus vanished into the wild. Alone and hunted, he wandered until he met others like him persecuted, powerful, desperate for hope. In them, Zeus found purpose. He founded the Olympian Rebellion, gathering Witchbreeds and outcasts into a defiant new family. But he never forgot Gaelan, who survived the massacre, scarred, burned, and sworn to vengeance. The man who once loved Zeus now lived only to end him.

Years later, a young man named Herron Ascleon arrived at the rebellion’s gates. He wasn’t a soldier, not really. A runaway from wealth, soft-spoken and curious, he was unlike anyone Zeus had ever met. He was warm, honest, and naive in ways Zeus found disarming. He loved Herron, but in the way a soldier understands love: as a role, a duty, a burden carried proudly but never quite felt in the typical ways.

Still, they married. In the safety of Olympus, beneath storm lit skies, Zeus gave Herron a blade Stormbringer, forged to carry a fraction of his power. They stood together as kings and Herron was the hope that Zeus still fought for.

Zeus walked willingly into the palace of Linguardia. No one knows exactly why. Some say he meant to bargain. Others say he was seeking judgment. Regardless, he was captured, tortured, and hanged in the city’s grand arena. But the sky did not accept his death quietly. As the executioner’s lever dropped, lightning tore the heavens open. Zeus vanished in a blast that killed his captors and levelled half the arena. No body was ever recovered. 

Zeus’s final days remain a riddle. He was heard whispering to himself. His journals spoke of a voice from beyond something divine, something terrible. A voice that called him “little god” and offered answers in exchange for faith. Whether he succumbed to madness or received true prophecy, no one knows. Only this is certain: he changed the world. And the world has not been the same since.

To Herron, Zeus was both protector and paradox. Their love was real but Zeus only ever knew how to be a soldier. He guarded his heart the way he guarded the rebellion with strategy, distance, and unwavering resolve. Herron softened him, but possibly never truly reached the core of him. Yet it was Herron he named heir. It was Herron he trusted to carry Olympus after his fall. And it is Herron who now bears the weight of his memory.