Chapter 4: the king and the pauper

There was this little thing called Xenia. Xenia was important in the sense that in a civilization full of backstabbing and glory-seeking assholes, you could only expect such behavior from other people, which isn’t conducive in the long term if you wanted people to have a modicum of trust toward each other, strangers, and the like.

After all, why should you trust that guy when he could and would probably kill you, given how many psychopaths existed statistically in the Hellenic world? This is where Xenia came in.

It was kinda like granted hospitality—hospitality offered to another person, to a guest, a stranger, a foreigner (a xenos)—ensuring they would be treated without reproach by you and that you would not do a Procrustes on them.

Xenia was supposed to be a code of conduct believed to be ordained by Zeus, more precisely Zeus Xenios, the protector of guests, and violating it risked divine punishment.

In other words, you’d better treat any guest right. You wouldn’t want to have the ‘mercies’ of an Olympian directed at you; just ask Prometheus about his liver and the liver-eating eagles to understand why it was not something you wanted.

I guess that in a world where the Greek gods were actually real, it would be something much more respected.

Xenia consisted of, I guess it could be said, multiple steps. After the words of Chiron, I was asked by him to follow him to what was probably—if the description in the books wasn’t bad—the great house.

“The camp director is gone, but he should be back in the morning.” That was actually great because if nothing had changed, the camp director was probably Dionysus, and even if I possibly could, I didn’t want to deal with an Olympian—especially the god of madness—after my bullfight earlier.

A woman who looked as if she had crawled out straight from a Lewis Carroll book came with a basin full of water, where I had my feet cleaned—and not in the way you think, I know you know what I mean.

After that, I was given a short feast that was probably not poisoned, before I was ushered to what would supposedly be, in the short term, my living quarters. This served to remind me that, in a way, I didn’t exist in any traceable way, which would maybe be less consequential if my face didn’t scream racially ambiguous, and I didn’t want ice on my ass like a Latino father of seven working in a cornfield for five dollars an hour… wait, what was I even thinking about?

Yeah, I truly needed that sleep. I’ll think about everything else later.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I woke up looking at a phantasm of days past.

The air tasted of cut grass and long-dead afternoons. It was a flavor I hadn’t let myself conjure in years, a ghost on the tongue that brought with it the ache of a phantom limb. My eyes were open, but the world they showed me was a forgery, a meticulous crime scene that could only possibly be reconstructed from memory. I was on a veranda, the veranda. The same worn, sun-bleached teak underfoot, the same intricate ironwork of the railing cool beneath my palms. Before me, the garden.

It wasn’t just a memory; it was an autopsy of one. Every blade of St. Augustine grass was perfectly in place, each hydrangea bush a riot of impossible blue, exactly as it was the summer I turned fourteen. The old oak in the far corner stood sentinel, its branches holding the light in a way that felt both sacred and staged. This was the kingdom of my childhood. The battleground for epic wars with stick-swords, the stadium for world-championship soccer games against the gnarled roots of the oak, the silent confidant to a thousand adolescent daydreams.

And I was sitting in his chair.

The high-backed, wicker throne where Grandpa would hold court. From here, he could watch the whole world—or at least, the whole of our world. He’d sit, a glass of iced tea sweating onto the side table, his gaze both present and impossibly far away, fixed on some point on the horizon only he could see. I used to try to copy that pose, perching on the edge of the seat, squinting off into the middle distance, trying to project a dignity I didn’t possess. A cheap imitation. The poorest form of flattery.

To the right was Grandma’s chair. Empty. The sight of it was a punch to the sternum, a sudden, violent hollowing-out of my chest. With her, the performance ended. The would-be dignitary vanished, replaced by a little hellion, a grinning, chattering calamity. I’d pester her for stories, for coins, for the leftover crust of her pound cake. I’d talk over her radio programs, my voice too loud, my questions endless. She never once told me to be quiet. She never said no. With her, the universe felt like a benevolent, fixed thing, a place where the rules were soft and I was its favorite exception. It was a safety so complete it licensed a kind of beautiful, unthinking tyranny.

The air itself was thick with the scent of jasmine and damp earth, a perfume so potent it felt less like a smell and more like a physical pressure against my skin. The light had that particular late-afternoon gold, the kind that makes everything look like it’s been dipped in honey and regret. It was perfect. It was a wound.

A taste bloomed in the back of my throat, metallic and sweet, like I’d bitten my own tongue while crying. A fucked-up synesthesia of grief.

“What do you think of it?”

The voice didn’t come from anywhere. It simply was, a statement woven into the fabric of the dream itself. I didn’t startle. I didn’t turn. A part of me, the part that had been sanded down by years of a quieter, more mundane reality, had already accepted the impossible logic of this place. My own mind was a mess, a tangled nest of anxieties and self-recriminations, but it wasn’t a sadist. It wouldn’t craft a torture this exquisite, this precise. This was external. This was intervention.

“It’s pretty much like how I remember it,” I said, my own voice sounding strange and flat in the saccharine air. “Mister ‘I-am-going-to-invade-others’-dreams-probably-with-an-agenda-and-manipulation-in-mind.’”

What was the point of posture here? I let my body go slack, leaning my head into the cup of my hand. A thought flickered—a desire for a cigarette, the specific weight of it, the ritual. And it was there, pinched between my fingers, a crumpled Camel Light as real as the chair beneath me. I brought it to my lips. I wished for a spark, and the tip glowed cherry red, the first drag filling my lungs with smoke that smelled of nothing at all. Dream logic. Will made manifest.

The world didn’t shift. It reconstituted.

One moment, Grandma’s chair was empty. The next, it was occupied. The thing sitting there was an abomination of absence. It was the outline of a man carved from alabaster, a statue someone had begun and then abandoned. It had my general shape, my height, the set of my shoulders, but it was unfinished, a negative space given form. A living silhouette. It reminded me of those ghostly, truth-seeking monsters from that old show, a blank slate waiting for a confession to give it features.

It turned its smooth, egg-like face toward me. It had no mouth, but the voice came again, a dry rustle like pages turning in an empty library.

“Allen James Holloway. What did you think of your evening?”

I exhaled a plume of tasteless smoke. It hung in the air, refusing to dissipate. “Directly with the government name? I guess that means you’re the one who packed my bags for this little trip. Seriously? A ROB? Could you be more cliché?” The bravado was thin, a sheet thrown over a trembling frame.

“Clichés are clichés for a reason.” The thing didn’t move. It had no need to fidget, to breathe, to blink. Its stillness was more aggressive than any gesture. “I suppose you could attach that label to me. I’ll be forthright. I do not have the time, nor the inclination, to play the part of the inscrutable mastermind. I am not a curator of mortal amusement. Your life, your choices, the petty saga of your existence—it holds no interest for me.”

As it spoke, the air around it began to warp. The perfect, honeyed light of the garden dimmed and bent toward it, as if the thing were a drain in the bottom of reality. The gentle sounds of crickets and distant birdsong were sucked into a new silence, a vacuum that ached in the ears. The casual, almost bored tone of its voice was a grotesque mismatch for the gravity it was exerting on the world. This wasn’t a being playing at being God. This was simply what it was. A fact. A law of physics.

“Obliterate every human being on your planet if the whim strikes you. Hunt the pretender deities that scuttle in the corners of your reality. Amass a harem. Die a saint’s death. Save your world. Stand on a mountain and scream until your lungs bleed that they are all figments, characters in a story written by a bored intelligence in a reality you cannot comprehend.”

It straightened, and the motion had the finality of a continent shifting. The placid garden behind it seemed to shrink, to become a painted backdrop. The thing in the chair was the only real thing now.

“No. My interest is singular. It is specific. It is you, but not your life.” The featureless face seemed to sharpen, to focus on me with a pressure that felt physical. “I am interested in only one thing, Allen James Holloway.”

The jasmine scent vanished, replaced by the ozone tang of a lightning strike about to happen. The world held its breath.

“And that thing is your death.”

The words didn’t hang in the air. They slammed into me, each one a sledgehammer blow of pure, unadulterated finality. This wasn’t a threat. A threat implies emotion, a desire, a maybe. This was a statement of fact. It was like being told the sun would rise. It was an appointment written in the fabric of time itself, and this thing was merely reading me the time and place.

My cigarette stopped burning halfway down. The smoke in my lungs turned to ice. The carefully constructed facade of cynicism crumbled to dust, leaving nothing but a raw, animal core. My heart wasn’t pounding; it was a frantic bird beating itself to death against the bars of my ribs. This was a fear beyond panic. It was ontological. It was the fear of a character who suddenly, horrifyingly, understands that the book can be closed.

I wanted to speak, to demand answers, to scream. My jaw worked, but no sound emerged. My throat was sealed shut by the sheer, immense weight of the truth it had just uttered.

The thing—the ROB, the God, the Reaper—simply watched. Its blankness was worse than any monstrous visage. There was no malice there, no glee, no hatred. There was nothing. I was not an enemy. I was not a victim. I was a task. An item on a checklist.

It had come to my most sacred memory, my deepest wound, and sat in my grandmother’s chair not to desecrate it, but because it was a convenient place to sit while it informed me of my own erasure.

The gold light was gone. The garden was now lit by a flat, grey, sourceless illumination, every color leached out. It looked like a photograph left in the sun too long. The chair under me was no longer warm teak, but cold, polished stone.

The being rose. It didn’t stand up; it unfolded, ascending to its full height without a single muscle twitching. It took a single step toward me, and the world didn’t just go silent. The silence became a physical entity, a woolen blanket smothering everything.

It leaned down, bringing its smooth, featureless face close to mine. I could feel the absence of heat coming from it, a chill that had nothing to do with temperature.

It didn’t speak the words again. It didn’t need to. They were etched into the inside of my skull, burning there.

The jasmine-scented air had turned to glass in my lungs. The thing’s words hung between us, not as a confession, but as a verdict read aloud in a dead language. My death had been a fixed point, a star in the constellation of my fate, and this entity was the astronomer who had miscalculated its transit.

“You see,” it began, and its voice had undergone a subtle transmutation. The absolute, impersonal force was still there, the bedrock of its being, but layered over it was a new frequency. It was not warmth. It was not empathy. It was the sound a mountain might make if it could feel the erosion of a single grain of sand—a vast, geologic acknowledgment of a minute, irreversible change. If I had to give it a name, I would call it mourning. Not for me, but for the broken symmetry of its own perfect system.

“You were not chosen for this new world, for these… godlike powers… because you were the most special creature amongst the billions, the trillions of other living things on Earth.” The statement was delivered without malice, a simple erasure of a foundational isekai fantasy. “One could argue there exist thousands of you. Thousands of beings with the same chemical makeup of upbringing, values, life, dreams. You are human. You are you. You are not special.”

It let that settle. The words didn’t wound my pride; they atomized it. They were the absolute truth, and truth on that scale feels less like an insult and more like a natural law. I was a statistic.

“And yet,” it continued, the cadence shifting like tectonic plates grinding against one another, “something that should not happen, happened. An error. A cosmic one, you could deem it. One originating, unfortunately, from me.”

The admission was so quiet, so devoid of the performative shame a human would layer onto it, that it was more terrifying than any boast of power. A god does not apologize for a tsunami; it notes the miscalculation in tidal forces.

Its tone shifted again, becoming clinical, a surgeon outlining the procedure post-mortem. “You were supposed to die in two months. A sudden, violent heart failure. One you would have been fortunate enough to initially survive. You would have returned to France for the convenience of its medical system.” It knew. It knew about my dual citizenship, the escape hatch I’d always half-considered. “You would have been told the cause was your own biology turning traitor. It would have been bothersome. Painful. Yet, hope would have been given. The universe and the French medical system would have aligned, granting you one more lottery win. A heart would have been found. A surgery scheduled. The chances were seventy percent positive. In ninety percent of all mirrored realities, all instances of you, you survive. You get better.”

The recitation was flat, a roll call of futures. I could smell the antiseptic chill of a hospital room I’d never seen, feel the phantom weight of a thin blanket over legs that had forgotten how to run.

“You,” it said, and the single pronoun became a nail, “are amongst the ten percent of versions that do not survive. You should have died in two months. Yet, because of my error, you died two months earlier. That is… unacceptable.”

The final word was not an apology. It was a quality control report. A flaw in the manufacturing process of fate.

A hysterical laugh tried to claw its way up my throat. I choked it down. “So you brought me here, to this… story… out of some form of guilt? Responsibility? A ‘sorry I fucked up, here’s some godlike powers and an isekai vacation’?” The bravado was a paper shield, and we both knew it.

The entity’s head tilted a fraction of a degree. A mannerism so perfectly, mechanically human it was more alien than its blank face. “Pretty good deal. But what is the catch?” I asked, my voice harder now, the part of me that had sat through countless contract law lectures seizing on the one constant in any transaction: the fine print.

A sound like stone grinding on stone emanated from it. Amusement. “The catch? I guess your years of studying law were not totally useless after all.”

It leaned back, the movement causing the world to strain around it, as if space itself were a stiff fabric pulled taut. Its gaze left me, turning toward the garden. But the garden was no longer the garden of my childhood. The gold was leaching from the light, replaced by a lurid, bruise-like purple. The vibrant greens of the grass were now the colour of old meat. The hydrangeas wept a thick, viscous black fluid that sizzled where it struck the soil. It was a living painting, yes, but one brushed onto the canvas with blood and soil and a sky moments before a tornado touches down.

“I told you you should have died in two months,” it said, its voice echoing slightly in the thickening air. “My error was making it come earlier. But…” It turned its gaze back to me, and the full force of its attention was like a physical shove. I felt my spine press into the hard wicker of my grandfather’s chair. A cold sweat, entirely separate from the dream’s atmosphere, beaded on my lip. I refused to flinch. I focused on the grain of the wood digging into my back, a tiny, real pain to anchor myself against the enormity of its statement.

“You’re alive now again, aren’t you?” it asked, a grotesque parody of a rhetorical question. “If you’re alive again, what should be different? It would only be letting things run their natural course, now that the initial error has been… corrected.”

The pieces clicked into place with a finality that was colder than any winter. The godlike powers weren’t a gift. They were the setting on the scales. They were the life support that would keep me alive just long enough to reach the correct expiration date. My new life was a delay of game, not a pardon.

“You’re telling me I’m going to die in two months anyway,” I said. The words felt numb in my mouth. A chuckle, dry and brittle as dead leaves, escaped me. It was the only sound my body could make that wasn’t a scream. “And something tells me it will have your personal touch. After all, you said it yourself. You’re only interested in my death.”

On the smooth alabaster plane of its face, a line appeared. Then another, curving upwards. A seam splitting open to reveal not a mouth, but a gash, a rift in reality itself. It was a smile, but it belonged to something that had seen a thousand galaxies burn and found the spectacle mildly interesting.

“I knew you would get it,” it whispered, and the whisper was the sound of every hope I’d ever had being shredded.

The world began to come apart.

It didn’t fade. It shattered. The sky didn’t darken; it peeled away in great, curling strips like old paint, revealing a nothingness that hurt to look at. The ground beneath my feet didn’t dissolve; it turned to a fine, grey ash, cold and lifeless. The beautiful, grotesque garden crumbled, each leaf and petal withering to dust in a heartbeat. The sound was a vast, endless crackling, the death rattle of a memory.

The entity remained, the only solid thing in the unraveling dream, its shark-smile the last point of focus in the dissolving world.

“In around two months,” its voice boomed, now stripped of all pretence of conversation, becoming pure declaration, a law etched onto the fabric of dying space, “even with Avalon inside of you, even with your Essences allowing you feats the petty gods of this world would weep to witness, you will die. And there is nothing you can do.”

The ash was up to my knees, cold and suffocating.

“So heed my words. Live at your utmost until the end. Live at your utmost until you become nothing.”

The ash reached my chest, a dry, icy tide.

“Live until we meet again in the end.”

The ash closed over my head. There was no sound. No light. Only the crushing, silent weight of absolute finality.

And I woke up.

The transition was not gentle. It was a violent expulsion.

One moment: nothingness, the crushing certainty of my own scheduled end.

The next: the rough weave of a bedsheet against my cheek. The ache of a body that had slept too hard in a strange position. A dull throb behind my eyes from wine drunk what felt like a lifetime ago.

And the smell. Not jasmine. Not ash.

Dust. Old wood. And the faint, lingering scent of a cooked meal from a floor below.

I was lying on my side, curled into myself. My heart was not pounding. It was beating a slow, steady, terrifyingly normal rhythm in my chest. I could feel it. A strong, muscular thing, pumping life through me.

Avalon. My Essences. They were in there, humming under my skin, a reservoir of power that felt, for the first time, like the most exquisite, most cruel joke ever conceived.

I had sixty days.

I took a breath. The air was real. It scraped down my throat, a mundane and wonderful pain.

I opened my eyes. Moonlight filtered through a window, painting a silver rectangle on the floorboards of my room in the Underlook Hotel.

I was alive.

For now. Alive for only two months.

Fuck.