Chapter 7

I groaned as I looked up at the ceiling from the flat of my back. The cool marble floor was hard against my skin as my eyes creaked open, and I took in the dull light around me. My head hurt, not in the same way as passing out had done the day before, but from where it had hit the ground when I had ceased to be upright. I frowned; something wasn’t right. I mean, aside from having passed out for an unknown amount of time again and...

Wait ... Marble?

I squinted, turning my head and trying to open my eyes to see what I was lying on, but my vision was still too blurry. I felt my fingertips scratching inquiringly against the hard surface beneath me. It was cold, smooth, very hard, and absolutely not the grey dust that had been inside the pillbox. I groaned and turned my head back to the ceiling, but instead of being a stark gray concrete slab eight feet above me, I found myself blinking up at hundreds of huge, interlocked, carved blocks forming a ceiling dozens of feet higher than it should have been.

Flickering lights cast dancing shadows across it, only adding to the confusion in my slowly clearing mind.

I groaned and sat myself up. Hoisting my body into a more upright position and angling my hands behind me to support my weight.

Well, this is new...

The room I found myself in was huge and wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of those films about some ancient culture and some mythical king. It was a throne room or perhaps a temple of some kind, and it was truly astonishing in scale. Large marble blocks covered the floors, and the walls were angled inwards, forming a trapezoid shape, with the ceiling only about two-thirds of the size of the floor. Large colorful frescoes depicting scenes I didn’t recognize covered vast sections of the walls as they hung from the ceiling. Despite each one being comparable in square footage to the entire ground floor of my old house, they didn’t even cover half of the area of the enormous walls. Large, ornately carved pillars flanked the sides of the room, and glowing, flickering fire torches hung in sconces from each of them while more torches, on five-foot poles, lined each side of the walkway toward the central dais. There were no windows and, oddly, no door. Just the long, crimson-carpeted central walkway toward the angled, raised platform at the far end of the cavernous room.

Standing on the platform, a wide, beautiful smile on her angelic-looking face ... was her.

Beauty is an odd concept, and the old cliche that it is in the eye of the beholder is certainly one that I agree with. Yet there are some women who are just objectively beautiful. Hannah was sexy, Robyn had that cute cheerleader look, and Liz just carried herself in a way that perfectly drew the eyes, but of all the girls on the island, Hayley just seemed to take my breath away each time I looked at her. Yet the woman standing on the other side of the room was like something out of a dream. It was a kind of beauty that fairy tales were made of, the type that Hollywood starlets pay fortunes in surgery and makeup to imitate yet still tragically fall far short of achieving.

Her luscious, braided, golden blonde hair, the color of sunshine over midwestern cornfields, hung in an elaborate weave over her shoulder, the ends brushing over the tops of her perfectly sculpted breasts. Her face was a soft oval, and her pert button nose sat astride her thick, plump, moist lips, which seemed to be curled into a perpetual, affectionate smile. Her eyes were an impossible shade of blue. Bottomless pools of color which seemed deeper than the ocean that surrounded the island. Those breasts, proud and pert, were enclosed in a flowing white dress along with the rest of her curvaceous, womanly body. It clung to each flowing line of her in a way that personified feminine sexual beauty. She was everything that could be desirable in a woman in every possible way. She was raw sexuality, she was poise, she was grace, she was beauty on a level beyond divinity.

She was Aphrodite, she was Helen of Troy, she was my lady of the lake. She was more beautiful than Sophia Loren, more elegant than Audry Hepburn, and sexier than Marilyn Monroe. She was water to a dying man, she was the sunlight against the dark, and she was smiling at me.

Suddenly, I became very aware that I hadn’t put deodorant on before coming here.

“Welcome, Daniel. You are home.” She smiled wonderfully from the other side of the room. I hated being called Daniel. The only person on earth who I tolerated calling me that was my mother, and that was only because I didn’t have a choice in the matter. But from her lips, it was different. It was endearing and affectionate, full of warmth, love, and promise. “Please, come sit with me.”

I hadn’t even noticed the two throne-like chairs on the platform with her, her overwhelmingly beautiful body placed between them. Her eyes sparkled with the smile on her face as my feet started moving toward her. In a massive break with recent tradition, this was not something that they chose to do on their own accord, but a conscious choice by me. She had given me the invitation to be closer to her, an opportunity I would sell major body parts to accept. My footsteps echoed around the vaulted hall, but I barely registered the ominous echoes; every shred of my attention was on her.

“I know you have questions,” she kept smiling. I could only nod mutely. “I will try to answer them as best I can. But you should know that some things will just be beyond your understanding. All I ask is that you trust me, and in return, I promise that no harm will come to you or any that you care for.”

I swallowed hard, the inside of my mouth suddenly feeling as parched as the driest desert. As dry as Gandhi’s flip-flop, a certain former friend would have said. “I ... Who are you?”

Her smile grew wider, and the sound of the most beautiful, musical laughter echoed around my ears. “That may be one of those things beyond your understanding, my love,” She gestured to the chair to her right as she moved to sit in the other. She waited until I had settled onto it before she continued. “I have been known by many names over many, many thousands of years. The Egyptians called me Min, the Canaanites called me Astarte. The Greeks had two names for me, Pathos and Priapus, and the Romans, Voluptas. The Aztecs, the Mayans, the Chinese, the Filipinos, the Buddhists, the Celts, I have been known to them all. But my favorite name, the one given to me by the Norsemen of Scandinavia, was Freja. I am the Goddess of Sex, lustful desires, and of procreation.”

I blinked at her.

Umm ... Okay? What exactly does one say to that? “S’up Freja, nice to meet you”?... “What sort of meds are you on?”... “What sort of meds am I on?”

The questions came thick and fast into my mind, each of them more incredulous and disbelieving than the last. Yet, looking around, there were a few clues that hinted toward her telling the truth. The voice in my head, the vaulted hall with no entrance, the control over me and the others, not to mention the fact that I wasn’t freaking the fuck out at the whole absurdity of all of it. It had to be another form of influence over me, there is no way in hell I would have reacted with anything less than laughter and the offer of psychiatric help in any other circumstances, yet I found myself feeling calm, collected, and - more importantly - accepting.

To be fair, the only real possibilities that could explain looks as astonishingly beautiful as hers were that she was either an Angel or a Goddess. There was no question of Divine involvement. Either that or the whole thing was a figment of my imagination, in which case, I owed myself a massive high 5 for coming up with something as incredible as the sight before me because I wasn’t aware my imagination was that good.

“No, you are not crazy, my love,” the amused giggle came from beside me. “And assuredly, neither am I.”

“So, why the different names?” I said eventually. It was the first question that came to my mind that didn’t involve turning into a fawning sycophant.

Her smile widened a little. “I knew I had chosen well. To answer your question, I am a concept, a part of the human condition, and like most other concepts, my ... purview ... overlaps with others. My sister, for example, is the Goddess of Love and Beauty. A face can be beautiful, but so can a sunset or a painting; beauty means different things to different people. The same for Love; the love between two people is different depending on who they are. The love between a husband and wife, between a mother and her child, between friends, between brothers, the love a ruler has for his people. Unrequited love. She rules over them all. But people feel the need to give different names to different aspects of our personalities. For me, sex and lust are different. Sex is for procreation. Lust is frowned upon. Procreation changed; I became the Goddess of childbirth, of motherhood, of children in general. They took one part of my personality, mixed it with those of another Goddess, and gave it a name. And so, I - or parts of me - are known by lots of different names to the same people, and because I am a concept, not a person, my presence is universal, as are all gods. We influenced the development of ancient society to allow humanity to thrive.”

“Modern society, however,” She went on. “Seems to have gone in the other direction. All facets of our personalities deemed to be “good” have been grouped together under one almighty deity. Everything “bad” is said to be under the control of his antithesis. For me, I have been split. Sex is good, so is reproduction, provided they are after marriage,” this part was accompanied by a not-so-subtle roll of her eyes, “lust is bad. But all are interwoven; lust is necessary, essential even, and certainly far more prevalent in the world than sex. You could say I am more Devil than Angel.” She finished with a giggle. “There is only one God who is known by only a single name in all cultures. My brother, the God of Death.”

“He sounds like a charmer,” I said before I could stop myself.

She giggled again, leaning back into her throne and appraising me. “He is necessary, perhaps the most necessary of all of us. The only thing that gives life meaning is the fact that it will end someday. That is why you are here.”

“Wait ... What?”

Her smile seemed to falter a little, and she took a deep breath. “War, famine, pestilence, three of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, are really only different faces of the fourth, Death. The only times that I am able to manifest with this level of power are preceding times where Death reigns supreme. I come to the world as I am now, just before a cataclysmic event in human history. The last time I was here was just before the last world wars, the period of almost continuous death between 1914 and 1945. My function is to start the process of repopulation, to select, and protect the chosen few who will start the process of rebuilding humanity after Death’s great purge.”

“What do you mean, is something going to happen?”

“That is beyond my sight. The last time was just before the outbreak of what you now call the great war, followed by the spread of the Spanish Flu and then the Second World War. By the time His little tantrum had finished, almost 15% of the world’s childbearing population had been killed. That may sound like a lot, but that equates to over a billion lives that never were in the century since. If that happens too many times, humanity will fade into nothingness. I don’t know if it will be a war, a new plague, or environmental changes. Death can be pretty creative when he wants to be, but something is coming. So I brought you here to protect you from it.”

I nodded slowly

Makes sense.

“Wait, you brought us here?”

The amused smile returned to her face. “Of course, it’s not often a group of people, all sexually active, all possessing one of the skills needed to survive, and mutually attracted to each other, fall a mile out of the sky and survive. You didn’t think that was something as commonplace as physics, did you?”

“Erm, actually...”

She giggled loudly. “No, my love. You, all of you, were saved on purpose. I have brought you here to fulfill a purpose.”

“To procreate...” I squinted at her, double-checking that I was following.

“Yes, you are going to impregnate all of the women who have imprinted onto you, as will the other men in your group. The women will remain in a state of sexual heat until they are bred, then they will go back to normal until they give birth, then the cycle will start again. Well, almost normal. Their memories of home will continue to fade. It is cruel but necessary; all of them have lost more than you can know ... or they are about to.”

“I’m not sure how they are going to feel about that.”

She sighed heavily. “You are a good man, my darling. I have watched you for most of your life, just as I have all the others. You are all good people. Louisa and Robyn, as painful as their losses have been, were actually spared horrors that not even I can bring myself to describe. Death is unpredictable, but he is vicious, and his plans would have seen their souls destroyed and lost from the world forever. All I know is that, had the crash never happened, their lives would have been the absolute worst of tortures. Tom is a man who has faced more struggles than you can fathom, yet his heart is as pure as they come; his offspring will inherit his genius and will go on to lead humanity into the future. Ray’s offspring will correct the mistakes of the past, making sure they never happen again. He alone is able to limit the future plans of Death.”

“And me?”

“Your offspring are the light and the dark.” Her smile stayed firmly in place. “Like the fight against Fascism or the cold war, your offspring will grow to become leaders of nations, bitterly opposed to each other. But your calm, your reason, your ability to see the best in people, these are things they will inherit from you. When the two factions set aside their differences and find common ground, it will inspire the rest of the world to do the same. When humanity finally finds world peace, in hundreds of years’ time, it will be because of you.”

“What is going to happen?” I asked after a few moments to let this information set in. “To the rest of the world, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” she sighed and leaned further back into her chair, her long flowing locks cascading over her chest as she shook her head. “He is my brother only in as far as we were both created from the same unknowable source. I don’t know him. I know the God of War is involved, but he is always involved with some part of the world or another these days. He inspires bloodlust, that is a form of lust unto itself. The lust for wealth or power are not as different as you would think from the lustful desires for sexual release.” Her eyes glinted at the last thought. “But death, both my brother and the literal concept are unknowable. All I can tell you is that whatever is coming is going to be cataclysmic. I wouldn’t have this much power if it were anything less.”