@shadowsarise continued from here
"Hail, immortal fools!" The last mortal man sauntered through the streets of Athens, greeting the marble statues with what any of his fellow-humans would recognize as the most sarcastic form of salute he could possibly have chosen. "All your worshippers are dead."
This was his latest scheme to trick his mind into a lasting delusion, but it would perhaps have been easier to muster up any real anger if he'd ever more than half-believed in these Greeks. He might, at least, have been more comforted by the probability that one of them would strike him down for his insolence.
"Only your enemy survives -- and you will not face him, coward," he told the statue of Ares, before planting a mocking kiss on Aphrodite's cold lips, smirking at her lover all the while.
"And you -- Queen of the Gods, powerless pretender --" this, of course, was addressed to Hera; still, she, too received a kiss, as did her husband after likewise being informed of his failings.
"Your followers are all among the dead." This in a sing-song tone. "No mortal lips will ever praise you again--"
Trailing off, Verney turned, startled by an unexpected sound.
When the mortal turns, he would see a strange sight indeed.
There stands, among the statues, a tall man, broad-shouldered and strong of build, clad in ancient armor and dark robes that seem almost to wisp about him with the movement of the wind.
His sudden appearance is as the sound of discordant strings strummed together in the midst of an otherwise harmonious performance that sets the entire recital on edge. There is an unknowable yet no less unsettling sense of eeriness, of otherworldliness, to him, a distinct feeling that he should not be here.
Still and silent, he stands, almost as though a statue himself, for some moments more ere he speaks, head tilting slightly to one side.
"... I cannot determine if it is insolence or madness that moves you to speak so," begins a low voice, quiet and rough with disuse.
Were he more dramatic, as some of his kind, perhaps he might mock the great show performed by the other, might turn his words back upon him and bring them down to bear with such ruthlessness as to make even the strongest of men despair of themselves, might drag out every fault and failing of his character to return, in kind, such unkindness.
Those who have made mockery of their kind in ages long past have never been known to escape unscathed.
And yet... Though the dark figure's words seem a rebuke, his countenance betrays neither outrage nor anger. If anything at all might be attributed to him, it is only a grim weariness, a heaviness that weighs upon him as though he were Atlas.
"What derision you show to the dead and to the dying. Has tragedy twisted you so beyond mortal compassion that you act in this manner? Or is it only the gods to whom you display such contempt?"
