Ascended (War of the Covens 3)

The familiarity of Athens, its bustling metropolis and beautiful women, were a salve to his weary and sorrow-filled soul. However, it was not long before rumblings of Galen’s movement grew among the supernatural elements of Athens. His first home was no longer safe.

With a great sadness, Kirios left and traveled to Rome. He hid easily within the city, mesmerizing anyone who challenged him. After a while, though, even Rome was not safe from Galen’s madness. It had been a century since Galen had started his campaign, a century of trying to create a furor against vampyres and lykans. But the gods, Artemis in particular, were wrathful in their vengeance upon those who committed atrocities against the vampyres and lykans. Many magiks and faeries were fearful of the consequences of joining Galen. Yet Galen could not be stopped.

Instead, he and three of his most powerful magiks tried to invoke Athena, the goddess of war, into their cause. Kirios smirked at the thought. Athena had not been impressed by their warmongering. Unfortunately, her half-brother, Ares, the god of War, favored Galen. They sacrificed an entire village to Ares, and he bound the three magiks to Galen through what would become known as trace magik. Galen was inextricably connected to the men and to any children they bore.

Eventually, their company grew into a coven, and one of the Romans suggested they call themselves the Medium Nox Noctis—the Midnight—because they believed they were rightfully sending lesser supernaturals to the Underworld, where they would never see daylight again.

Word spread. Their opposition turned to Athena. Enraged at her brother’s idiocy, she decided to even the battlefield by granting the same binding trace magik to a magik called Penelope and her second- and third-in-command, lykan and vampyre. They were now a coven unto themselves: the Dies Lux Lucis—the Daylight.

It was not long after those lines were drawn that the unimaginable happened. Kirios groaned in remembrance, the emotional agony as fresh as it had been then. The omnipotent protection of the gods was lost to them, their last weapon in Galen’s war. It was the beginning of the second century AD, and it was becoming more and more apparent the gods’ power on Earth was waning. A new faith had spread, a belief in one almighty God. Some said his birth had killed their gods and that only those with supernatural children had survived, although trapped on their mountain in the Otherworld and down within the Underworld.

Kirios’s grief, like all his brothers and sisters of Gaia, was great … but he endured and moved forward, traveling the centuries alone in the new world. He found sanctuary for a time in Brittania, but then Emperor Commodus’s death created such a crisis, Kirios was forced to return to the Mediterranean. He almost smiled, remembering the heat of the sun on his cold skin, the fragrant sea air, the lightness of his steps where he touched shore. How different the climate of Brittania was. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed home. He snorted. How wrong he had been. He wasn’t home. This was an entirely different landscape from the one he remembered.

Galen was dead, defeated in battle against an opposing magik. And with the entrapment of the gods, younger magiks were no longer living eternal lives, although their life span was greater than human and they were still difficult to kill. Galen had been hundreds of years old and his son was his only remaining child. His children and grandchildren carried on his name, bound as the others within the Midnight Coven by the trace magik.

How curious Kirios became as he wandered his home country, encountering members of the Daylight Coven and hiding from Midnight. He thanked the gods each day for being one of the few left within the supernatural world who was not bound by the trace magik. They were at war in truth now. And rather than the trace being a helpful weapon, Kirios believed it was the unbreakable lock keeping a tight leash on the subsistence of the war.

Despite his bitterness, his misgivings, Kirios’s curiosity got the better of him, and he found himself wanting a glimpse of the Midnight Coven and their impressive organization. They had set themselves up in Brundisium on the southeastern coast of the boot of the Roman Empire … it was a chief port of embarkation for Greece, an excellent place to lay traps for “lesser” immortals; more than that, they could enlist magiks to their cause.

Kirios shifted slightly and winced at the scrape of stone on his head. A warm, gooey feeling let him know he had cut his head open again. Damn his curiosity. It was why he was here, trapped. He was supposed to consider himself lucky. Galen’s son had remembered him and his father’s wishes and ordered him to be imprisoned and starved, but not killed. Ye gods, but what was the difference between the two?