Pythia
Out in the distance, a figure clad in a black cloak with golden inlays stepped out of the whirlwind and whipped her hand around, causing the unnatural phenomenon to disburse as quickly as it appeared.
She looked around, her grim exterior taking in the desolation of her location while the dust itself paid her homage by settling at the ancient sandals that covered her tattooed feet. She floated over the hot sand, levitating inches over the surface before stopping at an abandoned campsite. A place where a woman named Amy Barnes had successfully fought to survive the death edict imposed on her by one of the last remaining Eternals in the universe. A slight that Pythia, Goddess of the Mortal Coil, would set right – even if it cost the lives of millions to rectify. She closed her whitened eyes and tilted her head, sucking in the words her latest plaything had uttered while she laid there. A sneer crossed her lips.
“Life is not a choice, mortal. Life is a chance and death the only certainty your kind will ever know. Your existence is merely borrowed time. Your breath mine for the taking. For I am death... and I will not be mocked, eluded, or denied a soul which should be in my gullet.”
She came into the world in 422 BC, was named Saffa by her parents, and thrived under their care for the first eighteen months of her life. Since her face had been covered by a caul when she was born, and animals and birds would congregate in her presence whenever her parents took her outside, the portents were too much for the leaders of Delphi to ignore. After being taken away from her home to stay at the Oracles of Delphi, she grew up to become Pythia, the most powerful seer in all of Greece, and making her prophecies and warnings from the Temple of Apollo located on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. In those days, no major decision would be made without first seeking her council: life and death ones like to wage war or forge peace, nature-based ones such as telling farmers when to start planting their crops, and sometimes trivial ones to determine the father of a child in the belly of a fornicating woman.
One day, the vapors from which Pythia's visions came were darker than usual, affecting both her mind and body. While being consulted by a local politician on which day his wedding should be held, blood began to seep from every orifice in her body. As the onlookers gasped in fear and ran from the temple, the brackish vapors floating around her turned into fire and engulfed her, burning not her skin or tissue, but seemingly her soul instead. When Pythia woke up from her ordeal, she found herself naked, save for a few shards of burnt clothing clinging to her waist and legs. Taking a purple cloak that one of her followers had discarded during their escape, she wrapped it around her body and gasped when a voice announcing he was Apollo himself called out to her from the very air inside his temple. After informing Pythia of his displeasure in her growing haughtiness, and her frequent prayers of wanting to know the pleasures of a man for the first time in her life, Apollo decreed her a Reaper. Doomed to spend eternity taking souls to the underworld while she herself would always be denied the death awaiting everyone.
During the last three millenia, she performed her tasks to the best of her abilities, but she soon grew weary with waiting for natural deaths – she wanted to have an actual say in the matters to give her some small portion of satisfaction with her fate. She appeared in the dreams of Catholic religious leaders in the twelfth century, giving them permission to start the Spanish Inquisition. She scattered plague-bearing rats across Europe in the thirteenth century, giving scores of people the Black Death. She also whispered her desires for the concentration camps into the willing ears of Heindrich Himmler when she met him in 1923, while attending meetings of the Thule society, along with her dreams of 'restarting civilization' in the thoughts of Pol Pot in the twentieth century. When the twin towers came tumbling down in the twenty-first century, she laughed in glee from her vantage point of the green goddess perched in the waters nearby. On occasion, she tired of mass executions and concentrated on single targets, spinning her web of destiny around them like a spider cocooning its prey. To her, Amy Barnes, Alex Melnychuk, Peter Rossington, and Dennard Jeffers were puppets. Unlucky mortals who had pissed off a goddess by being in the wrong place at the right time.
Above all things, Pythia hated failure. The two bikers had failed to kill the girl, who stupidly chose to live, who involved the young man who should have kept his metal chariot going on the smoothed road.
Pythia stared in the direction of the smoke spewing transportation the mortal drove and smiled for the first time in decades.
“You will die mortals. There is nowhere to hide. No justice. No quarter. You will perish as all humans do; in pain, agony, and laying in your own blood and excrement. Like I should have... ages ago.”
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