Xavier was always told that Olympia was the city where good souls were sent to die. And now that he was being drowned in a puddle of water by some unseen force in the middle of the night, this fact was all too clear to him.
No matter how hard he pushed his scrawny arms against the broken pavement, he couldn't get his face out of the freezing puddle. He struggled and seized, his head refusing to lift upward. It was as if someone had placed a heavy safe on the back of his head. He could feel the pressure pushing him down, but it was not as if a hand was on his head. His entire head was being grabbed from all sides and pulled downward into the water.
And suddenly, the pressure disappeared. Xavier shot out of the puddle, rolling over onto his back and gasping for air. His vision was cloudy, but he could see no one over him. Then he felt another pressure, this time centered on his chest. It was as if someone was pressing down on his rib cage, forcing him to lose what little air he had managed to collect.
And then he felt the burning.
It started in his chest, snaking upward into his shoulders and then into his arms. He felt the heat move down his legs, then to his feet, and finally to his toes. He felt his flesh burning, searing away at his bones. The feeling began to creep up his neck, through his spinal cord. His body began to spasm, the heat growing more and more intense as it entered the back of his head. he felt it in his mouth, and for a moment he felt like he could breathe fire.
The feeling reached through his temples, igniting his ears. He felt the fire reach his eyes. They burst into flame, and he opened his mouth to scream. His eyes darted around his surroundings, fire consuming everything around him. The buildings, the ground, the street cars, even his own body was engulfed in violent, orange flame.
And then he felt it enter his head, his curly hair going up in flames. The fire reversed, and he felt a sensation unlike anything he had ever felt before. The flames were inside his head, exploring the folds of his brain. The fire engulfed his mind, finding its way into every crevice of his cognitive functions. He felt himself slipping away.
But as the fire consumed him, he began to feel something…strange. Something…powerful.
The world began to fade to black. He felt his brain begin to lose itself, the memories inside burning as the fire devoured them. Images began to flash in his mind, the powerful feeling exploding into his brain in place of his memories. He was losing himself to this sensation. His life began to flash before his eyes, images flying through the fading black and into the air, landing straight into the fire.
"I know new cities can be scary," he watched his mother say to him, "but we don't have much of a choice now. Are you sure you'll be okay with leaving?"
"Yes," he lied. "If it makes you guys happy. It's not like I was going to be living here much longer anyway."
That was two months ago, just after the beginning of his senior year. The thought of losing his friends he had known for so long hurt him, but he couldn't hurt his mother by saying he wasn't happy with her decision. After all, his father needed all the help he could get, and she couldn't be around all the time to provide it.
With a puff of smoke, that memory was gone as well. He screamed, reaching for the images still appearing in the blackness surrounding him. He stuck out his arms and grasped at anything that flew by. He saw glimpses of his old home, his old friends, his grandparents. One by one they flew upward, bursting into violent flame as they reached the end of the void.
Then, with the last of his strength and desperation, he caught one. It was his most recent one. One from earlier in the day. He pulled it closer to him and watched. It was the last connection to life that he had.
"You stick with me, you stay alive," Tyrone said to Xavier as they prepared to leave the office.
"Yeah, I got it," Xavier said wearily.
"I'm serious, dude," Tyrone said as he looked him straight in the eyes. "Small town kid like you ain't got nothing on the type of shit that goes on out there."
Xavier nodded his head, lost for words with the genuine fear portrayed in Tyrone's eyes. The two hesitated at the office door for a few more moments, Tyrone releasing a heavy sigh. Finally, he pushed the door open, the silence and serenity of the office immediately being replaced by the shouts and screams of hundreds of students crammed in one hallway.
"Stick close, I'll get you to your locker. We only have 6 minutes before classes start, so we have to move fast."
"Got it," Xavier said, sweat appearing on his forehead.
"Oh, and don't wear your backpack like that," Tyrone said, pointing to the single strap Xavier hung around his shoulder.
Taking another deep breath, Tyrone grabbed Xavier's wrist. With a shout of "Go!", they dashed into the sea of students in front of them. Xavier could barely keep up, but Tyrone had no trouble pulling the small teen along.
They emerged at the other side of the hallway, battered and bruised. Tyrone's elbow was sore with the amount of shoving he was forced to do. Xavier, an amateur at the art of student-surfing, had been kneed and elbowed in the gut a number of times already. He had barely managed to hold on to his glasses in the chaos. If he had lost them now, there was no way he would survive his first day.
"Did you memorize your combination?" Tyrone asked.
"Yeah, I hope I did, at least," Xavier said, rushing to his locker and turning the dial left and right.
The locker clicked open on the first try. Xavier breathed a sigh of relief. He had been warned beforehand that he would not have any time to waste. Given he was normally bad with numbers, this miraculous break would surely have used up most of his luck for the day.
"Minute's up!" Tyrone yelled. "Throw your stuff in, we gotta go! We've got 50 yards to go until we get to first period, and I can already tell you the rapids are going to get bad once the first bell rings."
Xavier groaned as Tyrone took his arm, yanking him into the river of students once again.
And then the memory slipped from his hand, flying upwards to join its dying brethren. He screamed silently as he watched it go up. No other memories came up from below him. They were all gone, and his self along with them. There was nothing now. Nothing to live for. He closed his eyes, and felt the sensation of sleep come upon him.
But the sensation did not stay. His eyes were shocked open, and he noticed a pulsing void in front of him. He gasped, his breath finally returning to him. He sat up, only realizing that he was not sitting on anything at all, and yet he stayed. He looked around for the fire, but nothing was there. Nothing, nothing at all.
Xavier stood up, slowly turning back and forth to observe his surroundings. There was nothing but white and black for miles and miles, pulsating like the static of an old television screen.
"Am I…dead?" he wondered out loud, a deep sadness falling over him.
He felt tears roll out of his eyes involuntarily. Had he been murdered? How would he find out? What would his family think happened to him? He could do nothing more in the world. He was trapped in this blank plane that was death, no one to talk to, everything to reflect on.
The ash of his memories began to fall around him. He felt it on his bare skin, his clothes having been lost to the world around him. The ashes began to stick to him. He tried to shove them away, but they would not budge. They gathered around his form, like a swarm of vultures who had found their next meal. The black ash wrapped around his body, then his limbs, then his head.
They clogged his mouth, his ears, his nostrils. He panicked, whipping his head back and forth in a desperate attempt to get the clinging things off of him. And then they covered his eyes. And he saw her.
And, through some stroke of miraculous luck, he began to remember again.
Xavier gasped as Tyrone pulled him into the lunch room. Three periods were done for the day, and there were still 3 more to go. He didn't know if he could take much more of this school. There were too many people, too many classes, and worst of all, too little friends.
"Careful who you sit by," Tyrone warned. "You sit with Danny Hopkins over there, you're automatically in with his gang. And if you in with his gang, you'll be enemies of Jeremy Durn's gang. They like to stab kids."
Xavier recoiled at the sentence, smacking his head against a metal pillar.
"Has this place always been this…violent?" Xavier asked, nursing the bump on the back of his head.
"As long as I've lived here, yeah," Tyrone said. "We're so low in the valley here, the say the energies of Hell itself leak into the people."
"That's…creepy."
Tyrone snickered, which quickly turned into a full on laugh.
"Never had anyone take it that seriously before!" he yelled. "C'mon, let's get some food."
Xavier cringed as he reflected on what he had said. He chided himself for being so naive. He had barely been at this school one day and he was already making a fool of himself. The two went and collected the sloppy mush that was supposed to be food and found a table far away from any of the problematic groups Tyrone described.
The two sat in silence for a while, Xavier poking at the mush with his plastic spoon. Tyrone dug into the mess as if his own mother had crafted it from scratch.
"C'mon, man," he said. "This is the good stuff. You don't wanna know what they feed us on Thursdays."
Xavier took another look at the goop on his tray. The smell was nauseating. He lifted the spoon to his mouth, his hand shaking as it got closer to his face. He glanced at Tyrone through the corner of his eye. He was watching him with excitement, or maybe sadistic joy. He wasn't sure. All Xavier knew was that he needed to eat what was in front of him, if only to make Tyrone happy. Swallowing hard, he shoved the food into his mouth.
He barely got it down without gagging. Despite the softness of the substance, he had to do a surprising amount of chewing. The taste was horrendous, like someone had accidentally spilled an absurd amount of salt into a batch of instant mashed potatoes.
"What ya think?" Tyrone asked as Xavier finally forced the substance down his throat.
"It was good," he said hesitantly, not wanting to ruin the smile on Tyrone's face.
"You'll learn to love it eventually," Tyrone laughed.
"What the hell are you two doing at our table?" a woman's voice shouted from behind them.
"Hold up," Tyrone began to say as he turned in his chair, "We don't want any trou-"
His eyes went wide as dinner plates. He began to stumble over his words, grabbing Xavier by the shoulder and forcing him to turn around. Xavier mirrored the reaction his new friend had given, his mouth falling agape at what he saw.
She was beautiful. She had long, flowing hair. Her face was dark skinned and made up to look like a perfect model one would find on the cover of a modeling magazine. In fact, her whole body looked like a model from a magazine, photoshopped and everything. Xavier couldn't believe a person like her could even exist in real life, but here she was, standing right in front of him.
And she was angry.
"You little shitheads need to get out of my sight before we have a problem," she barked, motioning to the pack of well dressed girls and guys behind her.
This was the first time he had noticed them. His attention was so focused on the girl, he didn't even bother to pay attention to what was going on around him. And even as he tried to study their faces, he couldn't. He found his attention diverting back to the beautiful girl every time he tried to break it.
"N-no problem," Tyrone said, gathering up his food, all while refusing to take his eyes off of her.
Xavier quickly began to do the same, oddly compelled by her words. He hastily gathered his things, paying no attention to the cleanliness of his actions. The two began to shuffle away, their eyes locked onto the still very angry model. It was only when he slammed into something that he realized what he had been doing.
Him and the other object fell to the floor, both releasing pained grunts. Whoever he fell into, however, was not nearly as lucky as him, as the lunch mush flew into the air and landed directly on top of her.
"Oh my god!" Xavier cried as he shot to his feet. The model girl left his mind completely. He dashed over to the girl he had knocked over, who was just beginning to stand up. "I am so sorry!"
The girl silently groaned at the sight of the garbage that had fallen on top of her. Her eyes met with Xavier's as he tried to help her up. They both stopped, their eyes locking for a moment. The girl was different from the model he had just laid eyes on, but she seemed to have the exact same affect on him. She wore thick glasses that covered most of her face, her long brown hair tied back in a ponytail. They sat and stared at each other for an uncomfortably long time.
"Jessica, get up," a boy's voice came from behind them.
Xavier's eyes darted to catch the large silhouette of a quarterback approaching them. He was blond and tall, wearing a Letterman jacket with the school's logo plastered all over it.
"Alyssa needs her homework for next period done, like, right now," he said coldly.
"Yeah," Jessica responded, dazed. "Yeah, I'll get right on it."
Her voice was weary and tired. She looked as if the fall had been her first time sitting down in days. Nevertheless, she forced herself upward, delivering Xavier a weak but longing glance as she shuffled off towards the rest of the group.
Xavier shook his head, the strange feeling still inside him. He felt that there was something off about the two girls, like he was being forced to look at them for some reason. But that feeling was stronger with the second one. Much stronger.
"Dude," Tyrone said to him as he finally caught up. "That was a narrow miss."
"Who was that?" Xavier asked.
"Alyssa Vanderman," he responded. "Most popular chick in school. You do what she says, you get to live peacefully. You don't, you get beat up by every single one of the gangs around here. And her Daddy's is the worst."
"What about the other one?"
"Oh, you mean the one you covered in mashed everything?"
"Yeah, her."
"Jessica Zeitman. She's their pet. Does all their homework for them. Doesn't challenge a thing they say. I don't think she's even all there, if you know what I mean."
"I…kinda like her," Xavier admitted.
Tyrone burst into laughter. He slapped his knees, bending over in the hallway as he chuckled. It took him a few moments to recover, Xavier giving him a confused and annoyed glance in the meantime.
"Don't go after her, kid," he said. "She's already taken. By Zach Taylor. And if he holds onto her like he holds onto a ball, he ain't ever lettin' her go."
Xavier looked back to the table. The beautiful Alyssa gossiped with her friends, each one admiring her beauty and authority with every second of her speech. Jessica, however, sat with her nose down, desperately filling out whatever homework Alyssa had failed to complete. The rest of the table laughed, but she did not laugh with them. She looked sad. Xavier hated that. Not only did her sadness hurt her, it hurt him, for a reason he couldn't explain.
"I'm going to make her happy," he said to himself.
The memory came to a halt.
"I'm going to make her happy," the thought rang in Xavier's head as the ashes wrapped around his mouth.
Her sad face haunted his mind. He couldn't die, not yet. He still had people to please. He couldn't let himself be lost while there were still so many things he needed to do.
The ashes stopped constricting him.
He thought harder, of all the things he couldn't lose. His mother and father, who would most certainly miss their son who had gotten lost in the middle of the night. He couldn't let them be sad.
The ashes fell from his skin, allowing him to take a deep breath.
His thoughts redirected back to Jessica, then to Tyrone, and then to all the friends he had left behind in his old town. If he died now, he would never be able to relieve their sorrows.
The void began to crumble. Memories began to flood back in, sound and light exploded from the cracks in the nothingness. He began to feel again, the cold wetness of the ground in the alley flowing into his fingers. he began to fly up, bursting through the cracks in the void.
With a gasp, he woke up.
He was still in the alleyway. There was no fire, though the wind confirmed that his face was wet from the puddle. The drowning, or at least what he had thought was drowning, had happened. He looked down at his arms, flexing his fingers and making sure sensation was still there.
Breathing a sigh of relief, he held his hand to his chest, heart still beating rapidly.
"What the hell did you do?" a loud, angered voice shouted from all around him.
"What? Who said that?"
"Me, you dumbass!"
Xavier slowly turned turned his head backward, his body cast in shadow. It was a man, and a quite large and strong one at that. His body was as if it was a shadow that moved in three dimensions. Orange fire burst from all around him, outlining the pitch blackness of his form. His eyes burned white hot with anger. Xavier immediately jumped backward, scurrying away from his massive attacker.
"Who are you? What do you want with me?" he screamed.
"I am Ares, God of War," the monster boomed. "And you better start running, because you just made the biggest mistake of your worthless little life!"