Becoming a God

Across from me, beyond the iron jaws of the prison gate,
He stood—tall, gaunt, eyes deep as forsaken wells,
Grey whispers of hair pleading against the creeping void of baldness.
With hands weathered by death’s cold touch, he poured liquid steel,
A silver vessel birthing oil onto a stone slab,
His fingers twirling round the severed blade,
A lover’s caress upon the guillotine’s wicked tongue.

Doom shadowed me, a false charge branding my soul,
My devotion to the throne now but a fleeting ember.
Xerxes, blind to the truth, deaf to my cries,
The palace council—wolves in gilded robes—
Sealed my fate with whispers sharp as daggers.

Had he forgotten? My king, my lord,
How once I shattered the goblet of venom,
How I snatched him from death’s coiling grasp?
Yet now, his Empress, Cassandane, draped in silken malice,
Arrived before the baying hounds, eager for the theatre of my demise.

The headsman grinned, his glee a blade as keen as the one he honed,
Steel kissed wood—a plank sundered like wind through petals,
Her Majesty's laughter, the song of a raven feasting on carrion.

The prison doors howled apart.
Hands, cruel as fate, wrenched me forth.
My screams wove into the air, unravelling at its seams.
Darius, once my brother in service, whispered low as I passed,
“You, who is about to die—I salute.”

Tears stained my cheeks, yet none could wash my doom away.
The Emperor’s scribe, voice cold as marbled tombs,
Spilled forth my sins, sins I had never sown.
The mob howled, their breath thick with bloodlust.
The sceptre moved; my fate was written.

The guillotine flashed, a silver serpent striking—
Yet it faltered, a hesitant reaper.

The heavens shuddered, their womb split wide,
And lo! Rain descended, not in weeping rivulets,
But in infants of mist and thunder's wrath.
Lightning, fork-tongued, spat fire into the frenzied night.
The crowd splintered, fear their new master.

A wind, a monstrous breath of the divine, seized me,
Ripped me from the stage of my slaughter,
And cast me into the newborn waters of the storm.
I drifted, untethered, a whisper upon the tide.

Ameratat, the undying, the ever-weaving thread,
Spared me, bathed me in her eternal light.
The water goddess, Anahita, bore witness,
Cleansed me of the false chains that bound my name,
And in her grace, I was reborn—
No longer a man, no longer a servant of mortal kings,
But a god, risen from the throes of injustice,
Crowned in tempest and truth.