So to reach the Temple of the Sun we had to follow the Road of Initiates to the golden gate. The road itself, a mist-enshrouded marble walkway arcing through the heavens with the world sprawled out below, might have been beautiful given better circumstances. But that beauty was tempered by knowledge of what we would be facing upon it, temptation that would attempt to lead us from the path and from our mission.
It wasn’t hard to anticipate what form mine would take. There’s still one issue that can rouse my temper more than anything else. Temptation came to me before the stars of the Hydra wearing Vayu’s face. Temptation accompanied by three figures, pale as death, whose faces I could not see. And he said he would be collecting more of my family.
But I was forewarned against it. I’d steeled myself against the torrent of emotions I knew would be coming. And even if it truly was Vayu before me, I am hardly foolish enough to take anything a trickster god who bears me a grudge would say at face value. I walked on.
Then he revealed the identity of the first of the figures to me. My mother, but not as most would see her. Gone was the rot that consumes half her form. It left her beautiful, despite the pale pallor. His first target, he said. Whom he hunted even now while I moved to rescue Thoth.
But the deception was no more convincing simply because a face was still tacked onto it. I checked the surge of anger, hate, again and walked on.
He must have realized that tactic wouldn’t work on me. So next he tried to goad me by calling me a simple brute. One who could solve problems only with his fists.
It was a tactic even easier to brush off than the first. Were it true I’d have succumbed to the circumstances of my childhood instead of rising above it. Still, I walked on.
His next tactic actually did halt my inexorable march forward; when he claimed to be my father, my biological father.
He claimed he’d posed as a man just like Baldur in order to catch her attention. He claimed that she was so desperate for affection that she latched onto the first scrap he through at her, that he faked the death so she’d be left clinging to shreds of hope instead of being reduced to shattered pieces. Why else was his ghost not at her side, he asked? Why else would he try to adopt me? I was born of a heritage I hated, he told me, growing closer to it even as I struggled against it.
Temptation or not, I was done listening to him talk. Even if what he said was true, it changed nothing. He’d still be the one who put me through close to two decades of torment, the one who by his own admission had attempted to sever ties between myself and my Mother. His people would still destroy mine because that’s their blind self-righteousness had them convinced that it was the way things must be.
Even if he was a parent, he was no family of mine.
Even if he did sire me, there is no lack of myths where a father is overthrown by a son he’s wronged.
I was done listening to him talk, letting him try to rile me. Thankfully, I didn’t have to leave the bridge to shut him up. I struck a match, gazing into the purity of the flame. Fire, and the sky around me, connections to the one I do call Father. The solid presence of the stone walkway below me, a connection to my Mother. I flicked the match towards him, and as it reached the phantom image I let the fire flare. The image of Vayu, that source of torment and temptation, burned away into golden light as the sun appeared.
And I walked on.
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