Page 36

A stunned silence fell over the room. Did King Hellion just call me mom? Why does it sound so familiar coming from his mouth? This situation is entirely messed up.

"What are you talking about?" I hissed under my breath as the king leaned in closer. "I literally cannot be a mother if you haven't realized."

"Well, clearly you still haven't figured out who you are." He stepped back then. "Send Seth back to your little village and I will tell you everything."

"Why does Seth have to leave?"

"Because, I know the consequences of bringing your soulmate into the fray." His eyes swirled with a sort of pain that I couldn't understand but felt like I needed to.

"Seth-"

"Absolutely not." Seth snapped as I turned to look at him. "I am not leaving you with the king, the king that has magic!" He hissed. "You can't make me leave. I won't leave you." I frowned slightly as I looked at him. I wanted to send him away.

"I want you to be safe." I whispered. "If this comes to blows... you won't be able to defend yourself." I whispered.

"I don't want you to be alone." He grabs my face. "Please, butterfly, understand, I want to stay with you. Don't make me leave you to face this alone." I pressed my lips together and held his eyes as I opened the portal behind him.

"Alright." I whispered and leaned in to give him a hug only to shove him back into the portal. His eyes widened with a shock and a hint of betrayal and that was when something... new happened. A wave of blue magic shot out of his hand, reaching towards me but I snapped the portal closed, making the magic die in the air.

"The rebirth of male witches has begun, I see." The king purred.

"What are you talking about? I want you to explain all of this." I turned back to him, sadness was clutching my heart but I faced him with a steady look. "I want answers now."

"Take a seat." A table appears behind us, two chairs at each end. He pulls out a chair and gestures for me to take a seat, so I do. He takes a seat at the other end of the table.

"How could I be your mother?"

"That is a long story, so I think I should start at the beginning." My back was tense as I watched him fold his hands on the table. "At the beginning of time there was nothing... nothing but a lone goddess floating through space. She grew bored of the nothingness and created the stars that we can see at night. Soon she created the sun and then she created the ground we stand on."

I watched him pour two cups of tea, sliding one over to me as I thought about the dream I keep having where I was floating through nothing, similar to this nameless goddess. "She favored this creation out of all of them. She made her palace in the skies above our lands." The palace in the sky I had seen after my first kiss with Seth flashed in my mind. "She often dwelled among the forests with a number of animals to keep her company."

I thought about that. The clearing in the forest with the squirrels and deers surrounding me took a forefront in my mind. "She watched as the world evolved and as humans came about, creatures that were so much in her likeness she wondered how she hadn't directly made them herself."

I took a sip of the tea, the flavor something I had never experienced yet felt like I had tasted it a few hundred times. "Soon, she felt lonely, even though she would visit the people and they would create temples to worship her, she felt as if no one saw her as she was only as a being to be praised. So in her palace in the clouds she created her son, a creation born of her emotions. She named him Leon and he was a god. She raised him as mortals raised their children, from babies to man."

Something about this story gave me a strange feeling deep in my chest. "However, the goddess decided to go down and pretend to be a mortal after Leon was grown. While she was down there she met her soulmate, a man that couldn't care less who or what she really was, he just loved her for existing. Of course the shock of her being the goddess that he was raised to pray to was a bit of a shock. Eventually, the two of them had a daughter."

"She was the first witch, the most powerful of witches, she was told to have no real limits to her powers as she grew stronger day by day. They say that her hair was like spun moonlight and she was in perfect likeness to the goddess that birthed her." He sighed as if he remembered this but my brain was still stuck on the whole spun moonlight detail. "The goddess came down to earth after having raised her soulmate into being a god to live with her in her palace of clouds as her husband."

"The first witch and the goddess gifted women with strong attributes and talents with magic that would forever be passed down into their bloodlines to both their sons and daughters." I gasped slightly at that. "However, the son would remain weaker as this power was a blessing from the goddess and the first witch to strengthen the women."

"Eventually the god, Leon, met a man and fell in love." I listened so intently that I wasn't sure if I blinked. "Yes, Leon fell in love with a mortal man and gifted him with magic, making him the first man equivalent to a witch."

"The man would come to the god to tell him about how the men are dissatisfied with their magic being weaker than their female counterparts." I watched as Hellion gulped down his tea. "Leon decided to have a meeting with the gracious goddess to see if we could appease the men that were complaining, little did he know that his lover had taken the opportunity to go and seek vengeance, killing the goddess's soulmate while he rested in her palace."

"Why? Why would he do that?" Rage fled into my system.

"He believed that handing the goddess her soulmate's head would make her agree to whatever it was that he wanted. Instead, in a fit of rage the goddess came down to the mortal kingdom to punish him and was hurt when mankind came to his defense, hiding him from her. The witches she had created tried to assist only to be silenced by their male counterparts."

"The goddess went to Leon who was now angry with her for threatening his lover. She had been weakened from fighting with the mortals as she came to him. She told him that she would never make man stronger as they would never deserve that power again. Instead, she used her last strength to curse the world. She locked away any magic a man could possess and said to Leon that men would regain their magic when she and her soulmate were reunited in their next lives."

"Leon was sent to the mortal realm as the goddess disappeared without a trace. Leon was banned from the palace he had grown up in out of spite for betraying the goddess and leaving her soulmate vulnerable to the abomination he had created."

"What does this have to do with me?" I asked, trying to understand what was happening.

"The goddess was a beautiful woman, her hair was silver so bright it rivaled the moon and all of her descendants would take on the same quality, the same hair and varying shades of purple magic." I stiffened.

"Are you saying I am a direct descendant of the goddess?" I asked as I gripped my teacup.

"That is precisely what I am saying, Mariposa." He took a deep drink of the tea he held. "You have no limits to your powers, similar to the first witch. However, the most important fact is that you have found your soulmate, bringing the gold thread of soulmates back into existence. Yet, even more important than that... your soulmate has been able to access a magic that has been forbidden to men for hundreds of years."

"Am I supposed to believe that I am the reincarnation of a goddess?" I asked a little incredulously.

"The goddess swore that she would come back within her bloodline and here we are with the coming dawn of men's powers and the new beginning to the soulmate thread." He looked me directly in the eyes now. "The only answer is that you are her, the great goddess Evangeline, back in the flesh just with a new name."

"And how does that make me your mother?" I ask but then it clicks and I was an idiot for not realizing it sooner. "You are Leon, the first child of the goddess."

"That I am, but I will never go by Leon again. That was my name when I was weak and nothing more than the son of Evangeline, the great goddess, the beginning."

"I don't believe this. I was born in Glorious Beginning, a humble town. I am only twenty years old. I can't be a goddess." I rushed to state even though my words felt like they meant absolutely nothing.

"Do you know why that town is called Glorious Beginning?"

"It's where our kingdom started." I had read about it. The kingdom had started in my little town before expanding to take up all the land from coast to coast.

"Wrong." My brows furrowed as I looked at him, realizing that if I was the goddess then he must be that little boy from my dreams. How did he get so corrupt when he was once so joyful? "It was named that because that was where the first witch was born."

"Why wasn't it changed when you took over?" He didn't answer my question, instead he stood up. I heard a rattling sound before a black ceptor flew into his outstretched hand. "What is that?" A feeling of wrongness coated my skin. The ceptor was full of that inky dark magic and I couldn't tell if he was gaining magic from it or if the ceptor was stealing his but either way his core appeared dark.

"This..." He whispered as he looked back at me. "This is the material I created in order to stop you once you came back to end me or find my lover once again, even if you don't realize who you are, mother, you are a threat to the world as it is."

Then he launched a sphere of magic at me.