Marcus…
When his dream began it was a surreal experience unlike any other dream he had before, which was saying a lot since most of them were already absurdly realistic and vivid.
He had the sensation of being in a dream within a dream and yet it didn't even seem to feel like his own dream. It was like his subconscious mind had been transferred into someone else's head as it was playing out.
The first thing he could see as he looked up at the sky through the eyes of this mysterious person was a mass of clouds swirling and spinning as if to form a tornado and yet there didn't seem to be any strong winds blowing as a result of it. The clouds themselves were focused entirely around this one area with everything else around it being a completely clear blue sky.
It was unnatural.
Then, a bolt of lightning sparked through the clouds and with it a sharp crackle cut through the air and was so loud that it nearly woke him from his dream. The bright glow from the clouds appeared that seemed to grow brighter and bright with every passing second. More and more bolts of electricity shined from within the clouds and seemed to strike at the glowing mass of energy.
When the ear piercing sound of lightning stopped, the clouds parted as the mass of energy fell, almost as if it were a star falling from the sky. It shined so brightly as if to envelop everything in its radiance and yet the light itself did not burn. It didn't feel painful to have it shining upon the man's skin but was rather pleasant.
The star continued to fall from the sky and when it landed on the earth the shock reverberated through the ground and even the trees were nearly flattened from the impact. The man himself who witnessed this fell back as the gust of wind slammed into him.
The dream then changed as he found himself on a strange wet surface.
As he opened his eyes, a gasp escaped his lips as he looked towards the sky and could see that the sky, which was almost completely clear save for the singular storm from which the star had fallen, was now covered in storm clouds and rain pour so heavily that he was certain a flood was inevitable.
The man then stood up straight to see everything around him and his heart sank as he could see nothing around him but the expanse of water all around him. Not even the peaks of mountains that scraped against the clouds were spared by the horrible flood all around him.
The man wondered how he was even alive as he stood suspended above the water.
The man looked all around him and could see tens of thousands of corpses floating in the water, all victims of drowning from this horrible flood.
His body wretched at the sight of so many dead surrounding him and threatened to vomit out the contents of his stomach.
Why was he alone spared? How did he survive such a catastrophe?
A rumbling sound echoed from beneath the surface of the water and he nearly stumbled as a huge wooden structure rose from beneath the water and was lifted above the surface.
Once it had fully broken from the water and the mist had cleared he could see clearly what it was.
It was an Ark
Marcus snapped awake from the dream and was staring up at the ceiling of his room wondering why his dreams have been like this since just before he left Terra.
What was even stranger about the dream though was the fact that he could have sworn he'd seen the shape of wings within the light of that 'falling star'.
Either way, it didn't do good to dwell on dreams.
He decided to go and read the tomes of Athena and Lycaon to take his mind off of it.
He sat himself down in the living room and grabbed the papers as he started pouring over the Greek letters.
Athena's tome began as such...
'I have fought in many terrible wars in the many millennia that I have lived, from fighting against the giants alongside my father Zeus to the Gods' Twilight War which many of us assumed would be our end at Horus's hands and yet was ended by none other than my elder sister Artemis as she ended that war with Khonsu and Horus's deaths. None of those wars would compare to the Amaskian War that King Dagon brought to this world I was spirited to.
When my retainers came to my palace in Brunhildt, the kingdom that I had built and ruled for hundreds of years before even Dagon was born, they came with word that he had declared war against all kingdoms of the world.
Like fools, my retainers and advisors laughed it off as some kind of joke. I as well thought it was amusing at first but I did not laugh. To laugh in the face of such a threat is to mock the strength of the new king making such a declaration and I knew nothing of this king.
For someone such as myself to not know anything of this king was dangerous. I had heard of a terrible and fearsome warrior making a name of himself across the world as a man who could sweep through entire armies single-handedly yet I did not hear of his name until after he had already become king.
A miscalculation on my part.
So much for being the "Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare"
I immediately decided to take action and confront King Dagon with four of my most trusted Valkyries at my back.
Upon arriving at Amaskia, King Dagon himself, followed by only two warriors at his back.
At his left, a woman who went by the name Nashandra with flowing and beautiful blonde hair. Despite her pleasant appearance and demeanor, she was a horrifyingly powerful warrior with a presence about her that invoked the fear of death at one's very soul.
At Dagon's right, a man by the name of Raime with short and choppy brown hair and eyes of a dragon. It was later revealed to me that Raime was the first born son of the Archdragon Malthael and was adopted into King Dagon's court as one of his most loyal warriors.
To think that the abomination that is Malthael's existence had managed to cross over into Erebus alongside myself was a horrible stroke of bad luck.
Why couldn't that monster have been spirited away to a different universe?
To make matters even worse, I could sense the power and the potential that Raime had to be even more powerful than his father. Despite all of that instead of killing Dagon and claiming a king's title for himself, he decided to serve him instead.
To think that Dagon was this powerful at the infancy of the war in contrast to how powerful he would later become...even as I write this while the war is close to its end, it still gives me nightmares to think about. If only we were informed about his strength and the threat he posed to all of us much earlier, we could avoided so many deaths.
When coming face to face with him I could sense nothing. It was impossible to grasp his power, as if the sheer scale of it was incomprehensible to me or rather as if he seemed to exist in a different plane of existence to even me, a goddess, while he was but a man.
The only beings that came close to such power were the Archangels and the primordials but at the time there was not a shred of doubt in my mind that he was anything more than a man.
When I challenged his declaration of war he laughed in my face as he said, "I did not declare war against you alone. The entire world is my enemy and yet you have come to meet me with nothing more than a handful of your royal guard?"
I held my spear aimed at his throat with my Aegis at my front to defend against him but before I could take a step he shattered my shield and snapped my spear in two. The weapons forged by Hephaestus himself were destroyed so easily by the strength of this man.
When my Valkyries tried to come to my aid, Nashandra and Raime slaughtered them mercilessly.
King Dagon then warned that if I did not run home to my kingdom and wait for war to truly begin that I would be stripped nude and displayed at the forefront of every battlefield to be made as an example.
With that warning echoing in my mind of how close I was to dying at his hands or being taken prisoner I ran back to my kingdom. Afterwards I continued to ponder why he didn't simply kill me or imprison me when he had the perfect chance to but the answer became obvious in the years that passed.
'It wouldn't be entertaining if all my enemies offered themselves to me like lambs to the slaughter' I can almost imagine him saying. It was the most plausible answer from a man such as him. If we didn't mount a full scale invasion on his kingdom, if we didn't throw everything we had against him then we would be dooming ourselves to complete annihilation.
Yet, despite all of this our efforts all meant nothing as he continued to push us back. Even as I called for aid from kingdoms all over the world, even from Lycaon the Wolf King, a man I knew to be one of my father's most hated enemies in the previous world, even with his help we could do nothing. At no point during the war did it ever feel like King Dagon was using the full might of his kingdom, or the full might of his power against us.
His strength was fundamentally impossible for me to grasp. No matter what tactics I devised, no matter what weapons we used, no matter how much power we amassed, we could not kill him and we could not defeat his armies.
And yet...he never once sought to destroy us outright. It would be too boring if it ended abruptly for him.
With that in mind there eventually came a point where he started to lose his enthusiasm for the war and even I could feel that the tide was changing for the better.
The pace of the war was unchanging for him. There was no feasible threat left in the world that could serve as a real challenge to him which made tearing armies apart more trouble than it was worth to him.
If we had continued to pressure him then perhaps he might have given up on the war altogether and the war would have ended on its own.
But the arrival of the Dark Champion had changed everything. We finally had a warrior of our own who could somewhat match Dagon's power to a near standstill but when he was introduced into the war I soon learned that it was the biggest mistake of all.
Dagon's love for war and slaughter was reignited and he pressed his attack even more harshly than before.
Not long after the war had evolved into a battle between the two titans. Everyone else seemed to fade into obscurity before Dagon's eyes as he was fixed on fighting Ruvick alone-'
"Hold on...Ruvick had fought in that war?" Marcus thought out loud in shock. That war was well over ten thousand years ago and yet he was around even all the way back then...?
Marcus had read only five pages of Athena's tome and yet there were still over thirty of them left. For now he was more curious as to why Ruvick was involved with that war and how he was connected with Selene. It was pretty obvious that he had loosely orchestrated the job involving Jiroh and Malthael and if Kayron did in fact work for Ruvick then it could also be tied to himself.
All of this information seemed to be interconnected in a way that he wasn't comfortable with.
He needed to find this man Ruvick and Kayron so that he can kill them both so that he doesn't get roped into another madman's games.