Prologue
Jacques shivered and wrapped the thin cloak around his shivering form. The winters here were harsh and would chill a man to the bone. Instead of being the shimmering powder described in romance novels and movies, it was a drab and dangerous gray, one that would drive even the sanest to the brink of madness. A single sheet of continuous ice covered the thick snow, and if you fell and caught yourself with your hands, the palms would be sliced to ribbons. Rain falls here sometimes during the winter. This would bring ice on top of the already existing ice, making any attempt to navigate hell. Oftentimes, if you were there when the winter hit, you were stuck there until the springtime.
Animals were scarce as well. The deer, elk, and moose would eat bark off the trees and hide in thick brush most of the time. The bears were hibernating, of course- it was what bears were known for, which made sleeping in a cave difficult. While caves were nice in the cold, bumping into a sleeping (and most likely pregnant) bear didn’t seem as nice. The birds had flown south for the winter because, unlike the stubborn humans who resided in northern areas, they had learned that the land and everything in it would be right where they left it. All they had to do was leave the snow and slush behind for a few months, bask in the sunlight, bite a few tourists because they didn’t give enough bread, and then fly back to the northern areas of the world to repeat the same process. They would do this until they died. Most died due to hunters trying to feed their families, very few died of old age, and some died because an animal that was smarter, faster, and more cunning had reached it before the bird could flee to safety.
This was the same situation that Jacques had found himself in, except he was the proverbial bird ensnared in the hunter’s claws. The man that was hunting him had gone by many names and had hunted Jacques by many other names as well. Orpheus. The first name he had taken haunted his every thought, even more so than the name his mother had given him. He had an entire religion based on his writings and songs as Orpheus, and it continued throughout the centuries. He missed the times when he would sing, and the forests would go silent. The bird songs would fall, and the deer would raise their head as his voice lifted through the treetops. He imagined that his voice reached Olympus, but he had no way to truly know if that was the case. He didn’t believe in Olympus, but he liked to imagine that it existed for someone else. If the Gods existed, then it meant that they had spent their time screwing him over.
The man hunting him, on the other hand, was known by only two names. Pluto. Hades. Everywhere his fingers stretched over, the ground froze earlier than it was supposed to, forcing farmers to harvest early or lose their crops. His hands were made up of rotting bone and had its stench. His breath would kill any living being within fifteen feet, and his eyes were the jaundiced yellow that had been seen in the end stages of renal failure. Anyone who was near him noticed the slightest flutter of the heart, a gap in thought, limbs made of stone, and a feeling of panic- a split millisecond of death. Jacques was petrified of the man, and rightly so. He hadn’t been before, but then he had gone and punched the man. He also stole his wife’s soul, but that was beside the point.
He was in a race against death, and it seemed that he would be the one to lose.
Part One- Ancient Greece
