[Erechthous the Snake crawled spasmodically around my feet. His tale was caught in flames. He screamed in pain and struggled to put out the fire. But he was a snake. His motions were limited. Mine were non- existent. I was desperate, I wanted to help him. But my hands couldn’t move.]
My legs couldn’t move. I was carrying a roof on my head still my desire to save him was stronger than my incapability; People think artifacts are dead. People believe life is the privilege of those who have flesh. Life is the privilege of those who have soul. And I have a soul, I had a soul that was burning, not from the fire that was burning my hard cover, but from the fire that was burning my friend. Their friend. Their ex God, their ex King, their Protector’s favorite friend. The one that they fed honey cakes and begged for his favor, was now suffering but no one came to his rescue. But this is how humans are. They adore only if there is the promise of expectation. They sacrifice to get, they don’t sacrifice to give. My anger tore my head off the ceiling. My sisters panicked and started to scream.
You are going to destroy the porch!
The temple shook. I too thought it was going to collapse. Erechthous fell violently off the porch to the ground. Still, like the great man he used to be, he fought. He wouldn’t give up. He rubbed himself on the soil. He hit his sharp tale on the ground again and again. He rolled over and over to cover himself in dirt. But fire is a hungry animal that will devour anything in front of it. How I wanted to separate myself from my unmovable universe and jump off the porch. We both fought with the inevitable. Fate had spoken; today you will see your friend die. After thousands of years of divine existence he had to die like the animal he looked like. Despair gave its place to clarity.
With grandiose relief that only a King could express in such a moment, Erechthous let his spears fall to the ground. And I wanted to become my own tear to flow to him and caress him. Serpents are not supposed to have feelings. Still I won’t forget the tenderness in his eyes as he saw me cry. Nobody has the right to judge anyone for his appearance. Who knows what god hides beneath?
We were only ten years old when this happened. The damage was not as big as it could have been; soon the Athenians were working day and night to restore everything to what it was. But everyone knew the Golden Age was over. Classicism was a walking dead moving slow into the roman era. I don’t complain. Romans loved us too. In fact we were being cloned in hundreds throughout the Roman Empire. Feasts, rituals, shrines were organized every minute – the show went on more glamorous than ever. But there was something fake about it. These new statues, beautiful as they were still they couldn’t speak new words. Like parrots they repeated a story that had been told a thousand times before. And people… people had lost their will to excel in the art of acquiring virtue. They preferred to excel in the art of pretending they have already acquired virtue.
Emotional rhetoric and cheap thrills would win the power game those years and everyone struggled to master them. Maybe this is why emperors, dictators, generals, politicians and philosophers of that era appreciated the theater world so much. When they weren’t struggling for power through war, they spent their days lying on golden sofas with beautiful young actresses and actors in their arms. To be honest, some of them were indeed beautiful.
I knew many of them, as they came to rehearse on the hill. But it was one actor specifically that would light my fire 300 years after our first distraction.
His name was Metrobius; the women impersonator.
[To be continued]
Note: Original story by @mariandavp written for publication in Steemit. The above form part of a fiction story and although it follows the true timeline of a Caryatids history it does not describe historical facts
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