Disclaimer: Hercules the Legendary Journeys and its characters belong to MCA/Universal and Renaissance Pictures. The Kirra's Journey series is a profit-free endeavor to have fun with these characters and pass it on to my readers. The character of Kirra and Tauthé, and any other original characters in this series belong solely to me.

Author's Note: Part II of The Longest Journey is what I like to call an "add-in" to the HTLJ episode Not Fade Away, the one in which Iolaus dies at the hands of the second Enforcer. Part I led up to that episode, and now, Part II meets up with it. I do not intend to make very many (if any) changes to the episode except to give it a little more feeling. Michael Hurst's performance in the episode is its only highlight. His "death" was very well acted. Every other performance, particularly during that death scene, was, in my opinion, not good. I've wanted to revisit that scene in written form for ages. No other episodes are specifically impacted but Not Fade Away, so go re-watch it to get prepared for Kirra's newest adventures in New Greeceland!

In Part II, Kirra meets a strange new cast of characters who threaten not only her life but her chance to warn Hercules of Hera's wrath. Once again on the run with Tauthé, she'll learn of the girl's origins, which could put to the test their quick bond of friendship. At the same time, Hercules battles the Enforcer while Iolaus battles his past and discovers more than his father Skouros in its depths. In the midst of it all, the girl who would have been a princess comes face to face with a Queen and the seeds of her true destiny.


Kirra's Journey

Episode 5: The Longest Journey, Part II


Book One


Chapter 1

The earth crunched beneath her sandaled feet. Air was the only tangible sensation. It entered her lungs in thin streams, fetid, heavy, and too rotten to breathe. She managed if only to remain alive. Every other sensation had been given over to imagination. She walked in a sea of blackness, arms raised in front of her to ward off any unseen danger. Sound, on the other hand, came to Kirra like cotton waded in the ear.

"Hello?"

Even to Kirra's own ears, her voice sounded far away and disturbingly unreal, a ghostly apparition of sound floating on the wind, not her own. A part of her knew she should be questioning her whereabouts. She should be asking the questions anyone would were one to suddenly find oneself alone and in the dark. And yet, the questions didn't surface in her floundering mind. They floated like her voice somewhere behind as might an unspoken thought.

From out of the darkness came a low and ominous sound. It bounced and echoed off the walls but met her ears in a register unmistakable as laughter. Kirra searched for its owner with useless eyes, twisting this way and that. Try as she might to find it, no shape manifested itself but the shape of fear. Fear seared its way from her gut to her extremities.

"Is anyone there?"

Another sound, this one not ominous but strangely familiar. A continuous sound, one of motion. Spinning. Yes, that was it. Something was spinning and it was close. There was always the chance that the sound was nothing more than a lure pulling her toward doom, but Kirra had nothing else. She had to find it or risk losing her mind.

She moved toward it and…crunch. It was like the carapaces of beetles beneath her feet. Kirra shook her head, determined not to contemplate upon what she walked. There was only the sound of spinning.

And light? Yes. Up ahead, a shimmering pinpoint of light.

"Hello?"

Moving faster now, every step bringing her closer to a light that grew in size and definition. A flicker of flame. Torchlight! Kirra picked up her pace and tried to ignore the ugly crunch beneath her feet. Only the gods knew what her feet touched. She couldn't concern herself with just now. There was nothing between her and the light. She had to reach it or else be lost forever.

Like staring through a keyhole overflowing with light and mist, Kirra reached the place where the pinpoint became a torch raging with a continual flame. Its light restored her sight and granted her a vision at the same time.

She had entered a chamber of some sort, a semi-circle of jagged rock walls. The effect was claustrophobic, but anything was better than complete darkness. Darkness destroyed the mind; left one cold and empty. Torchlight filled one with hope. Even if hope were as small as a pinprick, Kirra was willing to take whatever she could get. Her only hope came in the form of three figures.

Kirra came to a stop, breathing as if she had run miles. Surely, she couldn't have run the distance her body demanded she had! Still, it wasn't exhaustion that stilled her feet. It was the image before her. Familiar and yet, foreign.

Three women—one a child, one a young woman, and the other old—their faces drawn and bereft of expression. They stood beside the very instrument that had drawn her all this way, the sound she heard it the dark—a spinning wheel. She knew without having to ask who they were. She had written of them once long ago when she had the time to devote to such erstwhile endeavors; when she felt compelled to write of a man she adored and worshipped, but had never met. The woman who called herself the goddess of love had given Kirra an image of one of them once, though the child before her would likely never develop the curves Aphrodite had filled out in Clotho's white dress.

They were the Fates, or as her mother had often called them, Moirai. Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. The spinner, the measurer, and the cutter of life's thread.

One thread, in particular, spun through their wheel and collected within Clotho's spindle. The collection had not the thickness of the spindles that lined shelves built into the wall behind them. Some were very thin, with only a few yards worth of spun thread. Others were fat, wider than the spindle itself. But each had woven within it differing colors. Whites mixed with yellows and blues, interspersed here and there with grays and deep hues of fiery orange. On a few of them, blood reds bled into dead black.

Kirra shivered. These colors weren't only on the spooled and cut ones. Red and black existed upon the current spindle of thread. Her own thread. It had to be. Why else would she be here?

Clearing her throat (because one doesn't just talk to the gods without showing some form of humility), Kirra took a step toward them. "Excuse me?"

As the words left her mouth, she felt sick. This wasn't real. It couldn't be. Surely, she was dreaming. If it was real, standing here talking to the Fates, she was but one step from the Underworld.

Clotho looked upon her but did not speak. Here in these dark confines, the girl glowed with the radiance of the sun, her prettiness incomparable. The raiment of flowing white cloth covered her in innocence and purity itself, from the hood on her head to where it pooled at her sandaled feet, but that's where her innocence ended. The lack of expression on her face spoke of one who'd been at the work so long she'd long since been stripped of youth and vitality.

Kirra cleared her throat once more at the intensity of the girl's stare. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to interrupt, but I'm lost and I need to…" Need to what? "…find my way."

"Your way is set," Clotho said with a child's voice far too wise for her years.

"You need only follow it," Lachesis added without looking up from the thread stretched across her hands.

And lastly, the older one spoke, her voice thick with age and disuse. "Do not let yourself stray from it."

Kirra shook her head. "But where do I go? How will I know if I'm straying?"

"Your past will teach you the way," Clotho said.

Lachesis followed with, "But be cautious of the present…"

"For there will be many distractions," Atropos finished. "Your choices will determine your future."

"I don't understand," Kirra said.

She now felt more lost than when she came here. Why did she come here? To ask questions that had no form? Only to receive answers with even less coherence? But there was one question on her mind, one sole answer she sought even though she buried it, along with its significance, among the refuse in the back of her mind. Kirra opened her mouth to ask it when the laughter she heard moments before echoed back toward her. Its ominous tone reached for her like tenebrous hands from the darkness on her right.

"No one ever understands the Fates, my dear," said its voice, a tinge of laughter lingering like a contemptuous slap.

Its owner came near, taking shape in a long black dress that torchlight reflected toward Kirra in an unbelievably iridescent shimmer. She had never seen a fabric with such obsidian radiance, even with her myriad of trips into Corinth with Alcmene. She had witnessed cloth of such variety of color and design that it boggled the mind, but this…this dress was godlike. What Alcmene had once called "sequins" decorated the bodice, shooting colors of the deepest purples and the darkest blues toward her; though Kirra knew they were more than mere trinkets sewn into fabric, for the woman who wore it was more than a mere woman.

She wore a similarly iridescent crown upon her head. Her face was pale. Her eyes were the color of ice, and when she smiled, there was no warmth in her blood red lips.

"The Fates always speak in riddles. Even I have trouble understanding them sometimes."

Kirra couldn't find her voice. Something had damned the flow of words from her mouth and it was nothing short of stark terror. In this unearthly place, surrounded by all this darkness and rank air, Kirra couldn't find her bravery. She became the little girl terrified of her stepfather's rage again because the woman with a crown upon her head and an appearance of sympathy to disguise a latent malice could be only one person.

The woman extended a hand. "Hera, Queen of the gods."

Kirra's blood ran cold and her breath came short.

Hera narrowed her eyes. "But you know that already, don't you?"

When Kirra didn't readily accept her hand, Hera brought her ungloved hand to Kirra's face and touched her cheek. Fingers like ice cubes chilled her skin.

"Such an astute girl," Hera said. "I used to be like you once. So young and fresh and pretty. So full of wonder for the future. I held the world in my hands…"

The queen of the gods was not what Kirra expected. Not by far. The statues that depicted her were always of a younger woman with a smiling face. And why not? In the eyes of her worshippers, she represented the ideal woman. She was the very face of marriage and family. But the woman's heart was as ice cold as her eyes and she quickly displayed it in a melodramatic sneer.

"…until Zeus destroyed it."

Her fingers tightened momentarily around Kirra's cheek, and then she let go and walked out of Kirra's sight. Warmth fought to creep back into her flesh, but Kirra wasn't about to let her guard down. The crunch of the ground beneath Hera's feet signaled that she hadn't gone very far.

"But you understand betrayal, don't you, Kirra of Endor?"

Something about knowing the Queen of the gods knew her name watered Kirra's eyes and compelled her to speak. Was it that her tone of voice seemed to demand an answer?

"I don't know what you mean." She'd tried hard to keep the tremor from her voice but failed.

"Oh, come now…" The sound of Hera's voice had moved to her opposite side, blocking any side view of the Fates. "You've walked in the sandals of betrayal almost as much as I have." Kirra frowned and Hera answered with a smile. "You're father abandoned you so long ago for war and privilege."

"No, that's not true. He died in battle."

"You're mother gave up the love of her only daughter for the comfort of a man. Tsk, tsk."

"That's not how it was."

Hera came to a stop in front of Kirra, her smile gone. "No, of course, it wasn't." Cynicism didn't just drip from her lips. She became cynicism. "We both know the outcome of that arrangement, my dear. What he did to you is unforgivable. But we both know it wasn't your fault."

Terror should have taken her to even imagine disagreeing with the Queen of the gods, but Kirra found her voice. "It wasn't my mother's either."

"No, no, that deed falls squarely on your step-father, and trust me when I say, he is meeting my retribution for what he did. But let us be honest. Can we not place some of that blame at the feet of the man you think you love?"

Kirra's breath caught in her throat. "Hercules?"

"Love can be such a fickle thing. It comes and goes on a whim, especially when you're young. I used to think I was in love, too."

"No, I can't blame Hercules. He was there for me. He saved me. He—"

"'The only hero you have is yourself,'" Hera taunted. "Isn't that what he said? He didn't save you, girl. He left you so that beast of a stepfather could take what he wanted of you. If Hercules had truly saved you, dear, you wouldn't have done what you had to do that night." Hera looked down her nose at Kirra, daring her. "Tell me I'm wrong."

"But, I…he…you can't say…"

Tears came then. Kirra had nothing, no words to assuage the truth that had lived inside her since that night. She couldn't tell Hera she was wrong any more than she could convince her that she wasn't the queen of the gods and that this was all a dream. Somewhere inside, a secret part of her had always blamed Hercules for what happened that night, and when he spurned her advances and broke her heart, he turned her every motivation into a pointless endeavor.

Heartbroken and bleeding from more than the wound to her heart, Kirra could hardly fight Hera when she took her into her arms.

"There, there, my dear," she said, smoothing the curls on the back of Kirra's head. "Cry it out. All young women should have a good cry over their first love. Never forget the sage advice your mother once gave you before you set out on this journey of yours: 'All men are the same.' Despite his breeding, Hercules is still just a man."

Like an arctic breeze, the arms around Kirra turned cold, and the words that followed were enough to chill her from the inside out. "And that's why I mean to end him."

Her words were like a metaphorical poison poured into the ear. How could she allow herself to forget, even for a moment, who this woman was? Kirra pushed from Hera's grasp.

"Get away from me! You're a murderer."

Her smile was caustic. "As are you."

She could not refute that, but she had regained an ounce of bravery. "You murdered Hercules's family. An innocent woman and her three children! Don't dare talk to me of betrayal!"

"Does not a lion slaughter cubs when he takes over a pride? It is the natural way of things."

"No, it isn't. How do you justify trying to kill me?"

"I tried to get your attention."

"Well, you have it. Why have you brought me here?"

"My dear, you came of your own volition. Why don't you ask yourself why you came?"

Why had she come? She didn't recall making her way here. She couldn't fathom a reason why she would leave Tauthé alone to the whims of a madman like Nergal the way Hercules had—

No. Kirra shrugged the thought away. Hera was trying to poison her against him. She wouldn't let that happen.

"I did not choose to come here only to listen to your lies."

Hera's light laughter filled the chamber, echoing as though there were thousands of her, while she ran her finger along Kirra's lifeline. "The Fates do not seek out anyone, Kirra. Only you can seek out the Fates. You must have come to inquire of something." She turned a grin her way. "Your destiny, perhaps?"

"Destiny," Kirra spat out derisively. "It's a word made up to make people believe they're capable of something they're not."

The finger of the queen touched lightly upon the red mark in Kirra's line. "Oh, you were quite capable. Do not let yourself be fooled, Kirra, by impish goddesses who like to view their world through a rose-colored veil. You are destined for greatness, and you will affect the lives of many, but it is not as she says."

Over the queen's shoulder, Clotho stared pointedly at Kirra. A subtle but desperate emotion, more than anything she had witnessed from the girl since she'd come here, eked from her. And it vanished just as quickly when Hera tossed a glance over her shoulder. The girl was trying to make a connection, to tell her something. But what? She would never know if Hera continued to dissuade her.

Kirra took a step forward. She didn't want to know, but if it meant protecting the girl from harm…

"What is my destiny?"

Hera returned her glacial gaze back to Kirra. "Do not ask them. Remember, they only speak in riddles. I can read your lifeline just as well as they can. Ask me."

That wasn't a gentle question. That was a demand. Kirra swallowed and asked again, only this time, she didn't sound so sure of herself. "What is my destiny?"

Hera smiled, but there was no kindness in it, nor was there anything welcoming in the extension of her hand. Her fingers glowed with a chatoyant luminosity, mesmerizing in their brilliance. Kirra took back the step she had taken and more thereafter. It was a good thing she had, for a ball of color and lightning flew from the god queen's fingers. It shot like a dagger into the ground at her feet.

Kirra lost her balance. She fell to the hard ground, watching the shadows run away as though chased by the brilliance of Hera's power. The chamber floor exploded with light, and for the first time, Kirra saw what she had been walking upon.

Skulls. Charred as though with fire. They littered the ground like refuse, forming an uneven cobblestone surface. Missing teeth and crooked jaws grinned back at her. Open ocular cavities stared without means of sight but with a vision of death so clear Kirra felt its denunciation. Her feet had walked upon them. The hem of her skirt of had floated above them. But worst of all was the sight of the whiteness of her own fingers splayed overtop the curve of a human skull.

"You want to know your destiny, Kirra of Endor?" Hera asked, her voice choked with indignant laughter. "This is your destiny!"

She raised her arms and the light rose with her. It crawled the walls of the chamber like the rising of a red sun. What Kirra saw made her wish for the insanity of complete darkness.

Hanging from the walls were hundreds of bodies in various forms of decay—from bones with dry rot skin clinging to bare ribcages, to decomposing bodies dripping with their own putrescence, to fresh kills still running with blood. This was the fetid stench that had been assaulting her nose. Death. It occupied every corner of the room, though she could not have seen it before. In one corner, she saw a face more familiar than any of them. Mother. Throat slit. Mouth and eyes wide in silent horror…

Terror leapt into Kirra's throat. Over Hera's laughter, she screamed until it echoed back to her a thousand times over…