Birds… Sunlight… She hated mornings.
Her eyes squinted focusing on the sky she was staring at trying to understand. It was hot and dark… the last thing she could remember.
A dagger in her stomach! The woman quickly reached for her upper abdomen reaching for what she believed to be a wound. Perplexed, she withdrew her hand to find no injury, not even a scrape, but it was supposed to be there. Hind blood, the only thing to kill a goddess, it was covered in it.
The past… there was something wrong with her past. Subtly she prodded her mind to give up some more of the memories, of who she was and what she was doing here. She was sorry for her curiosity quickly.
Her mind offered up a dark figure that towered over her as a small girl threatening to take her away. The shade grew an appendage to grasp her arm and start to pull her inside, into the nothing. Her voice screamed out for any safety and there came her mother. The shade silenced her in a searing heat, those hungry flames etching the image into her brain never to leave. The barn swooned under the pressure of the heat, she cried again bringing her father to the room. The pressure exploded sending him back to be withered by hungry dancing flames.
The shadow then looked to her coming closer, into the flickering light all around her.
Breathing harder the woman managed to claw her way out of the memories. She looked uneasily around. More birds sunlight and crisp morning.
'Okay' she thought 'let's try something simple from the past… like my name…
Callisto.
Okay that was good, how about what I'm doing here… I didn't fall asleep here…
Huh… nothing on that.
She let herself sit there then considering delving back into the ball of pain that was her past.
Slowly she probed again, she needed to know no matter how painful the memory was, she had to know who she was before she could allow this to continue.
The dark figure presented itself again to her. It just stood there, staring menacingly. It turned and began to leave the weakened barn. She ran after the thing that killed her security, her life, her world, it had to pay, it had to die!
Once outside she looked around frantically for her tormenter. The only thing that remotely resembled the hideous creature was a monster, a monster in the form of a woman atop a horse.
Xena.
The woman's jaw set firm letting the memories of her early past flow into her mind easily after the initial pain. She clung to her dead father's teachings. The stories and seeming mass of random information coagulated into a plan for her life to take. No more would she exist as the happy young girl from then on, this woman had to end, and if that meant giving up her one life to make it so, so be it. Callisto had vowed to become a weapon for this woman who came into her life for no other reason than to kill her parents. All that was left of her life was now one mission, one purpose, one creed: Justice, through revenge.
She let her mind flow from her childhood to her adulthood, recalling when she finally confronted this so called warrior princess. How unfair it all was! Just as she was finally able to confidently give this creature the punishment it deserved the warrior princess decided to begin to atone for the deeds she had done on her own. She had switched the tables. No longer could Callisto call herself hero when going after this woman… but it mattered little, counterbalance must be served no matter what the world thought.
Callisto's plans to set the weights straight came and went with varying degrees of success, but things never truly felt even. Xena had love, Xena had heroism and villainy all bundled into one and it came so easy for her. She had taken away her reputation once only to have that thrown back in her face. She attacked Xena's special friend's soul, killing the love inside, a scrap of victory was claimed there only to end up in her own demise. It always came down to her own defeat and failure in the end. Nobody ever told her that her responsibility to the cosmos was going to be easy.
She had to become stronger… and stronger she became. She began to seek out artifacts, gods, anything that would give her an edge. After years of planning and cunning she had become a god… A god… surely now the cosmos and universe would hear her plea now that she had a say in the workings of it.
Then a vivid moment passed before her. Equality, Xena's resilience cracked finally! Her special friend sacrificed herself all to save the world, but it meant and end to the good Xena. It was so ironic, so perfect, so amazingly wonderful, now she could return to her life as a weapon for this cataclysmic blight on the world. Now she would be celebrated as…
Again she felt her stomach realizing that this evil woman had cut her glory short again the hindsblood on that dagger was supposed to end her for good. Quietly she cursed the universe once more for screwing her in the end.
She grit her teeth, frustrated that all this pointless revelation had done nothing to explain her current residence in this sylvan glen surrounded by the sickening morning.