The Courier Chronicle
Pagan Gods: humanities best frenemy
an opinion piece
At the one year anniversary of my fathers passing I am still hesitant to speak his name or the company name for which he was employed. Months now my family and I have been hiding among our neighbours and friends under false names and history. What other choice were we given but to run and hide after what occurred in New York that summer day.
I had just graduated high school, excited about the fall wherein I would be interning for the prestigious Minotaur Inc. I had decided to take the summer off a a final goodbye to my youth, as though I had known of the events to come and just how my life and the lives of my family, were about to spiral out of control. It was hot, for a late June afternoon, my friends and I had gone to the local water park to relax in the shade and step into the sprinklers, talking about our plans for the remaining summer. We were blessed to live in an upper middle class neighbourhood in Manhattan; the colonial styled houses giving a 'Pleasant Ville' feel and atmosphere. We felt safe and sheltered.
I stayed out late, later than I had promised my mother and father before I had left; I had lost track of time with my friends and this cute girl I had though about asking out. To Hell if I could remember her name now. After bidding my friends goodbye I set out for my house, looking at my phone for the first time in hours and was mortified to see I had missed nearly a dozen calls, my voicemail box full at three and a countless number of text from my mother and sister demanding to know where I was and to come home immediately.
Minotaur Inc. had long been in the media prior to the New York attack. Well known for their community betterment efforts and long standing actions world wide in charity campaigns for underprivileged and neglected communities as well as sending aid to countries wrought with natural disasters. In New York alone, the had opened countless homeless shelters and free clinics, places that I volunteered in my youth, places that I was proud to be a part of.
The company also had it negatives, like many others companies, wherein they had government contracts for weapons research and manufacturing. I cannot deny that they had a hand in helping the world profit from war, but that can never negate the good they did at home. Part of their research was developing weapons and early warning systems specific to the supernatural predators among us. They utilized their facilities to capture and dissect the monsters that hunter humans to better understand them, to learn their weaknesses and habits and develop a way to safe guard humanity.
My father worked within the Research and Development labs on fifty-first floor of the building within New York. He had been putting extra hours in, excited about a new asset they had received. He had promised to take me on a tour, to show me exactly what they were developing. Had I woken early enough that day I would have been in the office when it had come under attack. My father told me he was proud to know I would be joining his side at Minotaur, that I would be with him to discover the latest and best way to keep our people safe. I wanted to be there with him; our family history had been wrought with encounters with Monsters. My grandfathers journal depicted events from his childhood where a nest of vampires had hunting and stalked his family for years, waiting until they believed they were safe before attacking during the night and dragging a loved out out of their homes to their death.
Pasithea, historically she has been known as 'the muse', a persona within humanity that has always been most welcome. She has represented some of our greatest works from our earliest artists to our most renown scientists and philosophers. In recent decades she had been 'hired' (A term I use loosely here) by some of our most successful companies. Apple, Elon Musk, Disney. Companies that had no right being as successful as they had been. It was this that attracted her to Minotaur. They had reached out to her, asking for her assistance in what would be humanities most necessary task: defense against the Monsters that hunted and killed us.
It wasn't until my grandfather was an adult, and had his first children, that he met another human with a similar history. The pair banded together and sought out the Nest, killing all of them and keeping their families from harm. My grandfather made a point in revealing the Monsters to us, as my father did for me and as I will for my children. Knowledge is power, little one. He used to say to me. Only the ignorant die blissfully, but the educated die knowing they had made a difference.
Arriving home I found my sister on the lawn, distraught and incoherent. My mother was little better, tearing through the house stuffing everything she possibly could into the back of our SUV, screaming at my sister to get up and get in the car.
Father had been killed, murdered. The Minotaur building attacked by Monsters, everyone within was lost. And we were next.
We fled, left everything we knew behind, emptied our bank accounts over a few days and simply disappeared. We assumed new names, new identities and spent every day looking over our shoulders thinking someone might be there lurking, waiting to take us down like they had our father, like our they had our friends.
After months of hiding we settled in a small town, a group of people that called themselves 'hunters' having fled their own homes. It's simply a trailer park in the mid-west of America but it feels like the safest place I have ever been to. I won't reveal where we are, or our names, simply because I know if there are those still hunting us for being associated with Minotaur and their work, it wouldn't be difficult to find us.
Our community had received information from other hunters, leaving their fortified home after it had been 'over run' by werewolves. They'd come from a town called Vitae, that had aligned themselves with the very killers that had taken all those lives within my father office building.
It's peaceful here. Maybe one day we can stop looking over our shoulders.
Purpose
This newspaper document was written shortly after the Minotaur's New York offices were raided and subsequently destroyed. The author, an aspiring 18 year old 'company man', excited at the prospect of following his father's footsteps and working for Minotaur only to have his world collapse at the knowledge that his father had been killed by Hypnos and Thanatos; two pagan gods intent on killing everyone inside the building.
The article was found online and printed in Borseti's paper; showing a different side of the one going 'war' between light and dark, the editor printing it hoped it would show that there are some shades of grey that not all bad people are truly bad and not all good people are truly good.
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