Warriors of Poseidon 06 - Atlantis Betrayed

like me being romantic, you probably won’t like this, either.”
    “Please? But only if you want to.” She couldn’t explain, even to herself, why she wanted to hear it. She only knew that she did. Knew that if this man were capable of swearing an oath of one sort and following through on it, he was also capable of another kind of commitment. The personal kind.
    The kind that suddenly mattered to her a very great deal.
    He shrugged. “If you like. It goes like this: We will wait. And watch. And protect. And serve as first warning on the eve of humanity’s destruction. Then, and only then, Atlantis will rise. For we are the Warriors of Poseidon, and the mark of the Trident we bear serves as witness to our sacred duty to safeguard mankind.”
    A thrumming sense of power rang through the room, resonating in the air and in her bones, under her skin and blood and individual nerve endings.
    “That’s beautiful,” she whispered. Even she, with so little magic, felt the magic in the words. “But you don’t like it?”
    “It’s not the words I don’t care for, it’s their meaning. Why should I care anything about safeguarding mankind?” His face twisted with a rage so intense she flinched away from him. “Humanity murdered my parents.”

Chapter 22
    Christophe leapt out of the bed and called to magic to clothe himself in pants and a shirt as he paced the room, suddenly feeling like a caged animal.
    Like that little boy in the box, so many years ago.
    “What happened?” Fiona sat curled up in the bed, her knees to her chest, classic protective body posture. She was probably afraid of him now.
    He deserved it. He may as well tell her all of it now. Let her see how pathetic he’d been. How humans had destroyed his childhood.
    “We used to walk the land, did I tell you that? Not just the warriors among us but the normal citizens.
    Scholars who wanted to learn about humanity, for example. People like my mother and father. They could travel through the portal and, maintaining anonymity, travel among humans and even live in one Atlantis Betrayed – Warriors of Poseidon 06
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    place for a little while. Studying and learning, gathering anthropologic data about different cultures, much like your own anthropologists who travel to different lands.”
    She nodded. “Of course. If you have all this magic, we must seem fairly uncivilized to you.”
    He laughed. “It’s not just the magic. The magic is maybe the least of it. We had technology and books and treasures beyond all imagining. That’s why humans tried to conquer the Seven Isles in the first place, more than eleven thousand years ago. That’s when we knew we had to escape. Well, that and the cataclysm.”
    “Cataclysm?”
    “The Ragnarok. The Doom of the Gods,” he recounted. “The gods decided to take their petty squabbles to a world-ending level, and it happened to coincide with an attack upon Atlantis. The king and elders at that time decided we needed to remove ourselves from the battlefield before we were destroyed. So we went for a little swim, shall we say.”
    “Okay. Okay. Let me catch up here,” she said, climbing out of bed and pulling on a cerulean silk robe.
    “You realize that Ragnarok is Norse mythology. Atlantis is Greek mythology. Your stories are becoming a little confused.”
    He whirled around to face her. “Do you think the gods care about how humans have classified them?
    Norse, Greek, Roman, whatever? Gods fight each other, fuck each other—and who or whatever they can catch, actually—and play games with human lives like you’re all chess pieces on a giant board. No, not even as important as chess pieces to them. More like bugs underfoot. My ancestors didn’t want Atlantis to suffer the same fate.”
    “But—” She shook her head, more to herself than at him. “No. That’s not important now. Tell me how your parents died.”
    She walked toward him, hands outstretched, but he didn’t want to touch her. Couldn’t bear for her to touch him; not now. Not while he told this story that he’d never told anyone before. She was too pure, too perfect. Too good to hear his story of betrayal, torture, and death.
    Oh, they’d known. The warriors who’d rescued him had certainly known some of it, suspected more. But he had never spoken a word of it in more than three hundred years.
    She touched his arm and looked up at him with those blue, blue eyes. “Please.”
    And he was undone.
    “My parents were