And the face. It was the face of a reptile unlike anything I had seen before: a snout filled with serrated teeth for tearing flesh; eyes set forward in the skull for binocular vision; bony projections just above the eyes; a domed cranium that housed a brain large enough to be fully intelligent.

“Now you begin to realize what we are up against,” Anya said, reading my thoughts.

“The Golden One sent us here to hunt down this thing called Set and destroy him?” I asked. “Alone? Just the two of us? Without weapons?”

“Not the Golden One, Orion. The entire council of the Creators. The whole assemblage of them.”

The ones whom the ancient Greeks had called gods, who lived in their own Olympian world in the distant future of this time.

“The entire assemblage,” I repeated, “That means you agreed to the task.”

“To be with you,” Anya said. “They were going to send you alone, but I insisted that I come with you.”

“I am expendable,” I said.

“Not to me.” And I loved her all the more for it.

“You said this creature called Set—”

“He is not a creature of ours, Orion,” Anya swiftly corrected. “The Creators did not bring him into being, as we did the human race. He comes from another world and he seeks to destroy the Creators.”

“Destroy… even you?”

She smiled at me, and it was if another sun had risen. “Even me, my love.”

“You said he can cause final death, without hope of revival.”

Anya’s smile disappeared. “He and his kind have vast powers. If they can alter the continuum deeply enough to destroy the Creators, then our deaths will be final and irrevocable.”

Many times over the eons I had thought that the release of death would be preferable to the suffering toil of a life spent in pain and danger. But each time the thought of Anya, of this goddess whom I loved and who loved me, made me strive for life. Now we were together at last, but the threat of ultimate oblivion hung over us like a cloud blotting out the sun.