All I knew was this one true thing: we are each of us meant for personal destinies. Mine was being made possible by the sacrifice of another. Courage to race up the path toward whatever the Cave of Revelations held for me was given to me in the hard acceptance I saw in Max to perform a duty for the woman he loved.

I reached the cave out of breath, out of my mind, out of my body. I concentrated on the urgency of Max's orders. I must go to the cave. There he would come for me.

No one was around. No other tourists. No other pilgrims. It was cool inside the entrance. There were signs, in Greek, Italian, English, Turkish. I did not read one of them. I went on, plodding now, no longer able or willing to run headlong to the future.

It was as if I was so close to learning what this cave meant to me that the importance of it combined with the traumatic encounter on the trail seemed to draw me up short. It was as if someone wanted me to feel the weight of this moment, to understand that what was about to happen was more critical than the route I'd taken to get there.

This last bit of the way, I did carefully in that I watched my feet move. Down a rocky entrance until the tightness of the passage suddenly gave way to a rounded, open area with a few pews. A monk stood near a gate in the floor-to-ceiling railing. Beyond the gate, I saw a narrow fissure in the rock.

"My God. My God," I whispered. My hands trembled. I reached toward the fissure. All concerns fled; I felt captured in the rapture of awe. "So blue."

The monk turned full on to face me. His habit was covered by a long, hooded cloak. The hood over his head threw his face in deep shadow. "You see it as blue?" he asked me softly.

I turned from the fissure's beauty and looked at him. I could not see his face, but I saw a glow around him that radiated warmth and interest.

"It's the most beautiful blue I've seen," I said.

He unlocked the gate and told me I could approach the fissure as I saw the need. Just inside the gate, I stopped. The blue leaked from the fissure as if it were alive. But any closer and it would be too bright, too strong.

The physical exertion of running for my life up the path seemed to sweep over me. For this fleeting moment, my mind struggled to not be consumed by what was happening in the cave. I remembered my fear for Max's life. I hesitated, wondering if I should disobey Max and go back to help him... or perhaps send the monk... and then a vision...

From other eyes, I was seeing the scene I'd left behind me upon that path.

Big, massive hands held a sword at the ready... they were my hands clenched upon the sword's hilt. I shared the vision of eyes that tracked two would-be assassins, circling me, intent on getting past me to reach Eris.

I was Max within a fateful moment.

'At last, I do my duty.' I heard Max's inner voice as if it were mine, inside my own mind. I heard his thoughts. 'You could not keep Caesar safe, you were too late for your wife, your son... You must redeem past failures to those you loved...You cannot fail this time. What you do now reflects on both your lives. Protect her. Do... not... fail."

The sword was lighter than I was used to but it proved an easy adjustment on the first two men I had already dispatched. I wielded it with more precision, more force. It did not cleave into bone quite so far, but its path was as deadly when the might of my force was behind the swing. I told myself to remember in the speed of what will come to not let the difference affect my balance.

The men circled me. I was calm. I was focused then only on one thing: their swift, efficient annihilation. I held the sword perpendicular from my body and pivoted on my feet to stay with them as they circled me, one on either side, slowly advancing toward me. One feinted, the other would charge when my attention would be diverted.

The one who charged was not expecting to face the full brunt of my own charge. I roared as I hacked into his shoulder. His eyes widened as the shock of what happened to him became apparent. He fell at my feet.

Instantly, I was turning, whirling, ready, charging. My sword was now in one hand, the other arm keeping me balanced.

My lone attacker was a fearless, if foolish boy. I took no joy in what I had to do. I cleaved cleanly through his neck without a second thought when I saw the opportunity was there for the killing blow.

Expectantly, I clutched the weapon and maintained my crouching stance, ready for other men to descend upon me. When none appeared and the only sounds were the dying, I surveyed the battlefield and made decisions on what I would do next.

I paused to give silent thanks to my Gods for their help in my success. I pledged again to not fail them in guarding Eris.

With a rush, I left the path and the destruction there. And as I did, I came into my own body again and left Max behind. The force of this episode exploded within me. I sunk to my knees and then slowly to my haunches.

And my experience was only beginning. At the first touch of my hands to the rocky floor of the cave, a steamy mist of blue from the fissure seemed to surround me and hold me. My head swam in lightness and all that I had feared disappeared. I felt the coolness of the rock emanate into my hands. It swept up my arms and quickly through my body. I felt ... this truth, how it seems difficult to convey ... but I felt connected to the earth in a way I never considered as something humans did.

"Tell me, Goddess." I heard my voice say words I had no memory of knowing to utter. "Your child, your emissary, your bequest. Give me that which you would have me know."

The visions that surrounded me were gifts from the earth. In all of history, there are magical places upon this globe in which humans have historically found the rift between the life of the earth and the sheltered existence of man. These sacred places, these sanctuaries of revelations ... they wait for the rare human who has both the ability and the will to come join in the search to find out what the earth knows is happening as the ignored partner in the broader scope of life on our planet.

In one moment's breath, I gained the connection with a life force I had never fully considered but always respected. The earth. Nature. Life that we humans take for granted. Trees, rocks, mountains, streams, storms, current, flowers, dirt ... there only to sustain humans? A symbiotic relationship among species? A wiser, older life force observing how humans used the resources it gave? An innate knowledge that our lives could be affected if we opened to what the earth understood and accepted while we ignored the connection our ancestors once worshipped?

Revelations layered around me. There were too many available. I was, beyond all reason, simple-minded in how I chose.

"Help me, Gaia," I said. Gaia. The Earth Goddess. The most ancient goddess. As soon as I said her name, I realized that I had some choice of what she would reveal.

Not for me the grand revelations of Apocalypse and the course of humankind's spiritual reckoning. I was not a saint able to put aside personal interests in order to see to a greater calling.

What I chose to learn was far more personal.

Before me, the stretch of my line. I saw my mother's face for the first time. I knew it was her. Beyond her, other women, all related by blood and all anxious for me. All imparting the same message ... that my crucial destiny was being affected by my lack of understanding of my role. My mother's great misery ... in keeping me safe, she had robbed me of her guiding influence. I had not learned as she'd hoped I would.

Giving me visions confused rather than enlightened, I heard myself say. The women all nodded. And this was why this pilgrimage was necessary, I realized. There was relief on their faces. By the end of the final leg of the pilgrimage, only then would I understand enough to know where to go for the final revelation.

This is the meaning of pilgrimage. To find oneself. To understand one's place on the earth. To serve the greater good by learning to look outward as well as inward. To earn the way to a future peace.

Something stirred inside me. I was not the only one on a pilgrimage.

Max's face swam in the mists. I saw him as a boy. Laughing and racing with other boys. Growing older, awkward inside a body he was adapting to with some degree of trepidation at the unease he felt to not always wish to leave boyhood behind. Now in the bloom of adulthood, a warrior of honor and breathtaking boldness. Older still, now fully adult, a man of duty. His descent to personal, living hell. Understanding that which drove him even now, the allusions I had heard within his mind of having failed those he held most dear. Decisions he made to gain retribution. The dawning revelation that his selfish goal would not be sacrificed even when he learned others believed he was the salvation they deserved. A death of note. A life that mattered. His feelings in that shattered crystal place between this life and the next that, deep down, his guilt mattered more than anything because he expelled his life in pursuit of personal victory over a man who robbed him of everyone he had loved. A choice offered to him to redeem himself, if he truly felt the need. A request made of him that would require him to delay reaching Elysium but would allow him to perform a service that would place him in great favor with the gods.

A blinding flash of a god's interference with Max's destiny. The offer made. The opportunity to perform a service proffered. The nobility of choice. Max had not been seeking salvation or blessing or absolution, but was driven by one pure instinct: his duty to a greater good asked of him by one he considered worthy. The god who asked, knowing this about Max: that Max would serve for the purity of service.

My body shuddered with the understanding of what this meant. And somewhere deep within my heart, I felt shattered. To Max, I was not what I had thought I was... he had undertaken a duty to protect me, nothing more. My fingers slipped along the rock beneath me. The connection began to fade until some ice-cold spark leapt from the rock to my fingers and into my soul.

Stay. One more vision.

The steam around me seemed to lull me almost into a half-sleep. I was aware of the vision but I did not examine it as it came into me. I simply absorbed it as one might in a trance. I did not ask questions, I did not pose objections, I did not wonder. I simply accepted the vision.

Inside it, I learned the route I would take in the remaining pilgrimage. All stretched before me. Three more visions to prepare me. One final revelation would be given to me at the end. The revelation was the one reason I was hunted.

"Eris. Hear my voice. It's safe to awaken now," the monk's warm voice told me.

My eyes opened.

I was lying on my back upon the floor of the cave. I sat up and looked for the monk even as his words echoed in the cave. I was alone.

"Stop this," I said, sure that wherever he was hiding, he could hear me. "Stop this now. I do not want this. I want no part in it."

There was anger within me. So much anger. I wanted to yell. I knew I would not. There was no one there with me.

Footsteps scuffed softly from the passageway, approaching the entrance to the part of the cave in which I was sitting, dazed and scared beneath the anger. I turned to see who was coming, what danger I would now face alone.

It was Max.

I got slowly to my feet as he strode toward me. His hands gripped into my forearms to steady me and he was asking me if I was all right, if I'd been hurt.

"Take your hands from me," I said, in an utter-steel voice that did not sound like me. "I have no further need of your service, Max. You are relieved of this duty and you may return to where you came from."

He swallowed hard. His chin tilted down at me. He blinked rapidly before his mouth opened to say something. But he did not speak just then. Instead, his grip lessened and he rubbed his hands up and down my upper arms until I pulled myself gently away.

"Go. The Gods await you," I told him, my voice softer. My eyes would not leave his. I studied him intently. Even when his eyes dropped to the floor then swept over the fissure and then came back to rest on mine, I watched to see it come into him ... that I knew and that I did not approve.

"When we met, I did not know you were the one I was sent to guard," he said. "I have been here in this world for four years. Four years, Eris. Four years spent preparing for whatever would be required of me to accomplish the task I accepted. I was not given much knowledge. Only this ... that I would need to adapt my skills of war to perform a new duty in a new age. That duty was to ensure the continuation of the line of the Oracle of Delphi. I was not told ..."

He stopped and backed away a few steps. His hands locked behind his back and he struck this pose of confident deference.

"That's not good enough," I told him, knowing he was waiting on me to acknowledge that he had performed his duty. Indeed he had. But it was not good enough ... not when measured against the fact that he was placed in my path, I fell in love with him, and he was never meant for me in that way... and that he had known this. "You and I ... it was never real. I thought it was. I banked my life on it. I loved you, Max. No. I love you. I love you still even knowing that you have kept this from me that this was only a duty to you."

His face darkened. "I was not the only one of the two of us to keep things back from the other. When we met, I... You told me your name was Eris."

"I explained that to you already. And when I did... why did you not tell me who you were? Why did you not reveal to me that the danger I felt was real?"

He shook his head in irritation, waved his hand as if my questions were of no importance. "I was told only one name to search for: Judith. It was my only clue to the identity of the one I was meant to protect from all enemies, all threats. For three years, I tried to understand how I was to find you in a world where thousands and thousands of women are named Judith. Months ago, I began to believe that perhaps I had failed in my mission. Perhaps I had not been intelligent enough to use whatever tools this modern age gave me to search for this woman."

"I don't believe it's possible that we would both... I was sent to Finis Terrae because of a vision from my mother. Against all odds, you approached me upon the trail, Max. Was that your habit? Was that how you searched for this woman? Woman by woman you met upon lonely pilgrimage trails?"

"I knew of Finis Terrae from my youth, Eris. The stature of it as the place where the mystical meets reality... that is what drew me. I hoped to find a way to communicate with the Gods and learn how I had failed, what I could do to be successful in this duty given to me..."

"Why did you speak to me?"

"You were in pain, Eris. I thought to help you. Your feet... remember? But then you turned and looked at me. There was... something, wasn't there? Who can say what attracts a man and a woman, but I felt it. And you were a pleasant companion on the trail. You were searching for meanings of questions you'd not yet asked. I wanted nothing more than to see what would be on your face when you saw Finis Terrae after all those days on the road."

"That night... Max..." My voice broke then. I felt the wall of tears. I did not hold them back. They filtered down my cheek and dropped from my chin to the rock below. "That night...it meant so much to me. So much."

His arms opened to me. "It meant the same to me, Eris. I am not a man who is given to lying. Nor am I a man who takes his pleasure from a woman for any murky reasons. We found each other there. I took you, not out of duty, but out of adoration of the woman who had enchanted me."

My hands touched his chest. Our eyes held each other. "But you've known for days now... When you found my passport, you must have realized or guessed... Surely, when you saw..."

"Your real name? Judith? Yes... Imagine my shock, Eris, to find this name in the passport. I took it from your bag and studied it, of course I did. I had tried to trace Eris Turan from the moment I returned to London. I could not find records of her. I wondered why this woman, so honest with me in sharing her body and heart, would hide her identity. Imagine how it felt to me... to realize that you must be the Judith I was sent for. That you must have known who I was. That you had loved me in another's name and now had come back for nothing but to make me perform my duty to you."

I swallowed hard as I looked in his eyes. He did not lie.

"Oh, Max. That must have hurt you so." And it was this, the understanding of his pain, that propelled me into his arms, to hold him, to comfort him.

"You quickly proved innocent of these assumptions I had made in the wake of finding the passport. One look into your eyes... you are far too honest with me, Eris. As I am with you. I knew at that moment only two things - that this was love between us that would sustain rather than distract us from our destiny and that you were largely unaware of why you had embarked on this journey of yours. I believed my silence of who I was and why I was in this world was the better gift to you. It seemed to me that the Gods wished for you to learn here, upon Patmos, about what duty they had for you and what the road ahead would hold for us. It was not my place to give you this knowledge of your past, your blood, your future, was it? My only duty was to ensure your safety along this journey."

"But what is our love when matched against your only duty?" I whispered into his ear.

His answer was to hold me tightly to his chest. One hand in the small of my back and the other against the back of my head. I hugged in tightly around his waist. We rocked each other in the embrace. And there, within the shelter of him, I told him of the last vision... of the revelation I had received within that vision: that my pilgrimage was only beginning and that at its end, if I was successful, a second revelation was to be given to me at a place I would only learn in the course of our journey. I had not received any assurances within that vision that we would complete the pilgrimage.

A female cleared her throat behind him. We broke apart and found a nun in sharp, black habit standing near the entry to this section of the cave.

"We do not allow visitors access to St. John's actual meditation area," she said sternly, her accent decidedly British. "You should not have broken into the gate. It is a violation of our ..."

"The monk unlocked the gate for me and said I could enter if I wished," I told her.

She frowned hard at me and shook her head. "There are no monks here. Only our order cares for the Cave of Revelations."

"There was a monk. He must have come from the monastery," I said to her. She shook her head; there was no order of brothers at the monastery any longer, only the nuns were there now. I looked at Max. "There was a monk, Max. I swear. He unlocked the gate for me. How else could I have gotten in there?"

He nodded at me and patted a hand on my shoulder before turning a stiff smile on the nun. He said, "Sister, forgive us the trespass. We meant no harm. I assure you that we have done no damage."

She shooed us from the gated area and made a show of inspecting the lock in question. She wanted to be convinced I had not somehow damaged the mechanism. She did not believe in the monk.

"He was there," I said, grating the words out in frustration as Max hesitated at the top of the goat path. "And he meant me no harm. He only wanted to help me see the vision I was meant to see... to gain the first real revelations. Max? You believe me, right?"

He nodded, his mind racing elsewhere. I looked down the path. He took my hand in his and started leading me away, to the trail he'd seen a group of tourists come down a few minutes earlier. "We cannot go back the way we came. We shall take a taxi back to the hostel. Let us not dally, Eris. Much is left to be done."

"Did you kill them? All of them?"

He peered down at me as I reached his side. He gave me no real answer. I tugged on his hand. He nodded, twice, abrupt. There was no pride in the killing for him; only the reality that it was necessary. "I hid the bodies beyond the side of the trail. It may be many days, weeks even, before they will be discovered. But there may be others who may threaten you upon this island. And even if there are not, we cannot afford to stay here even another night. If someone did find them, questions will be asked and the woman at the hostel will remember we headed that way that morning."

"Who were they?"

"I did not stop to ask."

"Max, you also didn't hesitate to kill them. You could have wounded them and let them run away but you chose..."

He gave me an annoyed glare and started marching faster up the trail. His fingers interwove with mine as he pulled me along behind him. He glanced back at me and saw the questions lingering in my eyes. "I did not choose. They chose to attack us on the path. And know this, Eris, as long as they lived, they would have threatened your life."

"How do you know that? Maybe they were thieves who only sought our wallets."

"Eris!" He pulled up short and faced me. His narrowed eyes scanned my face and then he looked around us into heavy shrubs along the path's edges. "Among the ways I prepared for this mission was to study. Do you believe that simply because humans stopped worshipping the Gods that they ceased to exist? Eris, think. There is a reason I was chosen for this task. Who could the Gods have given this duty to in this present age? There was not a warrior alive now who believed in them enough to be trusted to undertake this mission. They may be hidden in this time, but the Gods are immortal. They reached back in time and offered me this duty. I could not say no. I would not have considered it."

"The Gods exist." My mother's legacy was this belief echoed throughout her inner sanctum.

"They still protect those who perform sacred duties."

"Like the Oracle."

He nodded. "They would not abandon her line."

"But someone wishes to see the line of oracles stop with me."

"There must be. There would be no other reason to send you a protector. You have felt the danger to yourself ever since your mother passed into another life.  Besides your name, all I was given was the knowledge that there was a force of men who wished to keep you from your destiny and that my duty was to protect your path until you reached it. I have tried to find out what I can about this enemy but... I was never certain for whom I was searching. But I know they are there. I know it in the same way you knew what you felt for me and never questioned."

"Some things one simply believes," I said.

Belief. The wars and deaths and damnations caused in the name of differing modern beliefs that were all intended to bring humans into a state of divinity.

"Somehow, I feel an affinity with you that I have not experienced since I have awoken to this modern age. You have an old soul. That is meant as a compliment. I hope you take it as such." He glanced at me as he undressed. He was trying to reach out to the unspoken feeling between us that sought to learn if what was between us was gamesmanship of the Gods, or if it was real and true ... and was only between us. I nodded and returned to my packing.

We had not spoken of personal concerns until this moment. Not from when we entered the taxi, not during that long ride, not once we strode into the hostel, not even inside the room as I did as he bid and began packing for us to leave. He was going to change clothes after washing himself, he told me. When he was done, he wanted us to leave and catch the next ferry to our second destination.

That his mind had been worrying over this issue of the connection we felt... for some reason, it was a relief to my numb mind.

"Perhaps the Gods wished for us to meet exactly as we did. Perhaps they knew that if we loved, the bond would steady me if I ever felt doubt," he said softly, his back to me as he began to remove his jeans.

"Perhaps they wanted to grant you a new chance to save the life of the woman you loved. To make right the one failing for which you would not forgive yourself in life."

"Then the risk will be great." He said it as he straightened and began walking to the small bathroom. Without turning to face me, he said, "I shall be the equal to whatever challenge they give me. Do you believe me?"

"With all that I am, yes."

"I told you once ... I will take your all and then some."

A breeze from the window chased through the still room. I watched him enter the bathroom. I saw him lean over to start the water warming from the spigot that fed the showerhead. He pulled the curtain behind him as he entered the stall.

I looked toward the window and saw the curtain flutter. Only it wasn't the linen curtain in the room's window I was seeing. It was the plastic curtain in the bathroom, the one he'd just entered through to take his shower.

I had seen red. A drop of red.

No.

More than a drop.

I stripped and entered the shower behind him. He turned to face me.

"My God! Oh, Max," I whispered to him.

Why had I not seen it before? Was I so in shock that I had only then noticed the stark evidence of what had happened on that path? Streaks of weak red across his jaw just above the line of his beard, splatters of red upon his neck, smears of red across his knuckles.

Death. Up close and ugly. The blood of other men upon Max's skin.

He had hacked or stabbed four men to death not two hours earlier. The evidence was red that had dried along his skin where it had been flung by the force of their loss of their lifeblood or by the travels of the sword he'd used.

I saw the two deaths I'd witnessed play out before my mind's eye.

"I could have lost you," I whispered to him. "It would have killed me. I would not have survived. They would have killed me without a sword. My death would have come because I could not have faced life if I had cost you yours."

"You were in no danger of losing me, Eris. They were ill-prepared to face me."

It was his virility. It was life.

It was my vulnerability. It was how close death had come.

I felt his hand touch and linger on my face. And then his touch turned deeply possessive, intimate in its need to reclaim the reality that we still lived. It might have only been for this moment, but we were still alive. And so he touched me to prove it, to show his mastery. My neck. My breasts. My belly. My hips. I turned at the unspoken request conveyed in his touch. My body and all that I was ... we responded to the purity of his masculinity.

It was all of me and then some.

My own hands touched his fingers as he gripped my breasts from behind. He was totally silent. No words. No sighs. No moans. I reached one hand out to the tile before me. I shifted the other hand to stroke hard down his hip, behind his thigh. I gripped into those muscles and held on just to feel them flex as I bent slightly at the waist and he shifted to take advantage of this position's invitation.

His hands dropped with no pretense to grasp my hips and pull me up onto my toes as he gently thrust his groin in toward mine. My breathing was hard. His own breathing grew labored.

"I need to know there is a life for us after this," I whispered to him as I let my head drop. He rubbed his length between the roundness of my buttocks. "We must survive together."

"While I breathe, my every breath will be for this love... my heart's desire," he whispered back. He reached his hand down to encircle his girth, to stroke it, to move it between my legs. He let just the head of it touch and swim in the wetness that came from my body's reaction ... my own proof that I lived. "Our life together will not be over easily. I will not let it be. We will have a time of peace, Eris. But first, we face a time of battle."

I got the mental image of him, suited for war. I saw the way he sat his horse. The hard glare in his eyes. The void of his expression. The distance he had placed between himself and the past. How he rode not for home, but for his own sense of duty. The grate of his voice urging, leading, believing. The press of his thighs into his horse as he drove for victory, for what he knew was due him. The thunder of the sound. The enormity of the life that he chased into hell and back out again.

Max pulled me back into the present as he pushed himself inside me. His fingers guided his penis into me. He was not ungentle but he was insistent as only a man such as he could be. When he hilted inside me, I gasped at the force of his final thrust. I cried out when he bit into my shoulder as he began to pump into me, slowly, firmly, determined.

He came into me with a whispered entreaty to never go so far into a trance that I would forget to come back to him. He had seen me in the cave. Had seen me clawing at the floor and not responding to him. He knew what I was. He knew what he was witnessing. It had scared him to witness. He had walked away, telling himself I was fulfilling a part of my destiny and that he must see to his duty to protect me while I was so vulnerable in the trance of the vision of revelations. He had returned to find me reeling from where I'd been, what I'd learned. All these lonely years he had waited for me... only to find that I would be more than his duty... our love would be his reward. Duty and love combined.

"You take... my all... and then some," I panted out to him. He held me up as I came, both my hands gripping in behind his thighs, my body locked to him because it had such need. His love for me is stronger than he would have thought he was capable of showing.

I see it all. I feel so much.

There is much I do not know yet. That is the one inescapable truth.

And so it is told. Max and I know this one secret. I am this age's present Oracle. And we know this one further secret: whatever else happens, there is a prophecy I am destined to bring forth that others would kill me to keep me from uttering.

On the ferry away from Patmos, I place my hands over my abdomen and make a vow to live.

Max is watching me. He sees this gesture. I smile at him.

There are secrets and then there are truths. Sometimes, for the best of reasons, they must both be hidden from good people.

We head for Turkey. We flee Greece and what we have left behind on Patmos. We cannot be bound by the laws of this age that would require we make a full accounting of the deaths of nameless enemies who would have killed us both if not for Max.

Ahead of us lies our future. We both respect the danger but we will not flinch from it. I would take Max and run with him to the furthest corner of the earth but there is no safe place for either of us until I make the prophesy that those hunting us will seek to keep unspoken before the modern world.