That night, under the shadow of a waning moon, Donatos slipped from the servants' quarters.
His precious cargo secured in makeshift containers, he navigated the lower paths of Olympus with practiced stealth. The divine palace never truly slept, but it had rhythms—predictable patterns of activity that even the gods themselves rarely noticed.
He had chosen his destination carefully—a secluded bend in the River Eunoia, where the sacred waters curved away from the main flow, creating a small, sheltered grotto. The location was significant; in his previous life, Alexios had discovered this forgotten corner during an assignation with a river nymph. The memory brought a grim smile to his face.
Strange, how knowledge once gained in pursuit of pleasure now served his quest for power.
"Patrol of the minor wind spirits passes in three minutes," he muttered to himself, pressing against ancient marble as a distant light bobbed along the main path. "Then twenty-seven minutes before the night hounds make their rounds."
When the light faded, Donatos sprinted across open ground, his servant's body already showing the limits of its mortal design. His lungs burned after mere moments of exertion—a humiliating reminder of how far he had fallen.
"Not for much longer," he promised himself, ducking into the concealing shadows of silver-barked trees that whispered secrets to one another when immortals weren't listening.
The grotto appeared unchanged by time—crystalline waters reflecting starlight, small glowing fungi illuminating the smooth stones with gentle blue radiance. No random wanderer would stumble upon this place; the path required deliberate knowledge to navigate.
Even most nymphs avoided it, as the confluence of divine energies here sometimes produced... unpredictable results.
Perfect for his purpose.
Donatos laid out his treasures on a cloth stolen from the divine laundry—fabric woven with neutralizing enchantments designed to contain godly residues. Each container was handled with reverent care, the contents more precious than entire mortal kingdoms.
"Divine Spring to provide the foundation," he whispered, carefully measuring a single drop into a crude mortar he'd fashioned from stone chips taken from broken statuary. "The water that grants Zeus control over primal forces."
The liquid glowed with inner lightning, illuminating the grotto with pulsating energy. Even this tiny amount contained power beyond comprehension—the essence that granted immortal stamina, eternal youth, and the ability to breathe the rarefied energy that gods consumed instead of mere air.
Most critically for Donatos, it was known to activate sealed abilities and dormant divine bloodlines.
He stared at the glowing droplet, considering what taking Zeus's particular spring might mean. Divine Springs weren't merely water—they were aspects of the deity they belonged to. Drinking from Zeus's spring might imbue him with some affinity for lightning, some echo of the storm god's power.
"A fair trade for what you took from me," he murmured, before moving to the next ingredient.
"Nectar Lily, the crystallized sorrow of betrayal," he continued, squeezing the hollow reed to extract the golden droplet. "To enhance mortal physique and grant resistance against divine curses."
The nectar hissed as it contacted the Divine Spring water, the two substances circling each other like wary predators before reluctantly merging. This precious substance was typically reserved for demigods before trials or divine rituals—a blessing Donatos could never have requested legitimately in his current position.
"Elysian Blossom, touch of the perfect afterlife," Donatos murmured, crushing the blue petal between his fingers. "To awaken divine heritage too and transcend mortal limitations. With two materials serving the same purpose, I won't fail!"
The petal dissolved into a brilliant azure powder that drifted into the mixture of its own accord, causing the concoction to pulse with rhythms that echoed the music of paradise itself. The Elysian Fields weren't merely a place but a state of being—perfect existence beyond mortal concerns.
This essence would help bridge the gap between his current form and what he once was.
"And finally," he whispered, his voice barely audible even to himself, "the Blood of Atlas, essence of one who bore the weight of worlds upon his shoulders."
The crimson drop fell with dramatic slowness, as though time itself made way for its passage. This was no ordinary ichor, even by divine standards. Atlas had held up the heavens themselves, his physical might unmatched even among Titans. His blood granted colossal strength, superhuman resilience, and an unbreakable body—the perfect complement to Donatos's current fragile form.
When the Titan's blood touched the swirling mixture, a silent explosion of power rippled outward—not in physical force but in potential. The nearby waters of the river receded momentarily, as though even they respected the magnitude of what was being created.
The resulting liquid was unlike anything that should exist outside divine forges—neither solid nor truly liquid, shifting between states of matter with every heartbeat, glowing with inner light that somehow cast no shadows.
It pulsed with a rhythm that seemed to both match and contradict Donatos's mortal heartbeat.
He stared at his creation, doubt briefly crossing his face. "This could kill me instantly," he acknowledged to the silent grotto. "Or worse."
But the alternative—remaining a powerless servant while his enemies lived in blissful ignorance of his return—was more terrible than any death. There was also the matter of his true nature. Donatos was increasingly convinced that his soul remained that of Alexios, son of Aphrodite, but trapped in a mortal shell. This body was merely a vessel, one that needed strengthening to contain his true essence.
With a decisive motion, he lifted the mortar to his lips.
"To vengeance," he toasted silently, and drank.
The effect was immediate and apocalyptic. Divine fire erupted through his system, not merely coursing through his veins but seeming to incinerate them entirely before forcing them to regenerate. His mortal scream died in his throat as his vocal cords didn't merely crystallize but shattered into microscopic fragments that tore through surrounding tissue.
He fell to the ground, no longer master of his own movements. His spine contorted with such violence that vertebrae cracked and reformed in new configurations. Bones liquefied and solidified in rhythmic pulses, each cycle bringing excruciating recalibration. Muscles tore themselves apart fiber by fiber, regenerating with divine patterns encoded in their structure.
The pain transcended anything a mortal body should be able to process—beyond agony, beyond torment, into a realm of suffering that had no name in any language of gods or men. His eyes boiled in their sockets, burst, and reformed with new capacity for perception.
His tongue dissolved and regrew a dozen times, each iteration capable of tasting new spectrums of reality.
Visions crashed through his consciousness like tidal waves of sensory overload—the cosmos as seen from Olympian heights, galaxies swirling like bath water; the weight of the sky pressing down with mountain-crushing force, every molecule a universe of pressure; the infinite sorrow of a goddess betrayed, emotional pain quantified into mathematical precision; the perfect peace of a deserved afterlife, serenity with such intensity it became another form of pain.
His cells died and rebirthed so rapidly that his body briefly existed in multiple states simultaneously—like a living illustration of possibility rather than fixed form. The divine substances fought for dominance within him, each seeking to rewrite his essence according to its nature.
The river waters nearby began to boil and freeze in alternating patches.
Small creatures fled in terror from the vicinity. Plants within a ten-pace radius either withered instantly or burst into unprecedented bloom. Reality itself seemed uncertain how to categorize what was occurring.
Hours passed in this state of unendurable transformation. Had any god been paying attention to this forgotten corner of their realm, they would have witnessed power fluctuations that should have been impossible in a mortal body.
The very fabric of existence strained around Donatos as divinity and mortality waged war within his form.
But the gods, in their arrogance, never looked to the shadows.
Dawn found Donatos half-submerged in the river, his body steaming despite the cool waters. His breathing was so shallow it disturbed not even the surface tension where his lips touched the water.
Slowly, consciousness returned—not the fuzzy awakening of a mortal, but the crystal-clear awareness of something fundamentally changed.
He raised a trembling hand before his face, examining it with new vision.
The flesh appeared unchanged to normal sight, but he could now perceive layers of reality previously invisible to him.
Beneath the surface, divine patterns flowed like luminescent rivers through his veins—not the full godhood he once possessed, but something far beyond mortal.