“Look at me, Lucius! Look at me, Lucius Commodus, Favorite of Rome!” Antinous focused on the very first rising beams of sunlight. “I am the one, the one most loved by Hadrianos Olympios! This is the gift that you could never give him. Look at me, Lucius Commodus! Oh prize of Caesar, and kin to no one! This, this is the gift you will never have! Never to know in your fragile and over-crowded lifetime!!!” Antinous saw the bend of the widening Nile River concealing the vast barges; a span of palm fronds crowding his view in the dim morning light.
“Blessed Mother Nile, embrace your Son… Step out blessed Son, out into the open arms of Death. Come, come… Your Life will be embraced by another, your Spirit to rest eternally with us.”
“It will take all I have to cross that doorway, to enter into this new world- the world I have only seen glimpses of. Many years I have waited to know what my destiny is What is to become of me. Now, here, this place. Beside the quiet flowing banks of the Nile- besides this gentle temple to the gods. Here, where no one can tell me ‘don’t’ or ‘wrong.’ It is my future to give… to love. To have love take this burden out of my hands, and enter… into what is… to be.” Antinous waded out into the very last reservoir next to the mighty Nile, the deepest and the furthest pond, up to his broad chest. “Gods of Eternity, take me to the home of light- to the garden of peace and forgiveness. Take my years and give them to the force of love, for there is no other.”
He then raised the amulet to his open, shivering lips and took the poison in one move, too quick to pause for any doubt. He tossed it across the water that now surrounded him,concealing any history of this moment. “I leave this world to join another. A passageway from pain to… freedom. I am free… No one can take this from me… I am… free.”
He gazed at the rising sun in shock, the dim black liner around his eyes like that of an Egyptian lord running down in horrid streaks of sadness across his face. The flash of golden iron from Amun-Ra being the last to penetrate his irises as those beautiful eyes of sable rolled helplessly back into his head. Reeling in delight as the sensation of flying instantly enveloped him, cascading him forward over rocks and cataracts, flowing madly past ships that rocked in subtle sleep, faster and faster across the oceans of the world, out beyond the unknown realm of man…
But Antinous sank helplessly down, slowly down into the mud. Down to the layer of forgotten pottery and wild grasses of the riverbed. Down to the rocks and gravel and boulders of the deepest, coldest depth. Away from man. Away from man’s hate, away from man’s envy, his deceit. Down under the weight of the rising sun’s warmth to shatter yet another chance for the coming of rain to replenish the Earth. Down below the prisms of reflected light that danced effortlessly upon the calm flowing waters for as far as one could see. Unblemished, undisturbed the water would remain, as if Antinous had never really existed at all.