It was another failed attempt, wasn’t it? Some sort of trivial matter. A small thing. A failed attempt. Nevertheless, a stepping stone to his inevitable ascent. He firmly believed it to be true. Firmly believed himself to be destined for greatness. A post of unreachable heights. A space on a pedestal beside the gods. He firmly believed it to be his fate, and he did absolutely everything to do it.

The obsession started out simply enough. A fascination for that simple word: apotheosis. Idiots who had already searched for it beforehand knew it meant the ascention of a being into divine status. Indeed, a status equal to the gods themselves. Or God. He didn’t know how many gods were there, exactly. He just knew that they were all grand, mighty, immortable beings. Or He. He didn’t exactly know, and didn’t exactly care. And soon, he looked up the list of names who imposed upon themselves such a state. Apotheosis. Phillip II of Macedon, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, a handful of Roman emperors. All amazing human beings in their own right.

It was Homer who wrote about the humans in his epics. God-like in form. God-like in stature. And would have been gods, had it not been for the critical reception of the Olympians with regards to these imperfect subjects. It was all curious, really. His name was Achilles. Achilles James Washington. And it seemed to him more of fate than coincidence, really, how it just happened that he was named after some Greek personality who was purportedly turned into a god in one telling of a myth. Or how his last name was the same as the first president of the United States, George Washington, whose face gazed upon the millions who have entered the Capitol Building from the comfort of his ceiling fresco, aptly named the Apotheosis of Washington.

So did Achilles begin to embark on a journey of self-apotheosis. He wasn’t content with actually sitting there on his throne in his palatial estate in an isolated island south of mainland Greece. No. At first, he used his scant influence to charm the easily coerced and the gullible, and demanded sacrifices from them. Lamb, cattle, chicken, goat. Heaps of fruits and red, red wine. And then, as his obsession began to overcome his better judgment, he ordered the sacrifice of small children. Babies. Tender flesh that might appease a god’s - or soon-to-be god’s - bloodlust, that he may shower this small sub-Grecian island with blessings. He was American, of course. But America was too big. Everyone was just too ignorant when it came to gods. Of course, the natives couldn’t argue. They thought they were praising a god. Or a soon-to-be god. It didn’t matter, really.

But then it came to him. Most gods - most men or mortals who went through apotheosis - had to die somehow. Only to be revived by their own… ‘holiness’, so to speak. Which brought him to his current predicament.

Sprawled on the street, bones broken, surrounded by his own thick, crimson blood, a police line surrounding his soon-to-be corpse. Achilles thought (oh, how foolish of him) he would sprout wings, or disappear. At least, his spirit would. It was really the very reason why he stood atop a high building (somewhere in the United States, where he flew the moment he decided he wanted to commit ’suicide’, of a certain degree) and jumped off it. Then his soul would fly to Olympus, or heaven, or wherever exalted beings of divinity went to. But it didn’t. He was shackled to the ground and to the limits of the mortal world, and there he would die.

Would he, then, go to the underworld? Hades? Pluto? Charon? Styx? Lucifer? Cocytus? Beelzebub?

But it didn’t matter, did it?

He lay on the street, blood gushing through his system and out of hit, dripping from his mouth. He was laughing. It was another failed attempt at something. He thought the sacrifices would suffice. He had done it all - blood sacrifices, humans, animals. His own would’ve done well. It was just another failed attempt.

He would just have to get back up on his feet and achieve his divinity.

If only he wasn’t dying at the moment.