Luck is not a Gift - It's an Owed Debt

(This story contains the topic of death and greed)

He was a man of many words, but even as he died. There was nothing to say, for he knew he was wrong about everything. Yet, what led to this, was not due to the harsh cruelty of the world, it was his own fault. His mistakes, and it had to have started somewhere. 

So we retell the story of the man who dared to challenge fate, an unfortunate tale, truly.

Callus Aetos, an adventurer at the age of twenty-seven, set off on a journey to find the Oracle at Delphi. He wished to know the future of his family, and was fully determined to change it had it been seen to be ‘evil’ or just simply not what he wanted. He wanted to overpower the king, Archidamus II. He sought to make his family all-powerful, to obtain everything a man could ever want.

Yet, when he arrived and was told his prophecy, he realized that nothing was as he wanted. The priestess of Delphi, the Pythia, told him of sorrow and death, unfulfilled goals and failure beyond the possibility of redemption. She told him that his greed would overpower his good deeds, that he would be damned for eternity. Callus had no desire to listen to such tales.

He was enraged to hear this, he believed that he deserved everything the world had to offer, even its fortune. As he thought this, he began thinking of every way he could shape his future to his desire. He had one thought, Tyche. The goddess of luck, fortune, and prosperity should surely help him fulfill his wishes. So he called upon the goddess at her temple, praying for her aid.

She appeared to him on the third day, the third time he wished she would help. A woman wearing a mural crown appeared before him, looking upon him in interest.

“What have you to offer for my assistance, mortal?” She spoke.

“Hear me, O' great goddess, Tyche, mistress of fortune!” Callus pleaded. “Offer me your aid and good luck. My fate has been told to come to a painful end, I only wish to live in prosperity with my wife. So please, hear my plea and grant me this one request. Oh if only I could correct my fate, then I would be pleased! I would create temples in your honor!”

The goddess listened to Callus, moved by his devotion, she granted him grace from his fate, allowing him to live despite what was foretold. He and his wife lived in fortune for years after this deal, Callus followed through on his offer, creating temples and statues in the goddesses name. That should have been the end of it. However, he began to become greedy, obsessed with his own prosperity, believing that he could ask whatever he wanted of the goddess and inevitably be rewarded by her grace.

She should have said no, she should have struck him down when she first got the chance, but she did not want to lose her most devoted follower. So he took it for granted. He began asking more and more of the goddess, things like the fortune of becoming nobility, asking for more time in life after his wife had died of illness, requesting more and more of what Tyche had already granted him. It wasn’t very long until Tyche had deemed his requests extraneous.

“O' lady of fortune, Tyche! Hear my prayers and answer,” he started as he normally would, calling upon the goddess.

“What do you desire now, Callus?” Tyche answered from the heavens to him. “You have surely asked for everything, have you not?”

He grinned subtly. “Only one last request, my lady. That will be all I ask of you, is one last request.”

“What shall it be?”

“I would wish for immortality, my goddess.” He said, as if he were simply asking for food from a merchant. “I want to sit with the gods at their divine feasts and live as an immortal. For me to live forever in peace alongside those I look to.” 

“You ask for too much, Callus.” Tyche said with displeasure. “You have grown so greedy that you look at my cornucopia and see only a trough to feed from. I cannot grant you this.”

To many, this would be understandable, but to Callus, he felt that the goddess was insulting him. He began demanding Tyche to grant his request, threatening to destroy her temples and statues he had created in the honor of the goddess if she did not allow him to leave mortality behind.

“I will destroy your temples, you will grant my wish.” He dictated. “You cannot turn down your most loyal follower! You shall make me immortal!”

So of course, Tyche got upset. “You stand before the goddess of the turning wheel and demand to stand still forever. You ask for the nectar of gods, yet you offer nothing but the dust of your own laziness. You have the audacity to beg for eternity, not to achieve greatness, but to shelter your own cowardice. You are nothing but a hollow urn—a bottomless void that consumes my favor without ever filling up. You want immortality? I will grant you a different kind of eternity. I am taking my hand off your rudder. I am stepping away from your sails. I leave you now to my sister, Nemesis. Her ledger is long, her scales are heavy, and her shadow will outlive you.”

The air, once filled with the warm, golden scent of Tyche’s abundance, turns instantly, violently cold. The smell of ozone, dry earth, and crushed ash replaces the fragrance of wealth.

From the deep shadow left by Tyche's departure, Nemesis manifests.

She does not arrive with a flash of light, but with a terrifying, heavy stillness. She is tall, draped in dark, unreflective chiton fabric that seems to swallow the ambient light around her. Her face is a mask of perfect, severe symmetry—beautiful, but entirely devoid of human mercy. Her eyes do not burn with anger; instead, they have the cold, unchanging clarity of a mirror.

In her left hand, she holds a pair of massive, bronze scales. The chains clink together with a dull, metallic ring that vibrates directly in his chest. In her right hand, she loosely grips an ancient ash-wood whip, its leather thongs tipped with bronze hooks that scrape softly against the stone floor. Coiled around her left arm, a pale viper tastes the freezing air, its eyes fixed entirely on him.

As she takes her first step forward, the sheer weight of her presence forces the air from his lungs. The fine, silken robes he wears—once a proud symbol of the nobility Tyche had handed to him—suddenly feel like a shroud of lead, pressing him down.

The boastful posture of Callus Aetos shatters instantly.

The defiance drains from his face, leaving his skin a sickly, ash-grey color. His lungs seize up, refusing to draw in the freezing air that now fills the room.

When he tries to speak, his vocal cords tighten into a knot; the demands he once shouted die in his throat as a pathetic, wet gasp.

A violent, involuntary shudder ripples through his spine. His knees buckle under the crushing gravity of her gaze. They slam hard into the stone floor, the sudden impact sending a jolt of pain up his legs that he barely even registers through his terror.

His hands fly up to his throat as if he is choking on the very air. The heavy signet ring on his finger—the mark of the noble house Tyche had built for him from nothing—slips from his trembling hand. It clatters loudly against the floor, rolling away until it bumps against the hem of Nemesis's dark robes.

He tries to look up, to meet her eyes with the remnants of his unearned pride, but the sheer, blinding weight of her cosmic authority forces his head down. Sweat breaks out across his forehead, freezing instantly against his skin. Stranded in the shadow of the goddess of retribution, his heart hammers against his ribs like a trapped bird, terrified of the absolute silence that has swallowed him.

Nemesis looks down at the signet ring resting against her hem, then steps over it as if it were nothing but a broken shell. She stops inches from the kneeling man. The bronze scales in her left hand tilt slightly, the heavy chains groaning as the side representing his sins drops with a definitive, metallic thud.

“You asked my sister for immortality, Callus Aetos. You were born a nobody, yet she lifted you from the dirt and handed you the title of a noble. You did nothing to earn the blood in your crest, yet you dared to beg for eternity. You wished to freeze your lifespan so you could gorge yourself on her unearned grace forever.”

Nemesis raised her right hand, letting the bronze-tipped thongs of the ash-wood whip trail across his trembling shoulder. The cold metal bites through his fine silks like ice.

“A mortal who demands the life of a god without the soul of a hero commits the ultimate theft. You wish to be eternal? The gods do not suffer parasites in their heavens. The balance of this world demands that what is given without effort must be torn away with interest.”

She raised the ash-wood whip high, and the air around it crackled with dark, suffocating energy. The pale viper on her arm hisses, its fangs dripping with a chilling, grey mist.

“Your title will be forgotten before the sun sets. Your estate will be swallowed by the earth.”

She brought the whip down. The blow drew no blood; instead, a shocking, absolute frost erupted where the metal struck his chest. The cold rushed through his veins, turning his blood to ice in a single, agonizing heartbeat.

Nemesis’s voice was barely above a whisper. “The wheel turns, and the debt is paid.”

Callus's eyes wide in a final, frozen stare of terror as the life left his body. His chest grew still, and he collapsed onto the stone floor, nothing more than a breathless, frozen corpse at the feet of retribution.

And so, the tale of Callus Aetos became a whisper carried by the bitter winter winds, a fable told to children when their eyes grew too large with envy and their hands too idle with laziness. The grand estate that Tyche’s blind favor had raised from the dirt vanished into the weeds, leaving behind not a single stone to prove a noble house had ever stood there. Travelers passing through the valley would sometimes stumble upon a rusted signet ring buried deep in the mud, never knowing it once belonged to a man who thought himself grand enough to bargain for the stars.

For the gods are not blind to the weight of a man's soul, and luck is a fickle companion that leaves no footprints when it flees. Let it be remembered by those who pray for unearned riches and those who demand the world without lifting a finger to till the soil: fortune may open the door, but it is character that keeps it unlatched. Push your luck too far, demand what you have not earned, and you will surely find that the goddess of chance has stepped aside—leaving you entirely alone in the quiet, merciless shadow of the scales.