I am coming upon Elysium. It is just over the hill we climb. We have fought the ocean and her efforts to keep us from it and lost much of the expedition, but the fields of the gods are just over the ridge before me. We are here.

  The captain Ellis walks ahead, and never a finer man have I known. With each sailor the seas claimed he held strong and shed no tears. He kept us going.

  Not that he was disrespectful, mind. He always tossed a penny overboard for the ferryman or if the man had died on deck pushed a coin down his throat. It was never more than an interruption for the captain. Our cause has paid many more lives on land to much crueller fates and now another man was dead and the captain was down another sailor or soldier; how would it hurt the effort and what would it now take to reach Elysium?

  I see the captain grab a handful of small brush and pull himself up a steep rise. Everything is so green here. We are just left the ships and the sun isn’t risen long so my legs are soaking with morning dew and all the grasses and plants glisten in the low morning light.

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  Truly this is where the gods shaped the world and nurtured the first men. Where else in the world is so fruitful?

  I know there is no other place. In our flight from persecution and in our travels for provisioning and planning this expedition we have been everywhere.

  The brush pricks my hand when I grab it to climb the same rise of earth the captain Ellis did. I look up for him and I see him atop the ridge. Almost there.

  Almost to Elysium. Elysium! The treasures of the gods are in our grasp.

  “Cap’n…” I hear, and gasps and shrieks and laughing above. There will be some awful amount of drink taken this evening.

  A hand appears. I take it and brace my legs. I look into Gemin’s strong face and he says, “No good. No good, son.”

  I smile at him. He’s bad at jokes and of few words when sober.

  “Cheer up, old Gemin,” I say as I pull myself up, “At last…”

  I’m on the ridge.

  Elysium is destroyed.