Those are the words of Giorgos Kalomoiris. He was describing how fighting a wildfire in Greece this summer felt like fighting the Hydra, a famous snake monster with many heads. “Cut off one, two more appear in its place,” the saying goes.

On the Greek island of Evia, spelled most often as Euboea but pronounced the same, (The “b” is spoken as a “v”), the fires were vicious.

Wildfires wiped out most of the forest. It burned people out of homes and old, prosperous businesses. One firefighter helped save the homes of others even as his own home was destroyed by the conflagration.

As I played Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, frustrated to near death and restarting several times as a masochistic love of it turned to bitter obsession, I did not know that these horrors were playing out in today’s Greek world. In the historical fiction game, the players will travel the ancient Aegean Sea in an attempt to find and save the character’s family, the fictional daughter and grandchildren of Leonidas I of Sparta.

At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE, the main character is a mercenary living on “Kephallonia” a mostly neutral, small island west of Ellis and Arkadia. To find who pulled apart their family when they were a child, the character, called a misthios, must find and kill every member of the cult known as Kosmos, which existed long before Leonidas and the famous Battle of The 300.

In creating the game, Ubisoft of Canada recreated the Ancient Greek world with breathtaking detail as far as known and mythological historic sites. Some are based on real features of the land, some on descriptions of the world’s oldest pure historians.

The player encounters real people from history including Socrates, Cleon, Pericles, Alkibiates, Hipocrates, Aspasia, Herodotus and more. Laboriously moving by sea, horseback and foot between the city-states, wild huntresses, Cultists, bandits and of course, Spartans and the Delian league (Athenians) along with pirates and other mercenaries, all represent constant threats, along with fierce animals.

I couldn’t help but get a curiosity about the Ancient Greek world, its history, its people. The creators of the game did some good work, but the game is the most tasking I’ve ever played. Some find it easy. I doubt their sincerity. If you should make it to Thera and figure out the puzzle to open the doors to Atlantis, you find out that, impossibly, Pythagoras is your real father and he’s still alive.

He tasks you with beating, in single combat, four creatures: The Minotaur, The Medusa, the Cyclops and the Sphinx. All can readily kill your character. But you have to kill them in epic boss fights and collect artifacts from inside their dead bodies, then take them back to Pythagoras. Then begins a truly sadistic journey through Elysium and Hades before you can finally enter the city of Atlantis.

Of course by 431, Hercules (Heracles), Perseus and Jason are long gone, but their stories live on. In Hades, there’s a boss fight with Hercules, and I wasn’t about to go in his cave after him. I used ghost arrows to shoot him through the rock walls. It takes a long time that way. But as his health diminishes he shouts an insult at his unseen foe: “You fight like an Argonaut!”

That’s hilarious since Hercules was an Argonaut.

The Ancient Greek world still fascinates us. The epic poem keeps the romantic and the terrifying alike alive to this day.

But I have to wonder. What would Socrates or Pericles think if they could see their people now? The lands scorched, trees burned to charcoal, animals gone or rapidly going extinct. Would the wars, the plague of 430 seem so terrible now, compared to what they would see, and then see what must follow?

To have a Greek firefighter compare a wildfire to the Hydra and pronounce that it would have overcome the great Hercules himself is not, to me, a use of hyperbole.

It’s just sad.

In the United States, the wildfires get names now, like hurricanes. This summer, 14 percent of the giant sequoia trees were incinerated. Homes in wildfire-prone areas are steadily rising in value, while HUD sells homes in flood-prone areas to the poor, knowing full well that the homes cannot survive.

In New York, flooding in the Holland Tunnel and subways, thought to be a freak during Superstorm Sandy, told us that it was not a once-in-a-lifetime event. And that it will keep happening.

A study predicts the obvious: people born after 2020 will encounter with terrifying regularity storms and droughts and wildfires that will make the awful summer of 2021 look peaceful in comparison. There will be more casualties, infrastructure destroyed, animal extinctions and food shortages than you or I can fathom. And we can already see a bad moon rising.

At the United Nations, Boris What’s-his-name, the UK Prime Minister who is really a bag of dead cats with a kitten in the middle eating its way out posing as a man, made a plea for world governments to take global warming seriously. Boris? That’s extraordinary, old boy!

As food prices rise astonishingly fast, due to global warming and greed, immigration policies which limit farm workers and more, we see also the pattern of extinction in wildlife, both plant and animal. What’s really bad is that rarely seen species are counted extinct, removing them from endangered status, which means everyone gives up on them. As animals no longer protected, they’ll certainly die. Yet history has shown us that we can help if we just don’t give up. The Perigrine falcon, bald eagle and some sea fowl have been brought back from endangered lists. We can do great things when we don’t give up.

And when dickhead politicians on the take crawl into their holes and let good people do what’s right.

China has made policy to stop construction of coal burning power plants. But we in the west do nothing.

Folks, we are all in great peril. There is no denying it, and those who try to should be seen as they are, greedy, delusional or ignorant.

I honestly care about how this world and everyone on it will continue after I’m gone. History is already chock-full of horror; yet we are writing an even more terrifying one, and we have no right to do so. Global warming is, according to health officials, the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. Future generations will live in a dystopia no movie can depict. Crime, disease, famine and war will accompany weather disasters like rising water levels, supercanes, thunderstorms from nightmares, fires and more, and I’m telling you that for all the ridicule she has endured, Greta Thunberg is right: it’s a world dying that we are killing, and whether or not you believe in an end of days prophecy, it’s already coming.

God damn it, stop this!

***

On Evia, people who lived in peace with nature are now in total despair. Can’t we sympathize, are we that hard-hearted, that selfish, that it means nothing to us?

In Rome, an unlikely scenario plays out. Wild boar (which root for trash but can get deadly, are ill-tempered and carry things best not mentioned) proliferate. They’re everywhere, prompting a common declaration: “We’ve been invaded.”

Wasn’t there something about the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse being given the power to kill with disease, war, and the wild beasts of the Earth?

Animals are responding to wildfires, deforestation and global warming.

Ask yourself if you really want to see that get worse. For that passage to come true.

Ask. Think. But be quick; we’re almost out of time.