Rage against heaven: chapter 27: After hour

The silence that followed the duel breathed like a living organ, pulsing through pillars re-knitted from slag and bone-white ash. I sat upon the fractured lip of a colonnade that ought to have folded into dust, my calves swinging above the bruised darkness where a floor no longer existed. It would have been a gross untruth, perhaps the most brazen lie of my two lives, if I claimed the spectacle before me was anything short of beautiful. Beauty, in this singular moment, meant scorched marble reborn into alabaster rivers, places once gagging with fire now ribboned with cool obsidian, and plasma lakes settling into mirrored glass.

The scene stirred like a gigantic painting still wet beneath the brush. Hecate served as both painter and paint, every arc of her wrist a decisive stroke, each flick of her fingers a stroke of color so luminous that this world was periodically bathed in light akin to the beginning of the universe.

Here, inside the hollow husk of the underworld we had just reduced to cinders and pieces, she restored it and its impossible horizons to pristine shape. Columns straightened, archways inhaled geometry, and the remaining parts regrew, now mosaics that shimmered with pearlescent glow.

I watched, unwilling to blink, while a trillion sparks, no, brush flecks, danced through the air and settled into stone. Her sorcery did not merely repair. It re-imagined. Fire and destruction, the ones we had uncorked moments earlier hardened into onyx veins that kissed the floor with glossy kisses; scorched rivers twisted back into subterranean channels, murmuring peace where they once howled wild. I took in every detail, legs dangling above that yawning nothing, and allowed the beauty of her craft to bleed into my bones.

When at last the final fleck of power flickered into place, it felt as if the empty underworld made a sound, a sound akin to an instrument returned to tune. Hecate approached, footfalls light, robes fluttering with fading motes of Amethyst. She stopped at my side. Together we gazed out across a realm repaired from mayhem, searching, looking into nothing and everything all at once.

I tilted my head just enough to catch the green in her eyes.

“You had your little magic session,” I said, voice steady as a stone dropped into still water. “Hope you’re satisfied.”

“I truly am,” she replied, mellow thunder under velvet. “I cannot recall how long it has been since I felt so…alive.”

We stood there, goddess and human yet not human allowing silence to settle once more. Then the silence yielded. Sheets of parchment drifted from god knows where, gliding on unseen currents. They sounded like dozens, perhaps hundreds. They moved as though cupped in translucent palms. They spiraled downward like patient doves and came to rest upon my lap. The stack was warm, faintly humming with magic I recognised as hers.

“One of the things you asked of me,” Hecate murmured.

I did not raise a finger. A gentle tug of thought, a little nudge of adaptive material synthesis sent the papers floating upward, aligning at my eye level with surgical precision. They fanned open, twelve pages forming a gentle arc. Photographs and watermarks shimmered beneath lamplike glyphs.

They were identity documents, passports, birth certificates, school enrollment forms, concerning a seven-year-old girl now christened Anatalia Chambers, formerly Anatalia Zerenvikov. A girl that didn’t truly exist, a decoy in plain sight for my daughter, for Thalia. My once-lost, newly gained back hurricane in small shoes.

It had seemed obvious, almost banal, that the safest hiding place from divine eyes would be plain sight. Not Thalia Grace, daughter of Zeus, living memory inside every Olympian ledger, but Anatalia Chambers, child of no myth, citizen of a world so aggressively mundane that no god would bother to sift through its tedium. More than that, father, the word glittered, Thalia had started calling me Dad, and how ridiculous that the label warmed me more than draughts of ichor. I had raised her, not Zeus, not Beryl with her half-meant lullabies. Fate had merely forgotten to notarise the arrangement. Tonight, I corrected in a way the oversight.

At first I had intended to use my own wealth. I was rich after all and my reactor and my future inventions will ensure that I am even more. I had also thought about leaning on the Huntington patriarch’s discreet political reach, to forge the papers yet when facing divinities, enough is often insufficient. That is why I asked Hecate. She controlled, even owned in a sense the Mist, the worldwide phenomenon that both cloaked, affected the perception of human beings and even beings from the mythological world’s perception. When dealing with gods, better to do the most than not enough.

I examined the new photograph: Thalia’s chin still jutted with familiar mischief, her eyes held storms that Zeus could only dream of conjuring, but fine adjustments nudged the gestalt away from the girl the gods remembered. Cheekbones softened, freckles darkened precisely two shades, and then there was the hair. Platinum blond, nearly ivory, echoing my own shade rather than her mother’s copper gold. Thalia had rejected anything too similar to Beryl. “I want to look like you, not her,” she had insisted, lower lip trembling. A harsh verdict for a mother yet it’s not as if it was not deserved. Additionally, it could even be said that it was only right that harshness earns its seat at the table when trust is fractured so young.

Ordinarily, I would have disguised her features with enchanted jewellery, shrouding amnesia within amethyst. That had worked these last days, yet charm work and enchantment could possibly fray when brushed by something unexpected and with Fate literally existing in this world, there was no way I was going to tempt the devil.

More than that, I had an idea in mind to definitely deal with that. If my idea indeed succeeded the way it should, then no glamour would be required. Anatalia Chambers would simply be, forged so cleanly into the world that the memory of it would misremember itself.

Still, reconciliation between Thalia and Beryl was something I knew needed to be attempted one day. Thalia’s anger is ice-tipped with lightning but ice can melt, lightning can ground. One day I will stand between mother and daughter and try to untangle the mess that was their relationship. One day.

“This is acceptable,” I told Hecate, guiding the papers back into perfect order, edges kissing edges as they descended into a neat bundle against my thigh. Only telekinesis touched them; my hands remained folded.

“What about Olympus?” I asked, eyes never leaving the forged seal.

“Like headless chicken,” she said, dry amusement curling her lip. “They will fumble for a fortnight at most, clutching auguries and shouting at each other. Then their attention will drift, as attention inevitably does.”

“Hopefully you are right.”

The longer I ghost along the margins of their paranoia, the more months I can siphon into preparation. Deities due to being apex creatures are a way insouciant and that is only good for me, them not checking under their own bed until the monster, me in this case bites their ankle and I intend to bite hard.

I slid the bundle into my lap then pivoted to the next irritation in my mental ledger. “What about the demesne of the mother of wolves?”

Hecate exhaled; singular runes lit behind her irises. “Always shifting,” she answered, “both in geography and symbolism. Even so, give me one month, worst case, and I will pinpoint it.”

“Excellent.”

I may have been glad that Thalia, my daughter was back but it didn’t mean that i had forgotten that i still had a missing nephew somewhere, stolen by Hera to be literally fucking raised by wolves, literal ones under Lupa’s reign and metaphorical ones within Rome’s martial doctrine. The thought curdles my stomach. They would mold him into a perfect javelin, hurl him at threats until the shaft snaps.

There were no way I was going to let my nephew be brainwashed by the Olympians and Rome, that I was going to let him drink the kool aid and became mister perfect child soldier, Percy Jackson lite but not good enough to be and that would die in the end after losin his girlfriend and finally beginning to live out of the limitations and conditioning instilled in him by The Roman part of the Dokatheon.

I cannot, will not, permit it. First I need his location. After that, Olympus will scream.

I just needed to know where he was. I think that more than that, deep down, I knew that the relationship Thalia had and would have with Beryl would never truly be one of daughter and mother.

I could be wrong. I hope I am but there were after all too many mistakes my sister had made regarding Thalia but the same could not be said with Jason.

Jason should still be a baby and yes, what Thalia and Beryl had was catastrophic to say the least but it didn’t mean that Beryl could not build something with Jason, something true, not wrong, without the grievous errors she made with Thalia.

My gaze drifted across the repaired valley. A stray ember floated up, turned into a firefly, and blinked out.

She spoke first, her voice trailing like candle smoke. “I listened to you.” A pause, almost timid. “I visited my son.”

Alabaster. The name fluttered through my mind, the image of a boy too clever, too bitter for his age. “How did it feel,” I asked without looking at her, “to stand before a child who carries half of you in his blood yet almost none of you in his memory?”

Or in any words, how does it feel to stop being a deadbeat for once?

She turned her gaze toward the horizon, where fault lines of distant magma glowed like embers instead of open wounds. “It was not unpleasant,” she answered, measuring each syllable as if the words might betray her if they rushed. “I watched him breathe. That alone would have been enough.”

“Then why,” I murmured, “did you do nothing for so long?” The silence between us thickened with unasked questions, so I kept speaking before regret could harden into accusation. “You are the goddess of thresholds, mistress of crossroads yet you never chose the simple path any mortal would take. A letter. A gift. A single day beside his bed when fever made him sweat and tremble, thereafter or while he is being chased by monsters. You could have been present in a dozen places while still guiding and taking care and loving him.”

She settled beside me, her robes cascading like poured ink, pooling at the ledge’s edge. “I did watch,” she said. “I watched him flee monsters, stumble through the dark, clutch your hand. I confronted those memories as soon as they drifted into his dreams.” A quiet breath. “I could not bring my wrath upon him when you had already offered him mercy. You healed his father. You lifted a curse that I, for all my craft, would have needed months of rites to banish. I wonder if perhaps fate had chosen a better guardian than I.”

A twinge of anger bit behind my ribs. “Do not wrap your abdication in compliments,” I replied, meeting her eyes at last. They gleamed like antique coins reflecting faint moons. “It’s easy to say you love someone. I don't believe that saying it is enough. I don't think that love is a word. I see it as actions, the littles ones of every minutes, hours, days and the big ones, all combined and please don’t tell me that you being a god, a deity mean you can't love like a human because the myths had showed time and time again that you could understand humanity, that you were in a sense a magnified reflect of our best and our worst.”

She folded her hands. Her fingernails caught stray embers, scattering them into tiny dusks. “Thalia is your first child,” she said, her tone soft yet certain. “You grew among mortals. You carry decades, not millennia, upon your shoulders. Age thins the threads of even sacred promises.”

My jaw tightened. “So you claim time itself will rot the heart? That in a century or a thousand I’ll look upon loss and feel nothing? Is that your prophecy?”

Her chin dipped. “Indeed.”

I laughed, the sound brittle as frost. “Is that the lullaby you sing to yourselves when guilt cracks your immortal skin? That grief fades, that love becomes memory, and memory dust?”

She answered with a patience that felt ancient. “Wait until the homeland of your birth becomes a footnote beneath wiser empires. Until the languages you speak are studied like fossils. Until every mortal face you cherished fades from every monument. We have eternity. Eternity always wins.”

Her words hung heavy, not as a threat but as certainty. I tasted insult, sharp as copper behind my teeth. “Perhaps eternity wins because you wager nothing but leisure,” I said.

“Yeah, maybe, I didn't understand, maybe I am too young but even then, deep down, I knew I would never become like the gods and you, that it would be the case simply because I would not be alone, because I will create a world where the ones I cared about, even those I didn't would see the future and not fear that you had described would happen,” I let the words simmer.

“More than that, in the truly unlucky case i lost  everything, that I lost my daughter, that I lost my sister, that I lost all those I cared about, I would not become like you all because  I don’t want to disappoint Thalia even in the case she would be gone, because more importantly than everything, children don’t ask to come in this world, especially demigods.”

The goddess ran her thumbs over her palms, as if smoothing parchment. She watched invisible motes drift between us.

I lowered my voice. “Bringing a child in my opinion into this world is the most selfish act imaginable. You summon a consciousness into a battlefield of joys and nightmares without its consent. Some do it for legacy, some out of ignorance but once the child arrives, the debt cannot be ignored. Every effort, every sacrifice, must be made to give that life a chance to surpass the horrors laid before it.”

Hecate nodded slowly but said nothing, so I pressed on. “Too often, the debt goes unpaid. Parents grow jealous, indifferent, or frightened by their own creation. Maybe the child is too loud, too slow, too unlike their fantasy. They abandon them, with fists or silence. That cruelty is universal.” My gaze fixed on her. “But gods have means mortals never had. The weakest of you can sculpt landscapes with a thought, yet your children perish like feral pups, chased by nightmares that are your discarded toys. The gods are the masters of this world yet their children die like gutter rats, literally hunted, literally being eaten by a monster straight out of the books of the Grimm brothers. This is why I say you don’t love them because had it been the case, I wouldn’t have had to bury the half-eaten corpse of a child no older than ten, because if it was the case, I would have never saved your son. After all, if it had been the case, Alabaster would have never run from monsters any day of his life.”

I nearly whispered, though I prayed to no one. “All children deserve parents. Too many parents especially gods have never deserved children.”

She flinched, an eyelid’s twitch almost as if she was suffering from a wound and trying to hide the fact that it was the case. When she spoke, her voice was akin to the hush of a cathedral. She spoke softly, in a tone that could be mistaken as kindly “You remind me of Prometheus. Hopefully, your story doesn't suffer the same tragedies as his did.”

“Prometheus,” I repeated, tasting the name like old wine. “Prometheus, huh? Thinking about it, if there is one deity I would accept without doubt to be on my side, that's him. About me reminding you of him, you don’t need to worry.”

I lifted my hand toward the underworld’s amethyst sky, where purple gradients shimmered.

I raised a hand to point at the stars in the purple sky of the empty underworld.

“Prometheus gave humanity fire, an eternal flame stolen from tyrants. I aim to give them something fire can only illuminate, never reach.” My finger traced the glittering horizon.

“He gave them warmth. I will give them and my daughter, the one humanity was in my opinion always born for in my opinion.” The inheritance beyond Olympus.” I let the word spill, bright and unlawful: “The stars.”

Hecate’s lips curved faintly. We sat in silence as the underworld sighed around us. Her shoulders relaxed, as if my declaration had lifted a chain or replaced one weight with another she preferred. She studied the ruins her light had repaired, then turned back to me.

“I truly do love Alabaster,” she said again, quiet as snowmelt. “I love them all, my children, mortal, immortal, living, dead. I do not speak of love as vanity, Alex. I speak it as a curse. To love for eternity is to survive disappointment for eternity and that is madness.”

“Then choose madness,” I said, shrugging. “Better that than apathy disguised as wisdom.”

Her laugh was small, almost childlike, gone as soon as it came. “Small mortal, great ambition.” She eyed my raised hand, still pointing skyward. “Perhaps forever has found a student willing to fail differently.”

We lapsed into stillness. The quiet ached like a song half-remembered, mournful and melodic in my mind.

“Tell me,” I said at last, “why you truly never alerted Olympus about me. You could have done so before confronting me, probably before I even knew something was afoot.”

She exhaled, a hush of confession. “Because I saw my son stand alive between monsters and watched you stride into the fray. Because I saw you healing his father. Shielding the boy. Snarling at creatures that bear the lineage of the night mother, that should have been beyond you. You acted and spoke as if every child deserves safety.” Her voice frayed. “For the first time in a century, I tasted shame. Shame that a mortal exceeded me in a duty I should embody, shame in my personal failing and more importantly, excitement.

I nodded. “Then hold that shame. Let it guide your next choice.”

Her eyes glowed with things I couldn’t see. “And when time turns my shame to dust? Will you remind me again?”

“I will,” I promised. “Even if I have to carve it in stone.”

A faint tremor shook the ledge, a lullaby of settling rock.

She rose. “Then perhaps, Alexander, we will carve together.”

“Perhaps,” I echoed, staying seated.

She stepped away, dissolving into silver. Yet her presence lingered before fading too.

Alone, I breathed deeply. Somewhere, a reborn world whispered. The air tasted raw but ready as if only waiting for seeds and wings. I closed my eyes and pictured Thalia beneath a sky untouched by divine indifference, where no child was hunted for their blood. In that dream, Jason stirred in Beryl’s arms, recognition dawning without fear, his mother holding him learning to parent without regret.

I whispered to the quiet: “I will build it.”

Silence answered like a hymn.