Chapter 28 Nyssa #2
“Repeat things, Ekho,” she said with scathing bitterness.
“Because I was foolish. I followed the order of our late King, and the Queen punished me for it.” She took a deep breath, her resolve steadying as no one dared interrupt.
“Zeus ordered me to distract his wife while he was… otherwise occupied… with one of my sisters. And before you ask, it was a different sister each time — thank the Furies he never deigned to visit me. Although it did hurt at first, until they finished and I realised that he was actually just an egomaniacal dickwad with a—”
“Ekho,” Io whispered sharply in warning.
“Ekho,” she repeated, jerking backwards. “Tartarus. Sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s nothing we haven’t said before,” Caelus answered with a grin. “My father… was not the most beloved man. Least of all, perhaps, by me.”
“Me,” Ekho said quietly. “Perhaps I may stake the claim of hating your mother most, then.”
Caelus and I exchanged a brief, amused glance unsure who here might have actually earned that mantle. Likely, him again — she did stab him in the heart, murdering him, after all.
“You’d be surprised,” I murmured ruefully.
“You’d be surprised,” she whispered back before raising her voice to continue her tale. “In any case, Hera came looking for her errant husband one afternoon. And as he had ordered me to distract her with my wit and charm—”
Io coughed.
“—so that he and my sisters could flee without being caught, I was the one she punished for the transgression. I was successful in distracting her for an hour, thanks only to her own vanity.” She paused for a breath — every word had come rushing out in a tumble as though it were a relief to bare this part of her soul to us, free of repetition.
“I asked her how her hair was so shiny and golden, which Aetherian designers she favoured because she always looked so effortlessly beautiful, and she was only too happy to prattle on about herself for the hour.”
I stifled a snort — though Demeter was not so successful.
“Afterwards, though, she realised what happened… what I’d done, and what I’d allowed to transpire. And since I had distracted her with pretty words, she cursed me to repeat the last words spoken to me.
“It was absolute misery — at least at first. I lost someone I cared about a great deal, believing I could only repeat the words he told me.
And for a time, that was true. But then another found me, withering into nothingness in a long-forgotten wood, by the skeleton of a friend and an accursed pool. They saved me.
“I know not who they were, only that they spoke with such kindness, held me — not in contempt but with tenderness, did not question or ridicule my peculiar habit… and they smelled of pine needles and some kind of beast. A deer, perhaps? Cow, maybe… donkey, perchance?”
“Donkey?” someone called with outrage. “Now I know you didn’t just call me an ass.”
Clipped footsteps clacked across the tiles as Pan wormed his way to the front.
“Ass,” Ekho repeated, quickly followed by a huff of amusement that stuttered out just as fast when the satyr finally stood before her, a look of wonderment on his face. “You,” she breathed. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
Pan, dumbstruck, could only nod.
Ekho’s head flicked down as she, presumably, beheld every inch of his fur covered legs and hoofed toes. “Are you not half ass, then?”
Velira snickered, the sound rattling off the stone as smoke curled out from between her swordlength teeth. Io took a dainty step sideways to avoid the worst of the smoke. The tremor in her hands, however, suggested that smoke was the least of her concerns.
Pan crossed his arms and raised a brow. A second later, his lips twitched and he chuckled, joining Vel in shared mirth. “How in Ephemeron you could forget all this” — he gestured downwards, encompassing his whole body — “is beyond me, Lilly Pilly.”
Ekho snorted as the words “Lilly Pilly” tumbled out of her mouth between titters.
“Lilly Pilly?” I dared ask.
“I found her wasting away beside a brush of it,” he explained with a one-shouldered shrug. “And after I’d coaxed her into filling her belly, taking a dip in the nearby river, and claiming a full night’s sleep, she made me hungry.”
“Hungry. What? How?” Ekho probed.
“Hungry,” he answered with a half-smirk, drawing out the last syllable with an ever-deepening voice.
“Just like the little pink berries on the bush where I found you, you looked delicious. Good enough to eat.” The smirk was no longer just a hint of an expression — it was a public notice scrawled across his face.
“Eat?!” she repeated, aghast. “You wouldn’t have… satyrs don’t — eat… people?”
Pan unleashed a raucous laugh, the sound echoing from the mouths of Aros, Erato, Evie and others.
Aphrodite strode forward and placed a gentle palm on the girl’s shoulder. “My darling girl, he does not mean it in that sense of the word.” Then proceeded to whisper into Ekho’s hood.
“Devour my lady garden?!” Ekho screeched, rendering the need for Aphrodite’s whisper completely unnecessary.
She threw back her hood, revealing pale but freckled skin, a mane of strawberry-blonde hair tied back in a loose braid, a set of wide, unblinking blue eyes, and a gaping set of raspberry-red lips.
Io gasped.
Pan stared.
Aphrodite grinned.
“Believe me, if he does it right, it’s rather a fun time.” She winked.
“Oh, I’d do it right,” Pan murmured, the hunger in his eyes visible even from ten feet away. He took two steps forward and Ekho recoiled, clutching at Io’s billowing sleeve.
“Aph.”
Her gaze met mine and she pouted at whatever she saw there. “No fun.”
Pan slumped as though he’d been held aloft by invisible puppet strings with a wily puppeteer controlling his every move.
I eyed my friend, warring with amusement and disapproval. She’d been particularly feisty lately. I wondered if it was war, being surrounded by mortals, or just the realm itself that was unsettling her. I vowed to find the time to ask.
“My apologies, fair maiden.” Pan bowed. “I was not myself.”
“I was not myself,” Ekho paused, frowning. “I am still not myself, it seems.”
Io slowly drew down her own hood, baring a wild, untameable mane of deep brown hair, and icy blue eyes. “We shall find ourselves together, then. I do not know who I am without these gods to serve.”
“Unfortunately, self-discovery will have to wait. You are about to be inundated with visitors of the royal variety,” I said.
“We are at war.” Athena’s voice reverberated around the temple, bouncing off the columns and disappearing into the open air.
“That is why we are here.” She hesitated, selecting her next words carefully.
“During Queen Nyssa’s coronation, certain events transpired — unavoidable events, if the Fates are to be believed.
Kronos was inadvertently freed from his icy prison. ”
The women looked as though they were unsure whether to believe her or not. Kronos was likely little more than a whisper of warning to mortals in this era — the ones who had suffered through his last period of arrogance, long dead.
“Hera has fled Olympus and the consequences of her actions to side with the Titan lord of time.
And unfortunately, the stage they have chosen to set their war on is Ephemeron.
You — each and every mortal in this entire realm — have once again been dragged into the devastation that is a war of the gods.
“In approximately thirty minutes, you shall be overrun by gods and sovereigns alike. Your temple was selected as a safe and neutral location to meet, and thus, they come.”
Athena waved a hand across the horizon, illustrating the host of ships converging on the Isle.
“Ekho, go get the others,” Io breathed. “We’re going to need a large table.”
“We’re going to need a large table,” she repeated, as if committing the task to memory — but now we knew better. She sighed deeply then disappeared down a narrow staircase I’d missed in my initial scan of the temple, hidden behind that monstrosity of a statue.
Minutes later, she returned with four more hooded figures, carrying two halves of a circular table between them.
They planted it on the lawn outside the temple, beneath the shade of a laurel tree.
Once they were satisfied with their handiwork — adamantly refusing the aid of muscular gods — I clicked my fingers and a host of midnight black chairs materialised around its circular surface.
Io blinked up at me, lips parted. They gaped further when an inky butterfly landed on the front of her robes, fluttering its smoky wings before vanishing into thin air.
She smiled softly to herself, running tan fingers over her chest where the insect had sat, right where I could feel a comforting warmth lingering behind my own breastbone.
Turning, I caught the gaze of the man who owned me, body and soul. His dual-coloured irises swirled, not with power, but with something infinitely more — more ferocious, more all-consuming, just more.
Love.
And clear within that gaze was something that he had known, even before I did: that darkness could be beautiful, too.
Perhaps love will make all the difference in this war, I thought. By having something tangible and fierce, we had something worth fighting for — even more than crowns, and courts, and prophecies. He certainly makes me want to live — more than anything else.
I take offense to that, Velira grumbled in response.
I snorted a laugh. And you, of course.
How very noble of you, tacking the dragon on as an afterthought.
Velira, you live in every corner of my mind. You’re hardly an afterthought.
She harrumphed, but it lacked the intensity of actual discontent.
I don’t want the mortals to see you yet, and it is far too late for you to fly off now. That doorway, I said, indicating the shadowgate I’d conjured to her left, opens within the clouds above our heads. Go now and wait for my signal.