9. Nyssa
Nyssa
I spent the next week training like my life depended on it — because it just might.
Weapons training, dance training, footwork drills, and every other spare second buried in the palace library researching.
I needed to understand my adversaries, and to do that, I needed to understand their patron god or goddess.
If I had any hope of passing the rest of their trials, I’d need to discern who they were, why they had come to be that way, and how their mind might perceive their place in the realm.
For instance, Ares — primal god of war and violence — was prone to fury and brute strength. His trial would be physical in nature, I was certain of it.
In the day’s remaining hours, I was called to sentence souls on the Isle of Judgement — a mixed batch of lower Olympians and demigods caught between mortality and immortality.
It was never easy, sentencing someone. But it was my duty to ensure they entered an afterlife worthy of the life they had lived, however briefly.
There had been little to no opportunity to speak with Charon. We’d been pulled in different directions by our godly duties. So, when it came time to prepare for the second trial, I found myself full of doubt, anxious about the looming day.
Why was I even doing this?
For a crown? I didn’t need it.
For the good of the realms? I was determined not to destroy them, anyway.
To prove them all wrong? That a daughter of Hades could rise above them all? Absolutely. My father would be thrilled to learn I’d overpowered all of those shiny Olympians.
My arm had healed fully, thanks to divine powers, and a golden-eyed god who had whispered quiet warnings into my mind.
Something dwells within you. While it slumbers, you endure. When it wakes, so, too, will all else.
Cryptic and entirely unhelpful. I pushed his words to the back of my mind and readied myself for the second trial. I had an hour before I needed to be at the Parthenon, and I intended to use every second of it wisely.
The black stone ceiling above me had been carved into constellations, those that adorned the Underworld’s sky. I had been staring at it for hours, unable to sleep, counting each individual star. All one thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-four of them.
My heart had galloped like a herd of Pegasi all night, leaving me exhausted and jittery before the day had even begun.
My fingers clenched the silken sheets — I hated this. Hated the tightness in my chest, the tingles in my extremities. Hated the restlessness clawing beneath my skin, and the way my mind couldn’t focus on a single thought, flitting from one bad scenario to another.
I needed a way to quiet it.
I pressed my fingertips against my temples, massaging gently in the hopes it would ease the tension headache brewing in my mind. The coldness of my fingers helped ground me, and my hands wandered lower almost of their own volition.
The icy tips of my right hand skated down my neck and across my upper chest, gliding back and forth in soothing lines. My left travelled lower, brushing past a peaked nipple and coaxing a sharp gasp from my lips.
Yes. This was what I needed to quell the disquiet.
I palmed my breast through the thin linen of my shift, dragging a solitary finger across the tense muscles of my abdomen — toeing that invisible line between belly and core.
Pinching a nipple between the fingers of my left hand, I let my right delve lower still.
It skated over the sensitive skin of my inner thigh, anticipation building tightly, curling my toes.
A breath hitched in my throat as a finger grazed over that bundle of nerves.
I circled it, teasing, letting my fingers explore, passing through my folds and back again.
Taunting myself. Driving myself ever closer to the euphoria of release.
I slipped my middle finger inside, my palm pressing firmly against that aching bundle. The friction was delicious. It was everything my body had been crying out for, and I could think of nothing else.
I repeated the motion until my hips tilted up, seeking even more.
Just as I pressed down, nearing that sweet crescendo, an image flashed through my mind.
Furies be damned.
A pair of eyes.
Silver eyes.
Like liquid mercury, his irises swirled.
I tried to shove the image away, but it sank deeper, imprinting itself on the backs of my closed eyelids. It felt like he was here, watching me — staring as my pale fingers rubbed circles over that bud, faster and faster — racing towards the edge of that metaphorical cliff.
A whimper escaped my throat. I hated myself for letting him taint my much-needed pleasure — hated him for being there, even if he wasn’t. Not really.
And yet, I didn’t stop. I couldn’t.
I was too far gone.
I leapt over that cliff, tumbling down through waves of exquisite release.
My back arched off the mattress as I cried out into the darkness. My whole body trembled with the force of it, breath coming hard and fast.
A knock at the door froze the blood in my veins.
“Nyssa? You’re going to be late!” Charon called through the thick obsidian door.
“Fuck,” I breathed, rolling off the mattress onto wobbly legs.
“Coming!” I yelled back.
“Sounds like you just did,” he replied, amusement threading through his tone.
“Oh, you’re one to talk!”
His laughter echoed down the stairwell as he retreated. I rushed around, hastily pulling on my leathers, and throwing my hair up into a tangled braid.
My shadows formed a doorway in midair, leading directly to the Parthenon and whatever awaited me in today’s task. I took a second to compose myself, reaching inward toward that cold darkness where my mask of indifference lived.
With a deep breath, I strode through the portal — into the unknown of the second trial.
Unsurprisingly, I was the last to arrive.
But at least my mind was finally at peace.
Hermes expelled a deep sigh, his toes tapping impatiently against the pristine marble.
“What a pity. I had hoped we’d be a champion down,” he sneered.
I lifted my chin, refusing to rise to his jab, already noting one absence.
“It appears we already are,” I said, lifting a brow and waiting for the explanation which I assume had already been handed out among the Olympians.
Hermes pursed his lips, unwilling to answer. Instead, the clarification came from my left.
“Hera has been eliminated. She failed to navigate Apollo’s desert,” Caelus’ deep, thunderous voice spoke with no inflection, betraying nothing about his feelings on the matter.
As my gaze clashed with his, a blush rose to my cheeks — my thoughts dragged backwards to just minutes ago, alone in my bed.
No sooner had I thought it than his nostrils flared. His silvery eyes widened a fraction as he inhaled deeply, scenting my tangled arousal and guilt.
Fuck.
I broke the connection, forcing my attention instead on Hermes, and Demeter, who now stood at the centre of the room beside him.
“Today’s trial will be one of wit and fortitude in equal measure,” Demeter began. “You will find yourselves in an orchard of my — admittedly unintentional — creation: the Bone Field.”
That sounds foreboding.
As if she’d heard the thought, the goddess of agriculture’s gaze flicked to mine. Her golden brows pinched ever so slightly in the middle, forming a crease on her otherwise flawless face. I wondered how many of her features were echoed in my mother’s, and how many now echoed in mine.
“When my daughter’s thread was severed,” Demeter said, glancing at Caelus, “the grief I felt was so severe it almost killed me, and those under my care. Mortal crops were failing, their livestock dying, and entire lands froze in a perpetual winter.” She drew a deep breath.
“But still, they prayed. Their pleas were anguished and desperate. They begged me to restore their seasons before all perished.”
She turned to the open balcony, staring out at the rose-coloured skies, lost in a thirty-year-old memory.
“It was when their children began dying that I realised my pain could last no longer. I was causing those mothers to feel the exact grief that was destroying me. And yet… how was I to simply stop feeling such intense sorrow? The byproduct of having loved someone so much. How? Persephone was lodged so fiercely in my aching heart that I nudged the hands of death itself after losing her.”
She turned back to face her silent audience. Her gaze paused on me once more, acknowledging the empty space we both felt. The hollowness that the goddess of spring had left behind.
“My daughter was embedded so deeply into my heart that I could not remove her, or the pain of losing her, without removing the organ itself. So that is exactly what I did.”
Gasps rang out around the atrium — this was not common knowledge. Demeter’s grief was a tale that had remained untold, until this very moment.
“I walked all the way across Olympus barefoot,” she continued, “my feet torn open, leaving gold-soaked prints wherever I stepped. I walked until the fields met the sea, and while gazing at the calm blue waters, I carved my heart right out of my chest.
In the centre of a barren field, I dug a deep hole with my bare hands and buried the still-beating organ.”
Horror flooded my system. I had never heard of a god enduring such agony, much less inflicting it upon themselves.
“Another heart grew back, of course — one without Persephone’s name etched into it.
And where I buried the first, a tree sprang up overnight, growing taller by the hour.
As though my heart had been a seed, waiting to be planted.
Your task today: locate the Tree of Threnos, deep in the heart of the Bone Field.
pluck a fruit from its limbs and eat it. ”
“Is that all? Seems easy enough,” a champion scoffed from the corner — Leander, I thought.
Demeter snapped her head towards the offender, her hazel eyes narrowing. “May the Fates bless you so that you can never understand the pain I endured.”