Chapter 38
Time Warp
LYRA
“Screw this,” I mutter. “What I need is a higher vantage point.” To see everything that’s going on.
I turn in a circle, scanning above the tops of the trees until I catch sight of a bluff, treeless and green, overlooking where I stand. “There.”
It’s too far to run, even at my faster goddess speed, which means trying to teleport.
I’m not in Tartarus here. I should be able to.
Focusing my gaze and all my will upon that spot, I accept the tingling that gathers at the base of my spine.
Unlike in the abyss, when I tried both times, I easily feel myself blink out of existence and then back in again.
Pleasure rips through my body and draws a lengthy moan from me.
It takes a second to let go of that before I can look around, panting.
I’m not quite at the top. Close enough that I can scramble up the rocks, though.
“At least you got here, Lyra,” I mumble under my breath. “Not bad.”
When I reach the peak, I can’t help the way my hands slide up to cover my mouth, holding in the bile that wants to bubble out of me at the sight that greets my eyes.
The ocean behind me is on fire, waves and monsters crashing into each other with roars of fury and pain.
But it’s the land all around me—decimated to black beyond a few small green patches like where I arrived and where I stand now—that brings bile to my lips.
Large gashes are ripped into the earth as though monsters exploded out or something huge gouged into it.
I can see the figure of a man lying very still not too far away, at the bottom of my bluff.
Alive, I think. He has to be, because I know him later in his life—Koios.
The aura of northern lights that emanates from him is fainter in the daylight but still visible against the black smoke rising around him.
He’s missing an entire leg.
Is the Koios I know missing a leg? He wears shorts that I don’t think revealed a scar and doesn’t walk with any kind of detectable limp or hitch in his stride, and I wonder if Titans can regrow limbs.
Another body hurtles past me, spraying dirt and rocks when it hits, and I duck and swing around to see the wildly waving arms of a hecatoncheir who is out in the fiery sea.
Bile rises so fast I cough on it.
Because the hundred-handed creature’s face is covered in the same veil I saw over Hestia’s. Impossible to miss at that size, even far away.
Another boom, and I whirl again in time to see Demeter tie up Tethys with vines, just like her daughter, controlling the plants to contain the Titaness. A Demeter whose face is also covered in a veil.
“Oh gods,” I whisper as realization starts out as a spark of doubt but quickly catches fire like the seas. And then those words seem to stick on repeat. “Oh gods. Oh gods. Oh gods.”
Please don’t let this be what I think it might be.
I need to see Zeus.
His face when I saw him before wasn’t veiled. But what about now?
“You should not be here.”
I jerk my gaze up to find Rhea standing before me. She is covered in blood. Hers or someone else’s, I can’t tell which, because the figure-hugging draped dress she wears is gold, and so is ichor—the gods’ and immortals’ blood.
Her eyes widen slightly, then narrow as she takes a closer look at me, her gaze moving from my eyes to my wrists. “Orion,” she murmurs. Then her gaze sharpens. “Are you…Lyra?”
What in the name of the cosmos? “You know me?”
“My son told me of you. He told me to lock you in Phlegethon if I ever saw you.” Her lips form a barely-there smile. “I must say, he described you exactly. You really do have the most extraordinary green eyes. But the stars on your wrist are what give you away.”
Hades spoke to his mother about me? This must be happening after the last time I saw him in Erebos, when he did lock me up down there.
Not that this matters right now. “None of you are fighting back?”
The Titaness’s shoulders fall. “No. We would never hurt our children.”
Shit. I was really hoping for a different answer. One that explained things way better than the off-the-wall explanation my brain is starting to come up with.
“Why are they attacking you?” I ask as I slip my axe back into the sheath on my leg.
She shakes her head. “We don’t know. Someone has convinced them that we are monsters.”
Monsters. Someone convinced them…
A headache stabs through my skull, and I drop my chin to my chest. Because off-the-wall is starting to ring like the truth, and I can’t wrap my head around it. I don’t want to hear it.
“I saw a veil,” I tell her. “Over Hestia’s face. Demeter’s, too. Not of cloth but of light.”
“Mother Gaia.”
I hear her broken whisper and lift my head. She looks like she might be sick. An answering nauseous roll inside my stomach tells me that my wild idea is right. “Have you seen veils?”
“No.” She scans the carnage laid out before us in a terrible tapestry, the violence of battle booming across the skies and rending the earth. “Have you seen others veiled before this?”
I hesitate, only because of the timing, during the Crucible. “On Zeus’ face. Once before. But Phoebe was here just now when I saw Hestia’s. She went oddly rigid and then told me I was coming into my first power.”
I’m not sure what response I expected to that, but it wasn’t for Rhea to start shaking so violently her dress rustles against the ground. “She told you that?” The words come out of her stiff lips in a harsh whisper.
I nod.
“And then what?”
“Then I could suddenly see the veil over Hestia’s face in more detail.”
“We need more proof,” she says under her breath, then lifts her arm like a perch, and a distinctive cry pierces the skies from above. A few seconds later, a hawk swoops in low to land on the leather gauntlet covering Rhea’s outstretched arm, settling to perch there.
Rhea points at a pebble. “That is a mouse. Eat it.”
The hawk looks from her to the rock and then ruffles its feathers, seemingly unimpressed.
Then Rhea waves a hand over its face.
“Holy shit.” The words are out of me before I can stop them, because now the hawk’s eyes are covered in…not a veil, but similar-looking, just over its eyes. Iridescent light.
She points again. “Eat the mouse.”
Without pause, the hawk flies to the ground and gobbles down the rock.
Then she leans over, and it’s almost like she’s peeling the glamour off its eyes—like removing contacts. The hawk coughs up the rock.
After one glance at my face, she doesn’t even ask me what I saw.
In hers, I see a thousand shades of despair.
“Only the god who places it can see the veil, Lyra… I believe you are now the goddess of glamours, with the ability to see them, no matter the source. Probably to manipulate them at some point.”
The goddess of glamours?
Of course the middle of the battle between Titans and gods is when I would manifest my unique power.
And what a ridiculous fucking power.
Glamours. That makes me the goddess of what? Lies? Fake shit? Mental and emotional manipulation?
I want a different power. This one sucks.
It’s also exactly the wild idea I was starting to have on my own.
“Fates be damned,” I mutter.
Rhea lets out a short, sharp breath. “My thoughts precisely. What you’re seeing—the veils over their faces—means someone very powerful must have glamoured our children.”
Hearing it confirmed out loud sends my heart plummeting through the soles of my feet and into the very Underworld itself, where it shrivels in the cold and dark of the in-between spaces.
Because I know what happens next.
What happens to her. To all the Titans.
And if we’re right, if the gods are glamoured, then that happy Titan family moment I saw before—that was real. The lie is everything the gods believed. Everything the world believed. Still believes thousands of years later.
That the Titans are evil incarnate.
That’s the lie.
Oh gods. “Rhea…they don’t know what they’re doing. You can’t stop it—”
Black smoke rises out of the ground, manifesting from nothing, and I know who is coming next.
More smoke swirls around the Queen of the Titans, like two cobras dancing back and forth, winding into each other to form a latticed cage around her.
“Run,” I urge Rhea. “Try to run. Hide. Don’t let them find you.”
Instead of answering, Rhea does something with her hand, waves it, and a tingling rush flows up and over and through me. And I don’t have time to figure out what she just did.
Because he’s here.
While the cage around her remains, the rest of the smoke dissipates, and standing before her is…
Hades.