87. The Forge
The Forge
The next day I asked Styx
to accompany me to Pallas’s forge.
‘What do we need to go there for?’
she complained as we walked out
of her chambers. ‘We have our own
work of making to do.’
I shook my head. ‘He is your consort.
Why don’t we just see what he makes?
Perhaps he creates things like we do.’
She scoffed at this but kept walking.
The beach was bathed in sunlight,
fresh after a morning storm.
From a distance, I saw Pallas
working with dazzling adamantine.
Next to him, tall and broad-shouldered,
was Perses. He raised his hand in greeting
as we approached.
Pallas glanced up from his work
of beating the adamantine into shape.
Around him iridescent objects
gleamed brightly in the sun.
‘What are these?’ Styx asked,
but her tone was of curiosity,
not of any kind of malice.
Pallas looked up at her.
‘Your father brought me diagrams.
He says they came from prophetic
dreams of the Titans. He calls them
divine weapons.’ She reached out
and touched the edge of one,
letting out a harsh hiss when
its sharpness cut through her finger,
golden ichor spilling from it.
Immediately, Pallas was up from his forge
taking her hand in his and examining
the wound. ‘It’ll heal,’ Styx said shortly,
but he was already binding it
with a piece of cloth ripped from his robes.
‘It will not heal quickly,’ I told her.
‘That’s what adamantine does.’
Styx looked around at the weapons.
And I saw a shadow pass across her face.
Pallas was still holding her hand.
Her face cleared to something softer and she said,
‘Thank you.’
I raised an eyebrow and caught Perses’s eye.
He smiled at me and winked.
A warmth came to my cheeks.
Perhaps this was the first of many such
moments between Pallas and Styx.