The Beloved of the God of War

6 - Herald

I saw her as a hazy shape first, as if I had dust in my eyes. I blinked hard and squinted to try to bring her into focus, and her silhouette slowly sharpened with every breath.

She was beautiful, just as all the gods were, and as she sat by the blazing hearth and stoked the fire, I found myself entranced. There was something softly regal about her, like a queen who had stepped down from her throne to sit and watch by the seaside. Her long, flowing tunic-dress - her peplos - was the color of burnt autumn leaves, a dark, muted red. The hooded cloak she wore over that was an even humbler shade of brown, but I could still see the auburn tresses that framed her slender face in soft waves. This had to be Hestia, I thought. She turned her head to smile at me.

But if she was Hestia, then how was she out here on the mountain? Everyone knew that she was bound to the domain of the hearth; she could not step outside it. But again I was reminded that this was not the world I knew anymore. When I glanced up at the sky to check that we were indeed outside under the sun, I found nothing but a domed ceiling with lit torches lining the stonework all around.

I looked down. Under my feet was no longer the rocky path, but a stone floor worked by hands unknown. I didn’t even have to look around to know that we were now inside a grand hall.

“I was walking for hours,” said Ares, and at the sound of his rough voice, my heart jumped into my throat. I sneaked another look at him - only to end up turning my entire body to face him in surprise. He was no longer garbed in just a plain Greek tunic - a chiton - and an equally plain, gray cloak over that. I saw him in his godly Aspect now, well-armored in a burnished yellow cuirass over his torso. A swift inspection revealed greaves over his calves and protective guards over his thighs and forearms. And though he still held my wrist with one gauntleted hand, he now carried a fearsome helmet under his other arm.

“It only takes as long as you want it to. Welcome back, Ares.”

Hestia’s voice reminded me of a kind mother’s, I thought, and a shiver ran down my spine. There was something powerfully domestic about her presence, and somehow, she reminded me of my mother despite the fact that they looked nothing alike.

Ares scoffed at her neutral reply, and with a firm pull, dragged me off toward a set of magnificent, oaken double doors that I could have sworn had not been there a second ago. “Come,” he growled when I tried to resist. I threw a look back at the goddess as if I were hoping she would take pity and help me, but of course that was ridiculous. She was one of the old gods too. She had no reason to help me.

And yet she met my gaze with a sympathetic warmth that took my breath away. She smiled and laid the iron poker in her hand across her lap and straightened her back. “Ares,” she said. “Be cautious.”

If he heard her, he didn’t show it. I stumbled after him, my forearm still trapped in his bruising grasp. He slammed one of the massive doors open as effortlessly as if weighed no more than a curtain and dragged me down a wide corridor until I could see the beginning of a faint light at the end of it.

I felt faint. “Ares, please,” I tried one last time. I didn’t know how he could hear my weak voice, but he must have, because he turned his head to glower down at me. “Please -”

I couldn’t unearth the words I wanted to say. My tongue felt too heavy in my mouth to continue pleading.

“If you don’t know what you’re asking for, then don’t bother,” he said after I fell silent, and then he led me into the hall of the gods.

------

This was the Sanctuary. I knew it instinctively the instant we crossed over the threshold of the enormous stone doors and entered its bounds. Here was where the might of the old gods was most concentrated, the most potent.

The walls and floor were made not of stone or wood, but of some kind of smooth, dark gemstone - nearly black. I could see something dark and hazy swirling underneath my feet like a living shadow underneath the polished, glimmering surface. The torches lining the wall every few feet threw their flickering light over the ground and occasionally illuminated other moving shadows, all gliding like faint ghosts under the floor. I shivered.

Too afraid to watch the moving darkness any longer, I looked back up and took in the sight before me. The ceiling was made of gemstone as well, but this one was a luminous, translucent blueish-white - it almost reminded me of the sky. Every facet and cut of the gorgeous mineral glinted with a living light that seemed to glow from within, and it threw the occasional moving ray of broken, uneven light across the floor below. It reminded me of a fluorescent light shining through an aquarium, glowing and illuminating the dark room it resided in.

And then there was the large, raised dais at the top of the steps that began just a few feet ahead of me. On top of that dais, twelve ornate thrones lined the rear half of the circular hall in a grand semicircle, each diagonally flanked by two large columns on either side. 

All of the thrones were empty, however, save one.

“And what sort of god are you, little one?”

Zeus smiled indulgently at me behind his full beard as he lounged on his throne. It was one of the two largest, both of which were at the exact center of the semicircle arrangement. He was wearing a flowing white chiton, similar in design to the one that Ares had worn under his cloak while in his disguised, mortal Aspect.

I had no doubt that Zeus, too, was in his own mortal disguise for some unknowable reason, even though this was his hall, his home. Though I wouldn’t have been able to explain if it asked, there was something about his homely brown curls that didn’t seem quite right. Neither did his friendly blue-gray eyes. There was a strange interest - maybe even a perverse hunger - in them that made me tremble.

When I didn't respond, he laughed. “Look at you, you’re shaking,” he said. He propped one elbow up on the left arm of his throne and put his head in his hand, observing me with that unpleasant, unnerving curiosity for another moment. “You’re beautiful,” he remarked, and I felt my blood freeze in my veins.

He didn’t seem to notice my reaction. Instead, his gaze flitted over to Ares, who still stood next to me though he was no longer grasping my arm. They stared at each other for a long moment.

And then suddenly, as if responding to some silent signal, Zeus’s eyes were no longer kind and cloyingly sweet. The too-calm blue eyes became a stormy and fierce gray, like a clear sky abruptly darkening ahead of a fast-brewing tempest. He was angry. Furious. Though I was nowhere near him and standing a full twenty feet away, I felt his growing wrath coiling around the room like a heavy blanket of static electricity. I couldn’t breathe.

“Take her back,” he ordered, his voice as hard as granite. All traces of his fatherly disposition had vanished into the ether, replaced by a twisted, livid countenance. “I’ve had enough of your triflings. And when you return, there will be consequences. I’ve kept you at the end of a generous leash for far too long.”

Ares tilted his head, matching his father’s stare with a frigid grace that made me wonder how he could blithely ignore the oppressive pressure that threatened to make my knees buckle. “She hasn’t answered,” he said, his voice equally unyielding. “Aren’t you curious?”

Zeus narrowed his eyes, irritated at his son’s obstinate resistance. But I saw, too, the doubt that Ares’s words sowed in the sudden frown that crept across his face. His gaze slid back, and there was a peculiar suspicion slowly growing in his gray eyes as he looked at me, really looked at me this time.

“You know the Old Law,” Ares told him in the silence. “You’ve asked her to Name herself. And under the eyes of the Oracle” - he pointed up at the massive crystalline ceiling, the metal pieces of his gauntlet clinking together faintly with the movement - “there are no lies.”

My palms were sweating where I had jammed my fists into the pockets of my hoodie. I kept my mouth clamped shut, but the compulsion of the Sanctuary was pulling on my tongue even now. It was futile to resist, because if all that brilliant blue of the ceiling stretching above our heads and the living light inside it really was the Oracle, then I had no hope to cling to anymore. None at all.

Zeus waited, debating between the pleasure of denying his wayward son and of satisfying his own curiosity. I saw it the instant he decided, and my stomach churned.

“Who are you?” he demanded. And then, as if someone had slipped inside my skin and was controlling me from the inside like a hand puppet, the power of the Sanctuary compelled me:

“I am the god of Naming,” I heard myself say. I saw the Oracle shine bright and throw another moving halo across my form. It ghosted over me before sliding away and fading to nothing on the dark gemstone floor.

Zeus’s frown deepened, and he shifted on his throne. “Of Naming,” he repeated dubiously. “What does that mean -”

“I Name the unknown and reveal it. I am the god of the things that do and do not pass, of the changing and of the becoming, then of the unchanging and of the unbecoming; the god of new truths."

I saw Zeus’s eyes widen and witnessed the horror that bloomed behind them, but still the compulsion held me. I couldn’t stop.

“I am the first of the New Gods, the Herald of the End of Days.”