Kendare Blake - Antigoddess

Beneath their feet the skin quickened, tightening like the muscles of a snake before a strike. They were lifted three inches, and Athena cast him a sharp look. He was always impatient, always twitchy. Someday it would get them into trouble they couldn’t get out of.

“You say I am the goddess of battle, and so I am,” Athena said, careful, unlike Hermes, to keep the modernity out of her voice. “But wisdom was also my charge. And I can’t understand this. That is why I come to you. To learn what you know.”

“I know many things with my ears pinned to the dirt. They walk across me and spill their secrets into the sand. But you cannot escape this. You shouldn’t.” Demeter’s voice was low, spoken through tense lips and teeth. Her eye swiveled up and down the length of Athena’s body. “Look at you. Ink marks your skin. You bear a whore’s jewelry in your nose. Why should you escape when my daughter is already gone?”

“Persephone,” Athena whispered. The queen of the underworld and Demeter’s daughter, stolen from the summer lands and dragged below to be the bride of Hades. It made sense that she had died faster than the rest. She was half-dead already, one side of her an ageless, golden-haired maiden, and the other a rotted, sagging corpse. When Athena closed her eyes, she could see Persephone’s demise: the black skin slowly consuming the peach, the blue eye becoming cloudy, then milky, and finally falling into her skull. She swallowed and frowned, unsure whether the vision was true or just the product of her imagination.

“I’m sorry,” Athena whispered. “I was sorry the first time she was taken from you. You know that. I wanted to get her back.”

Demeter sighed, and the skin moved them with an uneven rattle. “What do you want, Athena? Why have you come, dressed like a harlot, asking stupid questions?”

“It’s high noon in the desert,” Hermes snapped, blowing sweat off of his upper lip. “Was she supposed to come wearing a high-collared robe?”

Athena placed a hand on his arm. Demeter’s words didn’t bother her. They didn’t feel insulting so much as grandmotherly, and she regretted not covering her tattoos and taking out her nose ring. It was lucky that the purple streaks in her mahogany hair had mostly grown out.

“If you seek to stop this, then leave me out of it,” Demeter said. “I want to lie here until I tear. I want to rip into leathery ribbons and be carried away by birds.” She laughed another low, papery laugh. “If you want answers, go to the Oracle. She will guide you.”

“The oracle? The oracle at Delphi?” Hermes scoffed. He looked at Athena. “There’s nothing there but a half-ruined temple and mushroom-induced hallucinations. There never has been.”

“She didn’t say anything about Delphi,” Athena muttered. Of course she’d never considered going to the oracle. There was nothing mystical about that temple in Greece. The only thing that had once made it wise was the fact that Apollo had deigned to imbue it with knowledge. But he hadn’t hung around there for centuries. He hadn’t hung around anywhere that she knew of. They had all scattered across the globe, becoming hermits and nomads, and maybe it was that as much as anything that had spelled their doom. They had lost one another. She hadn’t seen any of them, save Hermes, for over a hundred years, unless you counted the dreams and flashes. And now she was looking for them all, scrambling around to save them, when she hadn’t really cared for most of a millennium.

“Please,” she said. “Just tell me what you know.”

“You can’t stop it, Athena,” Demeter said. “I see the feathers blooming under your skin. You’ll be weak. You’ll be too late.”

“But there is a way to stop it.”

“I don’t know. Not without great cost. There are tools that might help.”

“What kind of tools?” Hermes interjected, impatient as usual.

“Those that you have known before,” Demeter said. “Some of them walking are nearly as old as you are. They are threads that were cut, and then rewoven.”

Hermes turned to Athena. “What is she blathering on about?”

“Reincarnation,” Athena said thoughtfully.

“Oh,” Hermes snorted. “So we’re Buddhists now, are we?”

“What would they be good for?” Athena asked, ignoring him.

“What they were always good for,” Demeter answered. “They still are, fundamentally, what they were .”

Hermes stepped closer to the eye. He seemed to hesitate to speak to it, but in the absence of a mouth, there were few other options. “I still don’t understand,” he said awkwardly. “How will humans, even reincarnated ones, help us to stop … whatever this is?”

“You still don’t know what this is,” Demeter said.

“This is the twilight of the gods.”

The skin shook as the goddess laughed. Pebbles bounced on her surface at the vibrations. Athena and Hermes shifted their weight uncomfortably. It was like standing on a drum.

“The twilight of the gods,” Demeter said when the rumbling had stopped. “But not all of the gods. Some of us are the bitches of fate and will persevere.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re not fighting our deaths. You’re fighting a war. A war against your own. And you will lose.”

“A war against our own?” Hermes asked. “Why would we fight each other? We’re dying.”

Athena swallowed. Some of them would fight for exactly that reason. Dying wasn’t something gods understood. It certainly wasn’t something many would do well.

“You’ll kill each other now, because you can. What was impossible is now possible. And if that wasn’t reason enough to try, you are the Titan’s children. You’ll kill each other. Consume each other, to survive.”

The skin shifted softly from side to side. It took Athena a moment to realize that it was Demeter settling into the dirt, ruffling her skin like she was pleased with herself and ready to drift back to whatever sleep she had, stretched across the desert.

“Go and find the Oracle,” the tired voice of Demeter said, drifting off. “If you can, and if she’ll help you, after what you did to her. You three. But maybe you’ll be lucky, and she’ll hate the others more than she still hates you.”

“Enough riddles. Who is the Oracle? What can she do?” Hermes stomped his foot and Demeter gave an “Oof!” Athena gave Hermes a stern look. It was rude to stomp your aunt, no matter how dire the situation.

“The Oracle is a prophetess. Find her. Make her remember, and she’ll be much more than that.” The eye fluttered shut.

“You won’t help,” Athena whispered.

“Do I look like I’m in any position to help?” Demeter snapped, and the skin coiled back to attention. “And you, with your whore’s jewelry and pathetic knife. Are you in any position to fight?”

Athena walked to the eye and knelt. Gently, she placed her palm above the lid, and the tired eye drifted shut. “Perhaps not yet. But I will be soon.”

Abbott Park sat in the middle of the Spirit River Nature Preserve, an oblong strip of green land slowly yellowing its way to autumn brown. It was mid-October, and Kincade, New York, had already had a few hard freezes, just enough to make everything feel brittle and solid. Cassandra, Aidan, and Andie huddled on the outer edge of the fire circle, atop the remains of the low stone wall that seemed to begin and end at random, dotting the border of the park like an uneven stitch.

“You spread the word well,” Cassandra said, watching forty to fifty of their classmates mill around the three fire pits in the park. “Almost as well as if the word was ‘legs’.” She blinked and laughed, breath leaving her throat in a thin cloud. After a surprised pause, Andie and Aidan laughed back.