Damien woke to a ceiling he knew.
It was the old plaster above his own bed, with the hairline crack that ran from the window to the lamp, and for a long moment he only looked at it. The room smelled of lavender and warm bread. Sunlight lay across the blankets in a long gold stripe. Everything was quiet in the way a house is quiet when many people are holding their breath.
He turned his head.
They were all there. Hestia sat in the chair beside the bed with both hands on the curve of her belly, her blue eyes red-rimmed and bright. Ais stood at the foot of it with her arms wrapped around herself, her golden gaze fixed on his face as though she were afraid it might change. Riveria leaned against the wall with her staff across her knees. Loki was perched on the windowsill, Freya in the doorway, and behind them, filling every inch of the room's edges, were the faces of the people who had followed him into every fire.
Nobody spoke.
"How," Damien said. His voice came out a croak. He swallowed and tried again. "How did I get here?"
Loki let out a long breath, and some of the stiffness went out of her shoulders. "Welcome back, king. A scouting patrol found you on the outskirts, east of the walls. Flat on your back in the cinders, out cold, blood all down your front." She rubbed the bridge of her nose. "They said the whole plain was black for a half mile around you."
"Black?"
"Your shadows." Her smile was thin. "They would not let anyone near. The patrol sent in a dozen soldiers to carry you, and your shadows nearly killed every one of them. Three of them are still in the infirmary. Nobody could get within ten paces."
Damien frowned. "Then how..."
"Ais."
He looked at the foot of the bed.
Ais did not move. Her eyes were very bright. "I walked up to you," she said quietly. "They stopped."
For a moment he could not think of anything to say. He lifted a hand and she was there at once, her fingers closing around his, warm and a little unsteady.
"Thank you," he said.
"Do not do that again."
"I will try."
He pushed himself upright against the pillows, and the room swam. His head felt packed with wet wool. There was a hole in his memory, soft at the edges, as if a tooth had been pulled and his tongue kept returning to the place. He remembered the walls. He remembered a banquet and a war. He remembered the garden, and a black blade dropping out of the dark.
I was fighting something.
He sat very still. It was there, just under the surface. A weight. A name. Someone strong, so strong he could not keep a hold on the shape of him, and a long, quiet, unreasonable terror.
"The gods?" Loki said. She was watching his face closely. "You were fighting the gods."
"No." He shook his head slowly. "Stronger."
Hestia leaned forward. "The Dragon Monarch?"
"No. Not him either." He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. "Something else. Someone else. I..."
Then it hit him, and the rest came with it. Zeus on his knees in the garden. Odin's staff, gone cold. Antares stepping out of a mage's robes with a king's smile.
"The gods," he said sharply. "Zeus and Odin. The war. What happened to the war?"
"We won it," Loki said. Her grin came back, and this time it reached her eyes. "You should have seen it, Damien. The demigods ran. Every last one. Twenty-two gods fell out of that box of yours, and they lit up the sky like a festival. The whole city is still drunk. Everyone is saying it was you."
"No." His voice cracked. "I failed."
Her grin faltered. "What?"
"Zeus and Odin. I did not kill them." He gripped the blanket. "They were saved. Antares took them."
The room went still.
"He pulled them out of the garden. I saw it." He stared at his own hands. "And I think..." He stopped, then pushed on. "The avatar craft they used. The thing that let them wear those bodies without Ouranos's pact tearing them out of the world. It was Antares who taught them. He was Seratna."
"The mage?" Freya said.
"He walked in wearing that face and a cup of wine, and shed it like a coat. He was playing a man named Seratna the entire time."
Loki let out a short, incredulous laugh. "Seratna. Say it backward."
Damien blinked.
"A-N-T-A-R-E-S. Seratna." She spread her hands. "It is his name, scrambled. That is about as subtle as a brick through a window."
"It is Zeus we are talking about," Freya said dryly. She had not moved from the doorway. "That fool would not notice if the man introduced himself as Antares and handed him a lance. He taught him a trick and Zeus did not ask a single question."
"Fine. But then why?" Riveria's voice was quiet and cold. She had gone still against the wall. "Why would Antares save them? He hates the gods. He wants every one of them dead. He said so to your face."
Nobody answered. The room had gone very quiet.
Damien opened his mouth to say he did not know, and a spike of white pain went through his left arm.
He bit down on a gasp. It was a hot, clean pain, like a nail driven through the forearm, and he pulled back the sleeve before anyone could stop him. On the inside of the arm, below the elbow, there was a wound. Small. Narrow. A neat, shallow cut, still wet, still welling slow dark beads of blood down toward the wrist.
"It will not close," Riveria said. She had crossed the room without a sound and stood at his shoulder. "We tried everything. Potions, healing magic, Miach's own salves. It will not mend."
He turned his arm into the light.
It was not a random cut. It had edges, and the edges made shapes, and the shapes made letters. Three of them, thin and clear, carved into his skin as neatly as a signature.
E. P. I. M.
He stared at it.
His shadows could close it. He knew that with a certainty that surprised him. A single thought and they would knit the flesh together and leave nothing but smooth skin. He had done it a hundred times, for wounds ten times worse. They were waiting at the edge of his mind right now, quiet and ready.
He did not call them.
He sat there with his arm held out and his teeth clenched and something very stubborn inside him refusing, flat and total, like a hand closing around a stone. No. He did not know why. Not this one. His body had decided something his mind had not yet been told, and it would not be moved.
"Why," he murmured. "Why will I not heal it?"
And the memory broke open.
It did not come as a thought. It came as a flood. A burned plain. A red sword. A man with blue hair and amber eyes and a face so sharp it hurt to hold, who knelt beside him and spoke to him with terrible gentleness. Why fight? A hand locked around an ankle. A name, spoken once, with every ounce of awe and shame that a name could carry.
"I was in a battle," he whispered.
"Yes." Loki was off the sill now. "The gods..."
"Not the gods." He raised his eyes. "The Unknown."
Ais went rigid.
He saw it happen. Her ears lifted, her breath stopped, and every drop of color left her face. She had heard that name in the kitchen of a house a week earlier. It was the name of the one who had taken her father, bound him in iron chains of service, and set him at the door of a frozen garden to die twice.
"His name," Damien said. His voice was very low. "I know his name."
"Epim?" Loki asked, frowning at his arm. "Is that..."
"No. That is only what he let me keep." He shut his eyes and reached for it, and it slipped, and he reached again, and held. "Epim... Epimeth... Epimetheus."
The name dropped into the room like a stone into a still pond.
Every god in the circle felt it. He saw them flinch, one by one, as if something heavy had rolled across their chests. Loki's brow creased. Freya's hand rose slowly to her temple. Hestia, in her chair, had gone very pale. It was a name that should have meant something. It sat on the tongue like a taste they had known all their lives and could not place. They reached for it, and found a smooth wall.
"Epimetheus," Loki repeated slowly, and her eyes slid away from his as if she were reading from a page that kept going blank. "I feel like I should know that. Like I have said it before."
"I know that name," Hestia said.
The room turned.
She was staring into the middle distance with her lips parted, one hand pressed flat against the swell of her belly. Her voice was faint and strange. "Epimetheus. And Pandora."
Damien was already on his feet.
He did not remember deciding to stand. Pain shot up from his ribs, his head spun, and the whole room tilted, but he crossed to her side in two steps and knelt before her chair. She was the mother of his first child. Nothing in the world would have kept him sitting down.
"Hestia." His hands closed gently around hers. "What do you remember?"
"Only pieces." She swallowed. Her fingers were cold. "It is like trying to hold water."
"Anything."
She was quiet for a time. When she spoke, her voice was soft and slow, a woman reading a half-faded inscription on a tomb.
"My flame. The hearth fire. The flame of protection, of purity, of the virgin goddess who never leaves her place." She looked down at her hands. "Long ago, Zeus took it from me. He stole a part of it and shaped it into a woman. A living woman, with a body and a name. He called her Pandora."
Nobody moved.
"I do not remember the whole story. I do not remember who Epimetheus was." Her brow furrowed. "But I remember that Pandora was married. To someone. And she was given a box to keep. A jar, or a chest, a thing that Anu himself sealed. Inside it was everything. Every curse. Every plague. Every demon and monster that the world had ever feared. Locked away so they would never touch the light."
"Pandora's Box," Loki said softly.
"Somehow it was opened." Hestia's voice shook. "I do not know how. I only know that evil fell into the world that day, and the monsters were born, and Pandora vanished. And so did her husband."
She raised her eyes to Damien's.
"All of us knew him, Damien. Every god. I am sure of it. We knew his face and his voice. And now there is nothing there."
"Her husband," Riveria said slowly. "You believe this Epimetheus was her husband."
"I do not know." Hestia pressed a hand to her mouth. "I only know that when you said his name, my heart..."
"It is the same with him," Damien said. His voice was hoarse. "I know exactly who the Unknown is. Every detail. And I can feel it slipping even now, like smoke through my fingers."
He looked at the bleeding letters on his arm.
"This is the only thing that is holding it."
Silence stretched across the room. It was the heavy, aching silence of people who had just stepped to the edge of something much bigger than a war.
Then the door burst open.
It crashed against the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. Aisha stood in the frame, bent half over, one hand braced against the doorpost, her chest heaving. Her hair was wild and her eyes were huge. She had run the whole way.
"Everyone!" she gasped. "We have a problem!"
Damien's head snapped around. "What is it?"
"The dungeon." She straightened, and her voice cracked on the next word. "It is an outbreak, a monster outbreak, but it is nothing like anything we have ever seen. The guards on the Pantheon steps have already been overrun. It is pouring out of the Babel gate like a river, and it is not stopping."
She stared at him, wide-eyed, shaking.
"There are just so many!"
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