The great hall was nowhere near finished, and that night nobody noticed.
Lamps burned along the unfinished walls. The long tables had been dragged into a single ring, and every chair around it was filled. The six Generals sat shoulder to shoulder, Ottar still wrapped in bandages from collar to waist, Finn's spear laid across his knees. Beside them were the ministers, Freya and Hephaestus, Demeter and Miach, Aphrodite and Takemikazuchi. Riveria and Gareth sat near Ais. Aisha stood against the wall with her arms folded, still dusty from the Pantheon steps. Loki sat at Damien's right hand, and Hestia at his left, both palms resting on the curve of her belly.
One chair stood empty. It was an old, plain thing of dark wood, set between Hestia and Takemikazuchi. Nobody had been willing to take it away.
Damien looked at it for a moment before he spoke.
"Ouranos is dead."
The room did not gasp. It was worse than that. It went completely still, the way a forest goes still when something large moves through it.
"I was with him at the end." His voice was level. He kept it that way by force. "He was standing in the Hall of Entry when I found him. He told me what the dungeon has cost him. For thousands of years, he has been feeding his own life into the seal, holding Anu in the dark with nothing but his own strength. He never told anyone. He did it alone." He drew a breath. "He is gone now. I watched it happen."
"We know," Loki said quietly.
He looked at her.
"We felt it." She turned one hand over on the table and stared at the palm, as if something had been written there. "A few hours ago. Every god in this city. It was like a door opening in a house you have lived in all your life, a door you did not know was there." She swallowed. "Like someone had taken a weight off my chest that I had stopped noticing."
"Divinity," Freya said. She sat very straight, golden eyes fixed on the middle of the table. "All of it. Whatever Ouranos bound in us is gone. I could feel my power come back like blood returning to a numb limb." Her mouth tightened. "It hurt."
"My forge woke up," Hephaestus muttered. "I did not touch it. It simply lit."
"The fields outside the walls flowered," Demeter said softly. "In the middle of autumn."
"Then it holds for the dragons too," Damien said.
"It must."
The air above the table shivered.
It began as a faint rippling, like heat rising from stone. A line of gold split the dark over the center of the ring. It widened, and light spilled out of it in a slow, heavy tide, and every lamp in the hall leaned away. Takemikazuchi was on his feet with his hand on his sword. Finn's spear had left his lap. Ottar's head came up.
A woman stepped out of the light.
She was tall, taller than she had ever been in the shape Damien knew. Her hair was black as a starless night and fell past her waist. Horns of polished onyx swept back from her brow. Fine scales ran along her cheekbones and the backs of her hands, dark and glittering, and her eyes were gold, two molten coins, so bright and so old that nobody could look at them for long. The air around her weighed on the chest. It was not a human body wearing a dragon's name. It was a dragon, folded down small enough to fit a room.
Vritra's feet touched the floor, and the stones beneath them cracked.
She did not look at anyone. She looked only at Damien. For a long moment she stood there with the light fading from her shoulders, and something moved in her face that no one in the room had ever seen on it.
Then she knelt.
She did it all at once, down on one knee with her head bowed, hand pressed over her heart. "My Lord."
"Vritra," Damien said.
"I was gone. The oath held me, and then the oath broke." Her voice was low and rough. "I felt it go. I felt the whole sky open. I am free, my Lord, and I have come back."
"I see that."
"I am yours."
"I know." Something eased in his chest. He had not realized how tight it had been. "Stand."
She rose.
"And be ready," he said.
"Always."
Ottar had not moved. He sat in his chair with his bandaged hands flat on the table, looking at her as if she might disappear if he blinked. When Vritra's eyes found him, he inclined his head, slowly, deeply, the way a soldier bows to a comrade who has come back from a field where he did not expect to find her alive. She bowed back. Nothing was said, and nothing needed to be.
Damien waited until she had taken her seat.
"Now listen, because I will say this once." He stood and rested both fists on the table. "Anu is going to be free. Hours, at most. Maybe less."
Nobody breathed.
"He wants three things. Without all three, he cannot rewrite the world. Antares told me that himself, in my own office, with a smile on his face." He raised one finger. "The first is access to the Gate of Beginning. The door to the start of everything. Ouranos guarded it. Neither Anu nor I have any idea where it is. It was never written down, and no one else was ever told. With Ouranos dead, it is lost to everyone."
"Everyone but whoever finds it first," Freya said.
"Exactly."
He raised a second finger and turned his head.
"The second is Pandora's Box."
Every eye in the room moved to Alcy.
She sat very still, her red hair loose over her shoulders, one hand resting on the pouch at her belt. Her jaw was set, but there was no defiance in it. Ais had moved a half step closer to her without seeming to realize it.
"It stays with me," Alcy said.
"I know," Damien said gently. "I am not asking you to give it up. I am telling you why every man in this room would die to keep it safe."
She gave a stiff nod.
"The third is Ki's body." His voice hardened. "Antares has it. The moment Anu steps out of that seal, it is his. We cannot stop that. We can only stop the other two."
He straightened.
"So this is the plan. We find the Gate before he does. We guard Pandora with everything we have. And we wait for him to come."
"Wait?" Gareth rumbled. "That is not a plan, lad. That is a prayer."
"It is both." Damien smiled thinly. "I do not think Anu will attack us directly. Not at first. He has been in that stone for ten thousand years. He cannot rewrite anything until he finds the Gate, and he does not know where it is any more than we do. He will send people to look. He will use Antares, the Pillars, whatever he has left. He will not come knocking at my walls."
"And Pandora?" Riveria asked. "Does he know where she is?"
"I think he must."
"Why?"
"Because Zeus was in that cavern when Antares killed him." Damien's lip curled. "Zeus has never kept a secret in his life. I would stake the kingdom he offered the Box as a bargaining chip. He was desperate. He told Antares who held it." He shook his head. "It failed miserably, I am sure. But the name was spoken. Antares knows. Anu will know."
Alcy's fist closed around her pouch.
"One more thing." He straightened, looking around the ring. "We cannot fight here."
A murmur rose.
"Think about what is coming. Hundreds of gods. Dragons the size of cities. Anu himself, who made all of them." He spread his hands. "If that fight happens in Orario, there will be no Orario. I will not watch this city burn because gods cannot settle their quarrels. The people here have been through enough."
"Then where?" Hephaestus asked.
"Heaven."
The word dropped like a stone.
"It is large enough. It is empty of mortals, and it was built for beings like this. If we take the fight there, the people of Orario never have to see it." He met each of their eyes in turn. "Getting us there is my problem. Yours is to be ready."
No one spoke for a long moment.
Then Loki pushed back her chair, and rose.
She did not hurry. She stood slowly, small and red-haired and sharp-eyed, and for a moment the old, wicked grin did not appear on her face. Her hands were steady. Her voice, when it came, was quiet enough that the room leaned in to hear it.
"Damien."
"Loki."
"For ten thousand years, my kind has let other people bleed for us." She looked at the empty chair. "We came down here and gave our children swords and called it a blessing. We sat at our windows and watched them die in the dark. We called it fate." She lifted her chin. "I am tired of it. I am tired of being a woman who watches."
She planted her palm on the table.
"This time, we fight beside you. All of us. Not behind. Beside." A small, fierce smile cracked across her face. "And I am proud of it. I have never been so proud of anything in my life."
Silence.
Then Freya stood.
"And I," she said.
"And I," said Hephaestus, her one good eye bright.
Demeter rose, and Miach, and Aphrodite with her chin raised. Takemikazuchi bowed low from the waist. Hestia tried to stand and Damien's hand closed gently on her shoulder. She looked up at him with shining eyes and shook her head, and kept her seat, and lifted her hand instead.
One by one they stood until the whole ring was on its feet.
Damien looked around the circle. The Generals. The ministers. The women who shared his bed and the friends who had followed him through fire. A wild, bright, bitter pride flooded his chest, and he let it.
He smiled.
"Then get ready," he said.
Night had settled over Orario by the time the hall emptied.
Hestia sat on the edge of their bed with the window open behind her. A lamp burned low on the table. The curtains stirred in the cool air, and the sound of the city drifted up from the streets below, murmuring, drunk, still half asleep from the celebration. She had taken down her hair. She wore a plain white robe, and it hung loosely around her middle, over the roundness there.
Damien knelt on the floor in front of her.
He did not say anything. He laid his cheek against her belly and closed his eyes, and he listened. Under the soft warmth of her skin, very faint, there was a flutter. A tiny, stubborn rhythm, quick and quiet. A heartbeat that was not his own, and not hers.
She stroked his hair.
"Can you hear them?" she whispered.
"Yes." His voice was thick. "They are very loud."
"They get that from you."
He laughed, a short, helpless sound, and did not lift his head.
"I want them to have a beautiful life," Hestia said, after a while. Her fingers moved slowly through his hair. "That is all I want. I do not need a kingdom for them, or a crown. I want them to wake up in a house with sunlight in it. I want them to eat too much bread and fall down a hill and cry about it and be forgiven."
"So do I."
"I know."
"Hestia." He lifted his head at last. His eyes were bright and a little wet in the lamplight. "I have never felt this way. I have faced gods and dragons and a thing I cannot even name. I have killed a god of the sun with my hands. And none of it has frightened me the way this does." He pressed her palm against his cheek. "I have never wanted to protect anything so much in my life."
"That is love, my child."
"I know." He swallowed. "I want to make a world for them. For all of my children, the ones who are coming, and the ones who are already here. A world where no one has to fight the way we do. Where no one gets taken apart in the dark for being too strong, or too weak, or too forgotten." His hand tightened. "I want it so badly it hurts."
She smiled.
It was a soft thing, worn and tender and certain. She cupped his face in both hands and held him there.
"You will make it," she said.
"You cannot know that."
"I know it." She shook her head, and a tear slid down her cheek, and she did not wipe it away. "The day I saw you, Damien, a boy who had no place and no name and no god, wandering in the dust of this city with nowhere to go, I wanted you. I did not know why. I only knew I wanted you for my child." Her voice cracked. "It was the happiest day of all the thousands of years I have lived."
He could not speak.
"Everything else has been a gift on top of it." She laughed softly, tearfully. "I would not trade a single moment of it. Not the war. Not the crown. Not the ugly, terrible, wonderful mess of it."
She leaned down, and he rose to meet her.
The kiss was gentle. It tasted of salt and lamp smoke, and it went on a long time. The curtains stirred. The city murmured below. Between them, small and stubborn and alive, a heartbeat fluttered, and the whole dark world beyond the window seemed very far away.
/*\
If you Like this story! Check out my other story ! Sukuna in DC! And Fate/Dc Universe: The Master
AND
If you wish to read more or simply support me just because ? than check out my patréon at
"https://www.patréon.com/Riadooo"
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want !