Hey guys! I'm back.

As I have mentioned before, I've hit a bit of a writer's block. Thanks to about a dozen videos from OSP, Daryl Talks Games, and various other YouTube videos discussing literature, tropes, and FanFiction, some sleep deprivation, and me banging my head against the desk a few times, I was able to unblock myself enough to write another chapter.

Huzzah!

Although I am writing without a concrete idea of where this is going, unlike the other parts, so feel free to leave suggestions about what I should write about next.

So read, enjoy, and review! Remember the bonus chapters? That's still on. You know the drill: five relevant reviews per bonus chapter. Honestly, I've written a lot already, and I'd hate to see it go unread.

So yeah. That's pretty much it for now.

Delos.

The first thing to come to mind would probably be that it was the birthplace of the twin gods, Artemis and Apollo. The second thing was probably that no one was allowed to be born or killed there. Slightly stranger and admittedly difficult to enforce, but there it was [1].

It was, at present, a sort of neutral ground for the twin gods after what had become known as the Orion Incident, what with Artemis still being more than a little angry about Apollo's part in his death, and Apollo being rather put out about Artemis's role in his son Asclepius's death and his own subsequent punishment [2].

Gods could hold long grudges, this ability only surpassed by their refusal to apologize when their pride was on the line. Apollo still maintained that the giant was a bad influence on Artemis, and it had been almost two decades: why wasn't she over it yet? Artemis argued that killing the cyclops had been his own fault, and suggested that perhaps Apollo would understand her sentimental attachment to Orion more if he could keep the mortals he had gotten attached to alive for more than a few weeks.

It had only spiraled downward from there.

In the end, it was their mother who had intervened. Leto had understood the two gods' stubbornness more than most, so she knew that telling them not to fight was utterly useless. It was also the first real fight the two had had, so Leto understood it was Serious Business. She suggested an Arrangement: no physical aggression that would cause collateral damage, no curses that would cause collateral damage, no collateral damage in general, and they had to meet up on Delos every year on to celebrate their birthdays under a truce.

The twins, war-weary and somewhat traumatized by the fiasco that was the Sack of Troy, had agreed.

In theory, it made Thargelia a peaceful, festive time when the two put together their differences and the three celebrated as a family. In practice, it made for some very...creative ways to bend the rules as the twins' disagreements spilled over in the form of increasingly passive-aggressive jabs [3].

"Good morning, sister. Isn't it a nice day?" Apollo sounded like he was in physical pain.

"Indeed, dear brother. I am so glad that I get to spend it with you," Artemis's smile was forced, and resembled more of a grimace. Her hands were twitching, like she wanted to summon her bow and arrows.

Behind them, Leto decided that self-restraint was no longer a worthwhile exercise and face-palmed. Just two more days, she prayed. Just two more days.

Orion coughed. The arrow had hurt, though it hadn't done any lasting damage, being a giant and all.

Was it worth it, Artemis? He thought spitefully. Because despite your violent behavior, the only thing you managed to break so far is my heart.

Never in his life had he felt more betrayed. Not when the king of Chios had blinded him. Not when the various giants still stuck in Tartarus tried to kill him, especially since he had technically betrayed them first.

Seriously, he went through Tartarus, the pit of eternal damnation, with the single minded goal of reuniting with the goddess, an ultimate show of love and faith, and he got rewarded with rejection and an arrow to the throat?

He might have loved Artemis, but he still had pride. If she wouldn't have him, he wasn't going to go out of his way to win her back.

So what was he going to do now?

The ground rumbled. He straightened, anticipating an attack, perhaps from another scorpion. Instead, a sleepy looking woman manifested next to him. Gaea, his mother, sitting casually on a stump as if he had been the one to materialize at her feet.

"Poor child", the primordial seemed almost sympathetic. "So earnest, yet cast away as soon as the bloom is gone."

That manipulative...something. Orion struggled to come up with something bad enough to describe Gaea. "You're the one who started the whole thing."

"Only because I wanted to show you the truth, dear child. The gods are vain, self-centered, and forgetful. They forget what others do for them, and they abandon them as soon as the benefits outweigh the costs."

Orion knew that anything that came out of his mother's mouth was a means to control him. The problem was, a lot of what she was saying resonated.

"I understand that you do not trust me, my son," Gaea sounded melancholy, like she was genuinely sad about it. "But the truth is that you, as a giant, are not meant to love mortals or gods. I should know: I created you to destroy them. It's a lesson you needed to learn."

Orion shook his head, "I can, and I have loved both mortals and gods. It's not any of your-"

"And how many of them worked out for you? Your attempt at love with that mortal girl ended with her death [4]. The goddess Eos abandoned you. Your attempt at flirting with that other mortal girl ended with you blinded and in exile. Now, your dear, precious Artemis has rejected you. Do you sense a pattern?"

"I...I don't have to listen to this," he unslung his bow.

"You have wondered why I let you come back to this world, yes?" Gaea straightened a bit. "It's because I knew it would end like this. You've gotten boring, Orion. She's replaced you before, you know: it didn't even take her more than a year. A bright, young mortal man named Hippolytos." [5]

"Yes," she sounded genuinely regretful as she observed his stricken expression. "I have been watching, in some of my moments awake. The boy's dead now. Killed by Aphrodite to settle a petty grudge. I'm sure you've run into her as well."

Orion gritted his teeth at the mention of the meddlesome goddess. As much as he despised his mother, Gaea knew exactly how to get under his skin. "I don't think that's any of your business."

"If you'd like," Gaea shrugged, unaffected. Orion hated that he couldn't get a rise out of her.

"What do you expect me to do? Follow your orders like a puppet because I hate the gods?"

"You aren't a puppet if you have your own reasons for hating the gods, only allies with a common goal," Gaea said. "I can promise you acceptance. Forgiveness. And if you want, revenge. That is why you came to like the Hunters in the first place, didn't you? Lack of judgement for your past actions? The chance to start anew? But they do judge you, don't they? They judged you because you were male, and they judged you because you were a giant. Why continue to follow them so faithfully?"

Orion took an unsteady breath. Gaea was extremely persuasive. He wondered if she was charmspeaking somehow, but rejected the idea. Gaea doesn't need charmspeaking to manipulate people: she had experience. "What do I have to do?"

The first sign that leaving Orion alive and without support for his Tartarus-related issues was going to go down in history as a Bad Move happened on the second day of Thargelia. Artemis was about to take another bite of fruit, ready to deliver another thinly veiled insult about Apollo's lack of foresight despite being the prophecy god when she doubled over, overwhelmed by a high concentration of prayers coming from her Hunters, saturated with shock and outrage and grief.

Apollo was so surprised that he forgot to hurl his barbed comment about her being defeated by the goddess of marriage. "Sister?"

The world was spinning. Things were wrong, wrong, wrong. She hadn't felt such a disturbance since...she's never felt such a disturbance before.

Someone had attacked the Hunt while she was away. Deliberate murder for the sake of murder.

They were in peacetime now! While she had lost numbers during the war, they had been emotionally prepared for it: it was war. Who would do this?

There's only one person who would, and you know it.

"Sister!" Apollo's voice cut through her thoughts. "What happened?"

Artemis managed to sit back up-when had she fallen down? "The Hunt," she said. "I need to check up on my Hunt."

Apollo looked worried. "Do you want me to come with-"

"No!" she said, a bit more harshly than intended. "It's fine, Apollo. Just...keep going with the festivities. I'll be back. Tell Mother where I've been."

She flashed away before he could protest.

She arrived at the scene to the sight of multiple injured Hunters and quite a few bodies.

"It happened so fast," said Zoe. She had damaged her kneecap further by trying to run prematurely. Her face was such a perfect picture of misery that Artemis didn't have the heart to berate her. The thoughts I'm a failure, I'm a failure were projecting so clearly that Artemis didn't need to read her mind to hear it.

And Agatha was dead.

According to those who had been near her, it seemed that whoever had attacked her (Orion, you know who it is, you coward) had targeted her specifically. One of the Hunters had suggested that perhaps it was one of her family, come to "punish" her for running away from her marriage.

Artemis knew it wasn't. It had been almost three decades since Agatha joined, and no one was skilled enough to ambush the Hunters like that, much less making an enemy of her. Agatha had been the first Hunter to join after Orion, and the inciting incident that allowed him to finally get along with everyone. Agatha's death was a message: Orion had officially cut all ties with the Hunters. And he was declaring war.

Yep, I think the word Orion was looking for was "b****". Gaea loves to manipulate people. It helped that the gods weren't the epitome of good behavior, either.

[1] I was going to put in a reference about the Delian League, but I realized that the timelines weren't right, as the Persian Wars hadn't happened yet. Basically an alliance of Ionian Greeks (led by Athens) whose treasury was on Delos, formed after the Greco-Persian Wars. Well, they were going to have to maintain a gigantic navy somehow. Just in case the Persians came back. Even though Athens later started embezzling money to fund temple building, and it turned out that such a gigantic navy was unnecessary because Athens made a secret deal with the Persians not to attack them. It just ended up being very corrupt in the end, as with all nice things.

[2] The murder of the Elder Cyclops. Apollo had to live as a mortal for a while, though it wasn't all bad, considering that Ademetus was nice and Apollo liked him so much that he made all his cows have twin calves.

[3] This dynamic was inspired by the Olympic games back in Ancient Greece. I know that Ancient Greece invented them, but technically it was Rome that made it more similar to the format we see today. Back then, participation was limited to free citizens of various city-states, and despite the whole "put aside our differences" thing, it was viewed as a way for various city-states to win clout over their enemies. Rome made it open to foreigners, though there still was politics involved. In conclusion, telling people to put their differences aside for a certain event doesn't usually work.

[4] Side. She was a former girlfriend of Orion who died.

[5] As we see, Artemis does care about her followers. I suppose it's because making them immortal means she's less liable to lose them, so she could let herself get attached. Gaea is just manipulating Orion by giving him something easily confirmed and mixing it with a lie that he couldn't easily disprove. Orion, on the other hand, knew he was being manipulated: he just wasn't in the correct mental state to care.

I think that's it for the notes. Hmm, I have some ideas about what to write for the next chapter, but I don't have a general plan what to do. For example, should I cover the the Persian War? The Peloponnesian War? Aeneas' founding of Lavinium? Should I skip to the Roman times? Should I cover something I haven't mentioned yet? It's all very open ended, and at this point, I'm very open to suggestions.

Let me know what you think in the reviews, I suppose.