— XI. LUKE & BELLEROPHON: PRIDE

"Honestly, I'm a bit embarrassed." the ancient hero told the modern one, a red tinge to his cheeks. "Like, yes, I had all sorts of great feats… slaying the Chimera, and… actually, all I really did was slay the Chimera. But oh boy, did I think I was great."

The scarred son of Hermes was watching Bellerophon with a bewildered expression as the older hero gestured nervously through his story. Luke wondered faintly if this was some sort of torture Hades divised. Suffering through insecure long-dead heroes talk about how important they were.

"And so anyways, you probably know the rest of my story. Captured Pegasus—" he looked straight into Luke's eyes and mouthed "my brother," before continuing on. "—decided I was all high and mighty, and tried to fly up to Mount Olympus." he chortled, a bizarre sort of laugh that only unsettled Luke more. "Of course, Zeus flung a lightning bolt riiight at me and then I fell to my death."

Luke idly wondered what the point of the story was. It wasn't something that would help the son of Hermes, given that he was, well, already dead. Hubris here didn't really matter… since everyone was dead. Gods, it was a morbid place.

"Anyways," Bellerophon continued. He had a nasally sort of voice, and he reminded Luke terribly of some of the idiot minions Kronos had gotten him. The ones that went on and on, especially when you wanted it to be relatively quiet.

"The moral of my story is this, Castellan:" Bellerophon said Luke's name pointedly, and the son of Hermes looked rather startled as he started paying attention again. "You shouldn't have thought yourself better than the gods. You aren't. None of us are. Now, I don't know if that's just because they're gods and have infinite power— actually I do know. That's exactly what it is. The gods are gods, idiot, and apparently you couldn't take the clue from my story, Odysseus' story, shit any hero's story, that maybe you don't go against the gods directly."

Luke had a rather poleaxed expression as the son of Poseidon continued ruthlessly. "You think we dead folk don't realize how bad it's gotten for you baby heroes? We see, century after century, little demigods coming down to Hades, each century younger than the last. Every once and a while, one gets the bright idea to challenge the gods, to try to make life better for all the forgotten little heroes. And guess what, boy?"

"What?" Luke asked automatically.

"None of them succeeded. Hell, none of them made it to Elysium. All of them, little children with hopes of making the world a better place for demigods, suffering eternal torture in the Fields of Punishment." Bellerophon eyes were narrowed and he seethed with rage. "All of them unsuccessful. And look! Here you are, dead, unable to make a change. After a millennia, it gets so hard to care about all the little dead children who walk into Elysium. All of the child soldiers enslaved by our fathers, marching one by one after each other to their deaths. When I was alive, demigods had the chance of being happy. Shit, not all of us went off on quests. Of course, those are the only ones you'll ever hear about, the only ones who will ever make it here, but isn't it better to be happy in life than happy in death?"

"But you know what, Castellan?" Bellerophon barreled on. "We do care. At least, those of us who cared in the first place. If only, if only someone could come and speak to us. Ask us advice. Demigods could make change, they could make life better for themselves, for every single little hero that walks the earth. But they all… oh, Castellan, they all take your path. They all stubbornly defy the gods, threaten them, and all of them die."

"We need change. Of course we need change! And yet no one thinks of the right way to do it until it's too late."

— next: X. RACHEL & CASSANDRA: FORESIGHT