Crete – 850 B.C.

You remember the story.

The unremarkable Cretan princess. The daughter of the cruel king Minos, who spun gold string from her hands to lead Theseus through Daedalus' Labyrinth. Theseus was a young man, however, young and beautiful and heroic, with divine blood coursing through his veins, he sought for other things. Marble arches of an insurmountable kingdom, a throne upon Mount Olympus, the oft spoken Golden Fleece. Treasures beyond what a mere human girl with a sweet smile and glowing thread could offer. He left her in the night, sweetly and sharply, without word. The princess hung supposedly herself when she realized Theseus had gone.

That is the story, of course. That is how the ancient Greeks wrote of her. Nothing more but another myth: A beautiful princess who was betrayed by a bastard demigod, strung along by his own beauty, entrapped in the lies of legend and glory.

The girl with the golden thread, however, was not simply a hollowed story found in the yellowed and dusty pages of Ovid or Plutarch or Apollodorus.

She was a little girl once too.

Unfortunately, little girls do not often make the pages of myth. They are boring in the grand remembrances of time and space, but that is why poets are often wrong.

Before the myths and the legends and Theseus, she was merely a child with the name Ariadne. Outside of the great house of her parents, she would play in the sand on the shores of Naxos. The little princess would sketch into the wet sand designs of cosmic movement and sound. Round spherical and polemical shapes of celestial planets, stars, and universes. Untold to the human eye, these images were strange to those charged with watching her. They were not familiar images.

Of course, the Greeks knew of the stars and astrology. They knew the Earth was round, they knew the universe – and its stars – orbited around this "great sphere." But the images that the little girl drew into the wet sand of that Cretan beach were not astrology. They were larger than stars and planets. They were striking intergalactic starscapes, depicting a wide ever-expanding universe upon the millions of grains of finite sand. You see, Ariadne was not simply drawing Earth, but the entirety of everything. She seemed to have the map of the universe in her head before she was even old enough to know the names of the stars.

As time wore on, Ariadne moved past the Sun, the realm of Apollo, and began to move further and further out into the cosmos. Her sand drawings became looming monolithic faces of strange, celestial beings. These large, increasingly hollowed faces of creatures that seemed to have six eyes, but no mouth or expression, were alarming. They seemed to live within those images that the little girl drew. They seemed to be watching from their place upon the Naxos beach, only for their omniscient eyes to be washed away by the ebb and the flow of the tide.

Then one day, the little girl stopped drawing the stars. She fell to her knees, shaken and deeply upset. Her fingers bled from her raw fingertips, burned and scratched and cut, from digging into the millions of tiny grains that layered upon the white sand of the Cretan beach. The picture that lay before her was massive. It lay horizontal across nearly a milion (or a contemporary mile, as we would understand) of white beach sand. This time, Ariadne had not drawn the face of the creature into the wet banks of the shoreline, but upon the dry sand of the dunes. She had dug deep into the earth, torn into the flesh of the shore, creating the burning face that haunted her dreams.

Arishem.

She knew its name before she even knew what it was.

Ariadne knelt before the towering face of the creature she had just finished. It was then, before this tiny girl with tears in her eyes at her creation, that the crude sand-drawn image of Arishem began to glow gold. Not simply the color gold, either. No, Ariadne had seen gold. Her mother wore a gold chain, her father had a golden signet ring. This was the gold that stuffed the inside of stars. The lungs, liver, and heart of the Sun. This was the gold that blinded men when they challenged the Sun into a staring contest. This was the gold that burned into the vision long after the eyes had left it.

This was the gold that crowned the gods.

The girl gasped with disbelief as she backed up from the face of the god, her leather sandals backpedaling into the shallow sandbar of the sky-blue Mediterranean. "Mamá!" The little girl screamed. "Appa!"

Tears peeled down her face like diamonds cut raw from the earth. "MAMÁ!" She screeched for her mother with tremendous panic, but the waves threatened to drown out her terror.

Pain ripped through her palms. Her fingertips felt as if they were on fire. With quivering movements, she brought her hands up to her face. The dripping blood on her hands, bright crimson and wet from her severed flesh, was beginning to change. Dark red drops of blood that dripped with stark contrast into the light blue Mediterranean waters began to turn that self-same gold. The same gold that glowed from the distant face of the sand-traced god. The blood that had made trace ways, roads, and paths across her hands began to weave into interconnected pathways of strange, glowing cosmic symbols and designs. Round circles and dancing shapes formed across her skin. Stars and planets meeting on strands and lines of glowing color.

Ariadne's eyes grew wide as her breath caught in her throat.

Her mother was racing down the beach. "Ariadne!" She cried to her daughter as she spotted her out in blue sea. She raced across the surf, leaping through the small, but resisting waves. "Ariadne, yavrum, what is it?" She came up short of the little girl, standing a short distance away.

The little girl met her mother's eyes from the shallow waters of the sea. She shifted her hands slowly to show her. Gold clockwork glowed across her palms like stitching from the guts of the Sun.

London - 2024

Sersi stared down at her hands in front of her bathroom mirror. The cosmic gold from Tiamut's emerging body had long faded from the palms of her hands, but the feel of it – the burning and the pulsing and the moving of pure energy just beneath the skin of her hands – that was all still there. It made something inside of her feel uncomfortably disoriented as if she had been simultaneously spun upside down and dropped from the highest point of a skyscraper. That much power, that much license to change things… She could have done anything. She made Sprite human. An eternal made human. Scary, really.

She took a short breath in and brought her eyes up from her hands. Straightening, her brown-eyed gaze focused in on the reflection staring back at her from the mirror. Right. She needed to get ready for work. She pulled her hair back into a loose updo before she began to dig around for her moisturizer. Hmph. If Ajak could see her now. The immortal goddess who had once fooled handsy Greek sailors into thinking they were pigs, was apparently now resigned to her skin care routine just like everyone else.

"They didn't even have skin care routines in ancient Calcutta, let alone ten-step Korean morning facials." She huffed as she sorted through the messy cosmetic products in her bathroom cabinet. Most of them, of course, belonged to her, but she was more than happy to also blame Sprite, who lay on the couch in the next room flipping through channels on the TV.

"Sprite, the least you could do is organize your bloody lip kits." She called from the bathroom to the perennially moody, but newly human teenager.

"I own like three, Sersi, calm down." The teen called to her older sister as she rolled her eyes. But then, after pausing for a moment, she frowned. "Wait. You bought me those. I don't even wear lipstick!"

Sersi giggled at Sprite's comment as she leaned into the mirror to analyze the way her cover-up was settling into her skin. "Well, you should. It'd make those pretty lips of yours pop."

Sprite groaned and rolled off the couch with an abrupt bonk! "You're so annoying." She moaned into the floor face-down.

The older eternal chuckled into the mirror as she applied her lipliner. "What else are older sisters for?" Her phone buzzed beside her on the sink. Glancing down, she read the text. Another one from Dane. She sighed softly as guilt from her negligence blossomed across her chest like a weed wrapped around a wilting flower, withering as the weed grew wider-and-wider. Sersi knew she owed Dane an explanation for why she hadn't been answering his calls or texts. Or, you know, she may need to address the question as to why there was a strange alien rock hand emerging out of the Indian Ocean. But for as well-adjusted as her current boyfriend was to the strange happenings of the universe, it was difficult to put into words everything of the past week.

She needed to tell Dane. She'd see him at work.

Maybe she'd call in sick.

No, Sersi, -you're going to tell him. You have to. You owe him that much.

"Right, then. Sprite," she began. She came out of the bathroom as she spritzed some sweet-smelling perfume that Sprite did not like (as shown from her disgusted crinkled expression). "You might as well hunt around for a school you'll want to go to. You're a human now. You have to actually do that sort of thing."

This, of course, ignited a tired groan from the youngest eternal. "Are you kidding me?! I would be able to teach all the classes. I know everything!"

Sersi grinned down at her little sister, who had taken to laying on the floor. She bent down into a squat next to her. "Spoken like a true teenager." She was still grinning as she planted a sweet kiss on her forehead. "Find a school, right? There's some spare quid for takeaway on the table there."

"I'm gonna spend all your money!" Sprite singsonged sarcastically as Sersi walked to the front door.

"I love you!" Sersi called back with a playful giggle.

The oldest sister turned to go to the front door, but before her fingertips could even wrap around the bronze doorknob, it bust open and a blur of sound, golden flares, and red raced past her. Still in motion, despite the blur coming to a stop in the middle of the living room, the door slammed against the hallway wall. A dent from the doorknob sourly ridged into the pale green paint. Well, there goes the security deposit. Sersi thought with a frown.

Sprite was sitting up suddenly as Makkari was rapidly signing something to her. Her hands were shaking, her face was pale and stricken with some unholy emotion that Sersi couldn't quite place on the younger eternal's face. She'd never seen it before.

No, that's wrong. She'd seen it before. It had nearly been twelve-hundred years – long enough for even an eternal to forget – but yes, Sersi had seen that expression on the speedster's face. The first Crusade. A series of bloody desert battles, and amidst all that war and chaos, fire and brimstone, desert-living deviants pried themselves from the sand and quickly developed a taste for the blood of war.

A deviant had nearly taken off Druig's face as he stopped the humans from running into its waiting jaws. Makkari had raced to him, shoving him out of the deviant's way as she tackled him to the desert sand. She held tight to him for days after that. Arms clutched around his. Eyes never quite far from his face. Druig laughed it off as the speedy goddess having a "crush" on him – Oi, cakes, since when did ya' love me so much? – and while Makkari endured his jibes, it was clear something had been shaken inside of her.

Makkari didn't worry much about anyone else in their immortal family. They all were apt at taking care of themselves or sensible enough to seek each other out. Except Druig. Fiercely independent and prickly to the touch, Druig had been woven with an inevitable self-destructive soul. He cared little for his own life, and perhaps dangerously, cared more about making a point. After all, he had stopped an entire war just to convey his anguish to Ajak. If he wasn't an immortal god, he probably would've gotten himself killed.

To most of them, this made Druig insufferable, but Makkari… Makkari melted him. He smiled more when she was around. He made jokes out of humor, not out of spite. His eyes softened to show the green that hid in the sharp and pointy blues of his eyes. Makkari very well knew Druig was not as invincible as he painted himself. His self-destructive tendencies came from a stubborn, but soft heart that loved far too much, one she had long sworn to protect.

No, Makkari never feared for any of them. Except for the boy who never cared about his own obstinately immortal life.

Something was wrong.

"Makkari," Sersi spoke softly, signing along with her words. "What is it?" Her eyes shifted from her sister's to Sprite's. Sprite shook her head as Sersi glanced to her. Makkari had been too upset to understand.

Sersi crossed the room, grasping hold of Makkari's smaller brown hands in her own. She squeezed them warmly as she offered her little sister a comforting smile. "It's okay." She whispered to her. "Whatever it is – we can deal with."

Makkari's eyes filled with thick, uncontrolled tears that pooled along her bottom lashes. At the sight of her sister's tears, Sersi was reminded of the Nile's fertile waterbed as the river came rushing back, flowing and ebbing into the farming canals, uncontrolled and forceful. Panic had struck long, tight lines into the speedster's face. She slowly took shaky breaths in as she brought her quivering hands up out of Sersi's grip.

"Druig." She signed his name. Her fingers fluttered like wild creatures of the sky as she struggled to compose herself. Hands shaking, eyes wide and glommed with tears, the goddess held her breath. "Druig's been taken."

Chicago – 2024

"Screened-in porches are my favorite invention ever!" Makkari signed to Phastos and Ben with an enthusiastic grin on her face. "Outside-and-inside at the same time?! What could be better?!"

Phastos rolled his eyes dramatically at Makkari's commentary, but nonetheless he took Ben's hand in his. He nodded to his husband as he explained: "She's saying screened-in porches are her favorite invention, and she's a big fan of the fact that they are multipurpose in being both inside-and-outside."

Kingo snorted. "You'll have to excuse Makkari – she just found out about rotating doors the other day at the post office. She would've been in there for another six hours." He rolled his eyes in exasperation, only to yell, "Ow!" as Makkari hit him on the shoulder with an irritated look on her face.

Ben smile widened as he warmly chuckled, humored by both Makkari's enthusiasm over the couple's custom-made screened-in dining room as well as well as Kingo's remark. Phastos had been reluctant at first to build their dining room "outside" ("You're gonna yell at me in six months about how it's too cold, and how you'd rather just eat dinner in bed, and like, that's fine, but just mark my words: I'll be right, and you'll be wrong.") Ben, however, was adamant that it would be tasteful, which according to Phil's little sister, it was. All that to say: He was the one who was right.

"Screened-in porches are also my favorite invention. You know, he's much too modest to admit it, but Phil designed this one himself." He squeezed his husband's knee with a pointed look and an adorable eyebrow raise. See?

Phastos rolled his eyes. Again. "Babe, I have designed, like, three thousand screened-in porches in my lifetime."

Ben gave Phastos a look. "Okay, maybe you're not that modest."

Makkari's jaw dropped open in both awe and amusement at this shared admiration for screened-in porches. She was about to go on, but Kingo, sitting beside her, put a hand over his little sister's. "Yes, yes, you both really LOVE screened-in porches. We got it." The younger sister gave Kingo a dark glare to which the older eternal stuck his tongue out at her in response. Very mature, as usual.

Only just having split ways with one another a few days ago, all of them were back together again. Begrudgingly, Phastos had agreed to host the immortal family at his home in Chicago. After all, he was the oldest with Ikaris and Gil gone, he might as well try to put a teensy bit of effort into leadership. Not a lot, but just enough to show that he cared. Maybe, like, the minimal amount.

"Why do I even have to be here?" Sprite asked as she played with the remnants of her meatloaf on her plate. "I'm not even an eternal anymore. I shouldn't have to come to these stupid family meetings."

"Whoa! Somebody's cranky. Must be up past their bedtime." Kingo teased to a stone-faced Sprite. At her silent and deadly stare, his own face grew serious. "You know what? You're a troll."

Sersi, bouncing Jack in between her legs as the little boy pretended his matchbox cars were caught amidst an earthquake, turned to her little sister. "We're here, Sprite, because Druig is our brother and our friend and someone who is very special to all of us. So, we're going to make a plan, together, and find him." She said slowly as she searched for the right words to reason with the teenager, but all the same, Sersi was Sersi. Her compassion was clearly communicated with how she addressed her little sister.

Despite her exasperated sigh, Sprite mumbled something about Sersi being "kind of" right under her breath.

Kingo huffed. "I mean, we don't have to rush to find him or anything. Druig's still kind of an ass—" His words died on his tongue when he saw Makkari's absolutely stunning decimating glare. She could have taken after Ikaris and shot rays of death out of that gaze. "—asssssbolutely nice guy – is what I was going to say, Makkari."

Thena silently watched her siblings all cajole and chuckle, as well as casually sign to one another with the awareness that Makkari was listening. Her gaze was usually muddy in the dark greens of her irises, but now her gaze seemed to have darkened almost to the point of being obsidian. She traced a dip in the table with her thumb as she felt the voices in her head begin to whisper and speak restlessly. Like Sprite, she wasn't sure why she was here.

The war goddess knew she should've cared more. Druig and her had once been quite close, but she could say that about any of them sitting at this table. She used to be quite close to all of them, really. Until someone else moved inside her head and made it their own. I don't recognize myself in Sprite's illusions, she had told Gilgamesh. I hardly recognize myself when I'm with any of them to begin with, she thought now.

"So, here's an honest question," Phastos began as he leaned back in his chair, resting his arm casually on the back of Ben's. "Are we sure that Druig just didn't, ya' know, brainwash Makkari and everyone else into thinking he was—" he made a 'poofing' motion with his hands. "That seems a whole lot likelier than him just being zapped out of existence."

"But why would he do that? He's never been able to use it on any of us before." Makkari volunteered.

"Yeah, but four days ago Sersi killed a Celestial." Sprite added helpfully, with a sweet, but sarcastic smile in her sister's direction. Yes, she was, in fact, stilljust a little bit bitter.

"With the power of that said Celestial, whilst we were all in the Uni-Mind." Sersi argued, but seemingly decided to ignore Sprite's sarcastic intonation.

"All I'm sayin' is – our powers are changing. We're changing. We didn't think we were capable of much else besides being immortal either, and then two of us died within the span of a week." Phastos concluded as he spread his hands to show he was just offering a suggestion.

"I meaannnnn, not to start a fight – even though ya' know, I would win – Sprite's the manipulator. She could create illusions." Kingo raised his eyebrows in suspicion as he gestured to his little sister.

Sprite shot Kingo an icy glare. "Are you really gonna suggest that?"

"It wouldn't be the first time you've made illusions out of us. And unlike Druig, you could make us disappear out of thin-air." Phastos looked pointedly at Sprite from beneath the lens of his glasses. He was, of course, referring to the fact that she had helped Ikaris to escape The Domo by shrouding them in a swarm of locusts.

At Phastos' suggestion, all the eyes in the room seemed to turn to Sprite. As impossible as it seemed, Sprite had willingly betrayed them. There was a certain distrust between them that hadn't been there before, or perhaps there always was, but now Ikaris had gone and made it evident: None of them were particularly good at trust.

With an annoyed groan, Sprite threw her hands up. "Excuse me – could all of you stop talking like I'm not here? For one, I'm human now. My illusions don't work anymore."

Kingo gave her a look.

"They don't!"

"It couldn't have been Sprite," Sersi interjected, coming to her little sister's defense. "She's been with me this entire time."

While everyone seemed a bit relieved by Sprite's defense, Thena was growing tired of this. Her siblings' picky and chicken-headed discussion, the camaraderie, the ease. It made her feel as if she was stuck, closed-in without a way out. There is no better solution to a squabble than with a knife.

With a frustrated grunt, she summoned a cosmic blade into her hand and – BRHAM! – stabbed it right down through the dip in the table. Everyone shot back in their seats, with Kingo even leaping to his feet – "WHY DO WE STILL LET HER KEEP KNIVES?!"

Unfortunately, cosmic knife edges and human-made faux wooden tabletops do not blend particularly well. There was a trepidatious creaking of the table's structure as the space knife sliced through the cheap wood. A low humming sang with the knife as it rested, a ring of Thena's own power. Her weapons made a kind of soundless music, even when she wasn't using them.

Ben's eyes grew wide-eyed at the knife that had now gored their dining table. "Jack, uh, baby, why don't you come with me, huh?" He stretched his arms out to he and Phastos' son, while Jack's eyes mirrored his father's with wide-eyed disbelief.

"That, was, AWESOME!" He exclaimed as his father pulled him away from Thena's glowing knife and into the other room.

Phastos looked up to the sky as if to pray and shook his head, releasing the heaviest sigh. They had just gotten that one from Pottery Barn after Ikaris' dumbass had destroyed the last one. "Okay, one, no weapons in my house. Two, Thena – the table." Phastos snapped with exhaustion.

Uncaring of what she had destroyed, Thena left her knife in the tabletop, letting it hum with her power. "As far as I'm concerned, all of you are refusing to see the truth."

Unsure if her sister was as lucid as she seemed, Sersi tried to reach for Thena's hand. The older sister's eyes grew with concern. Thena seemed clear-eyed, but they had thought she was more or less conscious of her own actions in stranger situations. Now, here she was carelessly throwing knives around. "Thena, are you—"

"No, I'm not alright." She hissed at Sersi. The war goddess was sick of being coddled, babied. She wanted to be angry, she wanted to be rigid with madness. Her green eyes blazed with unspeakable power. A great poet in 15th Century Venice had once wrote a sonnet about Thena's eyes as he watched her slice the head off a great and terrible deviant. Most of it had been lost, except for the phrase blood-red in green stars.

"You all seem to have forgotten something about me. When the Athenians named me as their goddess, they didn't just do it because I killed a lot of deviants and monsters."

There was a sharp, but awkward pause as they all exchanged glances with one another in skepticism. Thena had killed a lot of deviants in her heyday.

Thena sighed. This time, it was her turn to roll her eyes. "Alright, fine. I did, but that's beside the point. They made me their goddess because war is not won by crude massacre and toil. It's won by strategy. Planning. This wasn't an illusion, this wasn't a ploy to manipulate, it was strategy."

Sprite raised an eyebrow. "You think this was an act of war?"

"Of course it was." Thena said plainly to the response of her siblings' gaping stares. "It's what I would do." She shrugged callously like a great, but bloodthirsty queen who casually ordered the death of thousands.

Makkari's eyes narrowed. A sharp look crossed her features. "What do you mean?" An emotion that seemed like anger sparked across her face, but anger on Makkari, much like her speed, was quick. It was short-lived, but so terribly, violently felt. It was as if Makkari felt the full force of human and divine emotion. Only for a few moments, sure, but a few moments to Makkari was a lifetime in the blink of a human eye. In those short, tenuous moments, Makkari felt the stormy vengeance, the quaking rage, swallowing, all-consuming anger of all great human tragedy and war. In its wake, a crushed look formed across her sweet features as exhausted tears threatened to fall.

"Picking us off one-by-one." Thena answered her sister. "We're already down a couple, anyway." Thena darkly added. Her hand reached up to toy with Gilgamesh's old signet ring that hung around her neck. "Three, I suppose. If Ikaris is still alive, that is. Which reminds me." She summoned yet another golden weapon out of thin air. This time, a massive golden battle axe, not dissimilar from Thor's Stormbreaker. "Phastos, you promised me you'd take me to him."

Phastos shook his head in disbelief. Oh, yeah, Thena was a real bitch sometimes. He'd forgotten that. "Thena, we can't just leave now." Exasperated with his sister, he stubbornly leaned back in his chair. She may be the god of human war, but he was the god of this goddamn house.

"Sure we can." She smirked with a small snort of cynical humor. "I'm done with playing good on this planet. I want him dead."

Makkari stood from her place at the table with that increasingly desolate expression growing across her face. "What about Druig?"

Thena looked her little sister dead in the eyes. Stabbing green upon soft, fertile brown. "That is not my fight."

Now it was Sersi's turn to show her anger with her younger sister. "How can you say that, Thena?! He's part of this family. He's our brother."

The war goddess stared her down. "Sersi, it's not that I don't care, but Ikaris killed Ajak. He is the reason Gilgamesh is dead." A crack webbed into the power of her voice as she felt emotion catch in her throat. "Don't any of you seethat?! You begged me to remember time-and-time again. Well, here I am, in all that I am. Memories or not, I can never forget that he's dead." A bold tear, brave enough to expose itself on the sharp cheekbones of the war god, blazed down her face. Thena quickly wiped it away.

Makkari's eyes glimmered with heartbroken tears as she turned her face from Thena's. Unlike her older sister, Makkari had no qualms to showing the lovely vulnerability of her expressions. She wiped a small, precious tear from her cheek. To make her smile, Druig probably would've caught it on his thumb and called it treasure. But she was not smiling now. The betrayal on her face was cracking like a canon across a dry desert, breaking apart the soft caverns of her face like rocks falling from a ledge.

"Thena, you aren't the only one who lost him." Kingo said softly. His face was mournful, but he was speaking the truth. Despite his humor, Kingo always spoke the truth when it mattered. "Gil was family to all of us."

Thena's eyes flared as a sound between a hiss and a gasp escaped through her teeth. Instead of throwing a knife at Kingo's face, she closed her eyes.

Thena, SAY it.

Stay.

Good. You're okay. I'll be back. His fingertips threaded themselves from hers. She wanted to scream. She wanted to scream louder than the voices in her head. But she couldn't. She just stood there. Back against a tree. Nails digging into bark. Shaking. Quivering. Crying. He died.

And she just watched.

Thena, the war goddess, who watched her entire world bleed out. Without moving a single muscle.

The overwhelming headache as the Mahd Wy'ry threatened to overrun her was welling like a pressure cooker in the back of her head. "Fine." She whispered, a sound barely louder than her own breath as she opened her eyes. Her gaze had sunk black as she met the accusation of their stares. "If you won't take me, Phastos, I'll go myself."

Without another word, the war goddess walked out of the room.

Crete – 850 B.C.

Long after she was meant to be asleep, Ariadne sat beside the door of her bedroom. While the tapers had long been blown out, the coverings and soft downy pillows of her mattress hadn't been touched. Instead of sleeping, the little girl had placed her ear to the slightly ajar door in an attempt to listen to the buzz and low hum of voices in the library below.

"…does…mean?" She heard her aunt ask with that strange accent of hers, but the words were muffled, hard to grasp.

With a frustrated huff, Ariadne pulled herself out of her room and crawled into the shadows of the hall. If she could reach the dark staircase, she'd have adequate cover from their all-too sharp eyes as she peaked over the edge of the low-rise marble railing. Scooting near the edge, she pulled herself up justenough to see the tops of the faces in the library below.

"It means that we have to protect her. Arishem has shown her his face. That is a gift in and of itself." Ajak observed. "We would do well not to question the Celestials." This time, rather than a pensive observation, her grandmother's words came across as a warning.

"But this has never happened before, Ajak. We're— We can't breed." Her uncle concluded definitively. "What does that make her?"

"Aye, soundin' like Ikaris the Doctor now." Druig smugly teased his older brother. "What ya' mean to say, mate, is that when we get the ride," he winked suggestively at his brother, "we don't have children." Druig's vulgar sarcasm echoed against the marble shelves of the library. "Or does sayin' the word make you uncomfortable?"

There was a pause in the conversation. A long pause as Ikaris stepped closer to Druig. Ariadne could tell from the shape and stiffness in his shoulders, beneath his cream-colored tunic, that he was tense with anger. As young as she was, Ariadne had gathered that Druig was particularly deft at pushing all of Ikaris' buttons.

Before Ikaris could respond, Druig's cynically amused laughter rang out. "Gonna shoot me with those pretty eyes of y'rs?"

"Ikaris." Sersi's soft voice seemed to reach for her uncle, tugging him back into place. She stepped into Ariadne's view, placing a soft hand on his chest as she looked up into his face. Ikaris' shoulders softened at her touch as he glanced down at her. He'd pull himself back. Just a little bit. Just for her.

"Has Arishem spoken to you about Ariadne, Ajak?" Sersi asked quietly as she stepped away from Ikaris.

"No. Never." Ajak admitted, but she seemed terse. Too quick of an answer for too large of a question. "The map he has given her… It's… Not for any of us besides her."

"What d'ya mean, Ajak?" Ikaris snapped. "She's an eternal. Even if she's born, she's like us. If she's loyal, she'll tell us what she knows."

"Enough." Her mother's voice sliced through the conversation. Powerful. Deadly. Sharp as the knives that sprung from her hands. "I don't care what she is, Ikaris." The cold, dangerous tone of her voice sounded like a sword being slid beneath the soft skin of one's chin.

"Whether she's an eternal, human, or something in-between, she is my child. I bore her, I named her. She is the flesh of my flesh." The low-pitch hum of one of her mother's weapons cut through the air. A golden sword was now pointed at her uncle, flickering and buzzing with the war goddess' power. A violent, silent song, one the little girl knew all too well. "Speak of her like that again and I will sever your head from your body. Do you understand?"

Ariadne stirred at her mother's words. Nerves flitted in her stomach like waterbugs on the surface of still and stagnant water. They're talking about me. They're all talking about me. She moved closer to the edge of the staircase. Her vision was still slightly obstructed by the dark shapes of the marble railing. If she could just scoot a little closer to the edge—

SLAHP!

A large, dusty lump of scrolls that had been resting on the top of the towering bookshelf crashed to the floor as Ariadne accidentally brushed against it with her foot. Every set of eyes from the eternals below looked up at her.

Before they even had a chance to call out to her, the child raced up the stairs, practically sprinting as fast as her Aunt Makkari. Reaching her bedroom, she slammed the door shut and dove under the thick Alexandrine silk coverings. Breathing heavy and fast, Ariadne bit her lip to keep herself from making a sound.

If she's loyal, she'll tell us what she knows.

We can't breed. What does that make her?

She pressed her face down into the pillows to silence the sound of her searing panic. What does that make her? What does that make her?

Straining her ears, Ariadne tried to hear the sound of footsteps on the split marble floor outside of her bedroom, but she couldn't hear anything. They must hate me. Hot tears filled her eyes. They're all going to leave me. That's what they must have been discussing after she left. What else could it be? Her tears had managed to dampen the soft plush stuffing of the pillow she hid her face in. She could picture it now. All alone in this world she'd been born into by divine gods of another planet, left upon the dark shores of Naxos, abandoned by those she loved most.

Eventually, just as she knew it would, the door creaked open. Ariadne held her breath. Please. Please. Please. Don't breathe. Footsteps drew closer and closer to the edge of her bed, before a large thump dropped onto the soft padding andmoved the wooden bedframe, causing a mournful creak of the weak wood to ensue under the weight.

"Augh. Agaya, Phastos is gonna have to build you a better bed next time. This is terrible. My ass is way too big for this." Her father commented as he looked down at the small body hidden beneath the thick bed linins. A small smile pulled at his lips. "You gonna scoot over, or am I gonna have to sit on you?"

At her father's request, Ariadne pulled the covers off of herself, bouncing up from the bed of silk and pillows like a baby bird popping up from a bundled nest. Her hair, wavy and wild and jet-black, was even more mussed from being hidden beneath her nest of coverings. Double-lidded and wide, Ariadne's eyes were a pulsing, explosive green that even now seemed to shimmer in the dim silver light of the moon. The rest of her face was a collection of parts she'd inherited from her parents. That nose – her father. Those lips – her mother. The round, childish cheeks – another kissless inheritance of her father. Using those features she'd been given, she fixed her father with an extremely serious look. Brows furrowed and her mouth curved into a severe grimace.

"Ah! There she is. I thought you jumped out the window." Her father chuckled as he reached to ruffle her hair. His massive palm practically fit over the entirety of her head.

Ignoring her father's teasing, she glanced down at her hands. "Appa," she frowned as she toyed with the stitching on the silken blanket. "Are you and Mamá going to disown me?" Her Greek accent was thick, despite her English words. She'd been raised in this land, after all.

Her father looked pensive for a moment, sticking out his lip in thought. "You know, we thought about it."

Ah, yes. This was one of those times when Ariadne knew her father was teasing her because he thought her question was too silly. This was, however, not one of those times when Ariadne would laugh at her father's teasing. She was serious. This was serious.

"It's a true question, Appa." She cried suddenly with tears in her eyes. "Are you going to abandon me under the stars? Drop me in the ocean? Leave me?" Her lip quivered with inconsolable worry. Tears flowed down those soft cheeks like sticky honey breaking through comb.

At her existential panic, her father's face morphed into one of undeniable, unconditional, fervent love. He'd unknowingly crossed a line. "Agaya." Baby. He breathed the word out in a whisper as wrinkles and lines of concern shifted across his face like the shaking of the sea. Without another word, he hulled himself up onto her all-too tiny bed as his massive arms wrapped around his all-too tiny daughter. Ariadne buried her tear-streaked face in her father's garb, clutching him tightly as he pulled the silk covers around her.

"Ariadne," he spoke her name slowly and succinctly, "your mother would tear the stars out of the sky if it meant keeping you safe."

The little girl sniffed as she poked her head out from beneath her father's arm. "What would you do?"

"What would I do?" Looking down at his daughter, this warm-bodied, living, breathing, beating, singing, dancing, glowing, serious-faced little girl, this child he and the woman he loved had made, conjoined and twisted, beloved and precious. Precious. A word he never quite understood until his own daughter. God, children of one's own flesh were so specifically precious. "I'd hide behind your mom."

"Appa!" Ariadne indignantly decried.

Her father cackled at the deeply unhappy frown on her face. Oh, yeah, that was definitely her mother's expression. She was no longer crying at least. "You know the story of Atlas, don't you?"

Ariadne nodded. The god who held the world on his shoulders. Sprite had told it to her when she was small.

"I'd hold the entire world for you, kid." Profound meaning hardened his features into a paternal devotion that could not be expressed in-between the sounds and voices of human speech. That much love rarely could. "Now, can you do something for me?"

Ariadne swallowed and offered her father a nod. Yes. Her big, angular green eyes gazed up at him, luminous and large and wet with unshed tears.

"You don't listen to em', okay?" He nodded towards the door where the others had been talking. "Ikaris, your uncle, he loves you, but… Some people struggle with love. It's— It's hard for them. They can't always make sense of it because love isn't always obvious." He paused as if in thought. "But that's not the case with your mom and I, Ariadne."

With one hand, he cupped her cheek and looked directly into her eyes. And then, in Korean, he spoke a vow to his daughter that he meant forever: "Know this, daughter, and know it well. Don't you ever, ever doubt our love for you."

His daughter's eyes filled with emotion as she solemnly nodded. Her father meant what he said. She would know it for the rest of her life. She wrapped her arms around her father's chest as he craned his neck to kiss the back of her head. "Will you stay with me, Appa?"

"For all of forever, agaya."

A long while later, Ariadne's door opened once more as Thena appeared in the shaft of light that poured over the threshold. With silent feet, she soundlessly stepped through and closed the door behind her, hands gently pushing the massive double-pronged oak door into place.

Inside, the room was full of sleeping, peaceful sounds. The white noise of the waves crashing outside the estate's towering limestone turrets, intermingled with the rumbling snores of Gilgamesh. Then, even softer, the slow breathing of her daughter at rest. Thena's regal and serious face softened at the sight as she drew closer. The "mighty" and "epic" warrior god reduced to a sleepy father with a tiny child nestled in between his chest and his arm. A silk blanket had been pulled up around her to keep her warm against the chilly sea breeze that blew in through the open triangular windows.

Softly and with the most care, she gently placed her hand on Gil's arm. He stirred in his sleep, tightening his hold around Ariadne before falling back into the slow and deep rhythm of his breathing. The war goddess rolled her eyes. What a mighty and epic warrior, indeed.

She went around to the other side of the bed and gently slid in beside their sleeping child. Trying not to move the bed, she managed to slip into the last square space upon a mattress that was clearly not designed for two very tall, very muscular space warrior aliens. Wrapping her leg over Gil's, she pulled herself closer, arms entangling around the back of Ariadne, while her hand came to rest on her husband's chest.

At her touch and motion, Gilgamesh's eyes flickered, eyelashes shifting and fluttering as he opened his eyes a crack. At the sight of her, a sleepy, but loving smile pulled itself across his face. "Where'd you bury Ikaris' body?" He whispered to her as he turned towards her, their faces a pillow length away from one another.

Thena chuckled as she ran her fingertips along his arm. His muscle twitched and shifted at her touch. "I threw him into the sea."

"I wouldn't put it past you." He whispered with a humored smile as he closed his eyes, pressing his forehead against hers.

They were silent as they listened to each other's breathing and the sounds of the waves, while seabirds and gulls cried out to one another in the starless sky. Ariadne stirred as she turned away from her father and buried her face in her mother's chest, wrapping her arms around Thena's torso. She sleepily mumbled something in Greek before she drifted back off to sleep.

"How is she?" Thena asked as she moved her hand from Gil's arm to her daughter's back, rubbing the soft, sweet skin that she had so violently threatened to protect only a matter of hours earlier.

Gil watched Thena's movements with careful eyes. "How do you think?"

"What do we do?" Her eyes shifted to his. In the quiet darkness of that bedroom, with their tiny child nestled between them, Thena allowed herself to be vulnerable. Her hard and serious and fiercely sharp face softened as a glittering of tears appeared on the edges of her eyelashes. "How do we protect her?"

Gilgamesh shifted closer as he wiped her tears with the soft pad of his thumb. His hand rested on her cheek, warm and calloused against the smooth skin of her face. Thena could feel the power that rested just beneath his skin. All that raging, godly power that could sock deviants into the sky, lift a building off of its place in the sand, and break through the walls of Jericho 'til' they all came tumbling down' (as the story goes, anyway). But here he was, all that power, all that strength, and he touched her with the softness of flower petals brushed against a sleeping child's cheek.

"The same we do everything, naekkeo: Together."

Kvch – 2024

This place, a desolate scape of ruin and ash and shadow, was once one of the most traveled planets in the galaxy. Kvch had been home to towering skyscrapers that shifted and moved along the grid of the planet with the phases of the planet's three suns, strange technographic creatures that were part-flesh, part-machine, and vast luscious jungles of living robotic fauna. Before the destruction of most of their planet and species, Kvch belonged to a race of the single-most high-tech sentient androids in the universe.

Although their technology was disbelievingly complex, the Kvchians were a simple people. They mostly relied on themselves, only trading their most complex technologies for forms of commerce with other neighboring planets. Less focused on interplanetary relations, they were dead set on expanding their power source: a landlocked grid system that was powered by the First, Second, and Third Suns of their planet. The grid system, a winding and complicated power source that endued the soil of their planet with a nearly infinite supply of power, became coveted by their neighbors. Their technology, the data, the wiring, and the source of it became highly sought after. In short, the Kvchians had invented a power source that ran their small planet, but with enough left over to supply energy sources to an entire planetary system.

The peoples of neighboring planets began to raid Kvch, pillaging its cities and murdering its people. They picked apart their grand design and stole the necessary pieces to supply their own power sources. It wasn't long before Kvch was nothing but an empty planet full of long-dead robots and busted, useless technology. Without the functional grid system, the suns of Kvch made the land inhospitable, especially to humans.

Little gravity existed in this place, and what little there was, was corrupted by the rusting oxidation of Kvch's once high-powered cities. Even a planet made of machines did not rot well. There was no day or night on Kvch, not entirely a problem to a planet full of androids, but to other flesh-made creatures it impacted the supply of necessary nutrients that existed in the suns' rays and made biological cycles impossible to regulate.

It makes sense then that it was upon this dead planet, with rotten sentient technology, and the skeletal bones of godlike machines, that Thanos found himself.

Cast off and exiled before, Thanos had long lived on dead planets. There was something comforting in them. The idea of all that life perished because of improper planning had once made him feel powerful. Ambitious, even. If he could just figure out the formula to solve mass extinction, perhaps he could save the universe. With just the Snap of his fingers.

Yes, it was true. He had once considered himself a savior, but in the long journey of his life, he had considered himself many things. "Savior" was the latest in a long chain of labels he had sought to define himself with.

The old titan had no more labels. He would no longer define himself by the conceptions of common language. Language limited what he was, what he offered.

Thanos sat in the center of a Kvchian temple upon the tracings of a faded 8-handed star, a centerpiece and marking on most old Kvchian tech. The temple was a decaying structure that had once been a place of worship and divinity. Like many other species, the Kvchians had worshipped the Celestials. Those towering foreign space creatures that were inhuman enough to inspire divinity.

Thanos smirked to himself but seemed to shift his eyes to someone out of view. "Tell me, little one, do our gods still exist when no one is left to worship them?"

Out of the shadows, a woman emerged. Her face had been seen before. Long before. On another world, in another time.

Lifetimes ago, her features had been softer, perhaps more beloved. But she had been alone for so long. Centuries. Memories had faded. Loved ones no longer mattered. And the collection of features upon her face that once marked her heritage were no longer important. Her eyes, wide and tired and double-lidded, had once been a great merging of green like the stuff of the earth, but had long since muddled into dark and unidentifiable colors.

"Those are the most dangerous kind." The woman answered him. A faint accent of something former existed in her voice, but it was merely a ghost of what once was. Her eyes flickered to the space debris that rose out of the fallen dust of planet. "They sleep, waiting for the day when they will rise again."

"Mmm insightful as always." He offered her a smile. "Why don't we wake them then?"

The woman nodded. A wan, voiceless motion. She knelt to the sand and placed her palms alongside the complicated pattern of the ancient Kvchian tech. The landlocked grid began to glow, gold chords that extended from the woman's fingers began to light and shock with energy. Technology that had been broken and useless for so long was now igniting with power and life.

The grid shot bright lights all across the grey ashy sand of the planet, zigzagging like living sprites shooting up through the data mines of the sediment. The light was coursing towards a strange structure that seemed to look like something out a dystopian sci-fi hellscape. There, upon three platforms, were raised sarcophagi connected to massive networks of power. These caskets, large enough to hold something slightly larger than a human, began to glow with cosmic golden magic, basking in elaborate, bathing gold. The designs of the Celestials began to weave and spiral across them in cosmic circles and symbols.

Thanos' grimace began to grow into a wide, dangerous smile. He walked across the interstellar designs in the sand to the first of the strange alien caskets. His large fingertips snapped back the lid as a grand smile poured over his lips.

"I am done with these bleak attempts of salvation. Now is a no age at all, Ariadne. Only peace."

The sarcophagus, glowing and awash with the goddess' power, revealed the sleeping face of the boy with the storied name. The one who the myths called—

"Ikaris."

At the sound of his name, his eyes snapped open.