Welcome one and all to another chapter of The Philosophy of Fear. Where we find out the means and the motives to the downfall of Paititi as well as the mystery behind those touched by death.
On with the show.
Harry Potter, The caverns below Paititi.
In the darkness of the cavern, the silence was all but deafening to Harry after Mictecacihuatl's statement. "You are my death that I welcome," the Goddess had said, her words echoing around in Harry's mind like exploding fireworks sending a shiver of rage and a lick of fire across his mind as he bottled up both familiar feelings before the front door slammed once more. His hands shake, but he doesn't know why, in anger? In fear? In excitement? Harry couldn't tell because he pushed it all down inside himself with the rest of the things that he didn't- that he couldn't- deal with at the moment.
He was fine.
"No," Harry said, clear and dead as he voiced his refusal to whatever the Watcher of Bones had just asked from him. "I'm- I'm not here to kill anyone. I just want to get into Paititi, hunt down my mum, smack her upside the head before grabbing our shite and leaving," he said, his eyes wandered around the cavern, refusing to look at the skinless woman. Mictecacihuatl is quiet for a moment, looking at Harry like he was her last hope, and that hope had denied her.
"I've waited a long time for one touched by death to open the door," she said, her voice almost a soft whisper. "To show themselves before me so I may ask for the end of my watch. It has been centuries of pain, of a slow and near unbearable death of being forgotten, of being shunted away into this place," Mictecacihuatl said, the pain and hopelessness evident in her voice as she looks down at Harry. "And now one has shown themselves before me, covered in the remains of my kin, but denies me my final rest," her following laugh came out harsh and broken. "Ironically looking for the entrance to the Temple of Quetzalcoatl which lies behind my throne," she said with a shake of her head.
Harry doesn't speak for a moment and continues to look away from the skinned goddess in front of him. Lost in his own thoughts and memories as the door in his mind slams again and again.
"You shouldn't want to die," Harry whispered, his own memories of Mag Turied playing in his mind, of what he had lost.
The goddess looked at Harry with pain and sorrow in her eyes. "You've suffered loss, haven't you, Nopil?" she asked, though to Harry it sounded more like a statement.
Sirius looked at him as he flew through the air. The smile on his face was happiness and fulfillment, his eyes soft and proud just before the flames -Slam-.
"NOOOOOOOO!" The roar of the Lioness shook the dilapidated castle, she charged forward with arms outstretched. To protect him, to shield him, to make sure he lived at the cost of her own -Slam-.
"Stay out of my head," Harry snapped at the flayed goddess, anger flashed in his now amber eyes. His hand shook as he gripped the polearm, his teeth gritted as his anger was shown on his face. But Mictecacihuatl's own face turns confused for a moment before her sad smile returns to her lips.
"I am not in your mind, Nopil. I lack the power to even do something as small as that," the flayed goddess said as she stepped around Harry and the Hunter was hard pressed to miss the grimace of pain that Mictecacihuatl was in with every step she took. "But the pain is obvious when I look into your eyes, Nopil. I've seen it far too much during our height to not know what it is, grief and pain," she said before turning back to Harry, pity in her eyes as she did. "You've yet to grieve for those who you have lo-" she tried to tell Harry, but his own sharp words cut her off.
"Shut up," Harry said, his head whipped around to glare at Mictecacihuatl. Finally looking at the mournful goddess, her black eyes glistening with pain unspoken as she looks back at him. "I don't need to be told what I should or shouldn't be doing, especially by you because I am fine!" Harry nearly shouts at the skinless goddess.
Mictecacihuatl just smiled sadly at him. "No, you are not," she said quietly. "You bury your grief deep within yourself in hope of not facing what has passed- of who has passed. You deny the act in hope of waking up to a world where those who have died are returned to you in a vain hope that everything will go back to how it was before," she told him, her words ringing with a truth that Harry didn't want to hear.
"Shut up!" Harry yelled, not wanting to hear her speak anymore, not wanting to hear the words as he shoved passed her and moved toward the door that sat behind the dais. "I don't need to hear this. If you want to die then jump off a cliff or go join the rest in the pit, I'm leaving," he said as he stormed across the room to the door, throwing his full weight behind it. But the door doesn't budge under the strength of the Hunt. "You said this was the back way into Paititi! How the fuck do I open the door!?" He hisses at the serpent angrily, but the snake doesn't answer him back, merely curled around the head of the polearm.
"You remind me of him," Mictecacihuatl said softly as she walked up behind Harry, one hand covering the wound on her chest. "He too refused to grieve, refused to accept, and in that denial he chose to usurp us and in the end doomed us all," she said, her voice never leaving the soft comforting tones, never angry with Harry.
"Who the hell are you even talking about?" Harry asked angrily as he turned back to the flayed goddess with a glare. He didn't want to play this game with her, he had only wanted to leave and help Artemis.
"Of my own son," Mictecacihuatl said mournfully, looking away from Harry in what could only be shame. "Of Inkarri," she said softly, causing Harry to pause as his eyes widened at her words.
Artemis, the Temple of Quetzalcoatl.
Their battle was set at a furious pace, at speeds few demigods could bring to bare, let alone follow with naked eyes. Her opponent, even ravaged by an endless curse and timeless age, had kept every ounce of his hard won skill and strength. Even without considering what the man had been cursed into becoming, he was a formidable opponent to Artemis as she was now.
Inkarri's body was littered with arrows. They punctured where vital organs once lay, wedged into his joints and in-between the disks of his spine, but the monster ignored them all in his unending assault against Artemis. Clawed hands moved like whips trying the claw and carved through the armor of her leather jacket, rotting the leather with barely a scratch to it. The curse spreads over anything alive or that once drew a breath. Artemis had prioritized dodging his swipes over anything else by either moving out of the way of the attack, kicking the undead prince away, or simply cutting off the offending limb with one of her hunting knives.
But therein lies a problem Artemis had noticed, Inkarri's limbs didn't stay gone. Thanks to the function of the curse laid upon Inkarri and Paititi as a whole by The End of All Things, Inkarri's limbs would regenerate almost as soon as she removed them.
Many monsters across the world could regenerate from wounds, be they mortal or minor. Some regenerated slowly over the course of countless centuries and some regenerated instantly, the cause for one over the other was simply the monster's diet. If a monster would consume a child of the gods and soon after lose an arm, it would regenerate near instantaneously. But if a monster had gone a long time without devouring a godling, the regeneration would be slow and could take a hundred years before the arm would return fully. Ingesting the blood of the divine would make any monster stronger, faster, and access to powers that they shouldn't have, it was the reason why they hunted Demigods after all.
But Inkarri wasn't a monster, he was a cursed mortal. His wounds didn't regenerate, they more reversed to the point before the damage was done, and thanks to the nearly endless power of the curse; he didn't have a limit to how often Inkarri could heal.
All of that alone was something Artemis was sure she could deal with, even trapped in a mortal form. But by some twist of fate or divine Providence, Inkarri was able to keep his magic.
Artemis dodges the claws of Inkarri that were aimed at her heart with a side step before swinging her blade upwards and severing his arm from his body once more. Inkarri roars in mindless rage once more as Artemis' foot shoots out, kicking the mindless undead in the back of his knee. Inkarri falls to one knee as Artemis flipped her hunting knife into a downward thrusting grip to impale Inkarri's head. But the black dust that rose with him when she first entered the room swirls before solidifying into a shield of black obsidian. The tip of her knife meets the shield sending cracks throughout the obsidian, but the volcanic rock holds firm and stops her attack.
Artemis almost growled in rage and would have if it wasn't for Inkarri wrapping his still remaining hand around her ankle and ripping Artemis off her feet. The cursed undead whipped her around before throwing her across the platform, possibly in the hope of tossing her right over the edge. But Artemis corrects herself in the air and lands, skidding across the tainted gold, on her feet. Her hunting knife put away and her bow was in hand before she had even stopped, inches from the platform's lip, before drawing three arrows from her quiver. She watches as the undead's arm is repaired in a flash of shadow reminding her of the damnable shadow loving bitch that was her son's teacher as she notches her bow.
The black dust collects once more around Inkarri, the small obsidian shield breaking down to join the floating particles, as they begin to form jagged blades. Four feet long, with hooks and barbs running across the blades with no form of handle, the six obsidian blades launch at Artemis at high speeds with a roar from Inkarri. She is forced to dive out of the way and roll into a crouched position as the blades slice cleanly through the golden edifice of Quetzalcoatl. If she was still standing there, the blades would have cleanly cut through the statue and her with little resistance. She lets her arrows fly, watching as they find home in Inkarri's thigh, heart, and left eye socket.
The poison Chimaera poison inside the tips of the arrows start working quickly, even with the dried out husk of a body Inkarri had. His flesh bubbles and melts from his bones, slowing him down just enough for Artemis to cross the distance and drive her knee into his face. Her knee meets the fetching of the arrow before driving through the monster's skull, Artemis had slung her bow over her shoulders during her charge and pulled out her hunting knives once more. With two quick movements after landing from her flying knee, she disarmed Inkarri in the most literal sense.
With her hands gripping her hunting knives in a reverse grip to make her hands sturdier, she begins to beat on the Corpo Seco. Her blows crush bones and break teeth as Artemis lets her infamous rage take over as she tries to beat the cursed undead to death with her bare hands.
"Well!?" She screams in her rage as blow after blow landed against the forgotten prince. "Answer me, Inkarri! Was it worth it?! Did you get what you wanted!? After you killed so many of your own people!? WAS IT WORTH IT!?" she roars in a rage, uncaring for how loud she was being, uncaring that Inkarri's wounds were repairing, uncaring for anything past her own rage- until…
Crack!
Pain shot through her hand as she felt something slice into her fingers, taking two of them from her. Artemis hisses in pain before pulling back her leg and booting Inkarri away from her, his claws slicing into her jeans but thankfully missing the skin. She looks down at her hand and sees her middle and pointer finger were sliced clean off her hand, blood now dripping onto the tainted gold floor.
"But…how!?" Artemis thinks to herself through her rage. She looks up to see the rotten form of Inkarri climb to his feet, and she understands how. Growing across the forgotten prince's face were black scales of jagged obsidian, it traveled across his hollowed cheeks, down his neck and all across his right arm. "Ah, that's how," Artemis thinks to herself as the black dust becomes more pronounced and gathers at an alarming rate and she prepares herself for Inkarri's next attack.
Harry Potter, The caverns below Paititi.
Harry stood frozen at the door, looking back at the flayed goddess whose face was unmoved by his surprise. He knew that the Mesoamerican Gods were all reflections of each other much like the Greek and Roman gods were. But never would he have guessed that the mother of the asshole who had gotten Paititi in the first place ended up as its last god watching over it all. Harry frowned as Mictecacihuatl's words finally filtered through his shock, his teeth gnashed together in anger.
"I'm nothing like him," Harry spat out at the flayed goddess. "For one, I'm not stupid enough to get a whole bloody city cursed," he said with a glare.
"Do you really think that was his goal?" Mictecacihuatl said, her cold dead eyes boring into Harry's. "That he wanted to curse Paititi, to kill his own pantheon?" She asked him, and for the first time anger replaced the sorrow and weariness in her voice as Harry froze. But it wasn't Mictecacihuatl's piercing look or her heated anger in her voice, but her words.
"Kill his own…" Harry said, disbelief echoed in his voice as he looked at Mictecacihuatl in horror. "You mean he did this? The- the- the pit of ash and rendered fat from every other god that was apart of your pantheon, that was him?!" Harry asked as his horror grew. He had no faith in any of the gods, and outside of Artemis and his teacher, he had no love for them either. He liked a fair few, but otherwise had no real care what they did so long as they weren't dragging him along into whatever crazy scheme they were hatching.
But Harry knew two undisputable facts:
One: The gods helped the world run as it should, keeping the world in order for the many domains that help build it.
Two: No matter how bad the gods could get, human beings were unquivocally worse then them if left unchecked. After all, if the United Kingdom and Ireland had its original gods returned when the Greeks and Romans left, the monster known as Voldemort would have been dealt with much, much sooner.
But to kill the very pantheon you belong too, the very thought was abhorrent to Harry. Nothing deserved the type of death he saw infected to the Mesoamerican Pantheon.
Mictecacihuatl tilted her head once more, confused as she looked at Harry's shocked and horrified face. "Have they not told you of our downfall? Have they not warned you of the dangers of mantling things you shouldn't?" She asked Harry and watched as the boy slowly shook his head. She sighed before she shook her own head in disappointment. "I see, so they buried the past in hopes history would not repeat itself," she said more to herself than to Harry.
"Allow me to correct this, and tell you the story of my child, of Inkarri," Mictecacihuatl said as she looked back at Harry, while she clasped her hands in front of her. "Inkarri grew up with his brothers and sisters, some mortal, some like him, but he had loved them all the same. He had respected and loved his father and honored the gods, as all children should. When he finally turned ten winters old, he was sent to Paititi like the rest of our children and was trained in the arts of war and creation. He grew into a fine man, I was…proud of him," she told Harry, sorrow in her voice as she spoke of the forgotten prince.
"But then the Spanish came, and brought with them their God and Guns," Mictecacihuatl continued, her eyes turning to the ground in shame for what had transpired in the past. "He fought them, or at least he tried to. But with better arms and armor, they slew our warriors and children easily. They used sickness on our cities that would not yield to them while masking the act in the form of gifts, Inkarri saw all of this and more. He lost his brothers to plague and steel, his sisters kidnapped and sold off, and his father executed. It had broken him in the end," she said, looking as if she wanted to cry, to weep for her son who had lost so much.
The sight twisted in Harry's chest, he had seen the same look on Artemis face just a few days ago as she all but begged him to talk to her.
But he hadn't because he was- purple eyes look at him with tears running down her cheeks. "Oh Harry, I don't think you know what fine is," she had told him, confusing him at the time, and confusing him even now- fine.
"He gathered his people under a banner of revenge and brought them here, to the city of Paititi. They were the first and only mortals to have stepped foot in the divine city at that time, we had not even allowed our kings in our golden city unless they were one of our children," Mictecacihuatl continued, heedless of Harry's internal conflict. "He had not wept once for the loss of his brothers, he had not cried out at the injustice brought on to his sisters, and he had not grieved for his fallen father. I wouldn't know why until after he made his way to our tallest temple in Paititi to call upon the power of the End of All Things; it was as simple as he refused to accept the truth," she said quietly as she turned back to Harry with a soft smile.
"What truth?" Harry asked, his hand slipping from the door as he looked toward the ground by Mictecacihuatl feet, to anywhere but her eyes that seemed to see right through him.
"The truth that all things die, Nopil. Be they mortal, Magician, monster, or God, all things have an end. That all stories have their final chapter," she said with a smile as she walked over to Harry, pain evident on her face with each step. She reaches out to place her hand on Harry's chin to draw his head up to look her in the eyes. "A truth that, much like Inkarri, you have refused to accept. Tell me, Nopil, who did you lose?" Mictecacihuatl asked Harry softly.
Harry opens his mouth to speak, the memories of Mag Turied once more playing in his mind. "Why didn't you stop him? You could have stopped him, couldn't you?" He asked instead, once more avoiding something he didn't want to accept.
"He was too lost in his anger and grief, even if it wasn't for my own king's order to not intervene in the war between our people and the Spanish, my words would have never reached his heart. So, in that grief, he enacted a ritual that reached out for the End, to overturn his father's and brother's deaths and to kill the Spanish invaders," she informed Harry, her voice soft and comforting to him. "But I ask you once more, who did you lose, Nopil?" She asked once more, and Harry opened his mouth and let the truth he was running from pour forth as he was confessing his sins.
Artemis, the Temple of Quetzalcoatl.
How Magicians are seen in the modern age heavily depended on the pantheon they belong to. The Greek pantheon saw them as useful but dangerous tools, arbiters between the magical and divine world to keep them as separate as possible. It was one of the reasons that Johnathan Doe, the child of Hecate, had gone prematurely gray, the constant stress of his job was something he had to put up with day in and day out. Not only was he the main contact between MCUSA and Artemis' own hunt but he was also called in to repair and supervise the Oblivation Squads that hid the magical world and unknowingly hid the divine one as well.
The Roman pantheon saw the Magicians as something else, for if the Demigod were the soldiers of the gods, then the Magicians were the ultimate weapons. With their training in combat and the magical arts, they were able to surpass any other demigods, other than Artemis' father and uncles, in terms of power. One needed to look no further than Johnathan Doe's predecessor, Gertrude Robbin. A daughter of Trivia with an absurd track record of accomplishments that had most of the gods sweating over what would happen if she turned on them. Gertrude's accomplishments were carved in blood and destruction of all things that had to try to stand against Olympus.
Titans gathering monsters to storm Camp Half-Blood? They had marched into a trap that Gertrude had set with magic and crushing earth, killing most of the monsters and even one of the Titans.
A band of necromancers trying to resurrect the witch Medea in the swamps of Louisiana? Gertrude brought their temple down around their ears with a couple pounds of plastic explosives.
A group of powerful Demigods planning a coup in New Rome before trying to take over the government? The Demigods hadn't even started before they were all found dead in their own beds. One of them was even a child of Jupiter, one before the oath of world war two.
And Gertrude Robbin did all of that before she was even twenty and was now sitting as the head of the DoMC at the ripe old age of one hundred and four years old. She was expected to die in the next few years so Johnathan could take over afterwards. Most of the gods had warned Thanatos to take Gertrude in her sleep, otherwise there will probably be a fight.
The Nordic pantheon had two Magicians and treated them much like the Romans. They were their ultimate trump card in times of war, one sired by the Old Man Odin and one from Freya. Both Magicians were kept at arm's length and were forbidden to step foot into the Nordic Pantheons territory without approval first, and had a consent eye on them from afar thanks to Heimdall.
But the rest of the Pantheons Artemis was unsure of, she knew the Shinto gods had at least two to persevere balance. But the rest she never cared enough to ask, focused only on her Magician as she was. But there laid her crime, Artemis never considered why they only had two, only letting her curiosity about having a child overwrite whatever question she should have asked.
But as Inkarri's shin meets her ribs, breaking them and slashing open her flesh at the same time, Artemis begins to understand. As lost to the curse as he was, as mindless as he acted, Inkarri was incredibly dangerous. Far more dangerous than the rest of the Corpo Seco's that infested the city of Paititi, whatever magic he still had access to wove around his emaciated form. Creating an armor of obsidian mounted with spikes and blades that easily punctured through Artemis' jacket and set her skidding across the platform near the top of the Temple, leaving a trail of blood behind her.
Artemis pushes herself back up to her feet, her broken ribs shifting uncomfortably as she did. But she refuses to hiss out in pain or any sign of weakness as Inkarri approaches her slowly. He was encased in a replica of the armor of his people, a headdress of a snarling demon hiding his face and six blades made from the same black stone floating around him. Artemis had only one of her hunting knives left, the other was snapped in the wake of Inkarri forming his armor. Her bow lay on the ground some feet from her, useless thanks to the two missing fingers on her hand.
Artemis was going to die, and she knew it. She had bitten off more than she could chew when she had challenged the forgotten prince in a mortal form and she was now about to pay the price.
"Hopefully that fool boy will feel it and know what it means," Artemis thinks to herself as she readies herself to fight against the weapon of the Inca gods. "Just let him live, that's all I ask. Please father, don't leave him here to die," she prays to Zeus and means every word. She would take any pain, any humiliation, any trail, if it just let her son live.
With her ribs burning with pain, Artemis squares her shoulders to take the charge of the Magician that caused the fall of the Mesoamerican Gods. If she was to die, she would die fighting! With a bowl of rage, Inkarri charges at her, the six black blades screaming through the air to dice her to bits. Artemis runs forward and dives through a hole made in the formation before falling into a roll that almost has her body sizing up in pain. Artemis lifts her last remaining blade to plunge into the black heart of Inkarri, as his rotting and cursed claws fall on her, seeking her throat.
Harry Potter, The caverns below Paititi.
"I lost…" Harry said, his voice hitching at his utterances. -A mentor, a protector, a lioness, one that loved him and he had loved in return, a mother figure before Artemis became that as well.- "A sister, my sister. She was everything I looked up to, everything I thought a good person was. She protected me not because she was ordered to, but because she wanted to, because she saw me as her cub and I saw her as my protector. She died because of me because she took a curse that was meant for me," Harry admits finally as memories of Atalanta flood his mind.
-"Come on, Kiddo. Let's go on a hunt," Atalanta says as snow in the early December days drifted around her short blond hair.-
-"I won't let him touch you, Harry," the words she whispered to him in the great hall the night that Sirius had broken into Hogwarts. Her words were like an oath, and her voice had carried with it a fierce protective nature that Harry had gotten from her.-
-"Just relax, Harry. Nothing is going to hurt you while I'm here. No one is going to come and take you away, you can relax," She had whispered softly behind him as her arms pulled him close in her protective embrace. It was the first night in years he had slept without his nightmares haunting his every step, all too afraid of the Lioness that had claimed him as her cub."-
-"Harry!" Atalanta's voice tore through the screaming crowd after the monster had risen and a queen was freed. Her voice alone had cut through Harry's fears and brought the wild beast of the Hunt to rest because as soon as he heard it he knew he was safe.-
Harry felt the hot tears rolling down his cheeks. She was gone, Atalanta was dead and he had lost his greatest protector, he had lost his sister. It was like a damn bursting as the emotions he tried to bottle up, tried to get rid of, all came flooding into him and It hurt. He didn't want to lose her, he wanted her to stay with him and Sirius at Grimmauld Place, Harry had wanted them to be a family; a real one.
The thoughts of his sister he loved so deeply were all wrapped up in the memory of another and Harry stumbled back like he had been struck in the chest. His back met the cavern wall and he slid down, his own grief and self-hatred almost overwhelming him as he cried.
"I lost- I lost- I lost Siri-" Harry said, unable to get the name out through the sobs that wracked him. -Sirius. His godfather, the man who cared about him before he even truly knew him. The man who wrapped him in a jacket before handing him to Hagrid, the only true kindness Harry would experience for the next ten years. A link to the parents he had never known. A father in some ways,- Harry's jacket had never felt heavier on him, weighed down by the memories of a man he would never truly get to know but had done everything in his power to make Harry happy.
-"The next thing you need to do is write to my cousin, Andromeda Tonks. Her husband is a solicitor," Sirius had explained in the clearing so many years ago when they both thought Harry had killed him with his spear. "-Is might not be there, but I'll make sure you won't go back," even when he thought he was dying, Sirius was still fighting to take care of Harry.-
-"Harry Potter," Sirius said when he first saw him months later, the gaunt horror of Azkaban wiped from his body but not from his mind. He had hugged Harry fiercely and so warm, like a hearth in the middle of a cold winter.-
-"Never again," Sirius had sworn in the halls of Hogwarts when he had come to collect Harry to visit his parents' graves. It was an oath to both Harry and himself, that he would never allow Harry to return to the darkness of the cupboard. One he had kept to his dying breath and beyond.-
-"I'm making it up starting with this home because it's a home for you," Sirius had told him when he had first visited Grimmauld Place. He wanted to give something so simple that was denied to Harry for so long. A loving home, and he had, his bark like laughs and jokes filled the halls that the man himself hated so much just for Harry's sake. And no place that Harry had ever stayed at before felt more like a home with Sirius and Atalanta.-
-"We need to leave!" Sirius had all but begged him, but Harry didn't want to. The monster was right in front of him, they could have ended it then and there. But they didn't, and all because of Harry, did the monster take the two most important people from him.-
"My- My fault-" Harry said through his sobs. "They're dead because of me," he said as hot tears continued to fall down his cheeks. The polearm fell to the ground with a clatter as Harry curled himself into a ball, his finger ran through his hair as he wept. The serpent that was wrapped around the head slithers away into the darkness of the cavern. Harry felt Mictecacihuatl kneel down in front of him, her silent presence came with a feeling of understanding. An understanding of loss, grief, and death as he felt her hand on his shoulder, squeezing in a show of silent support. He cried until he was emptied of it all, the memories both happy and heartbreaking playing in his head as the sense of finality settled over him.
He would never see Atalanta or Sirius again and it was his fault.
And he didn't know which one was worse.
"We weep for those who we will miss, we mourn for those who are lost to us, and we cherish the memories that they left behind so they will never be forgotten," Mictecacihuatl said as Harry finally looked up at her kneeling form. "This is what it means to let go, to know that their pain is over and sleep peacefully forever more. For life is pain and-" the flayed goddess started to say before Harry cut her off.
"Death but a peaceful dream," he said solemnly and watched as Mictecacihuatl nodded at his words.
"But now is the time to do what you have come here to do," the watcher of the bones said with a sad smile as she withdrew her hand.
"I don't want to kill you," Harry admitted softly but the flayed goddess merely shook her head.
"If you wish to get to the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, if you wish to open the door, you must," Mictecacihuatl admitted to him with a soft smile. "It has to be you, it can only be you to bring about my final end," she told him with hope and sorrow in equal measure in her voice.
"But why me? Why can't it be the grave-robber or one of gods? Why me?" Harry asked, looking into the fathomless darkness of Mictecacihuatl eyes.
"It's because I was wounded by another touched by death and brought to the state you see me in, so only by the hand of another touched by death can I be killed," Mictecacihuatl said, her eyes turning away from Harry to look to the floor. "When Inkarri summoned the End, he had tried to mantle it, and in doing so, angered it. It took Inkarri as a puppet and used him to destroy the last thing he had, his gods," she said before looking up to Harry, tears of her own gathering in her eyes. "It had left me for last. The mother of the foolish mortal that sought to usurp death and cursed all the other gods to linger in a painful death for all eternity. For me to watch over for just as long to remind me of what I had let happen, until the day I would be claimed by the pit as well," she said, fear entering her voice for the first real time.
"Please, Nopil," Mictecacihuatl begged, her head bent over, exposing her neck. "I- I am scared. I do not wish for that Fate, please…end this. This fear, this pain, please," she sobbed. Mictecacihuatl was being selfish, wanting to escape her punishment while her fellow gods died painfully for all eternity. Something in Harry nagged at him, telling him to toss her into the pit with the rest of them, it would open the door as well because she would technically be "dead".
To not let her escape her due punishment.
Harry wiped his eyes before standing up as the flayed goddess kept kneeling before him. "What does it mean to be touched by death? I know it means that I've survived death but that doesn't really explain it," he said in a hoarse voice as he looked down at the goddess.
The goddess laughs, but to Harry it sounded pained and dead. "It means you've died once before. That you crossed the Veil to Terminus and was, by some means, brought back from its cold embrace," she told Harry.
"That can't-" Harry tried to say, disbelief shooting through him. "But I've never died bef-" he tried to tell the goddess but froze, he hadn't died yet, had he? The spider fell to the ground, unmoving, and unmistakably dead. There was no counter curse to stop it, there was no magical shield that could block it, if you were hit by it, you died. Harry squeezed his eyes shut, forcing the memory away, he didn't want to- he couldn't deal with that at the moment. He leaned down as he asked his last question to Mictecacihuatl.
"I was Mantled a few weeks ago by a god or something like them, she had the same eyes you have and went by the name Didi. Do you know…" Harry asked as he stood back up, but trails off as the flayed goddess just shook her head, unable to speak. "That's fine and-" Harry said, pausing as he adjusted his grip. "Thank you, Mictecacihuatl," he spoke softly as the axe went up.
And then it fell.
The Temple of Quetzalcoatl.
Artemis watches as her death approaches her throat, Inkarri had won, there was no denying that. She would die and be thrusted into Zagreus' wheel to be reformed in her godly form. It would be a long and painful process and by virtue of her death, her hunters would lose their Immortality and supernatural abilities. It was an outcome she had foreseen, but had hoped to avoid, but it was folly to hope that after she had so blatantly challenged Inkarri in her rage. Artemis' last prayer was filled with words to her brother and father, to watch over her hunt, to give them power to continue on without her blessing. But as she closes her eyes in acceptance of her fate, as her hunting knife's tip bent and was unable to penetrate Inkarri armor….
"GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HER!" Roared across the temple and was quickly followed by a deafening crack of stone. Artemis opens her eyes to the sight of a blur kicking into the side of Inkarri, the forgotten prince folds around the blow to his ribs and is sent flying away from Artemis.
"Atalanta?" Artemis thinks to herself at the sight of the blur, thinking for a moment her Lioness had somehow escaped from her uncle's domain and had come to save her. But it wasn't, it was the one person she had hoped to spare the atrocities of Paititi on. He was covered, head to toe, in a blackish-gray filth with trails craver through the filth down his cheeks. His eyes burned and smoldered with amber light as he glared at Inkarri from where he had kicked the undead to. In one hand he held an odd halberd of divine make, his other hand was soon thrust out to her.
"My wand," Harry demands without looking at her.
"Harry? What are you doing here, I told you-"
"MY WAND!" Harry yells, rage and raw emotion in his voice comes out like blades to Artemis. Her son was enraged, and no small part was because of her. "I won't ask again," he says more quietly, and his tone is far worse than before. Artemis slowly reaches into the inner pockets of her jacket and pulls out her son's Willow wand before handing it over, he snatches it out of her hand angrily without looking away from Inkarri. "Go get your godhood back, now," he orders Artemis.
"Harry, you can't-" Artemis tries but her son cuts her off.
"Go!" He snaps at her as he watches Inkarri stand back up from his blow. "I'm not asking. This asshole is mine," he says, almost possessively, through clenched teeth. Artemis looks between the two Magicians for a moment before standing back up, holding on to her ribs.
"Don't die, foolish boy," Artemis mutters to him before running for the stairs that lead up to the main temple. Harry says nothing back to her as he holds his wand in a death grip, watching as black dust begins to gather around the corpse and forming blades in the air around him. Harry just glares as liquid silverish metal forms around him, twisting and forming into armor made from the metal of the Titans. Gauntlets, bracers, shin guards, chestplate, pauldrons, and finally his helm of a snarling wolf with far too many eyes.
As the helm forms over his face, tunneling everything else out of his eyesight other than Inkarri the forgotten prince, did Harry finally speak to the undead monster that was the reason for the death of his own pantheon.
"Let's hunt,"
Chapter done!
He said the thing!
And just to be clear on something, not everyone who has cheated death is in turn touched by it, but everyone who is touched by death has cheated it.
But Harry is finally coming to terms with his loss. Something he had bottled up and avoided for the most part of this first part, for as much as Harry has dealt in death in this story, he hasn't really suffered loss like this. And no, his parents 100% do not count toward that, for he had never known them to feel their loss so vividly like he does with Atalanta and Sirius.
Harry, at this moment, is at that stage after a good cry that all emotions are just rung out of you but for Harry all that's left in this moment is rage….
And the Hunt.
Tune in next week for Magician on Magician violence and the ending of the Paititi arc!
Kingsaxcul, Out!