I do not remember the first time I loved her.

Perhaps it was when I first saw her smile, a toothless one that had felt at that moment like the purest thing that could be, one I had decided the moment I saw it that I never wanted to be gone, to have someone hammer the joy in it until it shattered and cracked. Or maybe it was when I watched her sleep, the defiance dulled from her brow, and I could almost convince myself the world had not done to her what it had, that she had better parents, that she had rightfully more than everything I could have given her.

But love, real love, is quieter than all that. It creeps. It consumes. It grows until it becomes indistinguishable from motive, from breath, from the axis upon which the world spins. And so I do not know the first time I loved her—but I know that now, everything I do, everything I have done, built is for Thalia Grace.

It was always her.

Even when I told myself it was for me—revenge, justice, spite against the ones who had played at divinity with the fragile lives of demigod children and humans not strong enough to do anything—I knew, deep down it had never been. It was for her. For Thalia.

My niece.

My daughter.

The world had placed her on a pyre since her birth and would like her to burn prettily.

And I—I would rip the sky from its hinges before I let it happen.

My eyes drifted to the scrying spell, to the image of Thalia, sleeping beneath a fucking cardboard. Just by looking at her, I could see that her cheeks were hollow, bruised by exhaustion. Her fingers clutched a knife like a lifeline, as if it was the last thing real she had. She looked like she had crawled out of the jaws of death and found no welcome waiting on the other side.

Thalia should have never looked like that. She had never looked like that when she had been in my care. Even with Beryl at her worst, while I was still able to interact with her, Thalia had not looked that bad. Instead, she looked like a ghost painted in ash and looking at her hurt more than anything made by Hecate, that she had inflicted on me in our fight. It made it feel like nothing.

"I suppose now's the part where you tell me how you knew," I murmured to the goddess. Under her, I saw her shadow move like something that didn't belong to the world. It moved without wind, without sound, and moved wrong. I ignored it to focus on the goddess.

"I pried," she said with a voice like silk dragged through broken glass. "A hunch first. A curiosity, unseemly, perhaps. Yet I am not a god of restraint, Alexander."

She looked at me, head tilted, eyes dark as dried blood under fingernails. "I gleaned. I asked the world a question and bent the answer from it like a shepherd cracking the spine of a lamb for marrow. The fact that your mortal governments record everything made it even easier.

"You know your words are anything but reassuring right? That they are only proof that I am right to not like y'all."

She smiled without warmth, without cruelty either—just the absence of both. "It is meant to show you that I am invested, my dear little anomaly. I have no desire to gamble with empty pockets. Thalia Grace—your daughter Thalia—may well be the fulcrum upon which Olympus is either saved or razed, salvaged… or salted and sown and it is known of all with the littlest of importance."

Was she truly telling me in other words she had been able to glean into what I was doing accidentally? Nah, the Moirai must have it for me because I could not be this unlucky. "So you're telling me you staked everything on a guess?"

She circled the room like a serpent tasting air. "A guess that confirmed itself. A truth in disguise is still a truth when unmasked."

And she was right, wasn't she?

If she truly stood to gain nothing from betrayal, if she put herself so far past redemption with this knowledge—then there could be no comeback for her. No repentance. No sly retreat. There was no way in hell Olympus would accept backsies from her if they had an inkling of the fact that she betrayed them.

"I've not made it a secret," I said at last, staring down at my hands. "I don't like your pantheon. I don't like any pantheon. I don't like any of you so-called gods. I have the concept of your existence. I don't like what you do to the people, what your bullshit did to so many and my niece. This is why you must already know that what you're doing is in the last interest of your brethren and you, on your species as a whole."

"Yet here you are willing to work with me," Hecate murmured, voice cool as moonlight on a corpse.

"Here I am," I agreed, tasting bitterness like iron on my tongue. There were few things I would not do for Thalia and if I had to interact with Hecate even though it was the last thing I wanted to do, I would do so for Thalia. "What now? How do you help? How will you hide her?"

Her gaze sharpened. "You don't think the Mist sufficient?"

"It's a pretty veil. But I would be more than surprised if it lasts long enough before gods and monsters and the like realize something is wrong."

She chuckled, low and feral. "You're not wrong. If I relied on the Mist alone, it would be but a matter of time before someone peeled back the glamour like skin off fruit before the next time the moon rose."

"But," she went on, "I am not merely a weaver of illusions. I am Magic, Alexander. Not the tricks the mortal world and even some immortals would confuse with miracles. Not the party favors of warlocks or hedge witches. I am the shape beneath reality's flesh. It would be a problem—if I relied on Mist alone."

I straightened. "Then what will you do?"

Her eyes changed again, and for a heartbeat, they looked entirely human. Tired. Intrigued before going back to utterly alien.

"To make Thalia Grace seem gone would be infeasible to the extreme. Too many vectors. Too many questions. Too many beings asking where her soul has fled. And in this world, where one's essence is never truly lost, such questions tend to draw attention."

"So, not hiding," I said slowly.

"No. Duplication. I would craft a simulacrum—a twin sculpted from Mist and Memory, charmed with enough vitality to fool all but the most intrusive of inquiries."

"And if those inquiries did come?"

"They would not matter by then." Her voice was sudden steel. "Because by the time Olympus notices the shadow, the girl will already be safe in the firelight, too much time should have passed that it would be irrelevant with the great prophecy possibly happening at her sixteenth birthday."

I closed my eyes. I could see it—see it as plainly as if it had already happened. Thalia, free from all of this thing she should have never gone through, should have never faced. Free from the monsters. Free from the gods. Living. Laughing. Happy with me. Restored to herself. And a puppet made of mist taking the brunt of the world's gaze.

"And the imperfections?" I asked. "The things you can't replicate because of the…divinity in her blood?"

Hecate allowed herself a small, amused smirk. "She is the daughter of the sky's tyrant. There will be flaws. Subtle ones. But you—" she waved a hand toward me like brushing away cobwebs "with your strange magic. Something tells me that if necessary, You could smooth the rough edges."

"And at the same time study and examine it," I added. She smiled without shame at my words. My mouth curled. "The plan is more than viable."

"Yet I feel hesitation."

"Yes," I said after a moment. "Because there's something I need to know."

Her silence beckoned me forward like a confession booth.

"If the clone acts like her… walks like her… talks like her… does it feel like her?"

There it was. Not in what I said—but what I meant.

Would I be making something real? Would I be condemning something to live and feel and hurt—only to cast it aside? Would I condemn another version of my daughter to suffer?

Hecate's expression didn't change, but the purple sky above seemed to darken.

"It should not be the case," she said, voice measured like a verdict. "It may mimic her manner. Her presence. Her instincts. But in the end, it is not Thalia Grace. It will not suffer. It will not hope. It will act, and end, and vanish like smoke after its creator deems its duty done. It is a machine, just one made with magic instead of iron."

She stepped closer. Her eyes never blinked.

"But even if it did… would it change anything?"

I looked away. I looked at the still image on the scrying pool, flickering gently like an old film.

Thalia, curled under cardboard, skin too pale, cheek bruised purple. My daughter looked like she had crawled through a battlefield made of years and silence and survived only because she forgot how to die.

No.

It wouldn't change anything.

Maybe I'd feel something. A twinge. A weight. But I had made my peace long ago with what had to be done. Her joy—her freedom—was not a luxury. It was a necessity. The only goddamn necessity that mattered.

Because children do not earn love, because all children should be able to be safe and happy. They are owed it. Without clause. Without compromise.

And if this world—these gods—refused to see that, then I would be the exception. More of a heretic than I already was. I would always choose to be the heron that breaks its wings to feed its young.

No matter what I may feel, no matter what I may, no matter what I may sacrifice, no matter how despicable the act is, as long as my daughter would be happy, I would do it without hesitation.

I turned to her, to the goddess with fractals on her skin, the one I had tried to kill with everything I had.

"Let's do it."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The world folded itself wrong around us as I stepped through Hecate's portal—a sensation like being pulled through the ribs of a living thing. One moment, I stood in the realm she once had been the queen of, bathed in a purple haze; the next, I was here, close enough to smell the stale sweat and blood clinging to the air.

The scent that greeted me was old wood and mildew, rust and iron and the stale sweat of forgotten fear. A room made not for rest but for recovery. That miserable in-between where the body lies still but the soul paces behind its ribs.

I found myself meters away from the slumbering wreckage of a child who should have been laughing. Now that I was closer, I could see that Thalia was in worse shape than I had thought she was. Thalia lay curled on a moth-eaten mattress, her small frame swallowed by shadows. Bruises flowered across her skin as ink spilled on parchment. Her knuckles were split. Her breathing hitched, uneven, as if even sleep couldn't grant her peace.

My daughter.

And beside me, Hecate—the goddess cloaked in shadow and the shimmer of sickly green fire—exhaled as if she was shedding a skin she had worn too long.

"I have veiled us in Mist," she murmured, her voice like the rustling of old scrolls with ink and feathers of ravens. "Unless the Fates themselves spit in our eyes tonight, no hound shall scent you. No eye shall see you."

Her eyes, bright and liquid with something that looked like kindness if one squinted hard enough, shifted toward the sleeping girl. "The final rite is simple. One strand of her hair. That is all I require to shape the shell."

A silence fell between us, filled only by Thalia's uneven breath.

"She looks…" I began, and couldn't finish.

Hecate nodded, solemn and ancient, as though she had seen countless parents stand where I now stood—on the edge of something that might be joy, or might be annihilation. "I will wait for you beyond these rotting walls," she said. "Do what you must. I shall not witness this. As a mother, it is the least I can offer."

And with a flick of her hand, she peeled herself away from the world, melting into a plume of green fog and brittle shadow. A god leaving as quietly as she came.

And I was alone.

I had created Elpida, created, made and thought about so many complicated plans to reunite with my daughter yet wasn't ironic that it was because of none of those plans I would reunite with her? None of those schemes had brought me to her.

No. Zeus—that lightning-raping ass bastard—had been the one to tear her from me. His cruelty, his pride, his pettiness had been the reason and now, another god was the reason why I would have her back to me.

There are ironies so vast they make you laugh. And then there are the ones that split you down the middle like a rusted cleaver. It felt like the later

So many nights, times I had envisioned this. Reunions with open arms. Tearful apologies. Maybe a punch to the jaw, followed by a broken laugh and a hug too tight. Words had been rehearsed, rewritten, bled dry into his mind like ink across pages.

But now that she was here—real, tangible, close enough to touch—my mind had become an empty cathedral. Echoing. Hollow. Dust-choked.

I was afraid to breathe. Afraid that if I did, I would wake up and realize that all of this was nothing but a cruel dream. That this would all vanish by me waking up.

So I stepped forward on the balls of my feet, the floor beneath groaning like some wounded thing. I moved like a ghost, a coward masquerading as a father.

But wishes, it seems, are the first things slaughtered by reality.

The creak broke her sleep. Her eyes snapped open.

Blue. Blue not like water, not like oceans, but like voltage. Electric, sharp, unrelenting.

And they locked on me.

No recognition. Not even confusion. Just panic. Raw and feral.

She scrambled back, her body trembling like a bowstring about to snap. And in that moment, I saw her not as a child but as a cornered animal, bruised, exhausted, and ready to tear out throats if it meant survival.

It shattered something in me. Not because she feared—but because she feared me.

She looked at me and saw not her uncle. Not me. Not Alex.

She saw a stranger.

No—worse.

She saw a threat.

That incomprehension sunk in like a knife carved from ice. I had expected fury. Expected her to scream, to hit me, to demand why I had abandoned her. And she would have been right. God or no god, Zeus or no Zeus—I had promised her I would never leave her, and I had broken that promise.

But this? This forgetting? This fear?

Had it been that long?

Or had that bastard done something, tampered with her mind like he had done with me? Had he polished her memories clean of me?

"Stay back!" she screamed, her voice straining as if it were pulled through razor wire. "Whatever thing you are—don't come closer!"

She was ready to bolt. Her body screamed for flight. Her eyes searched corners and cracks, looking for a hole in the world wide enough to crawl through.

I held my hands up, slow. Gentle. As if trying to tame a wounded beast.

"Thalia," I said, barely a whisper. "It's me. It's Uncle Alex."

Something shifted. The fear cracked.

But what spilled from behind it was not relief.

It was rage.

The kind that burns empire to ash and grinds marble to dust.

The kind that no child should carry.

Her teeth clenched. "How dare you?!" she spat, voice rising, trembling, seething.

And the air changed.

Ozone sharpened the room like a blade. The scent of copper and singed metal made my mouth go dry.

Electricity flickered around her in jagged little spasms. Her eyes, they glowed. Her hair lifted as though pulled upward by unseen hands. Sparks danced across her shoulders like moths drawn to pain.

She hissed again, voice cracked as if she had been crying too much and had too little sleep. "it is not enough that you lie try to eat me alive, lie to stab me, chase after me, make me bleed. It is not enough you make everything hurt and hard. Now, you dare use his name to try to hurt me even more?!"

Tears streaked her cheeks, each one shining in the flickering blue haze.

Her blade was drawn, and it wasn't just a knife anymore—it was swaddled in pure lightning, a weapon of vengeance. Thunder rumbled above us, not in the sky but inside the bones of the room. Glass cracked. Windows rattled.

I caught my reflection in her eyes.

And I saw the difference. The reason she hadn't known me.

It was normal, after all, the uncle Alex she had known had eyes not of the same shade but of the same blue colour as her, had hair as dark as hers, not the ashen I now had on the head.

She didn't see her uncle.

She saw another thing trying to break her.

"I'VE HAD ENOUGH!" she shrieked, voice ripping out of her throat like a battle cry torn from the heart of a child soldier.

And she moved.

It was a thunderclap.

She didn't run. She struck.

And for a sliver of an instant, the world stilled. Had it been the version of me before my fight with Hecate, without my armour capable of enhancing my perception, seeing things move at least a thousand times faster, I would have been blindsided and I would never have seen her move. I would have been dead before I blinked, unable to see Thalia move but now it was not the case.

Because now—now it felt as if time bent just for me. My senses expanded. I saw her cross the distance in a thousand fractured images. Her bare feet barely touched the floor. Her blade was first. Her grief was second.

I could have stopped her. Dodged. Parried. I could have dodged. I knew I could have easily stopped her through pure physical prowess or magic. I could have reinforced my flesh to make sure the knife doesn't even leave a graze, I could have invoked my armour made of Necrodermis. I could have caught the blade with two fingers and watched it shatter.

But I didn't.

I didn't even flinch.

Her blade met flesh.

I let it.

Because the pain of being stabbed was nothing before the one I felt seeing her cry, because the pain was irrelevant here. If anything, it was something I deserved.

I had done something unforgivable after all, u had made her cry.

This is why I didn't dodge, move.

The only thing I did was hold her, hug her as if it would be the last thing I would do.

I held her, and the world fell still.

She froze in my embrace.

The kind of stillness not born from fear, but from something more jagged, more terrible—a child's disbelief. A tension wrought from too many nights alone, too many dreams ending in loss. She stiffened as though my arms were ghosts pressing in, as though love itself had become something foreign, dangerous, a thing not meant for her.

Her small body trembled, not from the cold of but from the war I was sure was happening behind her ribs. I knew her. She was my daughter after all.

Holding her, I remembered her warmth. Not this fragile, shaking wisp but the incandescent spark she used to be, always moving, always talking, laughing like the world could never break her.

I spoke, finally.

Softly. Tenderly, with everything good and pure and kind and honest my soul could muster.

"I remember when you were so excited after we came back from the cinema."

Her breath caught. I pressed on.

"The Little Siren. You wouldn't stop singing that terrible song." I laughed, just a breath of it, bitter and soft. "You were running all over the apartment even though I told you not to. Then you tripped and scraped your knee. I lost my mind. Do you remember? I was fussing over you like a lunatic, acting like you'd been hit by a car. And you—you laughed."

I could feel the memory unfold between us, like a crumpled photograph smoothed open.

"You were supposed to cry. But you laughed at me instead."

She still hadn't spoken. But she hadn't pulled away.

I pulled the past further forward.

"I remember finding you sneaking into the kitchen when you were supposed to be asleep. You had your tiny feet tiptoeing across the tiles like a spy." I smiled. "I told you off. But barely. I made popcorn instead. You fell asleep mid-bite."

A breath, ragged and tight, rattled in her throat.

"You didn't want to sleep, but your body needed it. So I let you sleep there, slumped against my side."

Still nothing. But I felt her now, her hands twitching against my t-shirt.

"I helped you with your schoolwork. You'd get so frustrated with your ADHD and your dyslexia. You told me you were stupid."

My voice broke.

"And I told you—God, I told you—you weren't. That you were brilliant. That you were perfect. Even when it took hours and you cried into your math book, you still did the work. You always did the work, Thalia."

A hiccup. Then another.

A crack in her silence, like ice beginning to break.

"I remember the promise I made. That I would never leave you. That I would always be here."

And then she broke. Shaking like a branch caught in wind too strong for it to bear, her voice cracked open like lightning cleaving the dark.

"Is it truly you, Uncle Alex?!"

Her disbelief made the air feel thick, like breathing through water.

I pulled her tighter, my own heartbeat thudding so loudly it hurt.

"I've changed, Thalia… but yes, it's me." My words were soft, cloaked in grief and wonder. "Sorry for being late."

It happened then.

The tension vanished. Like a bow unstrung after years of being drawn taut. I felt her collapse—not fainting, not unconscious—but her body simply gave up the act of holding everything in. Her weight slumped into me as if gravity had returned to her, after years spent floating in loss.

Something told me that if I weren't holding her, she'd be on the ground, curled into herself, unable to rise.

"I'm here to bring you with me, Thalia," I said gently. "To bring you home."

And her voice, barely audible, as if the wind itself were ashamed to carry it:

"I thought you had forgotten me. Please tell me this is not a dream, that this is not a lie. Please, tell me it is real."

I kneeled on one knee. I pressed my forehead to hers.

"It is real, Thalia. I could have never forgotten you. I could never stop caring. Never stop loving you."

And then came the sob. Not the quiet kind. Not cinematic.

But the raw, ugly sob of a child who has remembered how to hurt.

She shifted in my arms, clawing at my shirt, and then—

She remembered about, she saw the knife.

Her whole body changed. The fear didn't ebb—it turned, grew fangs, turned inward. Her sobs became frantic, disjointed. Her voice panicked.

"I stabbed you! You're bleeding! I—I stabbed you when you came for me! I hurt you! You could die! We should go to the hospital or maybe—maybe we shou—"

"It's okay, Thalia," I interrupted, not sharply, but like sunlight interrupting a shadow. "Don't panic. Trust me. It'll be alright."

Her fingers gripped my shoulders so tightly I thought she'd snap bone.

Between hiccuping breaths, she whispered again and again, each time fainter than the last—

"I trust you… I trust you… I trust you…"

And she clung to me.

As if I were the last thing in a world not painted with blood and betrayal.

Her arms wound around my neck like ivy seeking the sun. I held her as one holds the last light in a dying world.

And for the first time in years—perhaps lifetimes—I felt whole.

I pressed my lips to her temple, tasted the salt of her tears.

"Let's go home, Thalia."

This chapter is kinda one of the most important. There were so many ways it could have been probably better. I am not sure I was able to give justice to what I had in mind but I hope y'all like it.

Ps: I got a p.a.t.r.e.o.n.c.o.m / Eileen715 with two more chapters. With less than 5, you have access to everything I write a month in advance. Don't hesitate to visit if you want to read more or simply support me.