I pulled back from my mother's embrace, my hands shaking.
The image cracked again, not flickering this time, but shattering like a mirror. I saw the warm, crusty loaf of bread on the kitchen table. And I saw the soul it was made from. A grandmother, her face a blur of loving wrinkles, being pulledinto the void, her terrified screams silenced as her memory was unmade to provide the platonic ideal of ‘baking bread’.
I saw the soft green grass of the valley floor, and I saw the cost. A child, no older than five, laughing as he rolled down a hill, his form dissolving into grey static to fuel the memory of ‘soft grass’.
Every perfect moment. Every sensory delight. Paid for with a soul.
An erasure. An unmaking. This wasn't peace. This was a banquet held in a graveyard, where the food was made from the bones of the forgotten.
Hera had not built a sanctuary. She had built a lie on a foundation of screams.
And I, who had spent my entire life serving a lie, recognized the architecture.
I spun to face the fake Kaelen, to face the illusion of my mother and the perfect life, the fury that rose in me colder and harder than any star-metal.
“This is your peace?” I spat, my voice shaking with a rage that was pure ice. “This comfortable, warm little lie?”
“It is a mercy, child,” my mother’s form said, but her voice was wrong now, layered with the grinding, glassy sound of Hera's. “It is the life you deserve. The one you’ve always craved.”
I laughed, a harsh, jagged sound. “I craved a mother, not a ghost woven from stolen memories. I craved peace, not the quiet of a tomb.”
I took a step back, planting my feet in the soft, false earth. I felt the power begin to build in my core, not the borrowed flame of the Titan, but my own stubborn, unyielding will.
"You offer me my mother?" My voice rose, ringing with the harmonic resonance of the true me. "Then give her BACK. Not a dream of her.Her. You offer me peace? Thenmakepeace, don't steal it from others."
I raised my arms, the perfect, human skin already beginning to ripple, a glow building beneath the surface.
"I am Aria Pandoros, descendent of the woman who wept crystal tears, and I will not build my happiness on the bones of the forgotten."
I balled my hands into fists, my knuckles turning white.
"I choose thetruth," I roared, the sound of my own voice shattering the illusion. "No matter how it cuts!"
The world exploded.
Not into light, but into pain and metal. I screamed as my true form tore its way out of the fragile human skin of the illusion. It felt like I was being born and flayed at the same time. Star-metal, cold and hard and real, erupted along my arm, my leg, my cheek, shattering the soft, warm lie. The glowing runes ignited, burning away the dream-flesh.
The gentle valley vanished. The beautiful house, the peaceful princes, my loving mother, they all dissolved into screaming static.
I was back on the crumbling island of black marble, at the edge of the Soul-Well. Elias’s half-formed song hung in the air, a fragile shield. Thane stood before us, a grim statue of defiance. Kaelen and Flynn were locked in a desperate, losing battle against a tide of hollowed-out heroes.
And I was on my knees, gasping, the golden fissure in my neck pouring divinity onto the stone, my star-metal arm blazing with a cold, white-hot fury.
Hera’s psychic avatar shrieked, a sound of pure, venomous rage as her perfect, seductive trap was broken by the very doll she had tried to cage within it.
I looked up at her, my amethyst eyes burning. The exhaustion was gone. The temptation was gone. All that was left was the truth.
And the truth was rage.
TWENTY
Aria
The truth was a scalpel, and it had carved away the last vestiges of the girl I had been. All of it fell away like dead skin, leaving behind something forged in the fires of Hephaestus, tempered with the heart of a Titan, and loved, fiercely, brokenly, and completely, by four fallen princes.
My fury was not a fire. Fire was Kaelen’s domain, a hot, consuming rage that burned itself out. Mine was the cold of interstellar space. It was the absolute zero of a broken heart that had decided to stop breaking and start cutting.
Hera shrieked, the psychic sound scraping against the inside of my skull, but it was distant now, the tantrum of a thwarted child. I rose to my feet, not with the aching strain of my mortal muscles, but with a smooth power that originated in my star-metal core. The golden divinity pouring from the cracks in my skin didn't feel like a wound anymore. It felt like a venting of surplus energy. The engine was finally running hot enough.
