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Constant,incessantwhining from ungrateful humans, who’d been more than happy to ignore my existence for centuries. Millenia, even.
Grace, Grace, Grace.It was all I heard all day long. Grace the Agathos. TheProphêtis. The enemy, or the savior, depending on who was speaking.
The last time I’d felt this level of irritation at a specific agathos, it was her selfish wretch of a mother, demanding an army of sons from her childbed. Muttering incoherently about her daughter learning someday that I didn’t listen. Truly, Faith Bellamy was one of the Fates’ biggest failures in their experiments to draw agathos and daimons together.
But in my rage at her offensively obnoxious request, I’d changed the course of my own fate forever. I’d intervened. Asked the Fates to give her no children until she learned some humility. Instructed them to keep the daughter’s soul bonds from her until she was well into adulthood, to humiliate Faith.
Instructed them that Grace Bellamy’s voiceshouldbe elevated above the rest, to spite her mother.
They had. They’d done everything I asked, and in doing so, Grace the Agathos became unique. Touched by the Fates. Destined for greatness. AProphêtis.
Grace was a Prophêtis because of me.
She was the right combination of light and dark to bring together agathos and daimons, had suffered in her extended period of loneliness to make her even consider the idea of daimonic soul bonds, and I’d given her the ear of the gods in a moment of irritation with her mother.
She was the perfect storm. The exact combination the Fates had been waiting for, centuries in the making, ready to receive the prophecy.
The error had been mine. I hadn’t believed a balance between agathos and daimons could be found. Nyx and I were too different, so our creations must be too. Dark and light warred for dominance, never able to comfortably coexist.
Until they did.
She was among a generation of balanced agathos and daimons, souls so stable they could be bound to one another. Perhaps that’s all she would have been—an oddity among a sea of newfound oddities as agathos discovered daimon soul bonds—butImade her more. Grace’s power, the risk she posed, all my mistakes.
She probably thought she deserved the mantle of power and prophecy the Fates had given her. That she’d done something toearnthe glory bestowed on her. I already knew Nyx claimed credit, that she thoughtshe’dmade Grace important because Grace had prayed to her, but she was wrong.
Grace Bellamy was merely fortunate that her mother was a greedy wretch of an agathos. Nyx would have never heard Grace’s prayer if I hadn’t given her voice power. She was an agathos who spoke to gods because ofme.
“There is no Nyx, no Gaia.”
These infuriating creatures, little gnats who only existed becauseIallowed it.
Howdarethey?
They filled the rich soil I gave them with their horrid, intrusive pipes and wires, and I let them. The earth that was my very body, my home, my essence. They desecrated it, more and more each day—and Iletthem, because I thought they would love me for it. Love me and worship me the way the mortals had worshipped the Olympians so many years ago.
They’d forgotten me. They’d built monuments to their false idols andforgottenme.
They’d been confronted with proof of my existence, and still they denied me.
The earth shook, ripples of my power extending through every inch of land and sea.
No more.
I would tolerate the disrespect no more.
Above me, the sky turned dark as Nyx drew her veil of night across the world, hiding the sun from view and taking its warmth with it.
I could have laughed.
Was this sisterly affection? Nyx was a lazy, unambitious coward, but she would not tolerate being denied either. She especially would not tolerate seeingmyretaliation without enforcing one of her own.
Loose earth fell into the place where man-made intrusions had once been, the land healing itself, renewing.
Finally, the incessant buzz of humanity and their horrid inventions went quiet. Mortals had managed just fine without such things for most of time.
Let them learn to manage again.
Chapter 10
