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I drew myself up to my full height as the beast circled overhead, shielding my eyes from the rain with my forearm as I lifted my face to the sky. Maybe I was reading into things, but I thought I sawrestlessnessin the way that the creature was moving, flying back and forth right above me as though it was pacing in frustration. Frustration, but not anger.
Was I imagining things? Reading a kindness and compassion into the creature that wasn’t really there? Was it really just a creature of pure evil?
Washea creature of pure evil, I corrected mentally, glancing away. From this angle, I was getting quite the eyeful.
Maybe it was foolish, but I had this sudden, almost matriarchal urge to put him in his place. To box his ears and knock some sense into him, which was incredibly unlike me, and delusional to boot.
“Hey!” I shouted, my soaked clothes clinging to my skin. “What do you want?!”
It wasn’t the most eloquent question, but ultimately that was what I needed to know, and it gave the others time to put some distance between themselves and the monster.
The beast released a stream of fire into the air that almost immediately turned into steam as thick as fog before dissipating into nothingness. He flung his head the other way, throwing another heap of flames at nothing, followed by a roar.
I’d never had a pet before—my mother would have fainted if I’d so much as suggested the concept—but my neighbors growing up had a cat called Tiffany, who was the moodiest little madam I’d ever seen. Any time she didn’t get her way, she’d lash out and hiss and march off in a sulk, and that was exactly how the monster looked now.
It would be nothing for him to direct that fiery breath down and barbeque me on the spot. But if he wanted to hurt me, he’d had plenty of chances.
The monster huffed out more steam before diving straight down, pulling up at the last moment to land heavily on his serpent legs, just a few feet in front of me, staring me down. My neck ached from craning my head to look at his face. From this close, his overwhelming size became even clearer. He must have been fifty feet tall, at least.
I’d never felt so mortal.
“What do you want?” I repeated, taking a shaky step toward him. “I can see you’re angry. Maybe we can help each other.”
He huffed again, stamping his foot on the ground like a petulant child.
“Well, that doesn’t really accomplish anything, does it?” I said, more curtly than I probably should have. “I think you can understand me, so you’re going to have to find a way to reply somehow.”
He stared at me flatly, a little puff of steam coming out of his nostrils before he slowly nodded once.
Yes. He bobbed his giant humanoid, yet also very monstrous, head. It had all the features of a human face—eyes, nose, mouth—but his eyes were pools of flames, his mouth was stretched wide, filled with a vicious row of fangs, and his skin was a sort of greenish color that darkened to black scales on the two serpents he had for legs.
And the giant, snake-hybrid pit monster wasnoddingat me. Surreal. And good, because maybe we could find some common ground and I could convince him to stop terrifying us all.
“Do you… do you want to hurt us?”
There was a long pause before he clumsily swung his head from side to side.No.
“Oh. Okay. That’s good.” I shifted my weight, slipping slightly on the wet ground. “Oh my gosh, this rain. I feel like I’m going to sink into the ground,” I mumbled, to myself, thinking about Dare and the pit.
Abruptly, the rain stopped. The monster—I suddenly felt awful calling him that—blinked at me.
“Did you do that?”A nod. “Oh. That’s really incredible.”
So he had some kind of control over storms. There was only one god I knew who could do that, and he was meant to be locked in the depths of Tartarus. Still, I had to ask.
“Are you Zeus?”
If a bat-human-snake-hybrid monster could look disdainful, then that was definitely the impression I was getting from him. Not rage, not frustration, just a sort of unimpressed dismissiveness, before a single shake of his head.
“No, I didn’t think so.” I blew out a breath, suddenly remembering what that agathos woman had been saying around the campfire. “Are you one of Gaia’s children?”
He huffed out another puff of steam before nodding his head.
“You’re one of Gaia’s children and you don’t want to hurt us,” I repeated, watching him carefully. I knew the relationships between divinities were complex—Nyx was the mother of the Fates, but they’d worked closely with Gaia in the past—but standing in front of one of Gaia’s own direct descendants… It definitely had me questioning whether I was being too trusting.
He nodded, huffing once again. The puffs of smoke that came out of his nostrils were actually quite endearing.
Maybe the lack of food was affecting me more than I thought.
