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At that, T stomped his foot so hard the stones vibrated beneath me, shaking his enormous head back and forth.
“You don’t want me to go?”
Another vicious shake of his head. I was doing my best not to think of just how terrifying Tartarus would be, but T had come from there and knew just how awful it was. It wasn’t a great show of confidence.
T shuffled forward, gesturing out at the world below as if to say, ‘look at it’. I could admit, somehow, things looked less dire than they had just a few hours ago. I’d wondered if it was just because we were in the air and high above the worst of the devastation, but there had been a strange moment while we were flying. It was almost as though time itself stopped for a second, the world freezing mid-spin. It was strange and surreal, and even T had noticed it because his grip on me had tightened ever so slightly.
Maybe… Maybe Dare had been successful?
Could it be? Could he have been the one to fulfill the prophecy?
If so, was he safely back in the upperworld?
I waited, hopeful, but no explosion of deities rained down from the sky.Disappointing.
My head was swimming, probably from a mixture of adrenaline, hunger, and thirst. Maybe a little exhaustion, too. It was all catching up with me.
“I at least need to go back to Ephesus,” I amended, thinking out loud. “One of my soul bonds jumped into the pit you came out of in my place, and I need to check that he’s okay. I had a job to do. That pit was for me.”
T side-eyed me with such impressive apathy that I knew without a doubt he understood me just fine. He just didn’t care about my problems, and I sort of got that too—I probably seemed very small and silly and mortal to him.
“Are you lonely?” I asked quietly. Thunderclouds gathered almost instantly overhead, centered almost perfectly on where we were standing. I gave T my most unimpressed face, though I was fighting the absurd urge to laugh. “There’s no need for that.”
He grunted, and the clouds dissipated as though they’d never been. Neat trick.
“I didn’t mean it in a bad way. It’s okay if you’re lonely. It’s not really okay that you kidnapped me because you wanted company,” I added, surveying the abandoned town below with new eyes. “But that’s my theory on why you did it. Everyone else runs away from you.”
There was no huffing or grunting this time, just a heavy enough silence to make me think I was on the right track.
“Were you lonely in Tartarus?” T glanced at me, inclining his head ever-so-slightly, and I nodded slowly in understanding. He must have been there for thousands of years in who knows what kind of conditions. He just wanted to befree.
Maybe I was naïve—almost certainly, in fact—but I understood that urge.
I knew what it was to want freedom more than anything, to feel suffocated by your surroundings, to just want tobe, with no judgment. I’d probably experienced less than a fraction of what T had, but I got the general idea of it. Every part of living in agathos society had felt like a cage where the walls pressed in a little closer each day.
Maybe it was that shared experience, the small sliver of imprisonment I’d felt in comparison to what living in Tartarus must have been like, that made me suited to this. To this creature, this conversation, this moment.
I understood what it was to be lonely. I remembered perfectly feeling like the world was full of people and not a single one of them wantedme, connected withme, understoodme. It was a fate I wouldn’t even wish on Gaia, and I certainly wasn’t going to let T live that way.
“Maybe I can speak for you,” I volunteered. “I guess that’s what I am, isn’t it? A Prophêtis. A mouthpiece for the divine. I want to convince everyone that they don’t have to be afraid of you, that your intentions are good, but I think you might need to prove that to the world first.”
Resting my arms on the stone ledge of the balcony, I leaned forward to inspect the strange, still silence of the world below. I’d been so excited to see Wild, that it was onlynowthat I truly registered what he and the Spartoi had been doing.
They’d beenmarching. Marching in neat, orderly formation. Like soldiers.
Like they were going to war.
Werethey going to war?
My empty stomach roiled uneasily. Of course they were. It wasn’t as though Gaia’s followers were going to give up. I needed to get back to the pit.
“Fight for us,” I whispered to T. “Fight with us. When your mother sends her disasters, and her minions, and whatever else she sends. When she emerges herself to try and stop change in its tracks once and for all, fight on our side.”
T wrapped a snake leg around my waist, yanking me off my feet, and I shrieked in terror at the sudden movement, the sound bouncing off the stones.Oh gods, this is it. He’s going to kill me for asking him to fight against Gaia. What was I thinking?
The thick flesh of his leg caught me before my head could smack onto the ground, and then I was coiled up, almost protectively, in serpent limbs. I held my breath, waiting for him to crush me to death like a boa constrictor. Except he didn’t. The deathly squeeze never came.
After a long, tense moment, T bent himself sideways to peer down at me, a giant hand lowering gently and brushing over my eyes as though he was closing them.
