by Laynie Bynum
“Ah, Clio. The muse of history and lyre playing.” Orpheus folded his hands. “Did you know Clio is actually the daughter of Zeus? She and the other muses are often linked to Apollo because he’s the god of music and dance. You’ll find a lot of people here are not direct children of Apollo but rather of one of the muses. But we’re all part of the same team.”
I felt the color draining from my skin at the mention of the word ‘team’. “Yes… Well, you happen to also be in the same team as Aphrodite’s offspring, and I think that’s why Mica is hoping I’m the child of Clio… But I have no idea how I can figure out of I am or not.”
Orpheus nodded. “Sometimes, it’s obvious. Other times, not that obvious. We have a few people here who are excellent healers; at first, they thought they were children of Athena, but their gut feeling told them they belong with us. Your instinct knows best. You’ll recognize your brethren anywhere.”
“But… I don’t recognize anyone as my family.” Tears clouded my eyes. “I mean, you’re very nice, and maybe the others here are too, but…”
“Don’t panic.” Orpheus patted me on the knee, and then turned his head and shouted at one of the girls sitting on the other end of the room, scribbling something down on paper. “Agnes, can you come here for a second?”
The girl, with shoulder-length brown hair and a plain but pretty face, walked toward us. “Can I help?”
The people here were so nice, I would like nothing more than to belong with them. But when I looked at them, I didn’t feel a connection, or a bond, or anything of that sort.
“Aiden thinks she might be related to one of the muses. Since you’re the child of Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, I thought perhaps you two would feel a kinship.”
Agnes smiled kindly when she focused on me. “Don’t worry. I didn’t feel much of a bond with the others here either; not at first. But one of my sisters, Helena, touched my hands and knew we were connected. That’s how I knew. My main skill is that I remember everything I have ever written down. I didn’t even know that until someone pointed it out to me. Can I touch your hands?”
“Sure.” I held out my hands for her. “My powers are related to time. That’s why I thought perhaps I’m related to Clio.”
“Hm. Could be.” Agnes knelt down and took my hands. Her palms were cool against the feverish heat of my own hands. Nerves made my stomach clench.
Agnes closed her eyes, taking in deep breaths. I stared at her with as much anticipation as people waiting for a rollercoaster to shoot them into the air.
Please say yes. If I was one of the muses, I would never have to face the hurt of Mica fighting on the opposite team of mine. It would mean I belonged here, with these friendly, kind-hearted people who enjoyed art and music, and far preferred this over fighting each other in an Arena or during the Trials.
Slowly, Agnes let go of me. She had a pensive look on her face when she opened her eyes again. “I… I’m not sure.”
“You don’t feel a connection?” Bile rose in my throat. The floor vanished beneath my feet. I didn’t belong with them. Or with Mica.
“Not in the way I feel it with the others. I’m sorry.” Agnes got back up and dusted off her hands on her pants. “I… Maybe you should try with the children of Athena, or of Artemis.”
“Are any of their skills related to time?” I was grasping on to straws, desperate to find the place where I belonged; if it wasn’t here, then where was it?
“Maybe. No. I don’t know.” Agnes’s eyes darted from left to right. “I have to go.”
I stared after her as she hurried back to her friends. Was it just me, or did she seem… scared?
“Agnes has a keen sense of these things. Like all the muses, she’s in touch with history, our own history and the history of the gods,” Orpheus said. “Maybe you should try the other groups.”
Disappointment must have been written all over my face, because he put his hand on my knee and said, “But don’t let that dissuade you from coming here. The arts are for everyone. You can find comfort in music or writing, regardless of whether you’re one of Apollo’s children or not.”
“Thanks.” I clasped his hand, thanking him for the support. “You’ve been really kind. I’m just… Well, I was hoping I would find a home here.”
“You are at home here, with all of us.” Orpheus smiled at me, and the butterflies in my stomach made another flip—but from a different type of nerves, this time around. “The guards want to keep us divided. The whole system wants to keep us divided. The order of having lunch, the weekly Trials, those are all things imagined by a system that thrives on us being all part of separate groups. I’ve tried to tell the others this a thousand times before, but if we united instead of being divided…” He looked as confident as Hannibal guiding his elephants over the Pyrenean mountains. “No one could ever dare to stand in our way.”
“You’re right.” I gazed straight into his eyes. “Why don’t we get rid of this stupid factions system, and down-right refuse to participate in the Trials?”
“I like your sentiment, Aiden,” Orpheus said. His hand was still on my knee, my hand still on his, and I had no intention of moving until he did. “But you’re not the first one who’s tried that. It just doesn’t work. We’re not in this for a fight, but as long as the children of Ares are hell-bent on proving themselves, as long as the gods of the underworld refuse to get along with anyone, and as long as Zeus and Poseidon’s sons are still waging the wars started by their fathers, then we won’t be united. Never.”
“Why don’t they just get over themselves for the greater good? If we all work together…” I lowered my voice. “Maybe we could even get out of here.”
Orpheus finally removed his hand from my knee. “I’m not sure if that’s the right course of action, either. I want us to work together to make this prison a better place, but…” He looked away from me, staring at the floor instead. “I don’t know if you ever did anything wrong before you got here, but some of the people locked up in here… Well, they deserve to be. They should never be let out.”
“Because they did something horrible?” I wondered who he was talking about. Maybe Charon and his gang? I could also imagine Dryas beating people up whenever he felt like it.
“Yes. And because they could do it again, the moment they’re released.” Orpheus’ voice sounded strained. “Still, it doesn’t matter. I have tried to reconcile the different groups before, and so did a dozen others before me, but none of them could. Charon, Amphion, Dryas, and Lycus, they will never see eye-to-eye, not in a million years. And without their consent, there’s no way to unite all the different factions.”
Hmm. I thought about hot-headed Dryas, mysterious Charon… And Amphion, if I remembered well, was the son of Zeus. He seemed like he wasn’t easy to persuade either, although he had tried to defend me during lunch. Lycus I hadn’t really met yet, but I was sure he would be as stubborn as the others.
“Anyway,” Orpheus said. “I hope you find your place here soon, Aiden. Even if you’re not one of Apollo’s children, I want you to know that you can always talk to me if you need someone to listen to you. I’m glad to help.”
“Thank you. That means a lot.” Of all the people I had met here so far, Orpheus with his ocean blue eyes, was the nicest one, no doubt. I hoped that Agnes was wrong in her assessment, and that somehow, I did belong with them.
My eyes traveled over to where Agnes was sitting and caught her staring right at me. She averted her gaze right away, like a child caught stealing candy, or a mouse about to get hunted down by a cat.
If I didn’t know better, I would think she was afraid of me. But why? She had been friendly until the moment she took my hands and tried to see if we had a connection, if we were related. What had Orpheus said about her again? That, as a muse, she knew the gods’ history better than anyone?
What had she felt when she touched my hands?
Had it scared her?
And if who I really was, scared
her…
Then who the hell was I?
Chapter Seven
“That’s the door to the Arena?” I scrunched up my nose. “That’s… not what I expected at all.”
“What did you expect? That it would say ‘Arena’ in a gigantic font?” Mica remained distant from me, but at least she still had her old sense of humor. Our previous conversation had driven a wedge between us, and I had no idea how to undo it, or even if I wanted to. In a way, it was better to accept now that things would never be the same, than fight for something that no longer existed.
If I could turn back time to right before she got caught, I would, but I couldn’t. Time travel had its limits, and traveling too far back often had disastrous consequences, as I had learned first-hand. On the other hand, it would be selfish of me: without being brought here, Mica would’ve never known who her real mother was, or that she was descended from the Greek gods. She would forever be stuck thinking she was an orphan with strange manipulation powers, a mutant inhabiting the earth.
“I expected the door to be decorated with lions’ heads and flanked by pillars, or something along those lines,” I said. “At least a hint to inform people they’re about to enter a fighting pit.”
“Well, it’s not.” Mica walked toward the two jailors standing guard on each side of the door. “My friend got challenged to a fight in the Arena.”
One of the jailors, a middle-aged man with greying hair and some loose strands of grey in his beard, scrutinized me from head to toe. “Against?”
“Dryas,” Mica said.
The man scoffed. “You won’t last a second in there.” He had the trademark tattoo of the MMCA, but he looked a little more worn-out than the usual MMCA agents I had come across in the past. “I’ve seen men twice your size come out of there wobbling on their knees. The very reason why we allow this Arena is because we rather let the lot of you fight it out amongst yourself than us having to deal with it, but I don’t particularly want to wipe up the blood of a teenager.”
“I’ll be fine.” I sounded a lot more confident than I felt, but if I backed down now, I would forever be known as a coward here. I rather cross the river Styx than let that happen.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” The guard shrugged, his concern for me obviously having reached its limits. “Give me your arm.”
I held out my arm, and he unlocked the bracer around my wrist. Without it, I felt free like a bird, ready to soar and spread my wings. Except it wasn’t as if I could take out all these guards on my own.
“Get in.” Without much ado, the guard opened the door and shoved me inside. The door slammed shut behind me.
My jaw dropped to the floor.
Perhaps the entrance door hadn’t looked out of the ordinary, but the room behind matched the description of an arena in every single way.
It was like stepping right into the underworld, like entering another dimension.
Rock formations circled the arena, and four larger rocks rose out of the ground like gigantic shark teeth. I twirled around to look at the door and saw instead a flaming skull.
“Yikes.” I quivered at the sight of the monstrosity. The skull was easily four times my height, and flames hovered behind its eyes and half-open mouth.
I moved to the edge of the platform and looked down. Lava surrounded the platform, with bubbles exploding every few seconds.
This was hell. The underworld. No other way to describe it.
The air was suffused with an ominous red glow, and screams echoed in the far distance.
My hands trembled like leaves in the wind, and dread wriggled at the back of my mind.
Why had I said yes to this? What was this creepy place I had ended up in? Why hadn’t Mica warned me that stepping into the arena equaled stepping into a hellish dimension of fire and brimstone?
The skull’s mouth opened slowly, flames sputtering out. I fled to one of the shark-teeth rocks and hid behind it, trying to escape the flames reaching for me.
Dryas stepped into the arena, walking straight out of the skull’s burning mouth.
Flabbergasted, all I could do was stare at him while the skeleton’s fiery mouth closed behind him. By the gods, I had entered the same way, so… The skull was the door.
I wished I hadn’t joked to Mica about how the entrance to the Arena didn’t look spectacular at all. The mundane, white door had led right to one of the pits of hell!
“How do you like our Arena?” Dryas gestured around the place, obviously not taken aback by its ghastly appearance. He had probably been here a thousand times before, if not more.
“Looks a little ominous,” I said, still half-hidden behind the giant rock. “I hadn’t expected to end up here. This is another dimension, right?”
“Another realm, yes. The underworld, sometimes called Hades, after its infamous ruler. This particular part is located in the Asphodel Meadows, a place where ordinary or indifferent souls go to, who didn’t commit any significant crimes but didn’t achieve anything significant in life either. This Arena is their second chance.”
“Let me guess.” I moved from behind the rock, still feeling unnerved by the atmosphere of the place. It didn’t exactly look like meadows, if you asked me, it looked like fiery pit of doom. “If they reach glory in this arena, they can still move on to another part of the afterlife?”
“Exactly,” Dryas said. He rolled up his sleeves, revealing muscled, toned arms covered in tattoos. If he wasn’t such an arrogant jerk, I would consider him handsome, in a bad-boy, dangerous way.
“Because life in prison became too unruly, the guards allowed us to travel here, and fight in the Arena. They prefer it rather than people ripping apart the common room. The Arena always magically restores itself, no matter what happens. Besides, a fight in the common room wouldn’t exactly be fair, as none of us would get to use our real powers.”
“So, I take it you’ve fought here a lot.”
Dryas began circling me, and I did the same, like two lions ready to jump on each other at any moment. I analyzed my opponent. He was a lot stronger than I was, of that I had no doubt, just looking at those muscles made my stomach clench. He was also more experienced in fighting.
I had never actually fought anyone before. Even with the MMCA, I was more focused on staying out of their grip and escaping them than battling them.
All I had going for me, was the element of surprise. That meant I couldn’t have the first blow. I had to wait for Dryas to attack me first.
“I’d say a hundred times, more or less. People tend to annoy me.” He smiled like a hyena, hungry, ready for blood.
“Why?” I asked.
This question seemed to take him aback. For a moment, his concentration was lost. “What do you mean?”
“Well, why do people tend to annoy you?” I made it sound like an innocent question, but in reality, I was using it mostly to draw some time. “There must be a reason.”
Dryas looked at me as if I had turned into a giant ape and started throwing bananas at him. “Why do you care? People are useless.”
“Sounds lonely, if you think everyone else is useless.” The longer I kept him talking, the less time he could spend turning me into a punching bag.
We kept on circling each other, but Dryas seemed distraught by my questions, his eyes darting left and right. He didn’t understand my mind games.
“Not everyone is equally useless,” he admitted gruffly. “But anyone who can’t fight is. Life is simple: you either fight and win, or you lose and die.”
“There’s no grey zone for you,” I said, beginning to understand how this man’s brain worked. “What about people who can’t fight? People who need others to fight for them?”
“Weaklings.” Dryas spit on the ground. His face turned red at the thought of people needing others to fight their battles for them. “If you can’t fight, you’re a lost cause anyway.”
I wondered what had happened to him, had pushed him so far that he thought he always had t
o fight, no matter what. Something had pushed him to the point where he considered fighting the only option in any scenario.
“So, you’re an aggressor instead of a protector,” I concluded. “You rather have the first punch than offer to help an innocent.”
“No one is innocent,” Dryas fired back as quickly as the words had left my mouth. “We’re all on our own anyway.”
Hurt. An unimaginable hurt lay behind those words. It resonated from Dryas: behind those layers of arrogance, of blown-up confidence, was a man who had been pushed to the edge, who thought he had to strike the first blow rather than give anyone a chance, who wanted to hurt before he could get hurt.
Despite that I was mostly trying to bide some time, I also felt sympathy towards him. Towards someone who had been driven this far, had plummeted into an abyss where in the end, all he could do was be alone, because he could no longer trust anyone else.
I stopped walking, looked at him with all the sympathy I could muster, and whispered, “What happened to you?”
Half of me hoped Dryas would answer the question, but the other half saw his attack coming from a mile away. He howled and swung his fist straight at me. I dodged his attack by swirling to the side.
Another growl from Dryas, and he was on me again, slamming his fist into my face. The mere strength of the punch sent me spinning, and my jaw cracked.
I resisted the urge to snap my fingers, rewind time, and move aside before he could hit me, but I bit through the pain instead.
“Come on! Use your powers!” Dryas yelled at me.
I staggered backward, holding on to my jaw. “No.”
He snarled, grabbed my arm and twisted me around, pushing my arm against my back. “Do something at least. This is getting boring.” My limbs hurt like hell, and when I groaned in pain, he pulled my arm further.
Pure agony shot through me. The fingers on my free arm were itching to just snap and break free from the pain, but I gritted my teeth and resisted the urge.
