At the dawn of the world there was no Time, the voice began. Only darkness. Cold. Nothingness. Khaos.
Selene fought to keep the masked syndexioi before her eyes, but in an instant, she felt herself floating in blackness; the Phrygianum’s torches shed no light in this primeval memory. Then, slowly, the ground steadied once more beneath her feet.
From this chasm emerged Ouranos the Sky and Gaia the Earth, the voice continued. And from their union came Unbounded Time in all his glory. Aion.
Many-winged, lion-headed, fire-breathing. Protogonos. A primordial son too uncontrolled to govern creation.
Selene caught the merest glimpse of beating wings, of a fanged lion’s mouth belching flames to feed a fiery ball that exploded across her vision. When the fire passed, the light remained so brilliant it seemed almost tangible, a great, bright fog slowly melting through a rainbow of colors, from searing red to deepest indigo, before devolving into utter blackness once more.
Next Gaia birthed Kronos, called Saturn. God of Bounded Time, a Titan who bent the curve of the universe into a straight line. Who bound His lion-brother in place. The one true Father who gave life beginning and end.
Slowly, the air around her pricked with stars. Finally, a man appeared before her. Taller than a giant, with hair khaos-dark and eyes the layered blue of twilight. In his hand he bore a sickle, the blade serrated with stars.
He knew the world would flourish only under His benevolent rule. So He took His mighty sickle and sliced the manhood from His father, Ouranos the Sky, throwing his stones into the ocean to foam upon the crest of the waves.
Thus did Saturn become King of All, ruling a Golden Age bereft of sin, of suffering, of strife.
But Saturn’s wife, Rhea, grew jealous of her husband’s dominion.
Selene watched her own grandmother appear. Black hair intricately braided, starry jewels at her wrists and throat, her belly swollen beneath a sheer chiton spun of moonlight and morning dew.
One after another, Rhea brought children into the world, each imbued with a part of Saturn’s power.
“Here is Hestia,” she said, raising the girl child to her husband. “She will keep the hearth fires burning and bind families to the home.” But the wise Father took the babe and swallowed her down, placing her in His own gullet, where she could do no harm to the world. For He alone ruled hearth and home.
Saturn unhinged his jaw like a snake and gulped. Grief blindsided Selene with its force—a despair too keen for the loss of a distant aunt. She wanted to rip the clothes from her breast, to smear her face with ash. I’m witnessing the demise of my own child, she knew, though the thought made no sense.
“Here is Hades,” said Rhea, showing Saturn His eldest son. “He will claim dominion over the Underworld.”
But Saturn swallowed him down. For He alone ruled the afterlife.
Again, the sharp slash of anguish. Selene screamed in horror as she watched the baby’s tiny foot slurped between Saturn’s wet lips, but no sound issued from her mouth. She was a silent observer only, though she understood now why Hades’ demise caused her such agony. I don’t know how, but I watch through Rhea’s eyes, she realized. Her broken heart beats in my breast.
Again and again, five times in all, Rhea presented her children to her Titan king. And each time He protected the world from them. Hestia and Hades. Hera and Demeter and Poseidon. Family and harvest and ocean swells. All swallowed down to remain within the one true God where they belonged.
And then Gaia Earth conspired with Rhea, for they wanted the Father’s power for themselves. Saturn’s wife gave birth to one final son. A raging child who would cover the world in storm clouds of his own making. Who would bring war and suffering and lightning blasts.
Rhea wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes and raised it up to her husband.
“Here is Zeus,” she said. “He will rule the world.”
And Saturn swallowed down the stone.
Gaia hid her grandson Zeus in a cave in the depths of a mountain, among goats who succored him with their milk and nymphs who played loud cymbals to hide his infant cries.
Heart bursting with a mother’s pride, Selene watched as Zeus grew from babe to man among the familiar stalactites of his cave until his body rippled with power and his beard jutted sharp as a lightning strike.
Zeus sought his father. He ripped open Saturn’s gullet and withdrew his siblings. Each emerged full-grown. Ready to steal the world from its rightful God.
A great battle began.
Selene was a silent witness to the story no longer. Saturn had summoned the other Titans to his side, and giants, too, each with a hundred hands and fifty heads. The war with the giants—the Gigantomachy—had raged for so long that Artemis had grown to adulthood before the end. The battle came to her in flashes of double vision as she watched through Rhea’s eyes and her own at the same time. The gleaming storm of her arrows striking down her enemies. A queen’s long scepter ripping a giant’s head from its body. Golden ichor splattering across the carnage. The earth shaking with the force of the clash. The world itself near torn apart.
When the battle was done, Saturn’s own children cast Him down into the pit of Tartarus. A prison full of raging monsters, as black and cold as Khaos itself.
Six Olympians remained to divide the world, with their children to divide it still further.
But Saturn never forgot and never forgave. The world suffered with His loss.
And when His children freed Him from Tartarus many eons later, He vowed to take back what they had stolen.
The voice’s power finally dimmed, the words just words.
“The Olympians faded, victims of their own blind hubris. They grew weak and mortal—mere bodies of flesh.”
Selene slowly came back to the stone floor of the Phrygianum, back to the blood dribbling down her neck. She was in her own body again—but she felt a strange prickle across her skin that had nothing to do with the bull’s drying gore. Someone is watching me, she thought at first. Then, No … someone is watching through me.
“I will move the heavens themselves to bring the world into the Last Age,” her grandfather intoned. “An Age free of false gods. For I am God and God is One. One in Three and Three in One.”
Footsteps on the grate overhead. The syndexioi around her rustled as if to prepare for the next step in the ritual.
“The one responsible for destroying my rule must now suffer the consequences. The Great Mother must be brought low.” Saturn’s formal incantation became something more personal, more bitter, as he went on. “Rhea no longer walks this earth—my queen is out of reach. And so we imbue her granddaughter with the seed of her spirit instead. We water her with the blood of the bull that she may burst into bloom as the Great Mother herself.”
Selene’s chest tightened with panic. My grandmother looks through my eyes. I am not alone in my own body. She summoned a defiant bark of laughter anyway.
“Well, if you expected me to magically turn into Rhea, it didn’t work!” she shouted up to the grate, unwilling to admit to Saturn that his ritual might have succeeded. “I’m just cold and wet and sticky, and the only thing I have in common with Grandma is the desire to rip your fucking stomach out.”
The armor-clad Miles brandished his long spear at her and said something in Italian.
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t speak the vernacular.”
A figure appeared on the stone staircase that led from the overhead grate to the chamber’s floor.
“You would prefer English, is that it?” her grandfather asked. “A common language for a common girl.”
With his burnt face and white beard, Saturn bore little resemblance to the Titan king in the story. But his eyes still shone like a blue-black sky just before the stars appeared, and he wore his ceremonial garb proudly: a white robe edged in red. His divine sickle hung from his waist, the same curved blade he’d used to slice the balls from his own father. The same blade that had cut Apollo’s heart from his chest
.
He walked slowly down the stairs and across the bloody floor. Up close, she could tell just how strong he’d become. He might not have swallowed his offspring this time, but their deaths had renewed his power nonetheless. He would be nearly impossible to kill.
That wouldn’t stop her from trying.
With her own hatred fueled by her grandmother’s ancient rage, she hopped quickly over her cuffed wrists and lunged forward, ready to kill Saturn with her bare hands.
The Miles’s outstretched spear swung into her path.
She stopped with its point a centimeter from her chest. The long golden shaft had once belonged to Mars, the God of War. The Miles might not have any divinely granted abilities—he would wield the spear no better than any well-trained mortal—but the weapon itself, like her golden arrows, had been forged by Hephaestus. No running stream could heal her from such a wound.
“If I’m such a common girl, as you put it,” she snarled at her grandfather, “why do you keep putting me in your sacrificial rituals?” Chin raised, she stared coldly into his eyes, resisting the urge to wipe away the blood she could still feel trickling down her cheek.
“Because authenticity matters,” Saturn replied calmly. “To reclaim my own power, I need to destroy those who took it from me in the first place. Starting with the wife who betrayed me.”
“Except she’s already dead,” Selene said, trying to ignore the niggling presence inside her.
“Indeed. The Great Mother was not so great after all. Nonetheless, I need her for the ritual. I’d planned to kidnap a mortal woman as a stand-in—I hoped the marble pine tree would make up for my sacrifice’s inadequacies. But you are much better suited to my needs. I can already see your grandmother’s soul in your eyes.” He smiled tightly, an expression more of anger than amusement. “I didn’t think we’d actually catch you a second time, much less be able to hold you. Thank you for proving me wrong. Better to have a goddess for the ritual than any obsolete artifact—and you are both, no?”
“So what now?” she asked, ignoring the insult. “You’ve used Mithras’s rituals, now the Magna Mater’s. Are you going to send in the little dancing girls dressed as bear cubs?”
Saturn croaked a laugh. “Like your acolytes in Brauron? No, I think not. I don’t need Artemis—I need the Magna Mater.” He clapped his hands twice, prefacing a skittering of hooves and pitiable bleating overhead. “The taurobolium is complete. The Age of Taurus is past.”
This time, Selene ducked her head just in time, but the ram’s blood still slammed against her. Her T-shirt stuck to her skin; the hot liquid dripped beneath her collar and snaked between her breasts, rolling under the waistband of her pants in a parody of intimacy. The syndexioi around her chanted praise for the sacrifice that symbolized the passing of the Age of Aries the Ram.
“And what happens when you end the Age of Pisces?” she asked, wiping bloody strands of hair from her eyes with her cuffed hands. “It’s going to take a damn big fish to get a good blood shower.”
Saturn didn’t smile. His eyes traveled hungrily to the gore still drizzling from the overhead grate. “Every time we reenact the heavens’ progress, we move one step closer to the Last Age.”
“You can’t actually change the sun and the stars, you know,” Selene snapped. “None of us have that kind of power anymore—if we ever did.”
Saturn gave her a look of mild surprise. “The stars? No, we cannot move the stars.”
“Then why the fuck are you bothering to pretend you can? Why the obsession with the Age of Aquarius?”
“The Age of Aquarius … the Last Age. They’re one and the same. The stars will move with or without us, you are right—we merely channel the power of that movement for our own purposes. Great shifts in the heavens lead to great shifts on earth. We have waited two thousand years for the next moment of turning. Only now can the Last Age arise. But first we must rid the world of the last few tired remnants of the Olympians. We must restore the One God to his rightful place.” His chin lifted; he stared down his nose at Selene. “And to do that we must destroy the old King and make way for another.”
She shivered despite the hot blood coating her skin. “You mean killing my father.”
“Precisely. Zeus has, after all, had it coming for millennia.”
“He should never have released you from the pit of Tartarus,” she growled.
“No, he shouldn’t have,” he agreed with a nod. “And you should never have come here to rescue him. But too late for regrets now, is it not?”
She balled her fists; Saturn noted the gesture with a flare of his nostrils. “You dream of bursting free of your chains and striking me down. But you know now I’m far stronger than you.”
“You think I care?”
“Not at all. That’s why I’m going to leave this corporeal body behind once and for all. That’s what none of you have understood. You mourn your fading flesh, your graying hair. You want to return to youth and power and glory. I want to move beyond all that. The Hebrew god had the right idea, you see. If you never take human form, you can never be hurt, never die. This body is a tomb, granddaughter. One I’ll escape soon enough.”
He motioned to the Miles, who jabbed his spear toward Selene, herding her out of the stone chamber. Saturn led the way into a long hallway studded with doors.
“This temple of ours is far more ancient than the one we constructed in Manhattan,” he explained, as if he gave such tours every day. He stopped at one of the doors and pulled a key from his pocket. “More powerful, too, of course. But we never planned to hold the Olympians captive here—we knew you’d all left Rome after the Diaspora—so no fancy fortified cell this time, I’m afraid.” He opened the door. “This was once a schoolroom, where we taught new syndexioi the beauties of our faith. Perhaps now, in your last moments, it might teach you something as well.”
“So you are going to kill me?” A small part of her had hoped he meant to keep her alive to witness the turning of the Age.
“Of course,” he said, looking genuinely surprised. “The taurobolium implanted you with the seed of your grandmother, remember? In a few hours, you will burst into bloom as the Great Mother, and I will prune you from your stem. I just haven’t figured out the best cutting method yet.”
Selene swallowed hard. Would her body transform, her stomach swell, her hair coil? Would her mind, her heart, her very soul fall sway to the spirit of a grandmother she couldn’t even remember?
Saturn didn’t give her the chance to ask. He gestured to his Miles, who pushed her inside the schoolroom. The door locked behind her.
The first thing that caught Selene’s attention in the small, dim chamber was the fresco on the ceiling. A beatific young man wearing the seven-rayed crown of the rising sun and a star-studded cloak: Mithras-as-Jesus, the Sun and the Son. Beside him, some syndexios had painted a bearded, older man carrying a sickle in one hand: the Father bearing the symbol of Saturn. The third figure Selene had never seen before, but she recognized him from Saturn’s story: Aion, the primordial God of Unbounded Time, a creature with a lion’s head, four wings, and a snake coiled around his naked human body. The two Roman keys the figure held against his chest reminded her of the Vatican’s coat of arms.
“God is One in Three and Three in One,” said a gravelly voice from nearby. “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
She spun toward the sound. Crouched in the corner of the room sat a very old man, his nakedness covered only by a thin, ragged blanket. His patchy white beard drooped to his bent knees, and his scalp showed pink beneath his wispy hair. An age-spotted hand patted across the floor until it found a pair of broken glasses. He fumbled them onto his face and peered up at her with rheumy gray eyes, one obscured by a shattered lens, the other enormous behind the thick glass.
After a long moment, she recognized him.
“Father …”
In answer, the barest hint of a smile curved his thin lips. “Deer Heart.”
A m
oan escaped her as she staggered forward and fell to her knees before the King of the Gods.
Chapter 19
PSYCHOPOMPOS
Theo’s mouth felt sticky, his back ached, and he had no idea what time it was, but none of that mattered. Soon, he’d either be dead or with Selene. Or maybe both.
Twenty hours after he’d left New York, Theo watched Scooter Joveson bound toward the visitor’s entrance to Saint Peter’s Basilica. Beneath the watchful eyes of the countless Christian saints carved on the massive cathedral’s facade, the pagan Messenger of the Gods disdained Theo’s proffered hand and embraced him instead.
For his new career as a cybersecurity expert, Scooter had traded in his rakish movie-producer suit for dark slacks and a crisp checked shirt. He’d slicked his unruly black curls into a short ponytail, revealing a high widow’s peak that made the famously youthful god look just a little past his prime. Thick-framed blue glasses contributed to the overall “serious nerd” facade, an illusion quickly shattered the moment he pulled a brightly patterned Hermès handkerchief from his pocket and fanned his face with it.
“If we’re going to do this thing,” he carped, glancing around the sunbaked piazza, “let’s at least do it somewhere with air-conditioning.”
“Where’s Flint?” Despite the burly Athanatos’s unfortunate tendency to moon over Selene, Theo was looking forward to having an ally with a hammer. “I thought you said he’d want to help.”
“Well, slight hiccup there, I’m afraid. I keep calling, but his phone’s going straight to voice mail.”
“What? He picked now to turn hermit again? I thought you’d been in touch with him.”
“I have! He hasn’t ignored me in months, I swear.”
“You think something happened to him?”
“No, no. He can take care of himself.” Scooter’s perennial smile looked forced. “Except, you know, if the Host attacked him with one of our divine weapons. I mean, it’s possible we’ve been hunting them and they’ve been hunting us at the same time, so …” He gave a strangled, humorless laugh.
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