Olympus Bound

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  Back to Artemis.

  To Diana.

  To Selene Neomenia.

  Memory returned, slow and fragile at first, like petals falling from a tree. Her father’s cracked eyeglasses. Theo’s shocked face. Rhea’s silent helplessness. Flint’s horrified cries. Saturn’s grim smile. The scent of blackened meat.

  As the rest of the memory scorched through her, she nearly buckled under the remembered pain. Her hazy body showed no sign of the pyre’s many-tongued kiss, but she felt it nonetheless. She stood rooted to the ground as if iron chains still bound her fast, trapped in the memory of flames flaying the skin from her bones. But worse than the pain was the thought of what she’d left behind. Of Flint, trapped and chained. Of her father, bound for sacrifice. Of Theo, whom she’d tried so hard to protect, now caught amid his enemies. The men she loved most in the world, now in mortal danger. And she could do nothing to help them.

  Yet still the song continued. She reached for it, a drowning woman seeking a lifeline. She followed it backward, climbing hand over hand along the rope of names, following it to its source.

  To a wide lake, its waters smooth and mirror bright.

  To a naked young man who stood silhouetted before it with a gold lyre in his hands.

  Like all the figures in this world between worlds, the outline of his body blurred; his flesh seemed without substance. His once bright curls were near colorless. Yet she knew his face. She had known it since it floated beside her in their mother’s womb.

  Apollo, the God of Light and Music, ran toward her.

  When he flung his arms around her, she felt only the barest hint of sensation, haze brushing haze. I prayed to see him again, she remembered dimly. So why do I feel so little joy? They had always been two sides of the same whole. Sun and Moon. Civilization and wilderness. Male and female. Yet she felt as if Saturn’s pyre had burned away both Artemis and Rhea and left her no more than a shell that even her twin couldn’t fill.

  He stepped back to stare at her, and his face, too, was full of grief. “Has that much time passed, Moonshine, that you have finally lost your immortality? Or have the Fates cut short the thread of your life as they did mine?”

  “Not the Fates. Grandfather.”

  Apollo’s expression hardened. “And so he has killed us both.” He spoke in the formal language of a deity. Little sign remained of Paul Solson, the moody indie rockstar he’d been before his death. “He has finished his rituals, then? Is he truly God the Father?”

  “Not yet,” she managed. “But soon.”

  “What of the others?” he urged. “Surely Hermes and Hephaestus and Theodore will not—”

  At the mention of their names, her blurred hands pressed against eyes too unformed to weep.

  Apollo gripped her shoulders, though she could barely feel his touch. “Artemis, I beg you. Tell me what happened.”

  And so she did. From the battle against Saturn on the Statue of Liberty to her time in the flames beneath the Vatican. She told him of abandoning Theo and finding him again. Of Rhea’s soul mingling with her own. Of Zeus and Flint captive in the Host’s prison. Of her own failure to keep any of them safe.

  “I am no Savior,” she cried. “Those names you sing … they’re mine no longer. And I’m not the Great Mother either. Saturn finally got what he wanted—Rhea’s soul isn’t inside me anymore. She’s nowhere. Nothing. Wiped from the earth, from memory, from existence itself. And so am I. So if you must speak of me, don’t sing my glory.” Her voice turned hard, bitter. “Call me by my other epithets. Call me Stormy, call me Despoiler, call me the Face of Death.”

  She went on, repeating the long litany of all the titles she’d tried to forget until her words became a chant. Apollo sang with her, but with words of his own. A hymn of praise for his glorious twin. Dirge and paean twined in counterpoint, until, when Selene’s throat was raw from sobbing and every limb felt too heavy to lift, Apollo put his arm around her and drew her close.

  “You said Theodore has Hades’ helm and Orion’s sword,” he murmured.

  She nodded.

  “And Hermes is with him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you must not underestimate them, Moonshine. The Makarites is smart, the Trickster cunning. They will find a way to rescue the others. You must trust in that.”

  “You know trust has never been easy for me.”

  The corner of his lip twitched. “Yet you learned to trust me in the end. Trust me now. They will survive.”

  “Do you have the gift of prophecy again?” she asked, not daring to hope.

  “No.” His eyes roamed the parched ground and the mirrored lake. “This place is no Delphi. Here, I have only my music. And my faith.”

  “Faith in what?”

  “In you, of course.” Apollo lifted a narrow brow. “The others whom Saturn killed—Hades, Prometheus, Mars—passed through like any other shades. I alone have remained. And I knew you would do the same. We entered the world together. It seemed only fit that we leave the same way.”

  “You’ve been … waiting for me?”

  “I have not been too lonely. Song makes memories strong enough to withstand the ravages of time. It made the world and it can unmake it, too.”

  He rested his fingers upon his lyre, coaxing forth his hymn once more—the same tune that had drawn her from across the Underworld. A song, she realized, he’d been playing for the last six months.

  But this time, another man’s voice sang the words she had chosen.

  “Stormy. Despoiler. The Face of Death.”

  Theo’s voice. Ragged, hoarse, as if the words tore at his throat.

  Dread choked the breath from Selene’s lungs. But her heart cried out one word over and over. No. No. NO.

  She looked to her twin, whose gentle face had twisted with new misery. “I am so sorry,” he said.

  “You were wrong,” she managed, the words more lamentation than accusation. “He didn’t make it.”

  She turned to face the hazy outline of the man she’d loved. He stood naked before her, his fair hair falling across his forehead in a blurry sweep, his green eyes, always so keen, now mere smudges in a face devoid of its usual angles. Only his voice remained sharp.

  “Selene …” When Theo had spoken her name in the mithraeum, it had been an awesome gasp. Now it was a command.

  She opened her mouth to respond and no words emerged.

  Her twin’s arms around her shoulders were no comfort at all. Not when her brilliant, laughing lover was dead.

  Selene felt as if her body were still a charred husk, so fragile that the grief burning within would split her apart. A cry of anguish fought against her clenched lips. Apollo couldn’t soothe her now—only anger could tame the sorrow that threatened to break her. But what good was wrath when the one who truly deserved punishment was herself?

  She tried to speak. Choked. Tried again. “How did—”

  “I was about to drink from Lethe when I heard your song.” His eyes shifted to Apollo, his tone softening for an instant. “Hey, Paul. Nice to see you again.”

  “No, I mean—” Selene began.

  “There’s no time,” Theo cut her off. “Somewhere in another existence, Flint’s waiting with a syringe full of antidote. We’ve got to move.”

  “Antidote,” Selene managed. “Saturn didn’t kill you?”

  “No,” he said shortly.

  Apollo looked at him, confusion brightening into awe.

  That’s when Selene understood. I prayed you’d come to rescue me. But please, not this time. I beg you, Theo, not like this.

  Horror twisted through her stomach like a many-coiled serpent, threatening to tear her apart from the inside. Then, something deep within her switched off. A circuit breaker tripping. A sluice gate slamming shut. In the place of devastation she felt only numbness.

  Apollo still watched Theo, a bittersweet smile on his lips. “What a song I could write of your love.”

  Theo looked like he might vomit. “My l
ove,” he spat. “Is that what this feeling is?” But when his gaze flicked back to hers, some of his rage melted away. In her coldness, he seemed to find an icy calm of his own. His chest rose and fell in a single deep breath. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going. Now.”

  Something in his tone brought Selene to her feet. But Apollo only shook his head sadly. “It doesn’t work that way. You can’t just walk out.”

  “Sure I can,” Theo said. “Orpheus did.”

  “There are no Queen and King of the Underworld anymore to grant you passage. Hades himself is gone.”

  “I don’t need his permission. I have this.” Theo held up a gold leaf-shaped pendant.

  Apollo fixed his eyes on the thin sheet of metal like a starving man seeing bread for the first time. “Is that—”

  “Dionysus’s instructions.”

  Apollo turned to his sister, hope flaring in his familiar gold eyes. But even before Theo had shown her the pendant, Selene had already made up her mind. He had killed himself. For her. She still couldn’t allow herself to feel the true import of that gesture—the force of it would crush her, body and soul—but she could make sure he had not sacrificed himself in vain.

  She gripped Apollo’s hand. “We’re getting out.”

  “He came for you,” her brother replied hesitantly.

  “Well, he’s leaving with both of us,” she said in a tone that brooked no argument.

  She shot a glance at Theo, who nodded in solemn agreement. “Fine. But we don’t have time to waste.”

  He turned away from her, all business. He looked down at the pendant, then back up at the mirrored lake before them. “It says to go to the Lake of Mnemosyne. So far so good.”

  He stepped to the lake’s edge and reached down. The lapping water receded before him faster than any wave. He took another step; the water retreated still further.

  “You can’t reach the lake here. There is only one entrance,” Apollo explained. “I know where it is—at a stream that runs from the lake to the Styx—but the Gods of Birth and Death guard it well. Still … if we could enter, to drink from Mnemosyne is to drink from Memory itself. We would return to life with all our past intact.”

  “So we just have to get past Birth and Death, huh?” Theo said, a grim smile crooking one side of his mouth. “No problem.”

  Apollo led the way. Theo followed without looking back at Selene. But the flicker of his old wit rapped against the wall she’d thrown up around her emotions, a jeweler’s hammer tapping out a familiar tattoo. As she walked along the edge of the lake, her feet marched to its rhythm, and she felt, for the first time since Saturn’s men had dragged her to the pyre, a glimmer of hope.

  Chapter 25

  GOD OF UNBOUNDED TIME

  Selene walked along the water’s edge for what felt like hours but might have been seconds. To her right, the parched ground stretched into hazy distance. To her left, the vast Lake of Mnemosyne lay calm and still, reflecting the featureless sky. In either direction, nothing held the eye.

  This is what it means to be dead, she thought. To exist within nothingness. Apollo had wandered this netherworld for six months—half a year that might have felt like centuries or minutes. Only his music—and her memory—had kept him sane.

  Selene fixed her gaze on her twin and Theo, latching on to them as the only anchors in an empty sea.

  Finally, they came to a narrow stream that swirled with color like oil in sunlight. Where it joined the lake, two men stood guard. Selene recognized them from the carvings in so many mithraea: Cautes and Cautopates, the Torchbearers. They were twins, their expressionless faces like bronzes cast from the same mold. Only the direction of their torches differed—upward for Cautes, guardian of Birth; downward for Cautopates, guardian of Death.

  Between them stood a lion-headed man, the same figure she’d seen on the ceiling of the Mithraic schoolroom, the one Saturn had called Aion, Unbounded Time. He stood ramrod straight, clasping two foot-long keys against his chest. A snake writhed around his nude body and up his torso, its head resting above his lion’s mane for a moment before it slithered back down to retrace its twining path. An undulating double helix, twisting into the shape of life itself.

  None of the three guards paid any heed to the blurred ghosts standing a few yards away.

  “Dennis said we need to be Releasers,” Theo murmured. “That must mean getting our furry friend to use the keys to unlock the way forward.”

  “The Torchbearers will not let you pass,” Apollo said in a hushed voice.

  Theo tapped the gold pendant around his neck. “We’ll see.”

  Neither Cautes nor Cautopates looked at him as he approached, but when he tried to pass between them, their meter-long torches slammed together like a gate.

  Theo looked down at his pendant and read aloud carefully, as if reciting a passphrase:

  “I am the child of Earth and starry Heaven, but my race is heavenly. I am parched with thirst and I perish, but give me quickly refreshing water flowing forth from the Lake of Mnemosyne.”

  To Selene’s amazement, the guardians uncrossed their torches in response. Lion-headed Aion took a step back and raised his two keys overhead, as if to unlock the sky itself.

  Theo motioned for Selene to follow. “Do what I do,” he urged. “We’re almost there.”

  He passed beyond the guardians and quickly bent to sip from the rushing rainbow stream. Selene grasped her twin’s ghostly hand in her own and strode quickly between the guards. Cautes and Cautopates let her through—but their torches clashed together behind her with a shower of sparks, blocking Apollo’s way.

  “He may not pass,” they said in unison.

  Aion merely growled, his long teeth bared.

  “Why not?” Selene demanded. Her hand still clutched her brother’s, their outstretched arms reaching between the crossed torches.

  “Only souls newly arrived can depart,” the Torchbearers intoned. “You may go. He may not.”

  “Where I go, he goes.” She squeezed her twin’s hand, trusting her own nebulous flesh to convey her message. As one, they swept their clasped hands upward to knock aside the torches, moving so fast the flames barely licked their skin.

  Selene yanked on Apollo’s arm to drag him through, but Aion stood before them, barring their path to the stream. He lowered his keys with a roar.

  Theo stepped forward to help, then jerked to a halt as if he’d run into an invisible wall. His shell of calm determination cracked open. “Aion locked the way!” He pounded his fist against thin air, desperate, panicked. “I can’t get back to—”

  Apollo’s warning shout drowned out Theo’s words. Selene wheeled toward her twin just in time to see him dodge the torches swinging toward him from either side. Cautes and Cautopates moved in perfect symmetry, their flaming brands streaking the dim gray sky with light.

  “They move as one,” she cried, “but we don’t have to!”

  Releasing Apollo’s hand, she hurtled toward Cautes just as his torch swung toward her. She ducked the fluttering flame and seized the bundled reed handle instead.

  “They call me Torch-Bearing Goddess,” she snarled, ripping the reeds from his hands. “But I prefer She Who Helps One Climb Out.”

  She jabbed the torch into the ground, dousing the flames against the rocky earth.

  Cautes stared down at the blackened reeds, his hands limp at his sides, a robot with his batteries removed.

  Selene risked a glance back to her twin. Apollo had trapped Cautopates’s torch in the strings of his golden lyre. He wrenched the instrument to the side, shearing the torch in half. The flame tumbled to the ground. Selene stamped it out with her bare feet, the pain nothing compared to her time upon Saturn’s pyre.

  The torchbearers both stood slumped and unmoving, their strength doused along with their fire. The shape began to leech from their outlines, the color from their skin and clothes.

  But the fight was not yet done.

  Aion roared his anger, dragon fl
ames spouting from his fanged jaws. Selene ducked beneath the plume of fire and slammed a roundhouse kick into the creature’s stomach. His flesh was solid and unyielding beneath the sole of her foot; her kick seemed to have as little impact as a butterfly’s wing. She reached for his keys instead, but he bolted into the air. His four feathered wings flapped noisily, taking him—and his keys—out of reach.

  Saturn’s story came back to her. Primordial Aion, limitless and infinite, finally pinned in place by Saturn, God of Bounded Time, who bent the universe into a straight line.

  If I want to reverse my own death, she realized, I have to make Time limitless once more. I have to unbind him from his serpent coils.

  The snake hissed down at her, its tongue a mocking flicker. Selene snatched a rock from the ground and hurled it like a shot put. It crunched against the snake’s skull.

  The serpent unfurled, slipping off Aion’s naked body and spinning to the ground. Selene snatched it up, the coils heavy and rough. It blinked slowly, barely alive. She grabbed its neck, ready to finish the job.

  “Wait!” cried Theo. “Dennis said release Time from the snake. Don’t kill it! We don’t want to resurrect all the dead!”

  Selene held the snake up to Aion like an offering. He swooped down to retrieve the prize.

  She yanked it back at the last moment. “Drop the keys, and I’ll give you the snake.”

  Aion growled, smoke billowing from his jaws.

  She held the beast across her body like a shield. “Burn me, burn your pet.”

  The lion blew sparks from his nostrils and bared his fangs—but he held out the keys.

  The voice of the Torchbearers surprised her. She’d thought them too stunned to speak.

  “If you take them,” Cautopates began.

  “No one will ever pass through Mnemosyne again,” finished Cautes.

  “So be it.” She grabbed both keys from Aion. Then she hurled the snake away from the stream with all her strength. The lion-headed man flapped after it, bellowing his distress. She tossed one key to Apollo.