by Simon Archer
Something about the scene felt familiar to me, though I was certain I had never been here before. Other than the times I flew in Hailey’s chariot or on a pegasus, I was sure I had never been above three thousand feet. This mountain, however, stood up in the sky, seemingly so close that I could touch it if I just stretched upward.
Briefly, I wondered how my subconscious had formed this landscape when I saw the reason I was here. Irema sat in the snow, leaning up against a wooden stake in the ground. She huddled against herself, little flakes of snow appearing on her shoulders as if she’d been stationed there for a while.
This must have been one of Irema’s dreamwalks. I’d experienced two of them in the past when I was in Italy and my mom needed to get a message to me. Irema appeared in my dreams and relayed a prophecy that my mom had. Both times in the dreamscape had taken place in my mom’s apartment, so I wondered why we were here, atop a mountain.
It had to be something important as I knew that Irema, a daughter of Hypnos, used this power rarely. She didn’t bother telling the Elemental Officials about it because of the powerful nature. She didn’t want to abuse people’s privacy or be forced to attack them in her sleep. I always admired her choice to do that and kept her secret when she asked me to.
Flashes of worry flitted about my stomach, the kind of butterflies I didn’t want. I didn’t like the concerned expression on her face or the tightness of her posture.
“Irema,” I called out, taking a couple of steps towards her.
“Cameron?” the Enka soldier perked up at the sound of my voice. She lifted her head, saw me, and then scrambled to her feet. She ran right up to me and grabbed my arms. She was surprisingly solid, as if we were meeting in person and not in our dreams.
“You’re alive!” Irema cried, tears springing to her eyes.
“Of course I am,” I answered, rather confused at this greeting. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I couldn’t get a hold of you,” Irema said in a rush, her words straining at the edges, trying not to break. “For weeks, I tried and tried. But either you never fell asleep or you were dead. Hailey made me keep trying because she said that if you were dead, she would know.”
“Hang on,” I said, stopping her while I squeezed her arm. “Hailey’s with you? And what do you mean weeks?”
Panic took hold of my mind as I thought back to the myths about Calypso’s island. Like the Lotus flower, Calypso’s island had the power to make people forget how much time had passed. Even though it seemed to only be a couple of hours for us, in the real world, we had missed much more time than we thought.
“Weeks, Cameron,” Irema emphasized. “When we got back to campus and you weren’t there, Hailey freaked out. She begged me to keep trying so I reached out to you every night, even though in my heart I thought you were gone.” She hung her head in shame. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe in you, Cameron. It’s just that I’m able to step into everyone’s dreams unless they’re dead or immortal. It just…”
“It’s okay,” I cut her off, doing my best to reassure her. “You didn’t know. We were on Calypso’s island. She has some protective barrier around it and time doesn’t work the same there. You couldn’t have known.”
But as I said that, the words didn’t sound right to me. I raised an eyebrow and asked Irema, “Why didn’t you ask anyone where we’d gone? I mean, it wasn’t exactly official what we did but the Elemental Officials knew where we wanted to go. It wouldn’t have been hard to figure it out.”
“That’s the weirdest part,” Irema said, her eyes growing wide with worry. “When we asked about you and your friends, no one seemed to remember you. It was like you had never existed.”
My mouth fell open. “It’s the branch leaders. It has to be.”
“Yeah those fuckers,” Irema said through clenched teeth. She stepped back and her whole stance changed. “I have to tell you about them.”
“What is it?” I prompted, begging her to spill it all out.
“They’re not human,” Irema began, shaking her head slowly. She crossed her arms over her chest and her lip curled up into a snarl. “They’re the daemon spirits from Pandora’s box.”
The minute she spoke the words, my mind dipped into a tailspin. Information flashed across my mind’s eye, and I tried to process all of the incoming images at once.
“Eris’s children,” I deciphered. “They’re Eris’s children.”
“Yep,” Irema confirmed. “We defeated most of them but couldn’t find the other four. And now we know that they were on campus this whole time.”
Guilt wracked through me as if I was being thrown in a blender. I couldn’t believe we left the campus in the hands of those bastards. We’d only been thinking about the mission ahead, focusing on the greater good. All the while we were leaving the Academy at the mercy of some of the most dangerous beings in the Greek canon.
“Let me guess,” I said with a scoff. “The four are Ate, Algea, Neikea, and Horkos.”
Irema blinked up at me in surprise. “Mischief, Pain, Arguments, and Lies. That’s right. How did you know that?”
“Their aliases were Alanna, Ali, Nicky, and Holly when they posed as branch leaders,” I explained. My words tumbled out of my mouth as I was only coming to the conclusion while I spoke. “Holly said she was an excellent liar, and she made you believe lies about yourself. Alanna caused mischief in the library, while Nicky forced the Elemental Officials to argue incessantly. And then Ali must have been the one to force those waves of pain on us during that battle by the lake.” I shook my head and put my hands on my hips. Why hadn’t I seen it before? I realized that there was no way that I could have. Holly, or Horkos as I should start calling her, made us all believe the lies that they were branch leaders, actual graduates stationed at the Academy.
I exhaled deeply and tried to let go of some of the guilt and disappointment I felt towards myself in that moment. “So what now? How is campus right now? Is everything completely destroyed?”
“Not in the way you would think,” Irema said as she raised her eyebrows suggestively.
“What do you mean?” I asked, worried to hear her answer.
“It’s like everything is normal,” she confessed, surprising me. “Things are business as usual. Students took their final exams, they’re even going forward with graduation tomorrow.”
“What?” I balked, unsure if I heard her correctly. “Graduation is in the morning?”
“Yeah…” Irema said slowly. “Why? Is that a problem?”
“The Fates told me that I had to make the weapon before graduation or chaos was going to overthrow everything,” I said as I tugged at my hair.
I had expected to have more time but now the deadline was right on top of us, only a couple of hours away, and I still had no clue how to finish, let alone start, the Ultimate Weapon. I shifted my thinking, trying to focus on processing all of Irema’s information so I could get a full picture.
“What about Hailey and the other soldiers? They just went along with this business as usual shit?” I asked my comrade.
“Oh no,” Irema assured me. “They tried to start a coup and were promptly thrown in jail.”
“That sounds like Hailey,” I grumbled.
“I have been hiding out, dreamwalking to escape being captured,” Irema informed me. “I’m scared, though, that they’re going to find me any day now.”
“Okay, okay,” I said just to stall as I thought about what our next moves were.
“Can I ask?” Irema said tentatively. “Hailey told me that you were trying to find Hephaestus so he could work with you on the Ultimate Weapon. Is that why you were on Calypso’s island? Did you find Hephaestus?”
“Yeah, we found him all right,” I said with a grimace, not bothering to hide my dislike of the god anymore. “But he’s not going to help us.”
“Then…” Irema’s words trailed off and her face went white. She didn’t even need to ask the question. I could see it all over her face.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” I said, answering the question she didn’t outright ask. “The first thing is I have to wake up and tell Jade to stop the Argo, because she set a course back to campus and I don’t think going back there is going to be the best option. At least not until we know what we are doing.”
“If the Fates are right, then you better figure it out soon because we don’t have much time,” Irema added. “Graduation planned for dawn.”
“Dawn?” I gasped. “I thought it was a whole day thing?”
“It is,” Irema said with a nod. “That’s why it starts at dawn.”
“Fuck,” I grumbled. “I have to get out of here and warn the others. We have to come up with something.”
“I’ll be here as long as I can,” Irema told me with a stern look in her eye, letting me know that she meant it. “Let me know what I can do.”
“I will,” I said, though I didn’t add the part I was really thinking which was I don’t even know what I’m going to do.
“Okay, I’m going to push you off the mountain now,” Irema warned me.
“What? Why?” I asked, suddenly panicked.
“To wake you up sooner,” Irema said. Before I had a chance to argue, she shoved me hard in the chest and I flew backward. There were a few moments where I was suspended in the air before my back collided with something hard.
My eyes popped open like broken blinds, and I sat up abruptly, immediately banging my head on the bunk above mine. I rubbed the wound as I stumbled out of bed and ran. Because I had been asleep for the whole journey, I didn’t have my sea legs yet so I banged into the walls of the hallway like a drunk.
“Stop the boat!” I shouted, not sure if they could hear me from several levels below deck. Still, I hollered all the way up the stairs until my voice was sore. When I reached the deck, Jade was at her position by the steering wheel, while Daniella and Bethany sorted through our supplies on the floor.
I tried not to be off put but our surroundings. We were in a bubble of air, floating down at the bottom of the ocean. There was nothing but a dark blue all around us and some brave fish that swam past the strange ship invading their space. I had to pause at the top of the stairs in order to orient myself and not lose my footing again.
“Stop the boat!” I screamed a final time as I burst through the galley door.
“I heard you the first time,” Jade protested as she dramatically stuck a finger in her ear, as if I’d injured her eardrum with all my shouting. “I stopped the boat. Now, where’s the fire?” She chuckled at her own joke, but I didn’t laugh along with her.
I proceeded to relay everything Irema had told me from the weeks we’d missed from being on the island, to the secret identities of the branch leaders. When I got to the part about the fact that graduation was the next morning, Jade gasped appropriately.
“What are we going to do?” she said through her hand over her mouth.
“That’s what I was coming to ask you all,” I said, a little breathless from all of the talking. “I don’t know.”
“Okay,” Daniella said, getting to her feet. She put her hands on her hips. “What are our options?”
“Attack?” Bethany suggested, throwing her idea into the ring.
“Without the Ultimate Weapon, I don’t think we’re going to get very far. We barely made it out safely the first time we fought the daemon spirits,” I pointed out.
“Then how do we make the Ultimate Weapon, and fast?” Jade said as she left her post and joined us down on the main deck.
“What does the prophecy say exactly, Cam?” Daniella wondered. “Do you remember it?”
“I have it written down in my pack,” I said, pointing to the pile of supplies at her feet.
Bethany promptly dug out my bag and riffled through until she found my sketchbook where I doodled random designs for weapons when I was bored in class. She flipped through it until she found the paper that was different from all the others, the one I stuck in there haphazardly after the Elemental Officials first relayed the prophecy to me.
The daughter of Demeter cleared her throat and recited the prophecy as though she were on stage, in one of Sasha’s classes.
Thousands of years the War has waged
“Between man, beasts, and gods enraged
Fights never ending and nearly staged
By those who are forgotten and aged
The Ultimate Weapon will be made
For any side to win the crusade
A life-controlling elemental blade
To be weld by the child of the betrayed
The children will persist and learn
That what they need is to burn
With Eternal Flame to return
In order for trust they earn
The end is near when the fire is gone
A call is needed, not a yawn
Until chaos is quelled and light drawn
By the bringing of a new era, a new dawn”
When Bethany finished, the four of us waited in silence, hoping that one of the others had the solution. I licked my lips and thought through the words.
“Okay, here’s what we know,” I started from the top. “The blade is a scythe. It’s a life-controlling blade that was originally wielded by Kronos who is the father of the gods.”
“It also has elemental properties,” Daniella added. “Normally, that would mean that it needs to be touched by the gods.”
“Which also makes sense because the gods are the only beings who have enough power to affect one another,” Bethany continued the discussion.
“And that the Eternal Flame is needed to make the blade,” I concluded, adding that crucial fact that I learned last year.
“Cameron,” Jade said sternly, getting down to the point. “Can you make the scythe?”
“If I can get to the forge, absolutely,” I said with confidence. “I think we will need to sneak on campus somehow and get to the main forge. As much as I would like to use my private one at my house, I think it’s too dangerous. With people on campus not knowing who we are anymore, they will think we’re intruders, and we have to be careful where we go and what we do.”
“Will the main forge have everything you need, though?” Daniella double-checked, making me run through the list of everything required for me to make the Ultimate Weapon.
When I thought about what was in the Academy’s main forge, my mind ticked off all of the tools and the materials. I visually pictured the room, thinking through all of the steps. As I took my mental tour, something caught my eye. I remembered that Sarah’s old safe was underneath the workbench. I thought about what was in that safe and gasped as inspiration struck.
“That’s it,” I whispered. Then I raised my voice, full of confidence. “I have the remnants of Harmonia’s necklace.”
“The cursed one?” Bethany asked, as if she needed to clarify. We all knew the effects of Harmonia’s dangerous necklace.
“Yes,” I said, my voice raising in pitch at my excitement. “It was blessed by the goddess. I can melt it down and reforge it as a part of the Ultimate Weapon. Because the metal was already used by a god--”
“Then you don’t have to have it blessed twice,” Daniella deciphered.
I pointed a finger directly at her as though she were a game show winner. “Exactly.”
“Is that going to be enough metal though?” Jade stepped in, biting on her thumbnail. “What was left of the necklace was rather small.”
“No, but I won’t use just that,” I said, my thoughts getting ahead of myself. “I’ll use the helm I made for Hades, the girdle from Aphrodite, and Atropos’s scissors.”
“That’s great and all but one problem,” Bethany said as she held up a single finger. “How are you going to get these items back from the gods you gave them to?”
“Honestly?” I said with a shrug. “I’m just going to ask. What do we have to lose?”
31
“Sounds good,” Bethany said with a
shrug. “Great plan. Just one question though. How are you going to get to the Underworld? Because last time you went down there, we had to kill you, and I’m not really up for doing that again.”
I swallowed audibly and bit my tongue. I wasn’t quite sure on that part yet but Bethany had a point. I didn’t think that dying again was in my best interest.
“There’s water down in the Underworld, right?” Jade checked. She tapped her chin with her pointer finger.
“Yeah,” I said, slightly confused by her question. “It’s black, inky water, but it’s water.”
“Then I can get us there,” Jade said quickly as she ran back to the upper deck, taking the stairs two at a time.
“Care to explain?” I prompted, looking up at my friends with my hands splayed wide.
“The Argo can travel to any place with a body of water,” Jade replied, calling over the top of the steering wheel. “The Underworld has rivers, from what I remember from class and what you’ve told me.”
“Seven rivers, to be exact,” I added.
“No one asked you to be exact, Cam,” Bethany said with a sympathetic pat on my shoulder.
“Either way,” Jade said, her voice cutting through our conversation like a knife. “I can get us there. You’re sure this will work, Cameron?”
“Nope,” I answered honestly. “But it’s the best plan I’ve got right now so unless anyone else has a better one, that’s what we’re going with.”
The girls looked to one another and shrugged simultaneously, giving their consent to move ahead with the current plan. Jade nodded her confirmation and stared out beyond the edge of the boat, as if she could see the path in her mind’s eye.
I quickly dipped below deck again. I didn’t need to get seasick all over the deck before I had to go and negotiate with the God of the Dead. I wanted to be at my best for a conversation that I still wasn’t sure was going to amount to anything. Daniella followed behind me to give me some of the Lotus potion so I could sleep as we ventured to the Underworld. She knew the pain my stomach would have had to endure if I was forced to stay awake the entire trip.
