Heritage

Chapter 5: Heritage

I thank Megapede for the Betaing!

HERITAGE

17 October 1999

I strolled through the woods, completing my lazy patrol and returning into the clearing where the flag I was to protect was standing.

I sighed, Chiron may have thought that this shit taught me something, but he was quite mistaken.

I would have made myself scarce when all the demigods were called like I had done every other time. Unfortunately, Chiron had caught up with my constant absences and banished me from his healing lessons until I started 'actively participating'.

He was a very knowledgable centaur, one that had seen the greatest heroes of all time blossom under his tutelage, one that managed to adapt his teaching style to the times we were living in, which was nothing short of astonishing.

He was wise, knowledgable, and a dangerous fighter. Despite being half horse, he could spot sloppy footwork with the same accuracy he could land an arrow in a fly's ass from a hundred meters. So I wasn't going to ignore his orders, I got that capturing the flag was a war simulation, but I wouldn't be leading an army anytime soon, and I had other stuff I would have preferred learning.

For example, since Dionysus' graceful revelation, I had been trying to harness and understand my 'grandson of Poseidon' power. With little to no success, but it was likely because I was trying to do it without a natural body of water, no rivers, no lake, no ocean. I wanted to get to know my power on my own. I was still wary of Dionysus mark, I wasn't eager to master my power oy with Poseidon meddling.

Instead, I sat down in the clearing, wrapping myself in several layers of Mist out of habit, bored out of my mind.

Five minutes later, a seven-man team composed of an uneven mix of children of Ares, Hephaestus, and Athena came in.

Alarms! Defence breach! I thought, almost laughing out loud.

"They didn't let anyone here as a last line of defence?" a son of Athena asked.

"Obviously not, c'mon, let's get out of here before we're cut off from our lines." the Ares' son, who I recognized as one of the goons who tried to bully me the previous year said.

Soon, the clearing was once more empty. I tilted my head, looking in a specific place in the clearing: the air shimmered and the Mist briefly lifted itself, revealing the actual flag.

I smirked: if I had to play, I would make sure to win so badly that nobody would ever want me to participate again.

04 January 2000

Thalia, Luke, and I were in cabin 1, enjoying our relax-time, the jukebox that I had stolen, and modified with David's help, was merrily filling our ears with 'Enter Sandman' by the uncomparable Metallica.

The cabin was... white. White marble everywhere, with golden linings on the bunk beds, silks as covers... It was luxury, simple as that. Even more so since I was used to the less than lacklustre cabin 11.

"I'm bored!" Thalia whined.

I exchanged an eye-roll with Luke, the daughter of Zeus could act incredibly spoiled when in private, and the son of Hermes smirked.

"We could train with the sword." Luke proposed.

"I'd like that, I'm almost your equal, you know." I grinned, while the demigoddess huffed.

"Nobody likes a braggart I-ca-rus." Thalia grumbled, stretching out my name.

"I would feel better if it wasn't true, I always had a gift with the sword, and I've been using it for years, you've grown in leaps and bounds." Luke grumbled.

"I'm still bored, we do the same stuff every day." Thalia whined again.

"No, you're feeling the cage, it's different." I retorted.

"So... we're going to NY? I reckon we could manage to sneak into a concert or something." Luke offered.

I shrugged: "I don't mind..."

"Been there, done that. Oh, wait, I love this part!" Thalia jumped up from her bed.

And she started to sing along with a crystalline voice:

~Somethings wrong, shut the light

Heavy thoughts tonight

And they aren't of Snow White~

By then I had joined her:

~Dreams of war, dreams of liars

Dreams of dragon's fire

And of things that will bite

Sleep with one eye open

Gripping your pillow tight!~

Luke rolled his eyes, muttering something about rock obsessed idiots, but he added his voice to the refrain.

~Exit, light

Enter, night

Take my hand

We're off to never-never land~

"Gods Luke, you could kill the Fates with that voice."

"Shut up Thalia!" he tossed her a pillow.

Life was good.

12 February 2000

The sun was shining brightly, the sky was suspiciously cloudless, and the breeze was already dragging with it the first scent of summer.

I had surrendered, getting a handle on my 'nephew of Poseidon'-powers had been impossible. That was why I was standing with the waves hitting my knees on the beach of long island.

I already felt more alive, more aware. My senses were sharper, my body stronger. I felt free in a way that even my previous living alone couldn't compare to. I knelt, the almost freezing water felt nicely fresh against my skin. The waves refusing to make me budge, instead they were accepting, almost rooting me in place with their strange embrace.

Logic could only lead me so far. Ultimately, it was obvious, but difficult to accept, that every religion was based on an act of faith.

Faith in what? The gods represented natural and human forces, from Zeus who ruled the Sky, to Aphrodite who ruled over Love itself. I had little doubt that gods were somehow born from human imagination, after all, there were proofs of the Big Bang and of Dinosaurs. The likely, logical conclusion, was that while the universe and humans had begun their existence as the scientists know it, at some point in time things changed. Hopes, dreams, and stories shared around the fire came to life. I hazily remembered about Norse and Egyptian demigods after all. So when somebody asked which origin of the world and which gods were real, the answer would be 'all and none'.

Likely, some what-the-fuck-Force developed along with gravity and strong-weak nuclear force. The what-the-fuck-Force was some kind of magic that turned beliefs and dreams of large numbers of sufficiently complex creatures into reality, and since said beliefs placed a primordial of some kind at the beginning, maybe it worked retroactively.

That realization, however, wasn't freeing me from my conundrum.

I took a deep breath, before exhaling, and started swimming toward the open sea. The current seemed almost eager to bring me out of the safety of the beach, but while I did mind, there was nothing to it. An act of faith was my best bet.

Soon, I had left the relative safety of the little bay. When I somehow felt the waters were deep enough for what I was thinking, I took a deep breath and dived.

Five meters, ten... the pressure wasn't making me uncomfortable, and while I was slowly letting go of the air, I still had some time before needing a new lungful of it. 20 meters and I was still going. 50 meters, and it became clear that I had dived in some crack of the seafloor. I emptied my lungs and remained still, my body being dragged down by gravity. Soon enough, I was at 150 meters.

At 200 meters of depth, the light dimmed, the water had gone from crystalline to light blue to poisonous green. I was in the twilight zone. And I needed to breathe. My chest was aching, begging me for a breath of fresh air. I dived in my power, feeling it churning under my skin, easing my pain, albeit briefly. I inhaled.

I had scrunched my eyes closed, unwilling to see my surroundings in case it turned out Poseidon refused me.

I had ambrosia in my pocket in case my act of faith didn't work and I needed some pepper up to reach the surface, but the thing is, in a world where myth hides just behind the corner, acts of faith are often rewarded.

I breathed in, and I felt the sea.

I felt how it weighted on the ocean floor, how the wind rippled against the waves. I felt fifteen dolphins swimming at the border of my senses, a swarm of fishes I could likely identify if I could be bothered, and a curious tiger shark circling me.

I exhaled and inhaled again. My eyes didn't see more clearly, but I knew my surroundings in the same way I knew my body when I closed my eyes.

I watched my hands, marvelling at the layer of... air? something?... just above my skin. I poked my forearm, feeling my smooth skin like I was on land.

I opened my arms, throwing my senses across the water, feeling the rocks and the sand, feeling the currents that didn't move me without my consent, knowing not only the depth I was at but also my position in the sea. I laughed, the water whirling cheerfully around me. How the hell any of that was happening, I didn't exactly understand, but if there was something that the sea was telling me, it was that sometimes I thought too much.

With a flex of will, I collected the energy from the evermoving currents of the sea, moving said energy just like I moved my arm, and as I shrouded myself in it, I threw myself to the surface, stopping suddenly short of breaking it, an image of a lightning bolt crashing me in mid-air suddenly flared in my mind.

Still three meters from the surface, I twirled the water around me, calling forth a current to return to the camp Half-blood. I didn't know how fast I was going... but surely faster than I could run.

I exploded from the water and rolled out my momentum on the beach, I was panting, but I could feel it. The sea, the waves, like a second heart in my gut.

I smiled at the sunny sky, I could work with that.

Roughly a month later, I managed to spot Thalia in the arena, tossing around Ares' children with the sublime combination of spear and shield. It reminded me of Troy: the Achilles versus Hector scene. She handled three older demigods with ease.

She alternated thrusting the spear and using it as a blunt hammer. The first kind of attack made her opponents recoil, the second forced them to hide behind shields, their knees buckling under the impossible strength exercised by the thirteen years old girl.

I felt it again, Poseidon heritage thrumming in my chest. I recognized the air smelling of ozone, and a part of me saw Thalia as... enemy.

The sane part of my mind found fascinating the idea of rivalry among gods bleeding over to their mortal offspring. And grandfather Poseidon's enmities reach even me... I snorted at the monicker I had given to the Stormbringer, arguably one of the most terrifying gods out there.

Does this mean that their power is tied to their identity? And both to their blood? I wondered.

The more I realized about the world I was in, the more fascinating the questions became. I wasn't going to pull an Orochimaru and start experimenting on demigods, but I could see the appeal.

I was watching Thalia intently, feeling her power spiking occasionally. It wasn't an aura, nor the occasional smell of ozone, but there was a sense of... foreboding. Like the sky was about to fall on you, and somehow said feeling could be tracked back to Thalia.

I wondered how nobody else seemed to notice. Maybe it is my being 75% god? I wondered. I scoffed. If godhood followed Mendel's laws, regular demigods should have a mutant mesh of blood and ichor, and the same went for me, even if with a different ratio. No, the distance between gods and men wasn't something that could be measured with numbers. And yet demigods survived ambrosia and nectar, where it would have killed a regular human.

That was without talking about the magical mumbo jumbo that was the demigods' powers over their godly parent' domain.

Maybe... a god is his domain. I speculated. Thalia had gone along the planned thieving for the previous end of summer party, in the same way, Zeus broke his word on not having children. Yet, the king of the gods also ruled over The Rightful Law, of something like that.

Did his adherence to the sacrality of the law wane along with humanity growing loss of moral values? After all, the higher one climbed on the mortals' social ladder, the more exposed he became to compromise and bribery. But again, I wasn't so naïve as to believe corruption, rape, and whatnot didn't exist during Agamemnon's rule. Still, morality is a matter of perception, and the law is its reflection. I think immortality has its own way to completely skewer whatever moral compass one has, didn't Athena the Wise turn Arachne into a spider only because the mortal won their little bet?

What about the other religions? I wondered. I was reasonably sure that the author of the fantasy world I was in had squeezed all the money he could from the franchise, bringing in Egyptian and Norse gods and demigods as well.

I frowned, noticing my memories of my past lives becoming hazier the longer I lived in this reality.

It was unsettling. But for the life of mine, I couldn't figure out how to put a stop to it. In the Greek pantheon, every life was guided by the Fates. Each role revealed by her very name: Clotho spun the thread of life, Lachesis measured its allotted length, and Atropos cut it off with her shears. Sometimes, each of the Fates was assigned to a specific time: Atropos the past, Clotho the present, and Lachesis the future. Arguably, Clotho plucked my soul previous life and with Lachesis the spun me into this reality.

Where does free will fall into all of this...? Was I there to do her bidding? But no, Fate found a way to resolve itself anyway. Did that mean someone else cashed in an I Owe You from them? But who could hope to strongarm the Fates?

From what I knew, they were fatherless daughters of Nyx herself, a fucking primordial. And she wasn't the ruler of the night in the same way Uranus wasn't the ruler of the sky. Nyx was the night, and something more. In ancient times, before men managed to tame fire, the night was full of terrors, it was the unknown, the not-understandable, the endless mystery.

Nyx was a daughter of Chaos, her nature defied definition, I doubted that she owed anything to anyone, or needed to concern herself with a little demigod among mortals.

Yet, there was an inky darkness in the hut where I grew up. I remembered.

I shook my head, looking again in the arena. I grinned when I noticed Thalia had found another soon-to-be-sorry group of demigods to spar against.

I didn't know if my parentage would make me more powerful than the daughter of Zeus. I knew that the growth of my skills wasn't normal, even for a demigod, but power itself wasn't easily defined.

I remembered with absolute clarity 'my sister' 's lessons: Magic is based on intent, like every other action performed by sentient creatures'.

"I'm starting to believe that my sister was my godly mother in disguise..." I muttered, before pushing away that thought. It would have explained why I had never thought to question her. Hell, I don't even know her name.

Intent, intent... I mused silently, returning to a more interesting problem.

It made some kind of sense, after all, I hardly believed that Poseidon used magic words to raise the tide. Hell, I knew the moon was mostly responsible for it.

I was a firm believer that knowledge was power, and that knowledge didn't exist without understanding. Magically understanding something meant that somehow I needed to know it through my gut. I knew all kinds of facts about everything, tides and waves, coral reefs, and whatnot. My act of faith, I believed, had granted me some understanding over the sea.

I knew that stuff didn't happen only because of 'magic'. Physics is real goddamn it! I frowned. Gods were personifications of the natural forces birthed by the human mind. The different genesis of the world second each religion crashed horribly against each other.

I sighed. Thoughts for another time. I hopped into the arena and grabbed a training gladius from the rack. The blade itself was fifty centimetres long, the blunted edge shining under the sun. The handle was wrapped with leather, and I gave a pair of swings, it was a bit unbalanced towards the blade. But that only meant that I would be using it more as a hammer than anything else.

"Thalia, do you ever wish to hit something without holding back?" I asked with what I felt was an impish grin worming its way on my face.

She looked at me, an almost wistful smile on her face: "Yeah... but I don't want to kill half of the demigods by mistake."

I called forth my power. Seeing through and manipulating the Mist was delicate, soft. Instead, the kind of magic mumbo jumbo I had inherited from Poseidon was anything but: it was uncaring, untameable, heavy. It wasn't a magic core, it wasn't some abstract reserve of energy. It was, simply put, my will. My willingness to crush, my acceptance of collateral damage, my uncaringness about the consequences.

The air went from smelling of ozone to feeling like a sea breeze, water nebulized around me, evaporating briefly, and leaving a salt layer on my skin before getting wet again.

Exhilarating didn't even begin to cover it. I swung distractedly my borrowed blade, it blurred through the air, light as a walking cane.

I tied it to my belt and picked up a spear from another rack. I was a fourteen years old kid, standing at 1.63 meters tall, while the weapon was easily 2.50 meters long.

With my right hand tightly wrapped around the spear, I pressed down, almost embedding its head in the ground, before kicking with all my strength, snapping the ash wood exactly where I wanted it to break.

I whirled my two meters long staff around me, letting my body get used to its feel and balance.

I saw Thalia's eyes widening and her mouth opening in a little, surprised 'o', before her usually cobalt blue irises turned more... electric, with grey streaks, promising a thunderstorm. She looked at me not understanding what had just changed.

She knew me, I was easy going and laid back, albeit devious when necessary. And yet, in the same way, I had felt her 'presence' change before, she now felt me. Foreboding.

She licked her lips, that curled up showing just too many teeth for it to be a smile.

"I promise I can take it." I muttered. I was looking at her like a hungry wolf would look at a scared rabbit, and she was doing the same.

Never one to wait, Thalia charged forward, feinting hopping from one foot to the other, trying to unbalance me.

She lunged with the spear, aiming at my chest, I tilted to my right, my feet at shoulder width and my knees half bent. At the same time, I retaliated lunging with my staff, held in my right hand.

It impacted soundly against Thalia's copy of the Aegis, bulls eyeing Medusa's forehead.

My left hand clamped on Thalia's spear and I completed my twirl leveraging on my right foot, pulling her as strong as I could.

While I succeeded in unbalancing her, she jumped forward and slammed her shield on my back, or at least she tried to.

I flattened myself against the ground and added momentum to my spin, my left leg swiping the ground and the back of her calves just when she had managed to regain her balance.

She tumbled on the ground, bringing down her shield like it was a cleaver. I immediately jumped back, demigod or not, being struck with the edge of her shield would have fractured my tibia.

I was grinning madly, and Thalia had the same expression. I was hopping on my feet, I was thriving in our friendly conflict.

21 March 2000

"They won't grant us a quest." Luke rolled his eyes, "You must know that."

"Well, I never said anything about asking for permission." I shrugged.

Thalia grinned at my answer: "Do you have something in mind? At least something that won't get us flayed alive once we return?"

Luke and I looked at her with raised eyebrows.

She huffed: "Okay, something that won't get you two flayed alive as punishment and me without dessert for a month?"

It had been hard, but Luke and I had managed to point out to Thalia that whatever happened, the fucking King of the Gods was keeping an eye out for her.

That had been... an interesting conversation.

"There is a statue of Tyche. In a museum in Istanbul, I believe..." I returned on track, "She's the goddess of luck, more or less."

Luke snorted: "You want to cross the world to steal a statue?"

I arched an eyebrow, as I were to say 'what of it?'

"I'm in!" Thalia almost started dancing in joy at the prospect of leaving the camp.

"We'll need a plane..." I reminded her.

She paled. "Thinking about it, I'm perfectly fine with staying at the camp."

I snorted. She still was scared of heights, it was hilarious.

On the following night, around 3 am, I had entered the woods armed only with a sword and bullheadedness. My grandfather was Poseidon, my father some nameless demigod (who I thanked for the blood that granted me access to one of the most powerful domains) who had likely been seduced into the Lotus casino by my mother.

My mother. Chance didn't exist, my soul came from another world, I was sure, after all, I had years of (albeit fuzzy) memories even when I was five. A brain of a five years old isn't wired to understand abstract thought. So somehow memories were tied to my soul.

Which made sense, since people kept living in the underworld. I distractedly ducked under a branch and kept walking, taking notice of the occasional creepy noise coming from around me. I knew there were monsters in the forest, but my control over the Mist was so tight that it managed to trick even them.

None of the fates could be my mother, Nyx was out of the question. Which female immortal could manage something like that?

Then it hit me. I'm a fucking idiot.

I grew up with a fucking witch that taught me the basis of magic. Hecate.

The goddess of magic, witchcraft, the night, crossroads, moon, ghosts, and necromancy. She was the only child of the Titanes Perses and Asteria from whom she received her power over heaven, earth, and sea.

Who else could pull a soul from another reality only for shit and giggles?

"Hecate, the one who works from afar..." I muttered, still walking across the woods "Wasn't she a virgin goddess?" I frowned, then I remembered that Athena was one too.

But what did it mean? Let's think about my grandparents on my mother's side.

Perses was a Titan, son of the Titans Crius and Eurybia. He represented destruction and peace. My grandmother would be Asteria, another Titan, daughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe and sister of Leto. Asteria was the Titan who ruled over nocturnal oracles and shooting stars. Bizarre fields to work in.

I entered a large, oval-shaped clearing, the trees parting enough to let me see the sky without interruption. The full moon looked far closer than it should have.

It made so much sense! Magic itself was difficult to define, and it wasn't clear if it had any limit, after all, Circe turned people into pigs all the time, medea rose an army of skeletons from a bunch of dragon teeth...

Necromancy? I was almost sure I had died before.

I still didn't receive strange vibes from the moon, but... I stopped my furious train of thought and simply stared at a sudden flickering light among the trees. Weaving her way among the trunks, a woman walked towards me, a torch holding a silvery fire held high above her head.

I shut down my urge to snort. Typical godly-drama-queen.

She stopped in front of me, a mocking smile on her thin lips. She was wearing casual trekking clothes. Boots and black cargo pants, a grey t-shirt under a leather jacket, there was a thick, bronze-looking key tied to her belt.

She had pitch-black, shoulder-length hair which moved in waves, a large forehead, and a straight nose. Her irises were of a smoke-ish dark gray, with the occasional silver spark in it, the same as my right eye.

"Hecate." I narrowed my eyes: "goddess of magic, witchcraft, night, crossroads, moon, ghosts and necromancy."

Her smirk widened when I took what I hoped was a threatening step forward: "What have you done?"

If she was shocked by my open hostility, she didn't show it: "A masterpiece." she grinned, and the way she was looking at me made clear that she was referring to me.

"Why would you bring me here?" I insisted: I wanted to know if there was some price to pay for living the life of a demigod in a fanfiction universe.

"I don't rule over crossroads as much as I rule over choice, which is easily represented by crossroads, it's another reason why mortals often described me as three-faced." she answered.

"I didn't choose this." I countered.

"Didn't you? Perhaps, but in any case, the dead can hardly choose, can they?" she grinned some more, "Even if I admit it, I took you because you were always choosing. I wanted to see for myself the kind of change your choices would bring here."

I frowned, there was something... I couldn't remember.

"What do you want? What do you gain from my existence?" I pressed her.

"At the very least, I can see how you stumble your way through magic, I'll get a laugh out of it." Her smile turned devious.

"You're more of a Titan than a Goddess, aren't you?" I accused her, trying to unbalance her and force her to reveal something more about my situation.

Her carefree smile dimmed a bit at my accusation, and she tilted her head, clearly seeing through my attempt to gain some leverage over her: "Icarus dear, I strongly suggest you plan better which battles you chose to fight in. I am Hecate, the Three-Faced, and I have power over heaven, earth, and sea, I bestow wealth and all the blessings of daily life. I have shown the way to the ones looking for Persephone when she was taken, my passage is accompanied by voices of thunder, the shriek of the lost and the yells of the ones who failed." As she spoke her tone went from slightly warm to chilling and uncaring, evergrowing in volume until it felt like she was speaking through the voices of screaming silvers of wind, thousands of voices among the shadows and between the strands that made up the tapestry of reality.

Suddenly, almost like I had only been imagining it, her voice returned normal and her presence receded, the air began to flow in and out of my lungs once more, and I found my muscles answering once more to my will. "I know of your defiance and dreams of freedom, little one, I wouldn't expect anything less, but remember, that as you choose freely, you're mine, and are already serving me."

She rose her second hand, which was suddenly holding a twin torch to the one she held since the beginning, and started to walk away, the moonlit night losing that veneer of impossibility I hadn't realized it had assumed: "Remember me as you learn my magic, little Icarus, and beware to not fly too close to the Sun."

I narrowed my eyes. I will learn magic, because it's cool, not because of you.

I would have loved to have a brilliant comeback, but she kept referring to my choices... choices I didn't remember. Ok, how do I take back my memories?