Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

The phrase was something his grandmother used to say to him when he called her and his parents at home in Florida on Sundays: I love you more with every sunrise. When he’d shown them to her, she’d chided him for yet another tattoo, licking her finger and pretending to try to wipe them away with her finger, but she’d glowed with pride the rest of the night.

“For seven days, every seven years, the gods walk on earth as mortals. If you can kill one, you become a new god and take their power and immortality, but you’ll be hunted in the next Agon as well”

But she wanted the one person who had always been able to settle her, whether it was her temper or fear. She wanted the one person she had always been able to look to, knowing she’d find him there. She wanted Castor.

In that moment, the past became the present, and the present the past, and it was just the two of them in the shadows of their city, the way it had always been. The way it should have been forever.

“I enjoy this mortal,” Athena said from beside Miles. “He stays.”

Van gave a faint smile. “And you know what the truly ironic thing is? Even as I ran after you, trying to catch up, you did the one thing I wanted more than I wanted my next breath. The thing I told myself was impossible. You got out.”

“You know, some people get so used to looking out at life from the edge of their cage that they stop seeing the bars,” he said. “I’ve never forgotten them, I’ve just learned how to live inside on my own terms.

Monsters had fangs, but that was why lionesses were given claws.

Sometimes, he’d said, the braver thing is to accept help when you’ve been made to believe you shouldn’t need it.

“But I never thought you would win the Agon. I thought you would destroy it.”

“Do not deny your birthright,” Athena said. “You are no mere mortal. I have seen you fight. You may silence her, you may suppress her glorious rage, but a warrior lives in you still.”