Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

A new age was in reach, waiting to be seized by one strong enough to dare. “Now,” the new god said, “we begin.”

This was the thing with boys like him. What he was feeling just then, that rage, wasn’t the world falling in on him. It was an illusion shattering, the one that told him he deserved everything, and that it was owed to him simply because he existed.

But she was too afraid to close her eyes on the chance Castor’s face, bright and hopeful, would be there to lead her into the memories of the world she’d left behind.

Coming back to the city had felt like being handed old clothes she’d given away to someone else. Nothing fit. Everything was the same, and yet somehow different.

A feather fallen from a wing is not lost, Gil had told her, but free.

Her destiny was a gift, and now she would manifest it.

They would not fall. Together, they would prove themselves. They would prove that they deserved to be there.

She’d woven a tale she could believe. She’d seen a ghost in place of a god.

Lore had so few ties to her past life that the thought of finding another one had been a powerful drug, whether she wanted to admit it or not. She had stopped believing in the Fates years ago, but she could see it so clearly in her mind then, the gleam of their blades as they gleefully cut away everyone and everything until she had nothing, and no one.

dividing the distance between past and present. It was the only line in her life that Lore had no idea how to cross.

there was something about that word, coward. It wasn’t that he’d thrown it at her like a knife; it was already inside her like a painful infestation. At the sound of its name, it began to claw its way out. May all cowards be devoured by their shame, her mother used to say.

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.

“You are the strongest person I’ve ever known, Castor Achilleos, and it wasn’t because of how fast you ran or how hard you hit. It was because even when you got knocked flat on your back, you fought your way back up. You have to do it again now. Whatever you’re feeling, you have to leave it on the mat and get back up.”

Athena wasn’t at her most terrifying when her skin was flushed with fury, or she was snarling deadly promises. It was in moments like this one, when her eyes cooled and her body went still with a predator’s confidence that nothing would escape it.

“Fear is a foreign land I shall never visit and a language that will never cross my tongue,” Athena said.

Anger was like a disease to the soul, and no aspect of it was more contagious than violence.

“You always knew exactly who you were and who you were meant to be. Everything seemed to come easily to you because you wanted it so badly,” he said. “I used to think that if I could find a way to want it as badly as you did, I could find something buried deep in me. Something that would make me run as fast, hit as hard. To want to pick up that sword.”

“You did it because you’ve never known fear,” he said. “Because you wanted to live.” “I know fear,” she told him. “I know it better than my own reflection.”

“You can still get out. It’s never too late.” “I chose to stay in,” he told her. “I’m not leaving before I get the ones who caged me.”

“It’s not always the truth that survives, but the stories we wish to believe. The legends lie. They smooth over imperfections to tell a good tale, or to instruct us how we should behave, or to assign glory to victors and shame those who falter.

“Our fates are decided at birth,” Aristos Kadmou said. “As you well know.” “I am less certain of such things,” her father responded. “I believe we choose what we become.”