Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

the only way to truly know someone was to fight them.

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.

Apodidraskinda. A child’s game. Hide-and-seek. A challenge. Come find me. Lore dropped the cup into a nearby trash can and walked away.

I love you more with every sunrise.

“Martha’s,” she said. “Hungry.” “Taxi,” he said. “Easy.” “Money,” she said. “Wasteful.”

It was quiet uptown

that was New York for you. It always got a say, and, if you were patient enough, it led you where you needed to go.

“I’m not interested in school,” she told him, for the hundredth time. “You don’t even seem to like it.” “You don’t have to like something you need,”

“You must learn not to fear pain, or else it will shackle you and strip your courage. Fear is the greatest enemy.”

Because you’re the only one in the world I thought I could trust.

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.

“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. Perhaps there were some in Sparta who embodied those myths. Perhaps. But how we are remembered is less important than what we do now.”

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

Monsters lived in the shadows. To hunt them, you couldn’t be afraid to follow. And the only way to destroy them was to have the sharper teeth and the darker heart.

“Hold on to what you feel for your home,” Athena told her. “It will never abandon you if you serve it well. It is not so fickle as mortals.”

A person alone could be controlled, but a person loved by others would always be under their protection.

It wasn’t that anger was inherently good or bad. It could lend power and drive and focus, but the longer it lived inside you unchecked, the more poisonous it became.

“I’ve got another ancient proverb for you,” Lore said, sliding her arm out from the interior straps of the aegis. “Go fuck yourself.”