She was running, fleeing someone.
A hunter in the dark.
He was after her again, always after her, and all she could do was run through, though the landscape before her refused to change.
Run.
Kirke woke from her nap to find Kalypso gone, the trapdoor in their bed chamber thrown wide. Pausing to snatch up a half-full decanter of wine, Kirke made her way down to the basement.
Working her alchemy in the kitchens had been less than ideal, but Kirke couldn’t have risked Athene seeing what they did in the real lab hidden under the house.
The lab was a windowless room lit by a dozen candles and a stove that fed into the chimney in her chambers. Within, Kalypso stood bent over a table, easing a drop of moly extract into a mixture. Upon the stove roiled a cauldron filled with their latest attempt at perfecting an artificial Ambrosia. Nectar, the populace had begun calling their brews, and Kirke liked the name well enough.
She took a hearty swig from the decanter. Should she burden Kalypso with another of her nightmares? As an oneiromancer, her dreams might hold some import. Might indicate another of her kind hunted the dreamscape for her—or perhaps for sign of Nectar and thus trailed her without knowing her. Then again, her dreams could also be the result of too much wine before sleep and the anxiety sparked by Athene’s plight.
No, she would not worry Kalypso over this, least of all while the Nymph worked to perfect the Nectar. They needed that. Everyone needed it.
If they could get the tonic just right, Nymphs or Men who imbibed it over a prolonged period might fortify their Pneuma and develop Pneumatikoi strong enough to challenge the Olympians. She’d seen Titans run straight up forty-foot-tall walls, punch through marble, and harden their skin to the point spears bounced off. They needed something to allow Men to compete with that if they were to break Zeus’s hold upon the Thalassa.
After sipping from the decanter, Kirke moved in behind Kalypso, peering over her shoulder without touching her during the painstaking creation process.
Oh, how they had dreamed of a World free from Zeus’s insane autocracy. How many nights had they mused on the possibilities of elevating Mankind to power with which they could challenge the so-called gods? And they were getting closer, with almost every passing iteration.
Yes, sometimes unexpected side-effects cropped up. Mania and psychosis happened even faster than with real Ambrosia, and sometimes even worse results.
The moly was unpredictable … but it was also the only substance flexible enough to mimic Ambrosia. Its mercurial nature was both its greatest strength and its greatest danger. Yes, there had been madness and murder in the wake of their experiments. But what if it finally worked?
Besides, Ambrosia could heal most any wound. Which meant, if they duplicated it without need for the golden apples of the Hesperides, they would have a tonic that could allow Man to survive the injuries and illnesses that now plagued mortal existence.
That they had to sell the other product to keep their coffers full—and to ensure sufficient testing of it—was a small price to pay, considering what they hoped to achieve.
Kirke took another swig of Illyrian wine as Kalypso worked, keeping silent until the other woman rose from the table, stretching. With a wink, Kalypso poured the new concoction into the cauldron, then set about stirring it with a ladle.
“What do you think? Do we have it now? I really don’t want another batch that turns piss into acid. That was … pretty bad. Especially with the farmers who tried to cut down each other’s fences with the streams and all.” Kirke shivered at the memory.
Kalypso shrugged. “I’m mostly just doing what you taught me.”
Waving away the other woman’s false modesty, Kirke moved to sniff the cauldron, setting the decanter down on a table nearby. A sweet, heady scent wafted up, seeming almost a match for real Ambrosia. “Smells ever so slightly off.”
“I know, but that doesn’t mean it won’t get the same result. We’re never going to have an exact duplicate of it without those apples and we’d never get anywhere nigh to those.” There was a bitterness in Kalypso’s voice she couldn’t quite hide. The other woman had prodded her mother for access to the golden apples, and Kelaino had unequivocally refused, claiming the risk of Zeus’s displeasure far outweighed any possible gain.
The ancient drakon Ladon guarded the great Tree, and no one got past him save with leave from the Pleiades. Back in the Golden Age, Kirke had heard other sorcerers speculate Ladon was an Old One, a being birthed in the same time before time as the Primordials themselves, perhaps even spawned by them.
And, of course, Kalypso dare not tell even her mother that half the point was in trying to destroy Zeus and the other Olympians. They had imprisoned Kalypso’s grandfather Atlas in Tartarus and reduced mighty Helios, Kirke’s father, to a shadow of his own lucent self. A puppet. Worse still, Zeus subjugated Men and Nymphs for his own aggrandizement, treating both like his property. Nigh sixteen centuries of rape, tyranny, and petty cruelties.
No, Kirke remembered the Golden Age, and the long centuries under the Ouranid League. Men were dominated even then, yes, and Nymphs remained marriage trophies or mere objects upon which Titans could sate themselves, true. But not like this … Not as it was now. Kronos and his generation at least sought marriage from Nymphs to satiate themselves. They moderated their Ambrosial intake. Zeus and the Olympians were incarnations of unbridled debauchery.
Besides, if everyone had Ambrosia, maybe there would be no more gods. Maybe men and women could just live. Or so she and Kalypso allowed themselves to dream sometimes. They had both been to study at the Muses College in Themiskyra, had heard the words of Thalia—and of Themis herself—and had chanced that dream.
In fact, she and Kalypso had argued
