From within this agora, Artemis watched the construction up on the hill. Donkeys hauled carts of marble along a dirt road leading to the summit, the animals straining beneath the weight, indifferent to the irate shouts of their masters. Artisans from around Lydia were up there, carving blocks into caryatids and columns. Phoebe had marked out a space for a Temple of Thoth, and most of the work focused upon that and on the queen’s palace.
Around her, hastily constructed stalls had sprung up, merchants peddling figs and dates and apples. Across the way, another dealer hawked textiles imported from Phoenikia, bearing dyes of rich purple and crimson. And beyond, in the harbor, ships had begun to gather.
Life, it seemed, would spring up the very moment the slaughter ended, and the merchants would come chasing drachmae as if naught had changed. As if streams of golden ichor and the red blood of Men had not stained the land and sea, no small sum of it spilled by Artemis’s hands. Even death was but a small impediment to the implacable, relentless march of commerce.
Sandals fell upon the packed dirt behind her, and Artemis turned, starting at seeing her mother here. The woman so rarely managed to get out of Helion anymore. Artemis had to assume she had come to see her own mother, as she couldn’t have known Artemis would be here.
Artemis moved to embrace her, but her mother held her back. “Was it worth buying your father’s affection at the cost of your grandfather’s?”
Artemis winced. “I don’t know.” Who could say such things?
“He has gone north, I hear, along the Axeinos Sea, even beyond Phrygia.” Into Kimmeria? That was a wild expanse, overrun with Gigantes and closer to the Nyxlands than the sane cared to venture.
All Artemis could do was frown. Her mother was right to blame her for that. Koios felt betrayed by his wife and grandchildren, and maybe he had been. Small wonder he fled these lands. Maybe … Maybe now that the war was over, Artemis could travel there and convince him to return. She supposed it was the least she could do to clean up the mess she had made of this land.
A marriage broken. A city razed to the ground.
But then, Atlas had been forced to capitulate, and the nascent Ouranid League ought to ensure Ambrosia flowed throughout the Thalassa world. All Titans, not only the greatest among them, would maintain their immortality. Surely she could claim some credit for that. Such things she wanted to say to her mother, but Leto’s world was smaller. Males like Helios had forced it to become smaller when they named her Nymph. As small as a golden cell in a dungeon shaped like a palace.
And how could the woman not grieve for the father who had adored her and been driven into virtual exile?
“I might have expected this sort of thing from your brother,” her mother chided. “From you …”
Not knowing what else to say or do, Artemis seized her mother in an embrace, whether it was welcome or not. “I will go to find him, if I can.” Maybe she would spend forever solving one woe after another. “I will bring him back. In time.”
A full moon was up, and though the Temple of Thoth remained incomplete—columns with no roof—four priestesses knelt upon the foundation, offering supplications. Some of their words were in a discordant foreign tongue Artemis had never heard. The very speaking of it made the hair on her neck stand on end, as if some wrongness seeped into the air. Something beyond this world.
The night was thick, pregnant with arcana she could not understand, though she longed for answers.
Outside the temple, she watched the priests. They poured libations over the altar in offerings to the moon. So intent was she upon the proceedings she didn’t even notice her grandmother’s approach until the woman was at her side.
“Is there magic in this?” Artemis whispered.
Phoebe blew out a long breath. “What is magic? There are forces we do not comprehend in the World. We offer them respect because to do less would be hubris. You can feel the touch of something Otherworldly close by on nights like this, I can see it in your posture. Perhaps that is the power of the Primordials.”
Had the Primordials truly given rise to the cosmos in the Time of Nyx?
“And did you actually see the Time of Nyx?” Legends claimed the elder Titans had lived then, had joined Ouranos in ending the reign of Nyx and ushering in this Age. Phoebe and the other five who had won the Ambrosial War claimed to be heirs of Ouranos and named themselves the Ouranid League in his honor. But was that all posturing?
“I was too young to remember much, save we traveled here from somewhere far to the north. That and …” Her grandmother fidgeted a little. “I recall a nightmare, as if the night sky had tried to devour the land itself. Perhaps the cycle of sun and moon had not yet fixed itself as it is now.” She shook her head. “Or perhaps, those are the nightmares of a frightened child. But I believe Kronos when he claims to have seen Ouranos himself, to have fought for his cause. There are, my dear, powers in this World older than Titans. Older, deeper, and more unfathomable.”
And Kronos had, after all, proved himself the most formidable of the Titans in this war. If not for him, perhaps Atlas would have become emperor of the whole of the Thalassa Sea, rather than one of the six members of the Ouranid League. Clearly, Kronos had won the respect of all others, Phoebe included.
But what did Artemis’s grandmother mean by deeper truths? The question niggled at her, a needle worming its way through her mind, demanding answers. Just what lurked beyond this world?
“There is an order in Phoenikia,” Phoebe said,
