Not every batch proved a step forward, unfortunately. Sometimes she thought she had made some minor incremental improvement, only to later hear one of her customers had turned to cannibalism and torn out someone’s throat with her teeth. Which was not the desired result of a drug designed to bestow health and long life. Another time, she’d found out—to her utter horror—that sudden blindness had spread overnight among nigh three dozen people in the harbor district.
Though she had dreamed of giving them immortality, Kirke had ruined their lives, and hearing of it, she had abandoned her experiments for a month of despondency. Yeah, in such times, one had to ask if her very quest was hubris.
But always, always the work called her back. There had to be some way to achieve perfection through the moly. She had begun to suspect the blooming root might hold some connection to the great tree of the Hesperides. Perhaps the first seeds had come from that tree. Whatever the case, moly alone of all substances she had encountered seemed to have any chance of replicating the potency of the golden apples.
The lock clicked and Kirke’s heart lurched. For an instant, she cast about for a sheet or tarp to throw over the table, but, of course, she had no such thing in here.
The door swung open and Athene stumbled in, bleary eyed and blinking in the gloom of the lab. Her half-sister shut the door behind her and leaned against the wall, looking for all the world like she’d just wrestled a chimera.
“I didn’t realize you had your own key to this room,” Kirke said. Pointless, really. She should have known Athene would have taken such precautions in her own palace. Maybe her trust in Kirke had never been absolute. “Well, anyway, I don’t have aught to show you at the moment.”
“I need more,” Athene rasped, scratching at some crusting along her eyes. “I need to see it all.”
Huh. Sometimes, people who took the Nectar just wanted more and more of the stuff. Kirke was never sure whether that result increased with different batches, or if certain people lacked the ability to regulate themselves. Whatever the case, the Olympian looked like a heaping pile of Cyclops shit. “I gave you a dose two days ago.”
“Psh.” Athene licked her lips, then shivered. “I needed to see things. I feel like I’ve got this dam inside myself, and it’s so close to bursting. Almost like I can see the whole ambit of time, if I could just break open the gap a little wider. Just need a bit more of the water, is all.”
Ah. Well, shit. Kirke had only a single stool in her lab, and she took Athene by the arm, easing her to sit. “What you’re talking about sounds like a road to madness. You think you’re one of the Moirai? You think, even if you could see the vast expanse of past and future, your mind could handle that? Athene, I gave you the Nectar to help you get better glimpses. Not to tear down dams so you can drown yourself in the flood!”
Though Kirke hadn’t even seen her move, Athene was on her feet hefting Kirke off the ground by her shoulders. The Olympian’s grip was a vise and Kirke yelped from the pain of it, but her cries didn’t even seem to register in Athene’s wild visage. “I need more.”
“All right, all right, let me go.”
As if suddenly realizing she had just manhandled her sister, Athene set her down, holding her trembling hands up in warding—or horror at what she’d done. Her face had become a mask of torment and, unless Kirke missed her guess, self-loathing.
With a sigh, Kirke drew a basket from beneath the table and retrieved a tiny ceramic vial, which she handed to Athene. “Try to make it last. I need time to brew more and I’m in the midst of experimenting with some improvements.”
Without a word, Athene stumbled from the lab, leaving Kirke to wonder at just what her sister had beheld when she looked into the future.
It was a fortnight later when Athene, looking yet more ravaged, came to her again. She reeked of stale sweat and too much wine, and her eyes seemed unable to focus on aught around the lab.
There was little point in even forcing the woman to ask, so Kirke fished out a vial of her latest batch of Nectar and handed it over. Athene tucked it inside her khiton but didn’t leave.
Kirke wanted to shake her, to shout at her that she was destroying herself. She wanted to go back, to tell herself she should never have come to Kronion and certainly never should have offered Athene a taste of this. Oh, she’d thought to save herself from Zeus, yeah, but she hadn’t realized the drug would so consume her sister.
Nine years, and strong, indomitable Athene now looked more like a broken-down barn, so rotten it was easier to raze it and build anew than even think of repairing the structure.
“There’s a prince come from Mnemosynia,” Athene said, sounding half-asleep. “One of Mnemosyne’s mortal heirs, in fact. Uh … Pikus, is his name. I need … someone … to greet him. I’m feeling … not myself.”
That was akin to saying there were a few fish in the ocean. Athene was so far from herself Kirke wondered if even Mother would recognize her now. And that tragedy fell at Kirke’s feet, didn’t it? Yeah, she’d tried to save herself and damned her sister in the process.
“I, um … Yeah, of course, I’ll show this Pikus around the polis.”
After leaving Athene, she made her way down from the
