Circle? “The Circle of Goetic Mysteries?” Of which Enodia had also once been part. All the sorcerers in the Thalassa seemed to congregate for its secrets.
Artemis cast a sharp look at her, then nodded slowly, her face unreadable. Pyrrha wanted to ask what had happened with her grandfather, but the Titan seemed so dour now, she dared not.
The same evening, after they had eaten, Artemis decided to offer another sacrifice to the full moon. Rather than watch, Pyrrha wandered nearby, making her cautious way along the light woods. They were far from her encounter with the dryads, and she couldn’t imagine finding them here.
Which was almost a shame. While the horror of what they had put her through clenched her stomach, still … still she felt drawn back, desperate for more answers. Knowledge was everything, wasn’t it? With understanding of the World came the power to shape it.
Wandering thus, she found Enodia crouched beneath a tree, cowled and brooding as ever. “You had a brush with a tendril of an Elder God,” her mentor said without preamble.
“Artemis calls them Primordials.”
“Yes, they have many titles and many names. Names, you see, hold a power of their own. They are how we see ourselves, yes, and a mask we wear to shape the perceptions of others.” The sorceress turned to her. “Just as you, perhaps, should have a new name.”
“What?”
“Pyrrha was a scared girl banished from the court of Thebes. You must reinvent yourself as a proud, irrepressible sorceress. A mistress of the night. You have become both necromancer and now oneiromancer. Surely you have shed your childhood guise.”
Pyrrha folded her arms. “Um … Soteria? Oh! Maybe, Propulaia?”
“Choose whatever you wish, child.”
Pyrrha frowned. Crotchety old witch. “Oneiromancy is … understanding my dreams.”
“Yours, and those of others. The greatest oneiromancer of our age is called Morpheus, and he too is a member of the Circle of Goetic Mysteries. Perhaps you can learn from him if you can convince your friend to take you.”
Pyrrha glanced over her shoulder in Artemis’s direction. “She is afraid of something.”
“Everyone is afraid of something,” Enodia said, rising with a slight groan. “If you want to further your studies, you will need more mentorship than I alone can provide.”
Why, Pyrrha wanted to ask, but reluctantly decided to leave it be. “I’ll speak to Artemis about going to Phoenikia.”
As expected, Artemis tensed the moment Pyrrha pushed about visiting either Phoeba, to meet her grandmother, or otherwise searching for the Circle.
“There is a cost to all things,” Artemis said, rising, and seeming intent to stalk from the cottage on another interminable hunt.
Pyrrha grabbed her hand and pulled her back down. Or rather, Artemis allowed her to, since Pyrrha could never have physically forced the Titan into aught. “Please. I must have answers. I must know the arcana that bind the World together, Artemis. Whatever the cost, surely knowledge is preferable to ignorance?”
Still, her friend glowered.
“Did you not say you do not linger overlong in one place? Let us leave here together.”
Finally, Artemis sighed, pain creasing her features. “As you say. We will go to Phoeba first, and I will see if my grandmother will answer any of your questions. But, Pyrrha, promise me one thing. Do not push too far, too fast.”
“I … promise,” Pyrrha said. Maybe she even meant it.
29
Athene
1585 Silver Age
The haze that gripped Athene’s mind clotted out most thoughts, even as the tides of the past and future blended into a cavalcade of tumbling violence. For violence seemed to crest over the waves of time, demarcating its shape, the one constant. War and slaughter, battles echoing through the ages, monsters rampaging, and within a dark sea, a still darker shadow of an approaching enormity.
She saw too many things that made no sense, and too many things that did make sense.
But it all ran together in a muddled roil, until she could not make one time from the next, nor even be sure if all she saw was conjured up by her fevered mind.
She saw heroes striving against the chaos of the land, and her hand guiding them—or was it manipulation? She saw gods falling, and—though she told herself it was a dream—the fall of her brother Ares outside somewhere that looked like the walls of Ilium. She saw a thousand flickers like images cast upon Urania’s cave, and wondered at their source.
“Mother,” Pandion chided, his hand in front of her face. For a moment she wondered whether he’d actually had the audacity to snap his fingers in front of her, or whether she had just imagined that as well. They sat in her court room, but Pandion had apparently dismissed all the other members of the court, save for Athene’s steward.
“Mother, did you even hear me? They said he turned into a woodpecker and flew away. What explanation are we meant to send Mnemosynia for such a preposterous claim? They will think we mock them. They will claim we have abducted their heir!”
Pikus. She had sent Kirke to manage Pikus. And the witch had turned him into a bird? This sounded like a hallucination. Such things did not happen.
“Find your aunt and bring her to me,” she said, rubbing at her eyes and not looking forward to any confrontation with Kirke. Perhaps she ought to take another draught before the woman arrived.
No, wait. She had taken the last bit in the night, hadn’t she? She needed more, and Kirke would have to provide. Once, Athene had gone searching in her sister’s lab, but there were too many vials, all different, and none marked. Kirke had warned some batches were more dangerous than others, and not even Athene was so brazen as to imbibe one at random.
Or at least, she hoped she would not be.
The stench of opulence saturated the air of Babilim and nowhere more so than in the heart of this palace, with its great vaulted ceilings
