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Here she stood, misthios by trade, on top of the mountain she was thrown from as a child and sent, sputtering and wounded, to Kephallonia on a tiny raft. Here she stood, alive, despite being tossed from a clifftop , with her brother, her equal, who’d been so much smaller then, but here they were together. Gods be damned, fates be damned. They were together.
Their lives were cruel. Ridiculous by anyone’s standards, and yet here they were.
She shut her eyes and tried to pretend that the breeze that blew over the cliff didn’t make her dizzy. Her whole body was trembling. Deimos’ sword still lay on the ground. Myrrine was gone, halfway down the mountain by now, and Kassandra felt bad about that, mostly. The sight of her two children fighting had been too much.
Kassandra would find Myrrine again. Myrrine had fought for this too, whatever this was. All the years she’d spent thinking of saving her brother, of having a family again, and this had not crossed her mind. This was Taygetos– the place her world had started and ended in a single breath.
She inhaled and exhaled. Ikaros cried above. Deimos’ sword was still on the ground. Her armor was caked with blood.
Inhale, exhale. It didn’t work. She was still trembling.
Deimos cleared his throat. Kassandra blinked and something like harpstrings twanged loud in her ears– or maybe it was that she felt them being plucked somewhere deep in her chest. Regardless, a moment later she nearly pitched forward with the weight of her brother’s anxiety, his pain and his grief, his fear, and his anger. So much emotion. Her throat constricted dangerously, and she let out a loud breath to cover a strangled sob.
“I need,” she began, her voice trembling, “to go find mater.”
Deimos didn’t say anything.
Kassandra could barely breathe. “She went down the mountain–”
“When we touched,” he murmured, “lightning struck the trees beyond this mountain. The cliff shook beneath us.”
Kassandra swallowed. “I felt nothing.”
“Your senses are weak,” Deimos sneered, his lip curling, but there was no venom in his words.
Lightning flickered again– she saw it this time. The skies around them were the deep, swirling grays that reminded Kassandra of the rivers she’d swam in as a child, deep enough to stay cool in the summer, but shallow enough that they still reflected the storming skies above.
The cliffs shook this time, subtly beneath her feet, and Kassandra inhaled sharply, meeting Deimos’ gaze.
“You feel it?” He asked.
She shook her head, tremulous.
The corners of Deimos’ mouth twitched as his jaw flicked between tense and relaxed. “Something in the air feels different,” he said, “almost–”
Lightning arced in the air above them, a spiderweb of white that fanned out for miles and left a sickly burning smell in the wake of the explosion.
It felt to Kassandra as if something started and stopped in the same moment; she wondered, absently, if Myrrine had somehow known the storm was approaching before either of them had. It didn’t matter. Myrrine had taken care of herself on Naxos for gods knew how long.
“We need to get off this mountain,” Deimos said.
“No fucking shit,” Kassandra snarled, the tension in her chest billowing out of her in an obnoxious, anger-clouded breath. “You would have killed Myrrine, ” she said, “and me. Why did you come here? Was Brasidas not enough for you? Must you take everything I’ve ever loved?”
“Enough!”
Kassandra screamed, a keening thing that tore hot-white flame across her throat, and lunged toward Deimos with a dagger raised outward.
He grabbed her wrist, stopping her, and slammed his shoulder into the center of her chest, blocking any further movement.
“We need to get off this mountain,” he repeated, jutting his chin in the air. “The storm is around only us. Only around us.”
Myrrine had vanished, no doubt, when she’d felt the powerful sparks that ran between the two of them. The same sparks that Kassandra felt so close to her brother. The same sparks that she felt hovering in the storm above.
The storm was made up of clouds colored a desolate gray. Like a tornado, it was open in the center, but the winds swirled it around until a breeze kicked up, moving silt and gravel across the surface of the cliffside.
It felt as if all of Taygetos was holding its breath. Kassandra blinked. Yet again, it felt like something had changed.
Deimos stood in front of her and she jerked away from him, anger still hot and snarling in her belly.
“I came here to save you,” she growled at him, “to finish what we started.”
He looked at her, quiet. Almost sad. “I came here on my own,” he reminded her. He looked at the mountain path, where Myrrine had fled. “I meant to–”
“Don’t,” Kassandra snapped. “Don’t say anything. Mater promised you a home, and that’s what you’ll have. I’ve spent years trying to find you.”
Deimos swallows.
As they went down the mountain, Kassandra still caught Deimos staring at the storm.
It followed them home.
Home.
She could still feel the lightning in her veins.
~~~
"It was all a dream, right?"
~~~
“It was storming the night you were born, one of the worst I’d ever seen,” Myrrine said over dinner, two nights later. It is still raining. “When your brother was born years later, the skies turned black as midnight. I didn’t know what to make of it.”
Kassandra paused, one hand wrapped around the wider edge of her cup. “Storms,” she echoed, blinking. “What do you mean, storms.”
“Thunder so loud the walls shook, lightning so violent it tore apart the skies,” Myrrine said, a thumb running over the cerulean edging of the cloth beneath her plate. “Terrible storms, nasty ones. The city was left untouched, miraculously,” she raised an eyebrow. “As if they were all rage, but didn’t wish any harm.”
Her tone was almost… amused, but in the same moment Kassandra questioned whether she was hearing things, Deimos stood, scooted his side of their shared bench backward, and made an aggressive move toward the door. Thunder rolled outside, and Myrrine shivered, though she attempted to hide it.
Kassandra stared down at her empty plate and froze against the sigh that warmed her chest.
“Brother,” she said, “where are you going.”
“Out,” he answered, his voice low.
Kassandra raised an eyebrow. “Into the storm?”
Her brother scoffed. “Storms mean nothing to me,” he said, turning to sneer at her. He locked eyes with Myrrine for just an instant before adding, “they never have.”
And then he was gone.
Myrrine visibly relaxed when he vanished. In the long weeks they’d spent together, Kassandra had learned to read her
mater’s
expressions, though the older woman tried desperately to hide them. Kassandra suspected that something about Deimos’ presence had weakened Myrrine’s toughened exterior; a killer though he may be, he was still her youngest son, and the one thing she did not hide was how much better she felt having him around.
Deimos knew something Kassandra herself did not. That’s what her gut told her.
Her instincts were rarely wrong.
“Tell me what you meant,” Kassandra said, “the story.”
“Stories are contrived things,” Myrrine answered, “what I said was real.”
“A storm that raged for days, and turned the skies black as night but did no damage?” Kassandra sighed. “You’re fooling no one. You speak in riddles. Tell me what you mean.”
“He knew,” her mother whispered, “I saw it in his eyes. All the lies they told, but that part was the truth.”
A knot wedged itself in Kassandra’s throat. “What do you mean? Who–”
“The Cult,” Myrrine said, “they told your brother he was a demigod, and they were right.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You would have, given the chance. The Cult encouraged it in him. They would have known of the raw power he possessed. They’d have been fools to miss it.”
Raw power was one way of putting it. Deimos– Alexios– was the one person who had ever soundly been able to come toe-to-toe with Kassandra. She’d killed hundreds, maybe thousands of people over the years she’d spent as a mercenary-turned-soldier, searching for her family. Men bled whether they were Spartan soldiers or dressed in Delian blue. Deimos had been different. Stronger.
And she was different too.
“A demigod,” Kassandra said, “is the child of a god and a mortal.”
“Yes.”
Kassandra sighed again, loud and long. “Do you realize–”
“There are many things,” her mother interrupted, “that I never had the chance to tell you, even when I found you again.”
“But a god?” Kassandra sputtered. “You’re claiming–”
“It isn’t a claim, ” Myrrine snapped, “it is the truth. I took an oath, Kassandra. For all your questioning, you must understand that there are some things I cannot answer.” She took a breath and glanced briefly at the ceiling. “Our bloodline has always been made of heroes, Kassandra,” she said.
The bloodline–
“Heroes,” Kassandra snarled, standing up. “The bloodline.”
“Kassandra–”
“If we’re so powerful, then why was I thrown from the mountain,” Kassandra demanded, her voice breaking, her eyes clouding with unshed tears. Her throat constricted painfully. “Why was my life ruined, why was his life ruined? What use this power if it can be twisted just like anything else?” She gasped out the words and let her fists curl at her sides. “It’s useless,” she murmured, “just like this broken spear.”
She ignored the way the spear vibrated against her palm as she drove it into the table, ignored the way lightning flashed outside and ignored the way Ikaros’ cry reverberated through her as she stormed outside and into the rain.
Her life had constantly been a hapless attempt to run from those who’d use her power for their own ambition. Her life, while Deimos’ had lived carrying out the Cult’s wants and desires, unaware of the evil he was wreaking on the world. Both of them had lived out the consequences of carrying such power in their blood, and both of them had the scars to prove that it didn’t matter which way their life had gone. They’d both been used in the end.
None of it mattered.
How dare her mother owe everything to a story?
Ikaros’ cry rang through her ears again, and an image flashed through her head. There was a tiny crack in the ground where water sprang forth; the mountains above always broke out in wildflowers in the springtime. Deimos was there. Ikaros was driving them together.
Malakas bird.
She left the city and found her brother kneeling on the grass by the saltwater pool, tucked in between a few flower-speckled bushes. It was a strange sight indeed– a warrior garbed in armor, pink berries dotting the copper platting around her shoulders. She would have laughed if her temper wasn’t still spiraling in a flame-wrenched ache in her chest.
“Deimos,” she greeted him softly. “Aren’t you cold?”
He shifted just enough to crack one eye open toward her. “Did that bird bring you here?”
“Perhaps,” she answered with a bitter laugh. “He has a bad habit of meddling with things.”
Her brother scoffed. “I’ve noticed.”
Kassandra paused, then sat to his left, just in front of him so that she was in full view. She shut her eyes and let her heartbeat slow. Her mind was still racing, but even her thoughts fell prey to the mournful din of the waning storm.
“She is wrong,” Deimos said, “about us. About everything.”
Kassandra’s lip curled. “She blamed both our lives on a lie.”
“Oh? And you know the truth, do you?” he shakes his head. “Tell me.”
“Our bloodline is the reason we were both thrown from Taygetos,” Kassandra said. “And she’d have us believe we’re some sort of godspawn. Half mortal, half divine.”
Deimos met her gaze. “And you don’t believe her.”
“The Cult of Kosmos lied to you, brother,” Kassandra said. “Nothing they told you was true.”
Deimos’ jaw set. “You’re wrong.”
“You’ve seen through their lies yourself–”
“But not this,” he snapped,”this is the truth. It’s why they sought after me, and it’s why they hunted you.”
“We’re not gods, Deimos!”
“How do you know?” His voice wasn’t raised, but it held the sort of fury that came with being defied. “All my life, not one of the soldiers beneath me were able to match me in battle. And then I met you.”
“I’ve spent my whole life fighting, just like you did.”
“This is different. Your mother was right. We aren’t just warriors. Fighting is in our blood, and our blood is what makes us strong.”
“She’s your mother too,” Kassandra whispered. She watched as Deimos’ eyes narrowed, like he was contemplating the fact. She shut her eyes focused on the thunder above them. “Brother–”
“Those who call themselves demigods don’t know what it’s like,” her brother said. “Carrying the blood of the gods is not one half or the other. It’s all or nothing. We are not half mortal, half divine, sister. We just are.”
Kassandra opened her eyes. Her heart skipped a beat.
Deimos stood, arching his back to stretch his shoulders. He whistled once and Ikaros appeared from his perch on the rutted cliff above.
“We crossed blades and you came out alive, that means something,” he said. “But I’ve had an entire lifetime of the Cult’s teaching to learn to use my power. You have much to learn.”
“I’m still not convinced–”
In one swift move, her brother wrenched the spear from his back and threw it, a strangled shout erupting from him as a silver flash split the air apart in the same instant. The thunder that followed was the loudest Kassandra had ever heard. She held her hands to her ears but the sound still rocked her to her core, vibrating her bones from her jaw to her toes.
The gentle, dew-filled scent that had filled the grove was gone, replaced by something acidic and foul. Sparks spat from where the rocks had parted. Lightning flashed again, illuminating the spot where Deimos’ spear had split the rocks.
Kassandra had shot arrows alight with fire, dipped an oil-tinged blade in flame and twisted it over her shoulders in an arc, only to emerge unsinged. She’d sparred with foes twice her size and brought down monsters wreathed in age-old legends. She was Kassandra, Eagle-Bearer, but she had never thrown lightning.
And Deimos had just done it before her very eyes.
He turned to her, shaking out his hand, the barest beginning of a smirk stretching over his face.
“Does that,” he hummed, “look like something out of a story to you?”
~~~
~~~
Sometime later–
On the docks of the Adrestia, Kassandra sat meditating in the middle of the storm.
Barnabas had sat here with her for as long as he’d felt safe, but even the old sea captain had thought her crazed when the storm had worsened.
“You may have fought demons, but I refuse to be tossed from these decks by a storm,” he’d jested before taking his leave.
She’d looked at him over her shoulder, told him to leave before it was her who tossed him overboard instead, and settled into meditating only when she was sure he was gone.
The lightning in the sky had been going on for hours now, and she’d felt every flare, every flash, just as her brother had told her she would.
Sitting here, soaked by the rain, alone in the shadows of the anchored ship, Kassandra admitted to herself for the first time that it was she who had called the storm. Every bit of its thunder and lightning called to something at the very center of her.
Tonight was the first time she’d answered.
And it felt…
right.