I looked at his face in the stone and couldn’t speak.
I wanted to know too. How had it come to this.
Ten years ago, Caelum was the King of the Gods, and I was an ordinary mortal girl at the foot of Olympus.
He came down to the mortal world on one of his sky rounds. He saw me, and he took me up to the divine mountain.
Right beside his own temple, he built a palace for me. Just me.
For thousands of years he had been the most infamous flirt among the gods, and now, for the first time, he cut ties with every lover he’d ever had. There was only one mortal in his life: me. He said it to my face. “Sweetheart, I love only you.”
I believed him then. When I got pregnant he was out of his mind with joy, and he poured half his divine blood into me because he was afraid my body wouldn’t hold the bloodline of a god.
He set aside the business of the Council, and every day he came down to my little palace, laid his hand on my belly, and listened for movement.
But the day Nia was born, the Fates appeared in my birthing chamber.
“Mortal vessel, divine blood. Her fate is ill. If she stays on Mount Olympus, she will bring ruin to the whole divine world.”
Caelum stood outside the chamber all night, and he didn’t come in to hold her.
The next morning he had me and Nia sent down from the peak, back to the cottage at the foot of the mountain.
His attendant brought his words. “I am the King of the Gods. I can’t risk the divine world. Once the curse is dealt with, I’ll bring you back.”
I thought he just needed time. The prophecy had shaken him, and he would come around.
But a month later, Seraphina was at my door.
She had been Caelum’s lover once, and when he brought me up to Olympus, she had been the loudest voice against it.
She glanced at Nia in my arms, her brow drawing in slightly, like she’d caught the smell of something unclean. “So this is the cursed child? It’s true, then. Mortal blood is too foul. It’s polluted the divine bloodline into this.”
She turned to me with pity and contempt layered on her face, and she gave a soft laugh that crawled up my spine.
“Caelum sent me. I can use divine flame to cleanse the curse from the child.”
My grip tightened on Nia, and I pulled her closer. “Is there any other way? She’s only a month old.”
Seraphina looked at me the way you might look at a stubborn animal. “Elara, you are a mortal. What right do you have to question the methods of a god? Caelum has already agreed. All you have to do is cooperate.”
She lifted a hand, and Nia floated out of my arms. Under her power I had no strength to resist at all.
She laid Nia on a stone slab, and golden fire wrapped around my baby.
I will hear that scream for the rest of my life.
Nia’s tiny body arched on the slab, her limbs jerking. Her skin went red, then black, and the smell of burning filled the room.
I lunged toward her, but Seraphina threw out a hand and the divine force sent me flying back into the wall.
“Don’t interfere.” She didn’t even turn her head. “You’re a base mortal. You’ll only deepen the curse.”
When Seraphina finally stopped and left, there was a patch of skin on Nia’s chest that was charred completely black. I held her. She had cried until her voice was a rasp, and her tiny fingers clutched at the front of my dress while she wouldn’t stop trembling.
That night I carried her up the mountain, one step at a time. I walked for three days and three nights, and I made it to the doors of Caelum’s temple. I was going to beg him to pour a little of his power into her, to save her, to stop Seraphina from doing this again.
But when I pushed the door open, I heard Seraphina’s voice.
The same goddess who was always so proper, so holy, so untouched in front of me, was moaning.
“Yes… Caelum, harder.”
I went still in the doorway.
Nia was still seizing in my arms. Her little body kept jerking, and her fingers were locked into my dress.
Seraphina felt me there. She didn’t panic, and she didn’t even reach for a sheet. Sprawled across Caelum’s chest, her body covered in bruise-dark love bites, she just lay there.
Caelum frowned at me. He was sweating, still buried inside her. “Get out. Can’t you see I’m busy?”
It was like ice water down my back. I opened my mouth, wanting to say Nia was dying, that she wouldn’t last, that I was begging him to help her.
The words wouldn’t come. Not one.
Seraphina pulled herself up off Caelum’s chest. She studied me with a small, lazy smile, like I was a servant who’d shown up uninvited.
“Good timing.” Her voice was still ragged from before, drowsy. “Pour Caelum and me a cup of mead. I’m thirsty.”
Then she leaned back down to his ear. “Don’t mind her. She’s just a lowly mortal. Keep going.”
Caelum slid an arm around her waist, rolled her over, and pinned her under him.
I stood in the doorway with my seizing daughter in my arms, and I watched.
I wanted to leave.
I couldn’t.
An invisible force had nailed my feet to the floor: Seraphina’s power.
Even as she took Caelum’s thrusts, she turned her head and looked at me, and she smiled just a little.
“Don’t be in such a rush to leave,” she said, her voice broken up by her own breathing. “You’re his woman too. Doesn’t it make you happy to see him happy?”
I shut my eyes, but a force pried them open again.
She made me watch, and she made me listen as her moans grew louder, deliberate.
I don’t know how long I stood there. The hate inside me almost burned through my skin.
Finally Caelum seemed to tire of it. His voice came down, flat and unreadable. “Seraphina. Enough.”
Seraphina froze for a beat, then released her hold on me.
Caelum waved his hand once, careless, and Nia and I were back at the cottage at the foot of the mountain.
Nia ran a high fever all night. I held her the whole night, wiping her forehead with cool water. When the fever took her under, she mumbled for me. Mama.
I hated.
I sent what Seraphina and Caelum had done out into every mortal city. I ran down the mountain to the divine courier station and had everything carved into message tablets: Seraphina burned a child every month in the name of cleansing a curse, Caelum allowed it, and no one ever cared whether the child lived or died.
The story reached every temple. Mortals tore down Seraphina’s statues and ripped up her holy portraits.
I thought it might force them to stop.
I was wrong.
At the Council of the Gods, every divine voice condemned me. A mortal had dared to slander a goddess.
They threw me into the depths of Tartarus.
Caelum did not stop them. He looked at me with a faint annoyance. “Elara. I’ve spoiled you, and now you dare to disrespect a goddess. Sit in the abyss and think about what you’ve done. Come out when you’ve learned your lesson.”
At the deepest level of Tartarus, the Erinyes were chained.
They were Seraphina’s.
They wound serpents around my throat and poured poisoned mist into my ears. Every time I began to lose consciousness, they dragged me back, and they made me watch the scene in the Golden Hall again: Seraphina’s moans, Caelum’s cold face, Nia going limp in my arms.
Again. And again.
I lost track of time.
I just wanted to live long enough to see Nia.
When Nia was five, they finally let me out, and I half-crawled back to the cottage.
I opened the door, and I saw it: Nia, burning to ash in front of me.
I threw myself at the flame and tried everything, but the divine fire would not go out.
I sat with her ashes the whole night and couldn’t summon a single tear.
That same night, fireworks burst across the sky over Mount Olympus. Caelum had lit them himself, for Seraphina, and the two of them stood under the cascade of light, accepting the congratulations of all the gods.
I finished telling all of this to him, one piece at a time. In the projection, the younger Caelum’s eyes had gone red and wet.
His whole body shook, and his voice came out cracked. “Elara. Tell me what to do. Tell me how to change this.”
I looked at him for a long time. “If you can do anything, make sure the me from five years ago doesn’t get pregnant.”
Caelum was always going to end up with another goddess, and I couldn’t change that about him.
The only thing I had left to want was for Nia never to come into this world. Never to live through any of this.
The younger Caelum trembled. He couldn’t say anything, and in the end he covered his face with his hands. A single tear slipped between his fingers.
And in that moment, the door of my room opened.
The present Caelum walked in carrying a box of healing salve. He must have come to treat my burns.
He had heard the last sentence, and his expression went dark.
“Pregnant?”
