Your Loyalty to Me

Why do All Prophecies Sound so Depressing?

Hey everyone,
I don't know about you but writing these smaller chapters is certainly driving ME crazy.
But I feel worse for you guys because you have to wait whole days for these small ass chapters.

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Apollo's POV

A few hours of dreamless sleep, followed by a bubble bath.

It was not Mount Olympus, my friends, but it was close.

By late afternoon, I was freshly dressed in clothes that weren’t freezing and did not smell of cave excrement. My belly was full of honey and just-baked bread. I roamed the Waystation, helping out where I could. It was good to stay busy. It kept me from thinking too much about the lines of the Dark Prophecy.

Aria rested comfortably in a guest room covered in pillows and blankets because literally everyone, Jo, Emmie, Leo, Calypso, the Hunters, Jimmy, Ssssarah and even Lityerses insisted that she test in comfort.
(Don't ask me why she has that effect on people. I know I, for one, am immune.)

The Hunters of Artemis tended the wounded, who were so numerous the Waystation had to double the size of its infirmary. Outside, Livia the elephant helped with cleanup, moving broken vehicles and wreckage from the roundabout. Leo and Josie spent the afternoon collecting pieces of Festus the dragon, who had been torn apart bare-handed, they told me, by Commodus himself. Fortunately, Leo seemed to find this more of an annoyance than a tragedy.

“Nah, man,” he said when I offered my condolences. “I can put him back together easy enough. I redesigned him so he’s like a Lego kit, built for quick assembly!”

He went back to helping Josephine, who was using a crane to extract Festus’s left hind leg from the Union Station bell tower.

Calypso, in a burst of aerial magic, summoned enough wind spirits to reassemble the glass shards of the rose window, then promptly collapsed from the effort.

Sssssarah, Jimmy, Meg and Thalia Grace swept the surrounding streets, looking for any sign of Commodus, but the emperor had simply disappeared. I thought of how I’d saved Hemithea and Parthenos when they jumped off that cliff long ago, dissolving them into light. Could a quasi-deity such as Commodus do something like that to himself? Whatever the case, I had a suspicion that we hadn’t seen the last of good old New Hercules.

At sunset I was asked to join a small family memorial for Heloise the griffin. The entire population of the Waystation would have come to honor her sacrifice, but Emmie explained that a large crowd would upset Abelard even worse than he already was. While Hunter Kowalski sat on egg duty in the henhouse (where Heloise’s egg had been moved for safekeeping before the battle) I joined Emmie, Josephine, Georgie, Meg and Calypso on the roof. Abelard, the grieving widower, watched in silence as Calypso and I—honorary relatives since our rescue mission to the zoo—laid the body of Heloise gently across a fallow bed of soil in the garden.

After death, griffins become surprisingly light. Their bodies desiccate when their spirits pass on, leaving only fur, feathers, and hollow bones. We stepped back as Abelard prowled toward the body of his mate. He ruffled his wings, then gently buried his beak in Heloise’s neck plumage one last time. He threw back his head and let out a piercing cry—a call that said, I am here. Where are you?

Then he launched himself into the sky and disappeared in the low gray clouds. Heloise’s body crumbled to dust.

“We’ll plant catnip in this bed.” Emmie wiped a tear from her cheek. “Heloise loved catnip.”

Meg took off her glasses to swipe her sleeve over her eyes carelessly before putting them back in again. "I'll help."

Calypso dried her eyes on her sleeve. “That sounds lovely. Where did Abelard go?”