not human heroes of olympus

𝟬𝟬𝟭. the sounds of war

          She did not love war (a mantra she repeats like battle cries, a lie embroidered upon tapestries and burned into wood), did not love others dying during fights she was not a part of, but Eirene had a thirst for blood, and if this was how she had to get it, then damn her hatred of war. Now she was in her element, with glittering golden ash from the monsters she had defeated; falling like tinkerbell's pixie dust off of her stygian iron blade. The rotten, ghastly flesh and blood splattered upon her from the monsters that had put up a fight. Her sword had not left her grip throughout the entirety of battle, it was her greed after all that refused to part with the beautiful blade found discarded within the dwellings of an old ransacked tomb. There had of course been the original worry of the river water within her sword draining her life force, but Nico had ensured her that her 'aura' was very much intact and that he did not understand why.

          That was just another thing on Eirenes' ever expanding list of 'things that confuse the absolute fuck out of me', something that had taken up three dot points was that Silena (bless her departed soul) Beauregard had once told Eirene as they practised the correct way to disarm someone with charm-speak that she never looked more god-like; more beautiful than when she was fighting, when she was an inebriated hurricane of twisting limbs and bruised eyes.

          Her eyes had not left the battle before her, even when two offspring of Karkinos had surrounded her, oversized red pincers flying towards her face ━ the sole of her focus had been on those around her.

          Eirenes' subtle twinge of a smirk had long fallen from her face, and as she witnessed her fellow fighters, her friends fall to the ground, only to stay there, and not move, well her frown had formed into a rapidly growing scowl. The girl suspected that if she had a moment to spare, or a moral compass that was not built on twisted chaotic ideals, that she would have shed a tear, or at least have allowed herself to feel the familiar pang of sorrow.

          But Eirene was all for living in the moment, and currently the moment was not one for crying or for feeling pain. (No, instead the only thing that she felt despite her best efforts to remain a blank slate was rage, it lingered beneath her skin and boiled within the cells of her blood waiting for the moment to be released upon the earth.) She was a leader after all, not in the same sense that Percy was, but she had found herself being the person that people turned too in order to keep moving, to make a split second decision that could potentially end a life. Originally it had been surprising to find that people trusted her, though now she revelled in it, or at least she attempted to. It was a lot, to have that kind of faith placed into a girl who rarely even knew the next of her own actions, and yet it was nice to see that people knew eirene would take every action to ensure the safety of the camp.

          She had stopped fighting however, when the ground rumbled, so it seemed, did the other demi-gods as well. Even the monsters had stopped their attack for a moment, haunted sneers replacing the growling sneers upon disfigured faces, although on the other faces of the monsters was a deep fear, one rooted from the nightmarish cries and taunts of the darkest, deepest dwellings of Tartarus.

          Though when jagared splits within the earth began to appear in the road, and then the sidewalks, even starting to crack the sides of buildings, shifting the cars laying dormant on the paved streets ━ well, Eirene felt her frown drop and breath return to her hollowed chest. She wiped the golden specks from her stained sword on the front of her blood spattered shirt, she had long discarded the vibrant orange camp half-blood tee for something a little less bright, though it had all been in hopes of being disguised within the crowd and not because orange was a horrid colour on her. Eirene scanned the damage that her forces had taken and held back a wince as she watched the campers take this small break to help one another off of the ground, wipe the sweat, tears and dust from their eyes and carry on with their fight.