He let me out of the basement without a fight, and I took that as my cue to follow him, because you can’t just drop something like that and walk off into your manor. I appeared in front of him, and all he did was continue walking through me, as if I didn’t even exist. I shuddered, my skin feeling like it had just been slathered in oil and touched all over my groping fingers. Gods, I hate telekinesis. Especially ones that practically had the world at their feet. Feet, I noticed, which didn’t really touch the ground as he walked away from me, turning left down the hallway.

  I had no other choice except to trail after him, jogging along the mildew-stained carpet and running past giant windows that stood to my right, gritty with grease and dust and general filth from years of build up. I could barely see outside on the lawn, or even past that through the thick black tree line. The place was just as hard to see out of as it was from the outside. The entire place felt dead. Not dying, like most of Lower Olympus, but a place that had already given in to whatever despair bled from the walls and left the dark purple wallpaper lilting and old.

  A part of me figured that, without mom, home would probably end up like this place, too. The thought caught me completely off guard, feeling like an icy prod in the gut. I should probably call her. Eventually. She’d be fine without me calling for a few more days. Hell, she’d been fine without calling me for the past several months.

  That didn’t mean my stomach was any less settled by that thought.

  Finally, I found the guy in a study of some kind. A large fireplace in the wall, complete with stacks of old books surrounding a single armchair in front of the crackling fire. The curtains were drawn shut. The place felt cozy and lived in compared to literally everything else inside of the house. He stood over a desk in the corner, flicking through a book bigger than anything I’d ever read before. His back remained turned to me, and his hands were still in his pockets, but the pages still flipped, and a short cup of tea beside the armchair filled itself up with hot tea.

  I watched in silent amazement how everything around him worked without a single command, as he just stood there, slightly slouched, head tilted to read using the fire light alone. Hekka’s son. I guess the gravity of that was still setting in. You don’t meet that many of us, and yet here he was, doing his thing in a rotting manor. I mean, the world sorta kinda needed more heroes, and powerful ones (Adam didn’t count), but y’know, that’s just me thinking out loud. Maybe instead of reading old books all day long for the past ten years, he could have been…

  Relax, Ry. Maybe he’s got a reason for why he’s let the city his dad used to protect get destroyed.

  “Can I help you?” he asked me. His voice echoed inside the high-ceilinged chamber.

  “You just said your father is dead,” I said, spreading my arms. “Hekka was a hero.”

  “Hm,” he said quietly, finding his place in the armchair, with the book floating steadily on his lap.

  I hovered toward him and lowered the book. He tilted his head up at me, sunglasses reflecting the small crackling fire burning on nothing behind me. “I know it sounds pretentious, but we’re in the same boat right now.”

  He scoffed. “Leave. I’ve given you your answer, so abide by what you promised.”

  “But—”

  “Isn’t that a hero’s code? Their truest morality and the strictest faith in their words and others’, too?”

  Don’t go throwing those words in my face after you smacked me around your front lawn.

  I held tighter onto the book, stopping him from taking it from me with his mind alone. He relented and sighed, resting his jaw on his fist and looking at me a little too similarly to how dad used to look at me—just good old annoyance. “I was saying we’re in the same place, me and you,” I said, putting the book under my arm. “Zeus is dead, and you look like you were around my age when that happened, and seeing that you pretty much have all of Hekka’s powers, then we can help each other out.” I leaned on the chair, making sure he didn’t simply vanish. “You do me a favor and find someone I care about, and I’ll do you a favor and…uh”—I just had it—“help you leave.”

  He stared at me, the wind pelting against the window and the fire crackling gently behind us.

  “Why,” he said, “would you think I’m a prisoner in this house? In my home?”

  “Well, you haven’t left this place in years. I mean, how old are you?”

  He didn’t answer me, which was answer enough.

  “Exactly,” I said. “C’mon, dude. Heroes help each other.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “You’re suggesting I’m a hero?”

  “You’re the son of one, aren’t you?”

  He waved his hand, and suddenly he’s in front of the flames, stoking them with an iron rod. “Heritage does not constitute any bearing on one’s life choices. Becoming a hero is a decision, not just a fate chosen once you are brought forth into this world.” He set the poker beside the fireplace and turned to look at me. “But I suppose if that’s your way of thinking, then that must be what you think of yourself—trapped within the confines of fate just because—” He paused, then walked toward me, stopping an arm’s length away. “By any chance, are you his—”

  “Yeah,” I said, folding my arms after setting the book down. “Zeus’ one and only.”

  We remained in silence for several seconds. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He had this gleam in his eyes, this thoughtfulness on his face that made him feel much older than I was. I mean, for crying out loud there had been one visitor on this island in the past ten years, seemingly, and he was still walking around with a full suit on. But I guess he got that from his dad, the same way mine was always in casual clothes if he wasn’t in his gear. I didn’t even know how he looked on his wedding day, now that I thought about it. He had this weird love for ‘human stuff’ that put him in jeans or shorts and Hawaiian t-shirts every other normal day at home. I guess it was different here.

  Very quickly, it was beginning to feel like the shadows and walls of this place had a lot more to say about the two of us than either of us really could. Maybe in some other life, we would have grown up together as friends.

  But that would have required dad to actually bother spending any time with me.

  “I…apologize,” he said quietly. “For your father’s passing.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered. “Right back at you. Hekka was the coolest when I was a kid. Kinda scary, though.”

  He smiled. A fraction of his lips moving. “You only fear what you don’t understand.”

  “Like how you made the Earth swallow me whole?”

  “Or how you’re even standing here in the first place.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Is someone afraid of little old me? “Like I said, dude. I flew here.”

  “I don’t think you quite understand,” he said to me, suddenly back in the armchair. What is this, some kind of teleportation? Can Witchling even do that? “A long time ago, your kind wasn’t even able to locate this home, let alone enter it.” He rested his elbow on the arm rest, his chin on his knuckles. “And if they did, they perished.”

  I let the silence drag for a little bit. The storm outside was getting worse. I walked back and sat on a short coffee table, facing him and leaning forward. “But that doesn’t make sense, does it?” I said. “Everyone knew about this place. There’s literally a Yelp review from some random visitor years ago on the internet. It’s pretty easy to—”

  “Rylee,” he said slowly. I paused. “Yes, I can hear your name being whispered. You hear them, too, don’t you, the voices you think are in your head?” He lowered his sunglasses and slid them into his blazer’s chest pocket. He leaned forward as well, and suddenly, my skin began to prickle. “I apologize for changing the subject, but it’s hard to focus when there’s so much around you. So many…” He tensed his jaw and narrowed his eyes at me, then stood and walked toward me, stopping only to bend at the hip. I backed up, kinda freaked, then he grabbed my shirt and tugged it down. That’s when I got into the air and over the table, putting some distance between the two of us.

  “O-kay, yeah, how about you don’t touch me like that again, huh?” I said. “Unless you wanna get hurt.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You think you could hurt me?”

  “I think I could kill you before you knew what was going on.”

  “Absurd,” he scoffed.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  I want to state here and now that I was never a diplomat, and I also kinda didn’t like getting touched like that so easily. And I keep my word. Always. So when he was crashing through the wall behind him, only stopping when I put a hand out to catch him, I was only making it very, very clear that I wasn’t gonna be playing that kinda game with him. Not with Witchling. Not with Lucas. Nobody. I dropped him after catching him mid-air onto an old and very filthy kitchen floor. Empty. Vacant. Stacks of rusted pots and pans in overflowing, moss-covered sinks. Fruits rotted in a separate room not too far from us. I could smell the opossums dead in the walls, too fat on the meat and vegetables they could find in the freezers to get far. I looked down at him, my arms folded. Look, I hated to sound like this, but I hated people touching me. It’s a thing. At first it was because I thought I just hated humans.

  But no. Touching me in general got my skin feeling a little bit like it was crawling.

  Blame dear old dad for that.

  He blinked and looked around, then at the gaping hole of the several walls he’d just exploded through. The fire still crackled several dozen rooms away, but here in the dark, it was my eyes alone that lit up the shadows.

  I crouched so we were at eye level. “Pretty absurd, isn’t it?”

  His eyes didn’t narrow. His body didn’t get defensive. All he did was smile. “Our scuffle in the woods—”

  I waved my hand through the air and stood, using his collar to drag him off the floor. “If I really wanted to fight you, we’d still be out there. I figured you don’t have that much battle experience, anyway. Not with how you threw things at me. I’ve fought people like you in the past. Most of ‘em have a strategy. You just threw shit my way and hoped it would work.” I picked up his sunglasses from him—broken, but still—and handed them to him. “It only worked ‘cause I was trying to make a good first impression. You really should work on your people skills.”

  “Seemingly,” he said, taking his sunglasses back. “I’ve been alone for so long that some…tendencies have become lost on me. Social cues and the like. Once you only have yourself to speak to, your conversational skills weaken.” He slid his hands back into his pockets again, but not after straightening his shirt. “I only reached for you because of the sigil on your chest. I couldn’t believe someone of your heritage would even dare do such a thing.”

  I leaned against the kitchen counter. “I know I’m different, but you don’t have to make it sound like that.”

  “There’s quite frankly no other way to put it.” Tiny fires blossomed around us, floating in the air and turning the kitchen a soft shade of orange. “I met your father once before, and only once before. He hated being in the vicinity of my father, let alone this home. But he always struck me as odd, like an irritation against my senses.”

  Hey, me too!

  “I always figured Hekka loved my dad,” I said. “Hell, they were teammates for nearly ten years.”

  “And my father loathed every moment of it.”

  He snapped his fingers, and suddenly we were back inside the study, the walls I had sent him through slowly beginning to repair themselves. Right back where we had been sitting, and I couldn’t help but smile, because that was purely just showmanship. A way for him to say, You got a lucky shot. Any other day, and I would have been terrified, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had actually been myself in a fight without the baggage of death in my memories, too. Guess it’s genetic, wanting to fight. Killing the Kaiju down there in the sewers wasn’t a memory I liked thinking about either. I had butchered it, sure—but that hadn’t really been me. I wanted to think it wasn’t me, because whenever I did, it almost felt like I was watching someone else doing all of that. I don’t know. It’s whatever. Something to focus on at another time. All that power, and you saved absolutely nobody, Rylee.

  I rubbed my hands together and picked underneath my nails, making them tick.

  “Why?” I asked. “If Hekka hated my dad so much, he should have just left.”

  He remained silent for a moment, then said, “I suppose it doesn’t matter if I tell you our family’s secrets, now that there’s none left to stop me.” He sighed and took a moment. I gave him the time he needed. “You see, my family is what we call…special. Intertwined with the world in a way that’s hard to describe, but I suppose you now understand what that means, seeing that you’ve got It on your shoulder, constantly watching you.” I couldn’t help but glance, but found nothing at all. He smiled a little. “It waits for your death like a scavenger for food. So, so many of them want you dead, and yet it was different for your father. He was clean. Entirely devoid of any death.”

  I laughed. It echoed through the chamber. He cocked his head as I said, “My dad? Devoid of death? Ha!”

  “Am I mistaken?” he asked. “Zeus never raised his fist to a man. Not apart from his own brother.”

  Oh, man, tell that to the races that are nothing but numbers in our databases.

  But he’d been different on Earth, hadn’t he? This golden paragon of truth and justice, a family man to the team who knew him, and the protector of Earth when the time came for him to save it. My smile faltered the more he looked at me, because this was getting even more uncomfortable for me. I shifted and stopped picking at my nails.

  “Let’s just say the world didn’t know him the way I did,” I muttered.

  So how did he not have ghosts or whatever around him?

  “Regardless,” he continued. “My family boasts a past of protection at any cost. Countless calamities that might have consumed the world entirely simply do not exist in this reality because of us. This is the best case—”

  “Woah, alright, slow down a little,” I said, holding up my hands. “You said reality? Like, alternate—”

  “Yes, now please stop interrupting me. We could have gotten much further if you’d remain quiet.”

  I gestured to him that I was zipping up my lips. Got it.

  But regardless, holy shit. Realities.

  Is that what those weird things were? Those Alternate Realm things that Dominion had put me in?

  “As I was saying,” he said, sighing a little. “This reality is the best case scenario for the world’s end.”

  I stared at him, waiting for him to continue. The rain beat against the walls. The winds shoved against the home, making it groan and moan and struggle against the lashing storm. I gestured for him to keep freaking talking.

  “And that was because of your father’s death,” he said. “He was meant to die, yes. But not like that.”

  Quietly, I said, “What?”

  “Your father should have died before he even came here,” he said. “He should have died the day he made himself known, or the day he wore his first costume and saved the world, or founded the Olympians. His existence was a calamity. Zeus alone was destined to be a turning point for us all, and that, Rylee, is why you shouldn’t be here. I sensed you before you arrived, and you felt exactly like him. It’s your presence. The air surrounding you and the fate that precedes you by millenia.” He leaned forward. “Our texts weren’t talking about your father, they were talking about you. My father realized that when he returned home. He was questioned and interrogated thoroughly. Some would say harshly. But he had failed, and on his deathbed, I demanded an answer to why he did not do it.”

  “But,” I whispered, “my old man died, anyway. You guys got what you wanted.”

  No, my voice didn’t catch in my throat.

  And no, I wasn’t going to listen to the part where I was the one meant to die.

  “See, now that’s the thing,” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “My father was right in not being the one to kill Zeus. Our family was meant to isolate him. Capture him. Neither took place, because it was meant to be the one after him. The one with his blood, his heritage. The one who would burn the sky golden with his eyes one day.”

  I stared at him. The silence lingered around us. The voices in my head, for once, were quiet.

  I stood up and said, “Yeah, this has been great, but I’d really like it if you did what I asked you.”

  He blinked. “Do you not understand the gravity of your own existence? You—”

  “I get it!” I snapped. “Gods, I fucking get it! But my best friend is missing and I don’t give a damn about fate or the universe or whatever the fuck else your family has going for it, alright? I don’t care! I need your help, that’s what I need, not a history lesson. So are you gonna keep talking all night long, or will you help me out?”

  “Hm,” he said, and suddenly a flare of anger simmered in my veins. Old anger. Unresolved, raging anger. “No, you didn’t quite get what I was saying. You, Rylee, are going to be a problem. My father made me promise him to make his failures right. He perished a fool and an outcast from our family. Ostracized for going against what had so long been believed. He had trained for years, learnt things that would shatter the human mind beyond the basic modicum of understanding to the n-th degree. But he persisted. He studied. He was the one who was set to put right a world that has devolved into what it is, and then the Witch came, attacked us at our weakest. She took all. Left none.” He stood. The fire flickered. I glared at him. “You wish to know why I have remained here for a decade?”

  I remained silent. Didn’t even move.

  “I was studying the same books my father bled over to rid the world of your kind, but I suppose now my job is easier, since you’ve arrived at my doorstep.” I waited for him to move. I waited for him to try me. Instead, he tilted his head, his black eyes reflecting the snapping orange flames. “Or we compromise, and you lead me to her.”

  I tensed my jaw. “Lead you to who?”

  “Clementine,” he said sourly. “Witchling, as you’d know her. She holds power unimaginable, and she butchered my home, our clan, and left nothing. You are a hero, are you not? Avenge the fallen and give yourself to the needs of the universe. Your capture and isolation will result in the world healing. In the lives of the ones you love being longer, more fruitful. Less burdened by the suffering your survival will cause them. You heroes are so persistent with the safety of the world, so take this chance to save it. I can show you what that will look like the moment you give yourself to the balance of good. Relinquish your powers, and live eternally happy knowing that your choice here today resulted in the millions, possibly billions of lives you’ll affect. Your mother. Your friends. The one you love. Each and every single one of them will live on in your memory, happy, joyous—alive, Rylee.”

  I stared at him, my lips twitching into a disgusted smile. “That’s what this is about? My powers?”

  “I apologize for my crudeness,” he said. “But the wrong person bears your responsibility.”

  “Yeah?” I said, then got into his face. “Then who’s the right fucking person?”

  ‘Cause I don’t see anyone else doing what I’m doing.

  “I see your thoughts,” he said quietly. “I see your memories. I did not know his name. My father said it the moment he perished. Adam, is his name, isn’t it? The boy who looks like your father. The boy who will save the—”

  I hit him in the jaw.

  I found him somewhere outside his house in a crater of mud and dirt, gravel and wood.

  I hovered over him, my fists balled. Rain hissed off my skin, turning into tendrils of steam that snaked around my arms and legs and hair. My heart was a war drum in my ears. “Thought you’d be far more reasonable! I thought to sit with you, conversate with you, try to make you understand your importance before I use force! Child of Zeus. Heiress of Lightning. Harbinger of War!” He laughed and pulled down his tie, letting his collar snap in the violent winds surrounding us. “So this is the mighty Olympia,” he yelled over the rain. “Countless nights I’ve been plagued with dreams of a person with golden eyes. Of eyes that will light the sky on fire with golden flame!”

  “ENOUGH!” I barked. The rain briefly flew away from me. Gravel skittered. “Where is Biance Ross?”

  He got to his feet and looked up at me, hands out of his pockets. “She lives, only if you do not.”

  It doesn’t work like that.

  I see, then, he said in my mind. Then I’ll show you the consequences of your choice.

  He raised his hand to his left, smiling wolfishly at me. “Fracture.”

  And just like glass, the air around us shattered.