Hours passed in silence.The thoughts in my head were the equivalent of a malfunctioning pinball machine. One moment, things had been going well with Eryx, and a connection lit up between us. The next moment? I plummeted back into this damn cage again.
Getting two hearts to speak to each other was my specialty. Yet right now, the failure of getting Eryx to feel anything resembling warmth consistently pressed down on me. Was I losing my touch? I’d seen gods go impotent, but I had never considered that it could happen to me—metaphorically speaking.
The urge to find a way to reach out to Pia was overwhelming, but being stuck in this damning enclosure gave me few options. I was left at the mercy of Eryx’s mood swings and the absurdly unhelpful nest of blankets and pillows.
All my interactions with Eryx replayed on a loopinside my mind, from the moment he opened his front door until he unleashed his fury on the mirror that still lay in a thousand tiny shards.
I hadn’t pegged him for the type to have mommy issues, though you’d be surprised how many gods did. Nyx wasn’t known for her maternal softness, which was either damning in and of itself or entirely irrelevant. Though the presence of the water fountain out front in her honor weighed heavily on my mind.
Managing to drill down my best guesses to Eryx being a mama’s boy, a god too scared of his very nature, or the most heartless bastard I’d ever encountered, none were reassuring. The thought occurred to me that he could be all three, and that was downright frightening.
Somewhere in my confused state, I kept circling back to how Pia seemed so certain there was a piece of him worthy of desire, experiencing it for himself, and being another heart’s fondest calling.
I could fix this, couldn’t I? I could fixhim.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I was gratefully back in my simple dark wash jeans I had arrived in and my favorite white zip-up hoodie. The smallest of favors he had granted me before he left. Across the front of my sweatshirt, in baby blue lettering proudly displayed, read “Solis Lake,” and on the back was the academy’s golden crest.
My fingernail tapped against my front teeth in an uneven rhythm while staring off at nothing in particular, allowing my thoughts to wanderaimlessly.
The rest of the house was mostly silent except for the occasional sound of doors opening and closing, mouselike footsteps in the hall from scurrying staff members, and every so often, the ominous groan of pipes.
Time became meaningless being isolated like this. It could have been minutes or hours.
Sprawled out amongst the plethora of pillows, I stared at the top of the cage where all the bars arched into a central point above me. Where they merged was a large gold plate, the engraving reading:
To Eryxander the Great,
May even chaos slip through these bars.
- P.
I rolled my eyes. Whoever “P” was deserved a lifetime stay in this cage as far as I was concerned. Had this been some sort of ridiculous housewarming gift for Eryx or just a kinky friend?
The world may never know.
Closing my eyes, I never quite fell asleep. Fitful rest came, but my thoughts refused to be silenced.
“Got a heart, don’t you?”
Such a stupid question, but not as idiotic as my response had been.
A heart born of love and war was a complicated contraption. My mother enabled attraction’s intoxicating hold, and I made two hearts slaves to it. My father reveledin battle-born bloodshed and fury, and from him, I learned to keep desire’s heat burning in one’s veins.
So why couldn’t I crack open the heart of this one man when mine was just as hardened?
The question remained unanswered and forgotten when the door opened, its handle rattled just enough to coax my eyes open.
Inside stepped my last success story, the man with a sweet tooth for both confectionery fruit and a man named Dale.
I sat upright, seeing my favoritest butler ever, if only because he was the only butler I had Double-Tapped.
The visit was all too short. Eryx had the decency to send him here with meager rations that would barely satisfy a raccoon. And because even the god of discord didn’t care for things to be messy, Jamie granted me passage to the ensuite facilities.
Brief freedom came paired with a dark warning.
“Before Mr. Nightvale left to take care of a business matter, he wished me to pass along a message, should you consider fleeing. He told me to tell you that your ‘immortality would become a suffering even Prometheus could not endure.’”
Jamie’s flat and professional delivery of the threat did nothing to prevent my face from paling slightly. The mention of the great Titan—whose lore spoke to how he endured death via a bird’s pecker to his liver, only to be revived the next day, and the cycle repeated—left something to be desired on a personal level.
