Her tongue was stilled at the sight of the woman carefully piling stones upon one another, the largest at the base, the smallest at the top. There were several more of these mounds dotted about the hillcrest.
‘What are you doing?’
Metis straightened up, the wind dragging strands of hair across her face. ‘In my village we used to lay our dead upon the earth and bury them beneath stones. These,’ she gestured to the mounds, ‘help me remember.’
Danae pointed to the new mound. ‘Is that for Prometheus?’
Metis blinked. In that moment she looked so small. A relic of an age gone by, standing still while time ravaged the earth around her.
‘Did Gaia choose him too?’
Metis nodded.
‘How long ago did you become a Titan?’
The woman gazed out across the island. You could see everything from their vantage point, the entire rusted patchwork of Delos and scattered spits of land floating in the cerulean sea beyond.
‘I no longer mark the years, but it will have been at least a thousand.’
Danae sank down onto a boulder, the wind of her anger draining from her sails. Looking at Metis felt like gazing into a warped mirror of what was to come.
‘What happened to you? Why aren’t you still guarding the Hesperides tree?’ When her question was met with yet more silence she whispered, ‘What if the Twelve find me before I’ve mastered my powers?’
Metis lowered herself down onto a nearby rock.
‘You must tell me what you know. Teach me how to fight.’
The woman ran a hand over her face. ‘I am.’
‘Levitating a stick is not going to help me defeat Zeus. I need to be able to match the Twelve’s strength –’
‘You can’t.’
Metis shifted her weight to face Danae, one leg tucked beneath her. ‘The Olympians have spent centuries hoarding life-threads and building weapons to amplify their power. That armour they wear isn’t decorative, it allows them to harbour more of the tapestry of life than a single body could possibly hold. You will never beat them at their own game.The only way you will win is by twinning your will with that of the Mother.’
Danae’s stomach hollowed. She swallowed the fear thickening her throat, not daring to voice the question burning in her mind.
What if I can’t do it?
As though reading her thoughts Metis said, ‘Communing with the Mother is not like listening to the voice of your power. She doesn’t speak in words. It is more like …’ the woman held a fist against her gut, ‘a feeling from deep in your core. A knowing of what is right, even if it is not the path you wish to take.’
Danae didn’t have the heart to say that she had often prayed in the small hours to whatever divine presence had given her powers, but there was never a primordial goddess waiting to guide her, only the ghosts she carried.
She looked across the ocean, past the turquoise shallows to the wine-dark sea beyond. In the distance, the haze had burned off the water, and for the first time, she could see clearly the faraway island to the south of Delos. It was crowned with a wreath of clouds, and its hills looked strangely familiar.
‘What is that land on the horizon?’
‘Naxos.’
Home.
The word thudded through her, a longing greater than her thirst for life-threads tugging at her chest. During her life on Naxos, she’d never paid much heed to the islands surrounding her own. She had imagined them to be replicas of her home and therefore of little interest. Her thoughts had always flown further, to the mainland. She had no idea, when Prometheus instructed her to find Delos, that he would be sending her within reach of Naxos – like Lemnos, Metis’island was not marked on any map. They were so close; her ma and pa, Santos, his little boys, the familiar dusty path to her hut, the sharp tang of cheese cooking on the hearth muddled with the scent of her father’s fishing nets, her mother’s honey cakes, her secret cove. She could go to them now, envelop herself in everything she longed to return to.
She stood, her eyes stinging with salt as she scoured the land below for Pegasus. But even before the wind had stolen her tears, she knew she could not leave. Like the Titans before her, her life was no longer her own.
27. A Cold Hearth
The following dawn, Heracles woke.
