The woman laughed, a sound like dry leaves skittering on pavement. "No, child. I am not the Queen. I am the one who holds the keys to the doors you are so fond of kicking down."
She lowered one torch; the light illuminating the lower half of her face. Her lips were pale, curved in a knowing smile.
"I am Hecate."
My knees nearly gave out. The Goddess of Magic. The Titaness of Crossroads. The Keeper of the Keys. Master Theron had barely spoken of her and when he did, it was in hushed tones, claiming she was the only deity to be truly feared because she owed allegiance to no one.
"Why are you here?" I asked, forcing my spine to straighten. "If you're here to punish me for breaking the Gate..."
"The Gate was a boring piece of architecture," Hecate dismissed with a wave of her torch. Sparks drifted into the fog and vanished. "You made it interesting. I appreciate interesting things."
She walked around the frozen Skal, trailing a hand over its carapace. The monster didn't react.
"I am here because you are running blindly toward a cliff," Hecate said. "And while I enjoy a good tragedy, I prefer it when the heroine knows why she is falling."
"We're going to Olympus," I said, defensive heat rising in my chest. "To stop them from killing us, to stop the Devourer."
"You are going to Olympus to interrogate a drowning woman about why she is getting the carpet wet," Hecate corrected.
She stopped in front of me. Even through the veil, her eyes felt like searchlights.
"You saw her," Hecate said softly. "In the tunnel. You saw the Queen wearing the Healer’s skin."
"Hera," I confirmed, shivering at the memory of that cold, possessive gaze. "She's evil. She's breeding monsters. She's been manipulating my bloodline for centuries. She abused me and stole from me."
"Evil is a mortal word," Hecate mused. "It lacks nuance. Hera is not evil, Aria. She is panicked."
Hecate raised her torches, and the fog around us swirled, coalescing into images. It was like looking into the Gate, but clearer. Sharper.
"Look," Hecate commanded.
I looked.
I saw a city of gold and white marble floating in a sky of lavender. Olympus. It was more beautiful than any description, a testament to divine perfection.
But then I saw the edges.
The perimeter of the realm wasn't a shoreline or a cloud bank. It was a crumbling precipice. Great chunks of white marble, entire temples, were sliding off the edge of the world, tumbling silently into a swirling, hungry darkness below.
"It is not a metaphor," Hecate’s voice was somber. "The 'sinking lifeboat' your historian wrote of... it is literal. The foundation of the High Seat is rotting as the magic that sustains the realm is being siphoned away."
I watched as a beautiful garden withered in seconds; the trees turning to ash; the ground cracking open to reveal the void beneath. Figures of light, gods, lesser spirits, and other things I couldn't name, they all scrambled away from the fissures, terror etched on their immortal faces.
"The Devourer," I whispered.
"It is not a beast you can fight with a sword," Hecate stood beside me, watching the vision of destruction. "It is a storm. An entropy field. It eats magic and potential. It has been gnawing at the roots of Olympus for an aeon."
The vision shifted. I saw a throne room. A woman sat on a throne, Hera, in her true form, looking both radiant and devastatingly tired. Below her, the floor was cracking. She was pouring her own power into the fissures, trying to hold the stone together with will alone.
"She isn't power-hungry," Hecate said. "She is the mother of a dying house. All she is doing is trying to save her family."
"By sacrificing us," I said, my sympathy hardening back into anger. "By creating the princes as bait to lure the storm here. To feed it this world instead of hers."
"Survival is the ugliest instinct," Hecate agreed. "But it is the strongest. Hera believes that if she can lure the Devourer to the mortal realm, it will gorge itself on the raw, chaotic magic of the Princes and become sluggish. Sated. It will stop eating Olympus."
"So she destroys one world to save another."
"Yes."
