ONE
Aria
The air didn't split. It shattered.
One heartbeat, Athena was a lounging silhouette of arrogance on a fallen column. The next, she was a blur of starlight and lethal movement, erasing the distance between herself and Kaelen.
There was no sound of footfalls, no intake of breath. Just the sudden, sickeningcrackof her spear meeting Kaelen’s blade.
The impact sent a shockwave through the plaza that vibrated through me. Kaelen skidded backward, his boots carving deep furrows into the pristine marble floor. His sword, wreathed in black and gold fire, held the strike, but the sheer kinetic force of the goddess buckled his knees.
"Sluggish," Athena critiqued, her voice calm amidst the screech of divine metal grinding against divine metal. She twisted her wrist, a movement so subtle it was almost invisible.
Kaelen roared, a sound of blast furnaces and collapsing mines, as he was flung sideways. He crashed through a statue of Hermes, reducing the stone messenger to gravel.
"Kaelen!" The scream tore from my throat, raw and panicked.
The bond in my chest spiked with his pain, a sharp, hot jolt to the ribs, followed immediately by a surge of his fury. He wasn't broken; he was just getting started.
Athena didn't pursue him. She spun on her heel, her grey eyes locking onto Flynn, who was already mid-air, daggers drawn, aiming for the gap in her armor at the neck.
She didn't even look up. She simply raised her elbow.
Flynn slammed into an invisible barrier of force a fraction of an inch from her skin. The air rippled like a stone hitting a pond. The impact stopped his momentum dead, leaving him suspended for a heart-stopping second.
"Predictable," she murmured.
She backhanded him, and Flynn was launched across the plaza as if fired from a cannon, skipping off the white stone once, twice, before slamming into the base of a dry fountain.
"Spread out!" Elias shouted, his voice layered with the harmonic resonance of prophecy. "She sees the strike before the muscle twitches! Do not engage in linear patterns!"
The Phoenix Prince unleashed a wave of turquoise fire, not a direct attack, but a suppressing wall meant to blind her.
Athena walked through it. The fire parted around her armor of woven starlight like water around the prow of a ship. She looked bored.
"Elias," she sighed, flicking a finger. A bolt of white light, thin as a needle, shot from her fingertip. It pierced Elias’s shoulder, spinning him around. "Still trying to solve chaos with algebra."
She turned her gaze to me.
The weight of it was physical. It felt like the atmospheric pressure dropping before a hurricane. Those grey eyes dissected me, peeling back the layers of armor, skin, and magic to evaluate the mortal girl beneath.
"And you," she said, taking a step toward me. Her spear tip lowered, pointing at my heart. "The anomaly. The open door."
Thane stepped in front of me. He didn't rush. He moved with the tectonic inevitability of a mudslide, planting his massive feet and raising his war hammer. A wall of earth magic, brown and dense, rose from the marble floor to shield us.
"You will not touch her," Thane rumbled.
Athena paused. For the first time, a flicker of something like respect, or perhaps just amusement at the novelty, touched her lips.
"The Bear," she mused. "The only one of my brothers who understood that sometimes, the smartest move is not to play. Why start now, Thane? You know you can’t win. You are a beast in a suit of armor; I am a fundamental concept of the universe."
"Because she chose me," Thane said simply.
He swung the hammer. It wasn't a clumsy strike; it was an earth-shattering blow aimed at the ground beneath her feet.
The marble exploded. Shards of stone the size of tower shields erupted upward, aimed at Athena’s face.
She danced. There was no other word for it. She stepped onto a piece of flying debris, using it as a platform, leaping over the shockwave with graceful, terrifying ease. She landed lightly behind Thane.
