Page 39 of Harbinger

Cassius blinked. “Oh.”

He hadn’t thought he could be more dumbfounded by the startling facts they had just heard, but Atropos had just proven him wrong once again.

“I wish we could have seen Elios’s face when he realized his plan had failed,” Kes grouched.

“One thing still doesn’t make sense,” Morgan muttered, bewildered. “If the Abyss tore even a fraction, Chaos could have escaped. Why didn’t he?”

“Morgan is right,” Victor said in a hard voice.

“I…do not know.” Atropos lowered her brows. “We were trapped in the Seventh Purgatory and blinded by Hypnos’s spell, so I cannot surmise what exactly took place in that moment.”

“Besides, we were totally focused on making our escape at the time,” Tisiphone muttered.

“Despite my powers being suppressed, I foresaw that the Nether would tear and that the Fall would happen,” Atropos said, clocking their puzzled looks. “I charged Tenebra with destroying the rotten seed Elios had implanted within her so she could free us from his corrupt shackles and I asked Clotho to spin another Fate for us just for that day. One that would guarantee our getaway from the Seventh Purgatory.”

“What happened?” Cassius asked, his heart pounding. “How did Tenebra and the others end up getting left behind?”

Pain distorted Atropos’s features. “It was my fault.”

“No, it wasn’t, Attie,” Kes denied bitterly. “None of it was.”

“Our sisters sacrificed themselves so we could escape.”Orena’s face tightened.“We decided it was better that some of us made it out of that hellhole, than all of us be held captive there forever more.”

“But we didn’t know Elios would do that to them.” Tisiphone’s voice trembled. “We didn’t know he would go to such lengths to punish us for running away. That he would—he would turn our sisters against us!”

The four Goddesses huddled close, as if to comfort one another.

“Where have you been all this time?” Victor asked after a short silence.

Atropos shared a worn-out glance with her sisters. “Hiding in the realms we could find and gathering our strength. We had planned to look for allies who could help us free our sisters and mount a counterstrike against Elios, but we soon discovered that the tear in the Nether made it nigh impossible to uncover their whereabouts.”

“What about the Nymphs of the West?” Loki frowned. “By the sounds of it, Elios only captured the Moirai, the Black Fates, and the Furies. But there’s still the Hesperides.”

Surprise jolted Cassius.I’d forgotten about the Hesperides!

The awareness dawning on Victor and Morgan’s faces told him they were experiencing the same recollection. His breath caught at the agony filling Atropos’s golden eyes. The Goddess had turned gray.

“I ordered the Nymphs of the West to go into hiding,” the Moira whispered. “This was before Elios ambushed us.”

“Attie.” Kes squeezed Atropos’s shoulder. “You could not have known what would happen.”

Dread tightened Cassius’s chest at the other Goddesses’ grim faces.

“We tried to find our sisters after we escaped, but our efforts were in vain,” Orena murmured. “We finally discovered their last known whereabouts some two hundred years ago. Alas, their current location remains a mystery even our divine eyes cannot pierce.”

Tisiphone’s fisted her hands. “They were in Argent Lake when the Nether tore.”

Cassius startled. “The kingdom of the Naiads?”

Tisiphone nodded, her eyes glittering. A bolt of intuition shot through him at her abject expression. His stomach knotted.

Atropos’s next words confirmed his sick feeling.

“Erytheis, the eldest Hesperis, sacrificed her life to save Argent Lake.”

Loki froze, his crimson eyes rounding. “Erytheis is dead?!”

Atropos bobbed her head, her chin quivering. Loki’s tail drooped. Cassius gathered the imp had known the Goddess well.

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