Page 28 of Crown of Olympus
Unsurprisingly,I was the last to arrive.
But at least my mind was finally at peace.
Hermes expelled a deep sigh, his toes tapping impatiently against the pristine marble.
“What a pity. I had hoped we’d be a champion down,” he sneered.
I lifted my chin, refusing to rise to his jab, already noting one absence.
“It appears we already are,” I said, lifting a brow and waiting for the explanation which I assume had already been handed out among the Olympians.
Hermes pursed his lips, unwilling to answer. Instead, the clarification came from my left.
“Hera has been eliminated. She failed to navigate Apollo’s desert,” Caelus’ deep, thunderous voice spoke with no inflection, betraying nothing about his feelings on the matter.
As my gaze clashed with his, a blush rose to my cheeks — my thoughts dragged backwards to just minutes ago, alone in my bed.
No sooner had I thought it than his nostrils flared. His silvery eyes widened a fraction as he inhaled deeply, scenting my tangled arousal and guilt.
Fuck.
I broke the connection, forcing my attention instead on Hermes, and Demeter, who now stood at the centre of the room beside him.
“Today’s trial will be one of wit and fortitude in equal measure,” Demeter began. “You will find yourselves in an orchard of my — admittedly unintentional — creation: the Bone Field.”
That sounds foreboding.
As if she’d heard the thought, the goddess of agriculture’s gaze flicked to mine. Her golden brows pinched ever so slightly in the middle, forming a crease on her otherwise flawless face. Iwondered how many of her features were echoed in my mother’s, and how many now echoed in mine.
“When my daughter’s thread was severed,” Demeter said, glancing at Caelus, “the grief I felt was so severe it almost killed me, and those under my care. Mortal crops were failing, their livestock dying, and entire lands froze in a perpetual winter.” She drew a deep breath. “But still, they prayed. Their pleas were anguished and desperate. They begged me to restore their seasons before all perished.”
She turned to the open balcony, staring out at the rose-coloured skies, lost in a thirty-year-old memory.
“It was when their children began dying that I realised my pain could last no longer. I was causing those mothers to feel the exact grief that was destroying me. And yet… how was I to simply stop feeling such intense sorrow? The byproduct of having loved someone so much. How? Persephone was lodged so fiercely in my aching heart that I nudged the hands of death itself after losing her.”
She turned back to face her silent audience. Her gaze paused on me once more, acknowledging the empty space we both felt. The hollowness that the goddess of spring had left behind.
“My daughter was embedded so deeply into my heart that I could not remove her, or the pain of losing her, without removing the organ itself. So that is exactly what I did.”
Gasps rang out around the atrium — this was not common knowledge. Demeter’s grief was a tale that had remained untold, until this very moment.
“I walked all the way across Olympus barefoot,” she continued, “my feet torn open, leaving gold-soaked prints wherever I stepped. I walked until the fields met the sea, and while gazing at the calm blue waters, I carved my heart right out of my chest.
In the centre of a barren field, I dug a deep hole with my bare hands and buried the still-beating organ.”
Horror flooded my system. I had never heard of a god enduring such agony, much less inflicting it upon themselves.
“Another heart grew back, of course — one without Persephone’s name etched into it. And where I buried the first, a tree sprang up overnight, growing taller by the hour. As though my heart had been a seed, waiting to be planted. Your task today: locate the Tree of Threnos, deep in the heart of the Bone Field. pluck a fruit from its limbs and eat it.”
“Is that all? Seems easy enough,” a champion scoffed from the corner — Leander, I thought.
Demeter snapped her head towards the offender, her hazel eyes narrowing. “May the Fates bless you so that you can never understand the pain I endured.”
And with those parting words, the goddess strode over to the portal archway, placed her hand upon its marble column, and summoned the location of her trial.
Unlike the first challenge,today every champion had been deposited in the same location: the outskirts of a dark and haunting forest. Fog clung to the barren trees like a lover’s caress, their pale, smooth trunks dotted with grey lichen. Their branches, brittle and bare, home to neither animal nor fruit.
It was only when I paused to examine the skeletal trees — stepping closer and brushing my fingertips against their strange bark — that I realised just how accurate my initial assessment had been. There was no bark. Only an unyielding, smooth surface.
