Page 30 of Crown of Olympus
“It was good!” he tried again.
Now wait just a Furies-damned second.
“Shh!” I hissed.
The beat I could hear was far too slow to be my own. I pressed my fingers to my wrist. Sure enough, it still danced to a staccato beat — inaudible.
So, what was making the noise, then?
Another faint thump echoed through the forest, then another, five seconds later.
Th-thump.
Th-thump.
I tried to pinpoint the source, but the beat bounced off every pale surface.
Aph opened her mouth to speak?—
Th-thump.
Th-thump.
“Shh!” I said again, frowning as my eyes darted around the forest.
Aros stalked forwards, his own scanning the woods. I shot him a look that I hoped conveyed:“You can hear it too?”
He nodded once.
Weapons drawn, and bodies tense, we crept along the path, primed to attack at a moment’s notice.
But nothing stirred within the Bone Field.
It was a place of near-silent death.
Nothing could live here.
Nothing — except the origin of that weary heartbeat.
The bone trees thinned as we walked, revealing a gloomy clearing. It was far from empty, however.
Standing squarely in the middle was a towering, black tree. Its trunk and limbs were crafted entirely from twisted bones, in an enormous, morbid imitation of an oak.
The Tree of Threnos.
Golden sap trickled down from its branches, flowing through the grooves between bones like tiny rivers of shining blood. It bore gilded fruit in the horrifying shape of anatomical hearts, each one the size of a honeydew, beating in time with the tree’s pulse.
And perched on one of the tree’s higher boughs was Demeter’s own son, Thallo. Somehow, it felt right that he should be the first of us to locate her tree.
We paused at clearing’s edge and watched as Thallo stretched his long, tanned fingers towards a heart fruit. With a sharp tug, he plucked it from the narrowing tip of a bone branch, letting out a hoot of triumph despite wobbling precariously immediately after. He scooted backwards gingerly along the branch, oblivious to our presence, and rested his back against the trunk, long legs dangling on either side of the limb.
Cautiously, he raised the fruit to his lips and took a tiny bite.
At first, nothing happened. Then his face reflected disgust, as though the taste physically pained him.
And then he screamed, lost his balance, and fell plummeting to the ash-coated field.
Aros and Aphrodite rushed towards him. He was sprawled out, body thrashing, still screaming, though seemingly uninjured. I held back, wary of the god and the tree from whence he fell. A flash of movement across the clearing caught my attention. A glint of steel emerged as a largely-built god sprinted towards the commotion.
