Must the Flowers Die

Chapter 6: Dangerous Allies

Liam walked through the forests of Yosemite, miles from any trail. The forest breathed around him, noisy and alive. There was a rhythm to it that normally calmed him, but not today. He was happy when he finally escaped the last of the humans, but now there was nothing to distract him from the girl Mia. His feelings for her had changed since their trip to Table Rock. Before, he merely desired her. Now he could not escape her. He was behaving like an infatuated virgin, instead of a man who had lived numerous lifetimes.

He also could not escape the pang of guilt. As much as he liked to believe that Atlanta would not begrudge him a new romance, she was also extremely jealous. He had been with Atlanta his whole life until she passed away three hundred years ago. Artemis had given her a charm that slowed her aging – a valuable and rare aiónios stone, but Atlanta was mortal and could not escape the grasp of death forever, like Liam could.

It was abnormal, their mutual devotion to each other and codependence. He recognized that. Since her passing, life became a dull throbbing pain, not terrible enough to be dramatic but terrible enough to deny pleasure. He had spent the time withdrawing into himself, like those in chronic pain seek sleep to escape.

In the past few decades he had suspected that the end was near. There had been a few others like himself – demigods blessed with the curse of immortality. True immortality, not the slowed aging that Atlanta experienced. They had all grown as usual, until one day they stopped aging – at ten, at twenty-five, at sixty. After the sorceress Aina expelled all the gods and goddesses and after their mortal families and friends had died, they had spent centuries together. None of them had children, even though other demigods who were mortal did. Liam figured it was nature's way of keeping balance somehow.

These immortals were Liam's family for a long time. Because of Atlanta, Liam's life had been relatively blessed, even as she became a sick old woman before his eyes. The other immortals were not so lucky. They deteriorated mentally, some fast, some slow, but the process was inevitable. Knowing one's time on Earth is infinite made life cheap. Even the happiest, Alexander, who as a young man never stopped laughing and joking, succumbed to depression in the end. They were all gone now, by their own hands. Before they took that final step to end their immortal life, they had all slowly melted away from the company of others. Liam still remembered when Euclid, the first amongst the immortals to go, left the group to wander the African savannah. They had assumed he would come back, but he never did. When they finally used Cronus's gift of Sight to track Euclid's fortune after twenty years had passed, they had discovered that he had severed his own head.

After Atlanta's death, Liam began the same road down the inevitable. Perhaps Atlanta's limited time, even though she had lived for thousands of years, lent him a feeling of life's urgency and preciousness, a need to treasure every moment. After she finally passed, flavors, sights, smells, everything became dull. Even Apollo's urgent message from Olympus did not fully awaken him, though it imbued him with a new sense of duty. Part of him wondered whether his mission was in fact pointless. The gods had lived for millennia. They were outlasting their own planet, for gods' sake. So what if they all perished? Yes, Artemis would be amongst those who would be destroyed, but he found it hard to believe his mother would be devastated by her own death. The gods did not have the same sense of melancholy the demigods did. They appeared to have an unceasing desire to live, but Artemis had always understood moderation and balance as well. This thought was almost immediately followed by a sense of guilt. Olympus was home not merely to the gods and goddesses but tens of thousands of other inhabitants who would perish as well if he did not succeed. True, he had never met these individuals, but they were still people. And his mother – well, he really had no idea what she felt. It had been thousands of years since they last spoke to each other. Despite the guilt the nagging feeling of futility lingered.