ᴾʰᵒᵇᵒᵖʰᵒᵇⁱᵃ [ᴶᵃˢᵒⁿ ᴳʳᵃᶜᵉ]

α.

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CHORUS:  Why, why is this terror hovering constantly in front of my heart, to rule its divinations?

- Agamemnon, Aeschylus 

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AZA CAME TO UNDERSTAND, in her scarily-close-to seventeen years, those haunted by demons rarely received a reprise. The hospital loved to tell her otherwise; her doctors loved to tell her otherwise. As a child, she hoped for a golden day: one day, where the sun would rise and she would finally feel at peace. Her therapist would say 'good-bye,' and a perfect prescription of pills would pacify her. One day, after all too long, her years and years of torture and endurance and acceptance would almost be worth it. Aza would be unchained from her past. She would be unburdened, freed from the saddle.

Her mother, in one of the longest sentences she'd ever spoken to her daughter, told Aza the opposite. The words would haunt her forever – Natalia's talent for tormenting her daughter was unrivaled – twelve-years later they still rang in her ears, unmuffled by the predawn silence, as if the bleach-blonde sat beside her. Her mother's voice was crisp, if not slightly gravelly like her daughter's. "Our curses are a reflection of how we burdened others. I used to think I would be free, one day, until I had you; and I realized that life will force your atonement. The same will happen to you."

Sometimes, like when Aza rolled over in her bed and pulled her blanket to cover her head, she still heard her mother's voice. Natalia haunted her, taunting her like the stars beyond her window, teasing her like the way they'd twinkle in and out of existence, forcing her to squint to see them. Her mother's voice tormented her like the Huntress constellation – the girl she once knew. Yet another person Aza failed to save, fixed forever in the midnight sky to plague her.

Aza wanted to be free, but the price of freedom was forgiveness, it would be all too expensive. If the price of freedom were forgetting – acceptance, even – she could never pay. Natalia, whose skills and hopes and dreams and fears her daughter could never understand, still wormed her way into Aza's mind, with little room for anything more to taunt her.

There was so little time left. So little time for Aza to save the world, to save her camp, to save her friends and family. To save her father, who at once occupied so much of Aza's mind, who showed her what she could only interpret as what little affection he was capable of. Now he was gone, without so much as a whisper for help.

Her father haunted her dreams, and not for the first time. When she was younger, far before she had been claimed, his faceless figure would approach her in nightmares, and all the insecurities she buried so far beneath the surface would rise, suffocating her, taunting her, torturing her. As if it were a test – as if he needed to know she was strong enough to survive everything not only her mother put her through, but the world would add.

There were so many... responsibilities. Responsibilities she could never have imagined, before her father shrouded her in russet light and claimed her as his own. He was the master of fear and the lord of terror, and Aza was merely a shadow, with barely a fraction of his power as a gift; and yet, she was bestowed the same burden. To be the sovereign of fear, she was forced to learn to control it, unlike her father. The divine never suffered. Their offspring carried their weight, the sky on their shoulders.

And though she hadn't always been a fighter, Aza forced herself to become one. Too often, she could remember a time where she meekly sat on the couch in her living room, afraid to breathe too loudly. Afraid to attract her mother's attention lest she leave the room, too disgusted by her daughter, before Westley rescued Buttercup. Sometimes she wondered if she had a grandfather, one who might read her stories in bed when she felt ill. Maybe one day, she would be the one to say, "This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it."

Her father made her a fighter, in more ways than one. She didn't appreciate her father until he was missing. No, she decided, that was wrong – she didn't appreciate her father. But she didn't miss him, either, nor did she long for his appearance. She wasn't wistful, nor yearning for any sign of him. Rhionne's words struck her deeply: she didn't notice her father's absence until he was gone. Part of Aza's soul had suddenly been chipped away.

And once more, her father haunted her even in her sleep. It wasn't like before, when he sat on her couch and kept a healthy distance, observing her out of the corner of his eyes, with sunglasses low on his hooked nose. He didn't offer her any advice, or even threaten to crush her like a bug under his foot. He was no longer in power; her father was barely a god.

He was in chains. His red bandana, typically freeing his forehead from floppy dark hair, muffled his mouth. His eyes were dim, drowned by the torches that lined the stone room – the marble beneath him was cracked and dirtied. Millennia obscured the design, layered with grime and dust and the dried remnants of a golden liquid.

She watched, silently, as the pathetic remains of her father, held together only by thick chains, stared at the yellowed marble. She was bound by the same chains. It couldn't be real – it couldn't be her father, with such a similarly angled nose. He looked so powerless and weak: a cornered, broken animal. Elpis escaped him, though it hadn't evaded the lid of Pandora's jar.

What will you do without your father, little hero? Gaea's voice no longer held the same droll, sluggish tone. The Mother Goddess slowly gained consciousness, and with it she crushed the spirits of the demigods in her cruel earthen hands. You are powerless without him – powerless without strife. One-by-one, I will take everything and everyone away from you until you are nothing but a little girl with a toy sword. Your time has come, Aza-Everett. Your egotism will be your downfall.

There had been no whisper of her uncle in over weeks – no sign nor dream nor slight glimpse in her peripheral vision. She had come to understand that she was powerful merely because of the blood in her veins: the three gods of war held presence in her being. They made Aza who she was, and without her father, a part of Aza's essence was missing, like a gaping hole in her heart. She never wanted to see her uncle – or even Ares – imprisoned in the same way. Even if it was for selfish reasons. Without them, Gaea was right. She would be nothing but a little girl with a sword.

In the third nightmare, her father lifted his head. She didn't think he saw her – his eyes seemed to bore through her – but he whispered, almost too quietly for her to hear, and in the most pathetic, decrepit tone she heard, "Help me."

Those were certainly words she thought she would never hear from her father. He was larger than life, one of the divine, a lord and master of the strongest emotion. And yet, she saw him at his most pitiful, muted and feeble, a far outcry from the man who forced her to harness fear and rise above those who could not master it.

Even when Jason snuck into her bedroom, at a time that would've exploded Gleeson's head, searching for comfort and reprise from similar nightmares, Aza kept silent about hers. Though her father was imprisoned and her family far away, fear was still her burden to carry – others weren't made to carry hers. Her friends were all haunted, and her room became a solace for her seven companions; throughout it all, Aza was silent.

They were all targeted by the Earth goddess, tormented by vicious dreams and visions of failure. She wondered, sometimes, if her friends could tell that her burden slowly grew heavier, and the intrusive thoughts she kept deep in her mind, buried in a pit deeper and darker than Tartarus. They clawed their way towards freedom, and Aza's resolve weathered slowly.

Nico warned them: the House of Hades would haunt them, bringing their darkest fears and deepest-buried secrets to the surface. Fear. Terror. Anger. Misery. Aza's grip grew looser and looser, until she could no longer listen. She would sit on her bed, stoic and emotionless, letting her companions' words and worries wash over her – she refused to let them penetrate her, to add to her burden.

Aza was growing weak, and she despised it. She felt her grip on sanity – on power – loosening, and the tighter she held on the quicker it slipped through her fingers. For the first time in months, she was no longer the strongest figure in the room. She only wondered how long it would take her friends to realize.