𝐅𝐋𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐒, ᴘᴇʀᴄʏ ᴊᴀᴄᴋꜱᴏɴ

012 ── what they made of us.

       Heroism was heralded in imagery of crumbling skeletons and aeons of rot; a rationality of the divine inertia. Blood cresting collarbones with the slitting of throats; bodies splintered, bound by their shrouds on the pyre. Their cathedra was a mausoleum of mortality -- A cardinal flood, coppered and coarse, veiled their stones and their waters, their hands, wrought in the sordid act of self slaughter.

       History was the regalia of the epithet. Aureate. A laurel in ink and sullen devotion. A woman, purified in white, guarding the scales of culmination. Hector as the rotted corpse; Achilles the righteous avenger, hoarding him thrice about Troy's devastated wars.

Heroism was not made for those like her.

It demanded, like a petulant child, sacrifices and nurture. Patience, virtues that gilded skin could inhabit like law, like divine speech. A hero had morality gleamed into the skin of their teeth, a nebula of opportunity. Hers were dripping red; purged of such a thing.

It was a knife in her spine, the title of hero. A condemnation of self. We fight for Rome, Jason had told her once, a whisper under a sky gleaming. And we fight for our legacy.

He was wrong.

Theia Harlow fought for her life; she trained and honed and built herself as a pantheon of preservation. She remembered she had scowled then, under the darkness, crushed as Atlas was with the sensation of her friend's wistfulness, his blind loyalty. Her blood would not be split for an empire long dead. Her blood would not be spilt in the stead of ichor.

She would sacrifice nothing to keep the earth whole, in the end.

She would not be buried a hero. Would not be revered in the stars nor remembered for her deeds, sodden in virtue. Martyrdom had tried to carve itself in the husk of her torso, cleave its way into her heart. It had seared and wailed at her resolution's hand. She would be a faceless soldier, a number across the masses of fallen. Hector in the shadow of the aristos achaion.

But he — Percy — he would be. She could not say why that lit such a blaze on her tongue. Percy who was named for a hero, and a boy who would be revered as one. The blood of Neptune in his veins and morality purging it of it's unwelcome reputation. Peace across the ages, goodness. A hero that would be followed to his grave.

As the boat sped down the Columbia River, Theia pondered his sacrificial nature from the opposite side of the Pax. A lamb with his bloodied entrails strewed across an altar. An idiot, for lacking in any form of instinctual survival. No, he counted his bones last and survived by noxious coincidence. A hero, she mocked. The archetype.

How easy it is for the gods to crown a fool when his blood is spilt for their cause.

Her anger persisted at her, pecking and shredding itself on her skin, in her sternum as her thoughts brewed a tempest of his words. Her hands shook. How dangerous you are. Strength that, on a battlefield, would be heralded in pillars of marble. Strewn from war, a soldier has no further use, she supposed. She was as disposable as the next.

The earth mothers promise recollected, like life to a dying flame. You who renounces the gods, same as I. Her lungs shuddered in want.

Hazel helped Ella make a nest out of old books and magazines they'd liberated from the library's recycling bin. They hadn't really planned on taking the harpy with them, at first, but Ella acted like the matter was decided.

"Friends," she muttered. "'Ten seasons. 1994 to 2004.' Friends melt Phineas and give Ella jerky. Ella will go with her friends."

She roosted comfortably in the stern, nibbling bits of jerky and reciting lines from Charles Dickens.