❛WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU MAKE THE TEN MOST POWERFUL GODS ALIVE PLAY A GAME OF MUSICAL CHAIRS WITH ONE SEAT?❜
They fight - to the death.
They fight over three crowns and a throne with steel spiked maces. They despair a little more everyday keeping thei...
"Come, my children," she said, beckoning us to the circular table in the middle of the room, around which chairs were arranged in concentric circles. "It is time."
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CALCHESTER CITADEL, STEFFITH.
EDWINA
THERE WAS ONE ROUND TABLE in the middle around which sat Cosmo, Titania and their younger siblings, Emerick and Justaline. Emerick Rotavelle was the god of law and order, Justaline, the goddess of justice. Corrupt, selfish and rotten to the core, those Rotavelles were. With the exception of a few.
The House always envied others, instead of seeing their own, always green with jealousy. It sounded like some huge cosmic irony, seeing that all the Rotavelles possessed eyes of the same color in different hues.
Green.
Around the small table, another circle of chairs ran around the periphery - for our grandparents, the second generation of gods. The circle around that seated our parents, the third generation.
And the circle around that, the outermost one, was reserved for the fourth generation of the fifteen of us, the cousins who had participated in the Trial.
All six Houses of immortals had gathered in the huge hall, the enormous crowd watching from the balconies.
Yet five of the chairs were empty - for five missing immortals.
For my dead mother, Asteria Tremayne, goddess of the rain till she died and the power passed on to my newborn sister, Amphitrite.
For three missing immortals - Eric's mother and Cosmo's two youngest children, who went to a dangerous, enchanted Island and never came back.
And for Tristan Valmont's dead twin sister, Elodie Valmont, the goddess of rivers.
Around a century and half ago, when the Houses had started being formed, the gods had a huge fight over who would build their castle on the Derwentwater, the holy river of the immortals. When Cosmo had killed his father, Uranus, the King of the Skies, and thrown his heart into the stream flowing nearby, it turned pale and clear all of a sudden. The river now held mystic powers - anything dipped into it, turned to gold.
Pure, soft, absolute gold.
Its waters had so many other uses that it was impossible to decide who would get the sacred river. Tristan's bloodthirsty father, Apollo Valmont, the god of the Sun, had a huge fight with my father, Lucius. Being the bravest sons of the land, they still fought hard among themselves. All other Houses slowly backed out when blood began to flow.
Copious amounts of it.
The Tremaynes and Valmonts were the noblest and bravest of all Houses, and both considered themselves worthier than the other of getting the river.
