I wish I could rub the grief from you as if it were a smudge on the cheek. ━sandra cisneros, EYES OF ZAPATA
JERICHO NARINE is a corpse waiting to happen. They know it from dreams, hearing a woman speak the future through honeyed tones as if she is not promising a child of their demise, and keeps it secret because gods do not exist and if they did━they would not waste their time with adolescents who are hungry for what lurks in their chest. Jericho is twelve when they first hear a hurricane and mistake it as her vengeance, three scars disturb their cheek. Wounds hold a bitter taste that comes whenever a hand brushes over them with the hope that their jagged claws can heal what is fate. Their lesions are fate, their death is final: and, in some cruel manner, it is the only thing to remind them that they are alive.
Both are pointless battles, so Jericho embraces what they are (so tightly it can be construed as hate and maybe this is one fight she cannot afford to lose) and hope the sun isn't sweltering enough to force them to reveal what remains from growing pains. What good is a descendant of Aphrodite if you unspool them to their core and find them tainted, blemished from the inside out, and waiting for the mercy of Elysian? What good is love to the dead? Everything and nothing, Jericho supposes, and if wars were waged over beauty and wit━they think that it would be a waste of time doing it for someone who burns like a wildfire and hopes it will take everything with them.
Jericho expects that when they're good and gone, the gods will be too. Gaea can hear them, maybe the woman whispering from the misty fields of their mind is closer than they thought, and rejoices in their misery, blessed be the one who executes Olympus once and for all. They are not the same child facing on a storm or fourteen gripping onto a towering scythe as if it was death itself, instead, resigning themselves to be a puppet; the same as Ethan Nakamura and Luke Castellan (history is always doomed to repeat━no matter how many tragediesare caught in the way) but Jericho learns where those two have failed.
They were weak, easy to be swayed, and were tethered to commodities that left them vulnerable. Familiar in their goals but if they were all children whose lives are pawn for deities than Jericho knows that they will be the one to see through it. To disembowel Jason Grace, slit the throat of Percy Jackson, and witness at Olympus collapses into the Atlantic. Jericho will watch their souls leave through their mouths as they beg, scythe rusting with their blood, giving wounds instead of receiving, letting them rot and writhe like they once did in a mortal's womb, and will feel a peace settle in their bones.
Wars will not be waged for Jericho's hand, but they know true power comes from the one who declares it.
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