Page 1 of Blood of Olympus

Part One

WHISPERS & WARNINGS

“I must bear my allotted doom as lightly as I can.”

— AESCHYLUS, PROMETHEUS BOUND.

CHAPTER 1

Nyssa

“Even gods can break,” they whispered.

The eerie tri-layered voice of the sisters followed me everywhere. It haunted me — asleep, awake, it didn’t matter — not even now, months after their trial ended. Even my dreams were not safe from their meddling, for this was surely a dream.

I had no recollection of summoning them. I had no memory of shadowstepping either; of entering the void between places; the lining between realms.

Nowhere.

And everywhere.

It had only been a week since I last heard one of their infuriatingly cryptic warnings. One week since the Selection Ceremony and all that befell it.

“Binds, hides, seams,” I whispered, remembering, watching a lock of my sable-coloured hair drift past my face, caught in some invisible current. “Make time bleed.”

“Ah, and you did dio hēmisysa,” Atropos declared. “Your blade cleaved time, just as my shears sever lives — easily and instinctively.” She hovered before me, her waxen lip curling up at one corner. “One, two. Yours, mine,” she sang. “Kronos, Char⁠—”

“Stop it!” I yelled into the endless void. My rage-filled, panic-stricken voice echoed until it faded into the nothingness. “Do not say his name.”

The Fates exchanged a knowing look.

“His thread was always so vibrant,” Atropos murmured.

“And short,” Lachesis interjected.

“Destined to be cut short at its brightest,” Atropos finished.

“Stop it,” I pleaded, my knees threatening to buckle under the weight of my despair.

“Did you know,” Clotho began, her tone gentler and warmer than that of her sisters. She leaned in conspiratorially, as though she were about to let me in on some grand secret. “That when your souls whispered to me from beyond the endless void… when I first spun them into existence — his first, yours later — your thread wrapped itself so tightly around his I could barely separate them?”

A sob clawed its way up, burgeoning in my throat, like even the emotion was trapped in this nightmare, too. Tears pricked the corners of my eyes.

I was powerless to escape from this dream — their words. I had to hear them, endure them, and feel the pain of losing him all over again because of their terrible, honest cruelty.

“Even gods can break,” they said again as one, slowly drifting away — but not before they could sing another obscure song that my fresh haze of grief made difficult to remember.

“One vanished, one tethered, one tortured.

Two sundered, re-bound, reinforced.

Five surrendered,

Four unaltered,

Three protected,

Two defended,