He tosses me over the cliff.
It goes on and on like that. I eventually lose track of everything—mainly of myself. I have no idea how many times I go down, and my mind stops grasping the fact that I come back up. I stop fighting Perses. I don’t kick or claw. My existence turns into an endless, agonizing blur, with my only hope being to burrow as deeply as I can into that separate place inside of myself where I can hide. I’m only vaguely aware of anything else, like the hard and painful impact that marks the moment of my own repeated demolition, or Perses ranting and shouting and cursing me for a fool. The eagle comes and goes, its habitual shriek before it attacks a strange counterpoint to my new, internal silence. Every now and then, I hear Prometheus whisper to me to fly.
Fly? I haven’t tried in what feels like years and a thousand deaths. If I even have wings anymore, they’re beyond my reach.
“It’s not working!” Perses shoves me hard, but this time, he doesn’t push me over the edge. My wingless back bumps into the rock wall, and I slump against it, panting. I blink a few times, and some of the focus and feeling I’d forced aside return to me.
“You ride from life to death and back again, and you don’t even care!”
I laugh, nurturing the hysterical edge. I can tell it enrages him. Perses’s torture technique to try to get what he wants from me reminds me of Mother, and I wonder if I could be resisting him on purpose. Is defiance somehow ingrained in me? A previously learned behavioral pattern that I’ll never break?
I cough up another laugh, just to see his face darken and twist. “Physical pain means nothing to me.”
That’s not exactly true, but it’s close enough. There’s a point when choosing not to care and actually not caring start to converge. I mentally removed myself further from every fall until I was experiencing the plummet, the shattering, and the reconstruction from an outsider’s perspective. The Titan’s plan didn’t work. Finding my wings became entirely secondary to remaining an observer looking in on someone else’s horrific fate. And so each stomach-lurching drop got easier. I knew what to expect, knew the damage wasn’t permanent, knew Little Bean would be okay.
My breath hitches. But by Gods, she’d better not be feeling any of this.
That horrendous thought snaps me fully awake, popping the bubble I’d been protecting myself in. How dare the Gods do this to her? How did I ever once think they cared?
Motherhood’s wrath fills me. It’s a powerful force. “You’re a pawn!” I yell out. “And you’ve chosen the method of a dupe. This will never work.”
A chilling coldness replaces the fury on the Titan’s face. Perses closes in on me until the ancient power inhabiting him scorches my skin, and his breath heats one whole side of my head. Each puff of air against my temple feels like a volcanic eruption—volatile, explosive, ready to burn me alive.
I shudder. His very approach spells agony on deep levels. There’s no part of me that doesn’t want to run.
Perses dips his head, and his dark-as-night whisper makes a terrifying promise in my ear. “Then I guess you’ve turned down the easy way.”
CHAPTER 25
Fear detonates inside me. If that was the easy way, then what could be the hard?
“Do you have any idea how much time you’ve wasted?” Perses asks.
I shake my head, a quick, jerky movement made up of trauma and trembling nerves. I step back from him, gaining space to breathe without inhaling danger and anger and primordial magic with every lungful of air.
Perses slides me a viperous side-eyed look. “I do.”
Oh Gods. Time means nothing here, but in Thalyria…
Anxiety hits me like a hammer, ratcheting up my pulse. “Why are you saying this?” My voice rasps from screaming. I sound like a badly butchered sheep that’s been left to bleat and bleat and bleat.
“I’m saying this because after millennia of imprisonment, Zeus finally granted me a potential end to this mind-numbing forever. I could be fornicating. Eating my fill. I could be thumping goblets with great warriors in Elysium right now and watching the red wine slosh over my wrist like the blood of the enemies I’ve slain, but I’m not”—the Titan’s tirade builds in pressure with every word, his face turning a raging scarlet—“because you won’t find your backbone and fly out of here first!”
I flinch away from his fury. For my sake, I wish I could give the son of a Cyclops what he wants.
“The magic is gone! I’m telling you, it’s not there anymore.”
“Not gone,” he snarls in contempt, “or we wouldn’t be here.”
“Zeus took it from me. I found my spine in Sykouri. I had lightning. I had wings. I was ready to use them both—for whatever means.” I throw my hand out toward the gray landscape. Tremors rattle my fingers, and I snatch them into a fist. “Now I’m here—with neither.”
The God’s mouth pinches hard. He looks at me with unimpressed eyes. “It’s all or nothing with you, isn’t it? There’s no moderation.”
I snort. Moderation? This from the being that just rewrote my definition of torture by repeatedly killing my child and me? All my near-deaths? Well, they weren’t any fun, either, but this… This was life-and-death whiplash—and not just my own. Prolonged. Pitiless. Mind-breaking. Most of me wishes I was still on the outside looking in, because inside is just too wrecked to think.
Perses studies me with a sour look. “Too much humanity. Then not enough.”
My eyes narrow. Something in his words pecks at me like Prometheus’s eagle, a sharp jab straight to the gut. “Why do you say that? What do you mean?”
“Your balance is off. From what I hear, it’s been off your entire short life. Repress. Explode. Repress. Explode. On endless repeat.”
I inhale sharply. That sounds too right. I can’t help wondering… If I had better control over myself, could I have saved Kato?
Pain and loss slice through my chest like a barbed saw. My heart clenches, and I throw up a wall in my mind to block out the sight of blue eyes without any light.
I swallow. Maybe with greater control, I would have known better than to try at all.
An awful smirk contorts Perses’s face. “You think that’s all you’ve lost?”
I stop breathing. All of me stops. Oh Gods, Griffin.
No. He was injured, but there’s no way those wounds would have gotten the better of him. There were healers.
What in the Gods’ names is Perses talking about?
My pulse starts to pound, panic hitting my veins like a shot of poison. He’s trying to scare me. And it’s working.