by Simon Archer
“We could appeal to the sun god himself,” Arges offered as a solution. “That’s what we did last time. Although we did promise him rule over the daylight until Apollo came along and challenged him. Luckily, Apollo was too much of a lazy ass to keep up with the job of maintaining daylight. I don’t think we have anything that enticing for the sun god this time around.”
The solution hit me like a ton of bricks, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. It was so obvious that I broke out into a fit of laughter. Arges and Katlynn watched me with worried expressions as my laughter soared past the normal allotted time for laughter. It could have been the lack of sleep, but I just felt so stupid, it was funny.
Finally, I regained my composure and my breath. “We don’t have to do any of those things. I know exactly how we’re going to access sun fire.”
“How?” Katlynn wondered, voicing aloud the question that was written all over Arges’s face.
I turned to the cyclops. “I’m going to need to borrow Phae’s phone.”
21
“You want me to come to Italy?” Hailey’s voice crackled through the phone.
“That’s exactly what I want you to do,” I said sweetly. “Come on! It’ll be fun. You’ve never been here before, and Thanksgiving break is just right around the corner. It’s the perfect time.”
“I don’t know, Cam,” Hailey said, hesitation all over her voice.
“It’s not like you have to buy a plane ticket,” I reasoned. “Just take the chariot across the pond and boom! You’re here for the holiday.”
“Do you know that you just slipped into a British accent?” Hailey said with a chuckle.
“I’ve been hanging around Katlynn too much,” I groaned.
“With who?” Hailey asked, a hint of interest perking up in her tone.
“Oh my gods, no! Katlynn is… she’s…” I realized then that I hadn’t really explained the whole ghost half-sister situation to my girlfriend. While I didn’t really want to do it over the phone, I didn’t think I had a choice lest we get into an unnecessary conversation. “Katlynn is my half-sister.”
“Hephaestus had another child?” Hailey balked. “In this generation?”
“Not exactly,” I winced. “She’s a ghost who was sent by Hephaestus to help me. She’s how I got to the Underworld in the first place.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Hailey?” I prompted, hoping she hadn’t hung up on me.
“Why do you really want me to come to Italy?” Hailey said suspiciously. “Because as much as I would like to believe it’s because you miss the crap out of me--”
“I do miss the crap out of you! I miss all my girls!” I insisted.
“I know you have another reason,” Hailey continued. “I can hear it in your voice. What’s going on, Cam?”
I bit my lip and scrunched up my face. I had hoped I wouldn’t have to tell Hailey what I was planning to do until she got here, and then she would have a harder time resisting. But over the phone like this, she still had entirely too many opportunities to say no.
“Cameron,” Hailey prompted knowingly.
“So, you know how I told you before I left that I need to make the Helm of Invisibility?” I began.
“You mean in the mere seconds before you left?” Hailey said with a chuckle. “It was kind of hard to forget.”
“Yeah, well, we need sun fire to make it, and you’re the best source of sun fire that I know of,” I finished off. “So, I would like you to come to Italy, so you can help me finish the Helm of Invisibility, and so I can see your gorgeous face after all these weeks.”
I heard her sigh all the way across the globe. I waited in silence, though my body was a bundle of nerves. I tapped my foot, bit my lip, and paced along the edge of the pool while Katlynn waited anxiously beside me. Phae sat with her legs crossed in one of the pool chairs, sunglasses on, staring uncaringly up at the sky.
“How can I ever say no to you?” Hailey said. I could hear the smile, and I leaped into the air with an excited shout.
“Really?” I said, my voice showing my obvious joy.
“Really,” Hailey agreed. “I’m coming to Italy.”
“Oh, that is so amazing!” I squealed. “Okay, I’m going to pass you off to Phae so she can give you the coordinates or whatever you need to get here.”
“Who?” Hailey asked. “Exactly how many people are over there?”
“Technically one person,” I said cheekily. “But there is also a ghost, a goddess, and a cyclops. Okay, I love you. I can’t wait to see you. Here’s Phae. Bye!”
I held out the phone to Phae, who released an exasperated groan but took the phone from me, regardless. She held it to her ear and began to relay instructions to Hailey for how to fly onto the villa’s property.
“She agreed! She’s coming!” I said in a high-pitched voice to Katlynn.
“Well, I sure hope she’s coming,” Katlynn said. “She would be a shitty girlfriend if she didn’t.”
“We had a bit of a fight before I came over here,” I said with a low voice. “We kind of fixed it, but I wasn’t sure if she was still mad or how she felt, but this is a good sign.”
“Wow,” Katlynn said slowly, with a shocked expression on her face.
“What?” I asked, suddenly worried. “You don’t think it’s a good sign.”
“No,” Katlynn drew out the word. “I’ve just never seen you so,” she waved her hand around at me, “lovey-dovey.”
At that remark, I reacted reflexively. I picked up one of the grape themed throw pillows and chucked it at my half-sister. It was a bullseye which I was thoroughly satisfied by, but then I remembered that despite the fact that she was ghost-like, she was technically made up of the Eternal Flame. This means the minute that the pillow made contact with her, it burst into flames.
I squeaked in panic and rushed to pick up the pillow. With a lopsided throw, I tossed the flaming pillow into the pool. It landed flat against the water, like a fat man doing a belly flop. It splashed up sprays of water, right onto Phae.
She leaped up in surprise and yelped. In the midst of her surprise, she dropped her cell phone… into the pool.
I watched the smartphone float to the bottom of the pool while the top of the pillow still burned with the Eternal Flame because, as I should have known, the flame didn’t ever go out.
We all stood in stunned silence as we thought about the comedy of errors that had just happened. I slowly turned on my heel to face Phae even though I could feel the anger simmering off her, hotter than when the Eternal Flame turned green.
“I am so sorry,” I began, but Phae held up a hand.
“All I have to say is that I hope your girlfriend knows how to get here,” the goddess replied sassily. On that note, she yanked her wrap from off the lawn chair and threw it over her body. She stomped into the house just as Arges came out of it.
He pointed a thumb behind himself to gesture in Phae’s direction. “What’s her problem?” Then the cyclops noticed the floating pillow still on fire. “And why is that pillow on fire in the middle of my pool?”
“I really feel like you wouldn’t believe us even if we told you the truth,” Katlynn said in a flat voice.
“I’m going to trust you to handle that, Katlynn,” Arges said as he gestured to the fire pillow. “Considering it’s the same color as you, I’m going to guess you had something to do with that.”
Katlynn opened up her mouth to protest, but the cyclops cut her off. “I don’t want to hear excuses. Please, just remedy it. Cameron, would you please accompany me down to the forge? I want to teach you how to make the basic helmet shape so you can have it down before your girlfriend, Hailey?”
“Yes,” I confirmed.
“Hailey,” Agres repeated so he could commit the name to memory. “The daughter of Apollo comes. She has agreed to come, right?”
“Yes,” I repeated in the same innocent tone as before. Katlynn shot me
a glare that I ignored.
“Great, then let’s head down to the forge,” Arges clapped his hands as he was wont to do and headed off.
Katlynn flipped me the bird as I walked past her, but I replied with only a wide smile as I thought about all the things Katlynn was going to try to do to get rid of the pillow fire.
Arges led me down the stone stairs to the forge. We dived right into the lesson on how to make helmets. Before we brought out any materials, he rolled out two stumps from the back and set one down in front of each of us.
“In order to make the armor, we’re not going to use the anvils,” Agres announced.
“Not use the anvil?” I said, stepping back in surprise. “Then what are we going to use? Logs?”
“Exactly,” Arges confirmed. “This is a technique called dishing, and believe it or not, it is forging without fire.”
“I don’t follow,” I said, my voice foreign to my own ears.
“Have you ever forged something without using fire, Cameron?” Arges asked, even though his tone implied that he already knew the answer.
“I didn’t think that was possible,” I replied honestly.
“Well, it is, and let me show you how,” Arges said with a twinkle in his eye.
Over the next several days, leading up to Thanksgiving break when Hailey would arrive, Arges taught me how to bend and manipulate metal without first heating it up. The trick was using a rounded hammer and selecting a thinner steel. I’d never worked with such a flimsy material before, and it scared me.
“How is this supposed to protect you?” I asked Arges one day while we were dishing two plates for a Roman-style helmet. Dishing was the technique of rounding out the steel on the stump with a rounded hammerhead. It took a lot of work, and I couldn’t say that I was a big fan. I missed the glow of the metal as it popped out of the forge, but I was determined to learn from Arges and followed every step, even if my arms were limp noodles by the end of the lesson.
“You mean because it’s so flimsy?” Arges clarified.
“Yeah, I mean, it seems like anything could--”
But the cyclops cut me off. Out of nowhere, he flung a nail in my direction. Instinctually, I held up the metal plate I was holding, and the nail bounced right off. There was a loud tang as the nail slammed into the metal. There was a significant dent, but no puncture wound, no hole.
As I turned over the metal, I examined it closely. “I still argue that it could have hurt you.”
“It’s not meant to stop you from getting hurt,” Arges argued, “It’s meant to stop you from getting killed.”
He took the plate from me and with about eight bangs from his hammer, the plate was back to its original shape before he assaulted it with a nail. “And it’s easy to fix, so warriors didn’t have to keep coming to blacksmiths to get new armor. It was just for repairs.”
“That’s crazy,” I admired the sheer strength it took to straighten out the metal. Even though it was more malleable than the stuff I usually used, it took a lot out of me in order to bang away until the metal was smooth and round.
The one good thing about this process was the amount of time I got to spend with the metal. It wasn’t often that I put my hands on the metal itself when it wasn’t blazing hot. Sure, I was naturally heat resistant, but that didn’t mean I always touched the metal when it was glowing white hot. But without the heating process, I got to graze, smooth, and stroke the metal.
Every time I did it, it sent tingles down my spine, like most metals did when I sensed their essence. While it was different from my previous methods and techniques, I found myself enjoying the process. I realized that any way I could work with metal suited me.
A couple of days into the process, Arges brought up a subject that surprised me.
“Has anyone ever told you that you look like your father?” the cyclops asked as he paused his work.
“My mom mentioned it once,” I said offhandedly, “but you’re actually the only person, other than Aphrodite, who said they had met him.”
“Your hair grows that color naturally, doesn’t it?” Arges asked, pointing out my bright red hair that looked like I’d stolen the color from Ronald McDonald.
“Unfortunately, yeah,” I admitted. “I used to dye it that color, though, until I worked with the Eternal Flame for the first time and then bam! It just grew out that way.”
“It’s not just the hair and the eyes,” Arges said, his voice growing soft as he reminisced. “You have his spirit as well.”
I set my tools down, though I kept my fingers closed around the handles. I took a deep breath and thought about how to phrase my question. I felt the tension rise in my muscles and tried to ease them, but it didn’t work.
“What was my dad like?” I said, my voice soft and meek.
I felt Arges’s eye on me even with my back turned to him. I didn’t dare turn around. Something about the topic of conversation made me think it would be easier to hear his answer if I didn’t look at the cyclops.
“Just like you hear in all the stories,” Arges admitted, with a sigh expelling after he finished the sentence. “Abrupt. Stubborn. Hot-headed. Jealous.”
A lump formed in my throat, and I tried to swallow it down, but it wouldn’t go down as easily as I had hoped. Those weren’t excited words of praise and not things a guy expects to hear about his father.
“But brilliant at his craft,” Arges added with admiration in his voice. “I thought that my brothers and I were great until we worked with Hephaestus.” The cyclops let out a low whistle. “He was unlike anything we had seen before, as though he had been born with the hammer in his hand. His arrogance was completely justified.”
Arges came around to my side, not letting me hide from him anymore. My gaze trained on the tools resting on the anvil. The massive presence of him wasn’t easily ignored.
“He’s had a rough existence,” Arges said with drops of sympathy in his voice. “With his disability, his deformations, the world has not been kind to him. So for a long time, he refused to be kind back. I know these things are probably hard to hear.”
I shrugged, my voice still lodged behind that lump in my throat.
“But I will say this,” Arges told me. Something about the change in his tone, from something mournful to serious and pointed, finally caused me to look up at the monster. I made eye contact with him, and he tilted his head down so I could. “Hephaestus was loyal to a fault. He had very few mortal loves in his life, dedicated to his work as he was, but he loved those women and all of his children. With all of his flaws, that was one of his biggest strengths.”
Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes, and I looked down, refusing to cry in front of Arges. My thoughts raced through the cyclops’s words. They pricked at me, thinking of all the years I had thought my father abandoned us and refused to be a part of my life. It was a hard habit to deconstruct, reminding myself that there was a good chance that it wasn’t his fault he wasn’t in my life. Something had prevented him from being there. From the sounds of it, he would have if he had the chance.
“It sounds like he was a good man,” I said, my voice hoarse from the welling emotion.
“Why do you speak of him as though he were dead?” Arges asked, cocking his head to the side.
“I…” I paused, not realizing I had used the past tense when speaking of my dad. “I don’t know why. I guess… I’ve always talked about him that way because he was never a part of my life, you know?”
“I assure you, Cameron, that was not his choice,” Arges said. He turned so he could lean against the workbench.
“What do you think happened to him?” I wondered, daring to ask the question I’d asked myself hundreds of times since learning of his disappearance.
“I could not tell you,” the cyclops answered as he hung his head. He crossed his arms and looked at the ground as though it held the answers we both sought. “What I do know is that it would have to be something substantial to keep him from you.”
<
br /> “You’re just saying that,” I brushed off, not wanting his words to give me as much hope as they did.
“Even in the short time you have known me, have I ever just said something without meaning it?” the cyclops challenged. “I know your father, and I have not spoken for many years, but we worked together for centuries. It is very unlike him to abandon his work and his livelihood for no reason.”
“I’d like to think it was something important,” I confessed. “But after so many years of believing he just abandoned my mom and me, I don’t know. It’s a hard pill to swallow.”
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Arges said as he scooted in closer to me as though he were about to share a secret. “How did your mother and Hephaestus meet?”
I smiled at the thought of it. Even though my dad had left us, whether by his choice or not, I always enjoyed the story of how he and my mom met. So I lifted my head, and my spirits, and relayed the story to Arges.
“It was at a Renaissance Faire, do you know what those are?” I asked, not sure how much the cyclops had ventured out of his villa.
“I lived through the Renaissance,” Arges said with a know-it-all air. “In Italy, no less. So I am familiar with the shoddy recreations of that glorious time.”
“Right,” I said, drawing out the word in light of his pompous tone. “Well, my mom was an entertainer. She had a group that would drink on stage, sing, and dance around the pub stage. My dad, Hephaestus, had a blacksmith’s booth where he would make all sorts of weapons, armor, trinkets, and the like.”
“It was his hobby,” Arges said with a smile. “He liked to escape into the mortal realm as a craftsman and make simple things for the mortals. Easier customers, he used to say, than the gods.”
“I bet,” I sympathize. “Well, one year, his booth was set up right by the pub stage. He got to watch her show every day, three times a day until finally, a week before Faire ended, he had the courage to come up to her and give her a necklace.”
“May I ask of what?” Arges inquired. I could tell I reeled the cyclops in with my story. He leaned in like a boy scout listening to ghost stories around a campfire.