The Forest Gods' Fight

by Alexandria Hook

  There had to be more to the story then, for Persephone wouldn’t have let Hades drag her along into the forest and force her to live with him for three whole years if she hadn’t had any feelings for him—she would have escaped eventually, if she had wanted to. But this summer, Persephone seemed to despise him more than anything. She loved the lord of the dead once, so what went wrong in those lost years? I had a feeling the answers were somewhere in Athena’s journals.

  “Thanks again, sir,” I said awkwardly, hiding the newspaper articles behind the bookcase once again. “I—I should probably go now.” He just nodded silently and, without another word, I quickly backed out of the room and jumped off the balcony, with Athena’s journals and the class picture tucked safely under my arm.

  After I stopped to put on my armor again, I made my way back to camp slowly, very slowly. The monsters still seemed to be MIA, so I made it safely back to camp and hid my new keepsakes by the river in a dry spot behind a rock. The tents and cots were taken down and the fire was already put out, although I thought about lighting it up again. Almost all of the Knowing members were gone, and the nymphs and satyrs were splitting off into various groups to go back to their own corners of the forest. I would have said things were returning to normal, but the gods were gone.

  “Let me wrap up your arm for you,” Jan ordered sweetly as she unexpectedly walked up behind me. Still in a state of shock, I turned away from the river reluctantly and held out my bleeding arm for her to bandage. I watched the plump woman carefully, not trusting her, as she began to put gauze around the slits in my left arm. To be honest, I thought it was kind of disturbing that she did not seem nervous around me at all, unlike the other Knowing members.

  “Don’t think I don’t know where these cuts came from, boy. You shouldn’t have done this to yourself,” she whispered to me, shaking her head back and forth.

  “I deserved it,” I hissed back.

  Jan sighed, pausing to tuck a stray piece of brown hair back under her bonnet. “You couldn’t have stopped the Fates’ plan, Alec.”

  “But I should’ve tried! You just don’t understand.” I jerked my injured arm away from her, and she started to cluck her tongue softly at me in disappointment. “You can leave now. You’re done here,” I told her coldly, raising my voice a little.

  Jan gulped and I knew I had scared her, but she didn’t back down. She simply smoothed out her tattered blue dress and placed her hands on her hips, looking me straight in the eye. “Alec, you need help.” I had to admit that she was persistent.

  “Go away,” I growled, standing up a little taller. “I’m fine on my own. I always have been.”

  Jan sighed again and lowered her voice so no one else could hear her abruptly switch topics. “Alec, I know you loved her. Lady Athena, I mean.”

  Now that got my attention.

  “Don’t deny it. I watched you two together in the tent, after your whipping.”

  I glared at her menacingly, clenching my fists by my side. “That was never supposed to happen between us. It shouldn’t have happened. She didn’t want it to. You can’t tell anyone.”

  “I wasn’t going to, boy. I’m just letting you know that you can trust me, if there’s no one else,” Jan told me. She paused to look around and check on some Knowing Warriors packing up the last few bags then asked quietly, “Now, are you coming back home with us or not? We’re about to leave.”

  Then it was my turn to sigh, thinking about all the things Athena had said to me that summer. What did she expect me to do? I knew she had to have left me clues somewhere . . . I believe I trained you well—not just as a fighter, but also as a leader . . . .

  Suddenly, I knew exactly what to do and that was when I confessed my plans to Jan. But, for some reason, Athena thought that you might want to know them as well.

  On the night of my whipping, I had asked her if I could stay in the Woods after the war was over, and Athena had said yes, even though she already knew the gods would die. But right before she died, she told me that it was time to prove myself as a leader. She meant as leader of the Knowing.

  So I decided I was going to do both, in a way. I planned on living in the forest—there was no denying that it was my true home now since I cared about no one in the Knowing and they had never cared for me. I would be alone for the most part, besides a few wandering nymphs and satyrs, but it was the right thing for me; I deserved to be sad and alone for not deterring the deaths of the gods. I should have just stepped in front of Hades, and the gods would have been okay. Simple, really.

  But anyway, I also planned on visiting the Knowing about once a month for the time being, maybe less often later on. (I was sure I could find the money for a plane ticket somewhere, but I would just walk if I had to. Walking is a good way to kill time.) I couldn’t just ditch that part of my life completely, especially since the Knowing mark was tattooed onto the back of my neck and the base camp was so corrupt. As a hero, it was my job to help protect future Knowing generations by fixing what was broken now. Which was pretty much everything, in my opinion. Since Athena was only at the camp for about twenty-four hours, she never really saw the extent of the corruption for herself, but I think she had a pretty good idea of what things were like for me. She must have, since her last words were ones of warning. “We aren’t over yet,” she had said. Again, I pondered what that really meant.

  I knew for a fact that dealing with the Knowing would be the hardest part of my life from then on. You see, that’s the trouble with being a hero—you always have to do the right thing, such as helping your least favorite people no matter how much you hate the idea. I certainly didn’t feel like a hero. Now that Athena and the rest of the gods were gone, I didn’t even want to be one. Other than to uphold certain morals, there was just no point, in my opinion. I didn’t really have anyone left in my life to make proud, to impress, or to love.

  I honestly did not expect to live much longer, but I was going to try nonetheless. As you can probably guess, heroes don’t tend to have very long lifespans, especially ones who live on their own. One day in the near future, a monster (or monsters) would track me down as usual, but it would take only one second for me to make one wrong move and then I would die. So perhaps you could say that I knew what my “tragic fate” would be ahead of time, just like Athena did.

  Speaking of Athena, I wasn’t sure I would ever get over the deaths of the gods. People say that you should let go of the past and move on, but what if the past is all you have, all you want to remember? I felt like it was my personal duty to remember and honor the gods. Before that beautiful, tragic, painful summer, I was definitely a loner and a troublemaker, but later on, I was treated like an outsider and sometimes a criminal by my own family. Meeting the gods had been the greatest thing that ever happened to me and I had finally felt like I belonged somewhere, but now I was left alone again, this time with guilt to carry around. (Though, little did I know, I was carrying around a lot more than guilt.)

  However, even though the gods were great company and always kept life interesting, I hope you realize that the gods and I weren’t perfect people; we were often ruthless and insensitive, sometimes cocky too. To be honest, Athena and I were not exactly proud of all of our actions, such as treating innocent people with hostility or toying around like animals with certain monsters before we killed them. But, just like Athena wrote in the last chapter, maybe you can learn from us to better yourselves.

  Now, since Athena hid pieces of advice in each of her chapters, I figured I should get to tell you a piece of mine: Whatever you do, don’t fall in love with a god. And if you can help it, don’t even become friends with the gods, for there is simply too much to lose once you get attached. Please, just walk away or worship them from afar. Don’t let them get to you. They’ll completely turn your life around and, before you know it, you won’t be able to go back to the way things were before. I can’t bear to see that happen to you. It may have seemed like a good thing in my case (and I still thin
k it was), but just look at me in this chapter; I am a mess.

  Anyway, it’s about time for you to put down this book and move on in your own lives. Hopefully you learned something from Athena’s book, from the most recent story in a long list of Greek tragedies, but if not, maybe you just enjoyed reading it. Maybe you’ll even go back and reread this book to try to catch all the metaphors and life lessons if you overlooked them the first time. But, whatever happens, I wish you—as Athena always said—good luck. Try not to die.