The Forest Gods' Reign

by Alexandria Hook

  Chapter 16:

  A HERO AND A SPEECH

  Running. I was running like a maniac through the woods. My woods. I would know those trees, those rocks, those leafy green ferns anywhere. But why? I did not know. I did not know, and it scared me. Because when you’re the goddess of wisdom, you’re supposed to know everything. Not knowing, to put it simply, was not good. Not knowing could be more dangerous than anything else in the entire world. Not knowing could get you killed. And I was not ready to be killed. I had lived through way too many monster attacks to die this early in life.

  So I kept running. Running for my life—for anyone’s life, really, because I had no idea what was going on. My feet had minds of their own as they raced through the forest that I knew so well, not slowing down even the tiniest bit for miles and miles.

  And suddenly they stopped. My feet were now planted in the dirt, as if held to the ground by invisible superglue, and I couldn’t move an inch. This was even worse than the running, but I forced myself not to panic. Instead, I took deep breaths, trying to calm down as I glanced around me.

  But then my breath caught in my throat. I tried to scream out, but I could not make a sound. Because, lying at odd angles in the long grass was a girl, her wavy, shimmering, golden hair fallen around her perfect face, her expensive clothes covered in a fine layer of dust and dirt. This was the most beautiful girl in the world: Aphrodite. And she was dead.

  I desperately tried to move my feet toward her, to somehow rescue the poor girl, but I could not move a single muscle. Suddenly, the world started to spin faster and faster, until all I saw and felt was blackness around me. However, the sullen, glassed-over but somehow still beautiful blue eyes of Aphrodite were still etched onto my brain, probably permanently. She did not deserve to die. I knew deep inside that I should have been in her place, for everything that I had done, for all the secrets that I had kept. Now more than ever, the part of my past no one else knew about, the arrow, was coming back to haunt me.

  “Help,” the seductive voice of Aphrodite called to me through the frigid darkness …

  I bolted upright in a cold sweat as the blackness from my dream faded away, leaving only reality, though I still couldn’t shake the vision of the dead Aphrodite from my mind. Breathing hard, I gripped the metal edges of my dark green cot, suddenly feeling homesick for more than one reason.

  That couldn’t have been just a dream, after all. No, it was too real. Every leaf, every rock had been right where it should have been in the forest. I knew the place like the back of my hand, every little nook and cranny. And I knew now that I had to get home. Here in the Knowing camp, I ironically had no way of knowing what was going on back in the Woods.

  But, while rubbing my cold and clammy forehead, I remembered that Alec had mentioned a phone. Still, my breath came out shaky and untrustworthy as I put on some clothes and my leather boots to walk outside.

  It was early in the morning, so only a few Warriors were awake. Like statues of old Greek heroes, five of them stood around the camp, fully clad in armor, staring blankly out at the air, which was thick with a sticky gray mist. It was gloomy rather than mysterious, and not silvery and beautiful like in the forest back home. Also, the tall, silent tents, completely closed, with no windows, seemed to loom above me like Hades’s palace in the Underworld; they were not friendly and welcoming like the houses and shops on Main Street.

  Finding myself subconsciously comparing everything around me to the Woods, I frowned. Perhaps I was more homesick than I thought. Nevertheless, I made my way toward the main building that the Knowing camp had, which was supposed to house the phone.

  This building was quiet and dark too, but the old wooden door was unlocked, and it creaked as I stepped over the threshold. On opposite sides of the common area, there were two hallways I remembered from earlier in the day—one on the right, labeled women, and one on the left, labeled men.

  I searched down both hallways, then retraced my steps and searched the common area, which only had a black leather chair and a tangled mass of tattoo equipment in the corner. Frowning, I made my way back to the entrance to see if I had missed anything. I stood facing the quiet and sturdy door between the two hallways and was about to walk out into the cool morning air when I noticed something right by the side of the doorframe.

  A few holes were left in the wall from screws that had been pulled out, and a faint brown line was stained on the wall, running in a large rectangle about the size of an old wall-mounted phone. A tiny hole revealed where the cord must have been attached. Chewing my lip, I reached out and traced the line with my finger, certain that this was where the phone had been. But why had the Knowing taken it down? From what I had seen the day before, I guessed that Jason had it removed because, as a connection to the outside world, it posed a threat to his power, which was based on the policy of isolation.

  Suddenly the door creaked, and I instinctively grabbed the small knife from my pocket, narrowing my stormy eyes and shifting in place to strengthen my stance. I wasn’t exactly sure who I expected to barge in, but I definitely wasn’t expecting a fight, either. Just old habits, I guessed.

  But then the pained face of none other than Alec stuck his head around, and his eyes brightened when they saw me. When they moved down, eyeing the open pocketknife in my hand, I quickly closed it and sheepishly looked back up at Alec. Instead, he only stared at the empty space on the white wall where the phone should have been. “It’s gone,” he whispered in Greek.

  We must have stared together at the phone’s old place for five whole minutes before I finally told him, “I have to go back.”

  Alec whipped his head around and narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

  “Aphrodite. I think something’s happened,” I confessed with a sigh, and Alec shook his head, mumbling to himself as his face turned white with worry.

  “I’m coming too,” he proclaimed, determination burning in his deep blue eyes.

  I frowned and crossed my arms. “No, I can handle this myself. I have a plan. You need to stay here and rally the troops and regain your strength.”

  Carefully, he placed his hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye. “I am strong enough,” he said, trying to convince me, but I noticed him wince just the slightest bit as he said this. After returning his hands to his sides, he continued, “And besides, these people will not listen to me.”

  “Yes, they will,” I whispered, my gray eyes lighting up with an idea, and Alec just studied me curiously, wondering what ingenious plan I could possibly be thinking up now.

  ___________________

  The entire Knowing camp was gathered at the square wooden stage, confusion in their eyes and in their voices as they gossiped among themselves, not exactly sure what was going on. Some were still yawning, trying to wake themselves up, while I stood on the stage facing them, dressed in a blue-and-white traditional Greek tunic that someone had laid out for me in my tent. After they all finally quieted down, I yelled out, “I call upon Alec of the Knowing. Come up to the stage.”

  There was movement in the crowd, and then Alec, looking slightly bewildered (I hadn’t told him the plan), was pushed toward the stage. His shirt must have been irritating the deep wounds on his back because he was no longer wearing one, and so all of the girls were staring at his abs. Most of the men, however, stared only at the white bandages which covered his entire back and had bright red blood seeping through. Breathing hard and obviously in extreme pain, Alec still managed to climb up to the stage relatively easily. He stood up to face me in silence, his blue eyes full of questions.

  “Kneel,” I told him, and he obeyed, bowing his head. While he might have demanded an explanation of what was going on if we were back in the Woods, where he was also my friend, here he did not because he probably would have been punished even more for questioning a god. Alec was strong, but I was not sure that even he could withstand two whippings in two days.

  I continued, “I require your sword.”

  Ale
c frowned, no longer trying to figure out what I was planning, and reluctantly pulled the small gray rock from his pocket. When he squeezed it and the long, shining blade popped out, the crowd gasped in shock. They had never seen anything like it, but then again, they hadn’t met the handy Hephaestus of this generation.

  Alec handed the sword to me carefully, and I gripped it with two hands, holding it so that the tip was pointing toward the ground. He was still frowning, and the dark look in his eyes told me that he thought I was making a mistake. But there was no mistake. I was always right, after all. I always had a plan.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Alec murmured through clenched teeth, so no one else would hear.

  “Yes, Alec, I do. You’ve earned the title of hero, and the Knowing will just have to deal with it.”

  But Alec continued to argue under his breath. “Athena, you can’t force me to help them learn how to fight properly. They don’t deserve my help. Trust me when I tell you they are not the good guys.”

  “Maybe not,” I agreed quietly, looking him in the eye. “You can just think of it as keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer. You are the one who said the Knowing needed to be fixed in the first place.”

  At this, Alec finally nodded in agreement and lowered his head once more so the ceremony could begin. Smirking, I took a deep breath and began in a raised voice, “Do you, Alec, swear to do no harm to the innocent, and to punish the guilty only in a fair manner?”

  “I do,” he said firmly, trying to keep his voice from shaking.

  “Do you, Alec, swear to uphold the honor code of a Geek hero and to never turn a blind eye on someone in need unless otherwise justified?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you, Alec, swear to educate and train your people in the ways of the Greeks, but protect the secret of the myths against outsiders?”

  “I do.”

  And finally the last question, but perhaps the most difficult to answer: “And do you, Alec, swear to obey and protect your Greek gods in every way possible, even if the sacrifice is the life of a loved one or your own?”

  “I do,” he growled fiercely and without the slightest hesitation, like the Nemean lion, his blue eyes gleaming. I knew my little hero was not afraid of anything in that moment.

  I smiled proudly to myself, flipping the sword around in my hands casually, as if it were only a pencil, and the crowd watched me in stunned silence. I think they were shocked I was naming Alec a hero, but then again, they didn’t even know half of the things he had done. So I flipped the sword around one last time and swiftly brought it down in a stabbing motion as the Knowing crowd gasped, sure I was about to accidentally kill Alec. You would have thought they had a little more faith in their own goddess of wisdom and war.

  Finally the sword slammed into the stage, and the tip stuck right in the thin line where two wood panels met, just over an inch in front of Alec but exactly where I had been aiming. And my little hero didn’t even flinch. I supposed you could say he passed the final test.

  As the crowd let out a collective sigh of relief, I grinned again, and Alec looked up to meet my gaze. I yanked the blade back out of the stage and carefully placed the flat edge of the shining sword on Alec’s left shoulder for a second, then moved it to the right as I finished the ceremony.

  “Then I, Athena, your patron goddess of wisdom, war, and skill, name you, Alec, the first official hero of Mount Olympus of the twenty-first century,” I finished with a triumphant shout, and the crowd erupted in a tremendous cheer. I smiled, even though I knew most of them were probably cheering for me more than Alec, as he was still a traitor in some of their cold eyes.

  I handed the sword back to Alec, and he let out a deep breath, turning to give the crowd a short nod of gratitude. The two of us stood up there for a couple of minutes, anxiously waiting for the rest of the Knowing to stop clapping so we could move on with our day. However, I couldn’t help but notice that a group of tough-looking teenage boys at the back of the crowd was glaring at Alec, not even bothering to applaud with the rest of the crowd. I would have to mention it to Alec later to see what that was all about.

  ___________________

  It was finally time for breakfast, so the entire camp headed into the mess hall, where we received our food. I would have sat down with Alec, but I thought it was still best to eat at the table with the rest of the Knowing camp leaders, so I had to watch wistfully as Alec sat down by himself at an empty white table. You might have thought that he would be super popular now that he was an official hero, but all of the teens kept shooting him dirty looks full of jealousy, and, as usual, the adults and small children stuck to each other like glue.

  Alec had just started to dig into his scrambled eggs after the Knowing had said a prayer to the gods when the same group of guys who had been glaring at Alec during his hero ceremony came up behind him. They were laughing, but the grins on their tanned, oily faces were not friendly. Their eyes were filled with a cloud of anger, and their movements were cold and calculated—the look that Ares always wore when he was hungry for blood and revenge.

  I frowned and gulped nervously as the four of them slapped Alec on the back in what might appear to be congratulations. Alec clenched the silver fork he was holding with a white-knuckle grip as he tried to hide the pain when the first boy’s hand collided with his ripped skin. Three more boys followed the first, each slapping Alec on the back right where his wounds were, and I could see the anger flaring up in Alec’s blue eyes as he struggled to control himself. I sighed in relief only when the boys sat down at another table, laughing up a storm and finally leaving Alec alone.

  But it wasn’t over yet.

  Another group of younger boys saw what the first group had done, and they too stood up and started making their way toward Alec. I knew that this would be Alec’s breaking point, but I still held my breath, hoping he wouldn’t do anything to wreck his new image. At the same time, I wasn’t planning on intervening; I knew this was his fight.

  Before the other boys could reach him, however, Alec saw them and stood up, looking them right in the eye and daring them to make another move. All eyes in the mess hall swiveled toward him. The boys immediately halted, and Alec said something else to them, but he was all the way on the other side of the mess hall, so I couldn’t hear what was said. Then he turned and met my gaze, and I nodded to him, giving him permission to leave before anyone else could bother him. He bowed one last time and left the mess hall in a rush.

  Of course, I had to be sociable, so I reluctantly stayed and finished my breakfast along with everyone else. I was about to leave and go find Alec when Jason pulled me aside. “My lady,” he began with a slight bow, “not that I don’t respect your judgment, but why did you make Alec a hero? He’s just so … young. And you of all people would know that most of the other famous heroes were more than ten years older than he is now.”

  “You will understand my choice soon enough. But what I want to know is why your only emergency phone was taken down,” I replied with a frown, annoyed that he questioned my authority. After all, I knew Jason’s real problem with Alec was not the hero’s abnormally young age, though his ceremony was indeed a step in the right direction toward terminating the policy of having to be sixteen to start battle training, the policy that had left Alec completely defenseless on the eve of his quest to find the gods.

  Jason gulped guiltily, and his brown eyes looked to the floor. This was obviously something he didn’t want to talk about. “It was being … misused,” he lied. I was starting to get a feel for how corrupt this base camp really was. It seemed to me that the leaders—Jason in particular—destroyed or punished anything or anyone who might be a threat to their power.

  “If you’re smart, you won’t lie to me again,” I hissed. “Now, I am planning to leave here tonight, but first, I must make an announcement. And I would reinstall that phone if I were you. It will probably save some lives,” I told him mysteriously, leaving half of the story out
. He looked at me quizzically, but I only turned around and left the mess hall, annoyed.

  I sighed as I stepped out from the mess hall and into the bright sunlight, but my thoughts of corruption were interrupted by loud cheers coming from behind a large blue tent. Naturally, I went to investigate.

  When I arrived on the scene, a large circle of people were standing and cheering, blocking my view of whatever was happening in the center, with evil grins on their faces. I quickly pushed my way through to the front and found Alec, dressed in full, poorly fitting armor, holding his sword, ready to attack. The boy he faced was the same age, the blond who had been the first to slap him on the back in the mess hall during breakfast.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked an average-looking boy with brown hair standing nearby, and even more people started to gather around the fight. It appeared as if the whole camp wanted to watch.

  “Brady challenged Alec to a fight,” he said, pointing to the blond boy, “and Alec accepted.”

  I frowned in thought, deciding not to intervene, even though I knew it was a bad idea for Alec to be fighting with the unhealed wounds on his back. Although I generally believed that people should battle only if absolutely necessary, this was an exception. All around the camp, I could tell that people did not think Alec was worthy of being a hero, so this was Alec’s chance to assert himself as the alpha male and to prove them wrong.

  The crowd gasped as Brady lunged at Alec, but Alec easily blocked his sword and swung back. They went back and forth, back and forth, blocking each other’s swings, each one failing to get a clean hit on the other. Most of the crowd was enthusiastically chanting “Brady! Brady!” over the sound of clanging metal, and I shook my head, disgusted. I knew Alec was hurt, but I also knew he could fight way better than that. He was a hero, for crying out loud, and Brady was leaving big, gaping holes in his defense. Hence, I guessed that Brady had just started his battle training.