The Rage of Artemis )O( [Myrmidons]
A day hadn’t gone by where Callie did not think of Artemis and Apollo.
She had been living in their house, after all, after she had to leave the dorms, after she’d told Polyhymnus that she’d come back to Piperi after summer was done. She’d done her due duty. She’d told them about Euterpe. She felt the guilt of her decision weigh down on her constantly.
But thinking of Artemis and Apollo – of the future they would share together – that kept her going. She thought of going to Florida first, introducing them to her mother and Dr. Sweet, then journeying to Kenya to reunite with Kiara and from there – they had the whole world, their whole future, theirs at last.
She hadn’t heard from either of them, but she had to hope that they would not fail.
Callie, actually, was not thinking of Artemis when she walked into the book shoppe for her shift. She was thinking of the order she had to unpack today and how she’d decorate the display for July. She had her headphones on and was listening to some music, humming along. She pushed open the door of the shoppe, slid off her headphones –
She froze, glancing from Artemis to Belle to the curled body on the floor, panic quickly rising within her. She opened her mouth, about to ask what had happened, what was going on, but she met Artemis’ eyes and immediately she knew.
But dusk shadows glory, turned bitter and brief,
When one stands alone to bury their grief
“Artemis, no,” she whispered, taking a step closer. “Not like this.”
The bow cracked against the ground. Its wood splintered, snapped. This alone wouldn’t be enough to tame the goddess of wild beasts.
No, not lightning. Merida gasped. It was the opposite of lightning, as if the storm she had held inside her was sucked out through a straw. Her back arched as though she’d taken one of Artemis’s arrows between the shoulder blades. The burning from her magic snuffed. The howling from the wolf ceased. The gnashing of her teeth, the hunger in her belly– Merida had carried these things so long that she had not realized how much she had grown around these things. She collapsed without them as if her legs were nothing but sticks, now snapped like the bow.
She laid in a heap, gasping. At first, she thought– I’m dying.
She must be dying. Everything was quiet, cold, colour sucked out from the world. Her senses all dimmed. She couldn’t hear the commotion of the streets, smell Belle’s sweet scent…
Instead, she groaned and tried to push up with her flimsy, trembling arms as another person entered the store. Calliope, called Artemis. They knew each other? That had to be bad. Artemis was turning everyone into her enemy, whether they had been friend or foe. (One thing was certain– Hades could not meet this goddess–)
“Run!” Merida called, weakly from the floor as her warning.
@labellerose-acheron
@calliope-hesiod
Artemis scoffed at the feeble wolf-girl on the floor.
“She does not need to run,” Artemis said plainly.
She turned, then, abandoning Belle--though, she would’ve never hurt the woman (she tells herself this.) She turned towards Calliope and feels her heart beat once in her chest, for the first time since she had lost half of it. It only chimes the once, but it is enough to make her step towards Calliope, stumbling in her wretched grief towards the young woman.
Calliope cannot make it better. Her presence is a salve on a wound that will never heal. It is the bite of a brown recluse. It rots the flesh, it expands and expands, eating a hole through her until there will be nothing else: Artemis, a dying star, collapsing in upon itself.
She reaches out a hand anyway, bloodied and coarse. Artemis had always had such rough hands, from plucking thorny plants upon the fields of Piperi, from holding the hewn wood of her bow. It was if she covered her hands in callouses, perhaps she could protect others from her magic, buried beneath the layers of her flesh.
Now, she held out one of those hands to Calliope.
“Let us go, let us find Apollo in the Underworld, and then, let us do all we planned,” Artemis entreated her, tears shining in her eyes like the pools of water that Artemis had always imagined her mother had once loved, as she had once loved her children. As Artemis had once loved her father.
@calliope-hesiod, @heart-of-dunbroch
