— ✹ artemis·
❛ I upset you ❜ the Goddess assents —no apology to the words, but a kind of odd curiosity, as though upheaval was particular only to mortals, and no deity was ever tried by it. The Huntress brings two fingers together, and she sketches an arrow-tipped motion through the air: a signal, plain for supplicant and demigod alike, its understanding inherited from wiser ancestors, from lines of men who made survival inextricable from piety. The symbol dictactes: you can look. You can see.
❛ You would be in the right if I have. Your mother’s fate, the interference in what her fate should’ve been: it upsets me as well. I loved her, you see. Of course, not like you love your hunting companion—— ❜
A faint, intimate smile hangs from the corner of her lips; a break in the pattern, like the rapid shudder of a loom missing a spoke. ❛ ——but well enough. ❜
The oblique turn to her mouth means to say, oh, I know of your heart.She finds herself revelling in it: the radiance, lonely and unique, carried in Achilles’ bond. So easy to pick apart from all the others, the luster of what they have, the way it singes the night sky even now, miles into the forest. Like the burning stars of yore: beings wrought into legend not through kratos, but through agape. She is no Aphrodite; she finds to delight in love in and of itself. What she had glimpsed in them, however, is something endless, unquenchable and appeased at once. It seems to her brandished holy.
❛ I give you leave to be cross with me for bringing your mother here, though we both know, her impact is just as momentous in absence. But I do not give you leave to be afraid.❜
“there is much i do not know of her. it is not surprise to learn such a thing.” he would not admit to being hurt outloud, both out of pride, and the knowledge that the olympian before him likely was not looking for confirmation. she knew. they always did.
as the veil of understanding is pulled back, it makes sense to him that he speaks with silver-bowed artemis. “Πότνια Θηρῶν.” the epithet escapes his lips in reverence but not necessarily shock, as he called artemis by the moniker with which they worshiped her in phthia. she had been the subject of many of his mother’s stories when he was a boy, the ones she used to tell with a far off look in her eye as he curled up in her lap, a slow, dewy hand painting rivers into his soft hair.
he had always been torn. achilles loved his father, but he found it painful beyond measure to reconcile that love with the stories of anguish that ripped from his mother’s mouth like screams. “it is certainly an unsettling tale.” perhaps that was part of the reason his mother hated patroclus’ influence on him so vehemently; she had never been given the chance to choose.
“—and no, i do not believe many love their hunting companions so much as i do mine.” it was as honest as it was a warning. there were gods that would see him hurt, artemis’ twin soul among them, and he had a venomous enough mind to anticipate the knowledge that he was sure most gods possessed; the chink in his armour was not his styx-dry heel, but the noble-browed son of opus to whom his very being belonged. he laid his claim in his words, protective, adoring and reverent.
“it is news to me that she is here at all, lady artemis.” she had not shown herself to him thus far in sparta, though he knew it was only a matter of time before she put her damp finger to her son’s chin and tried to push his gaze from his patroclus to the spartan princess. "i would not bear you ill will for that, even with permisson. i just hope she has not come for things i cannot give her." he spared artemis a sad smile. "my mother and i are at odds, you see, about my future."
