Page 11 of Hekate: The Witch (Goddesses of the Underworld #1)

The Earth After War

Cocooned in the nest of a disintegrating but safe palace, I did not know what the world outside looked like.

But my mother, who had grown up playing in meadows and rivers and the ocean with her sister, Leto, and her cousins the Oceanids, knew this Earth well.

As she carried me in an ivory cloth slung across her front, all I could hear was her fast-paced heartbeat.

She had told me stories about her girlhood, but this Earth had no verdant pastures or vibrant forests like she described.

Instead, God-blood still potent sizzled on fertile brown earth and coated dying trees – I could see none of the beauty from her stories here.

My mother had brought nectar for us both, but as I grew hungrier for it, my stomach aching with want and then need, I noticed she gave more and more of her share to me.

It was only when I saw the sapphire seas like sprinkled diamonds glistening with sunlight that I understood the beauty of the world.

But it was fleeting, for my mother cradled me close and summoned the clouds to carry us from one island to the next.

Her footsteps, running, made the birds scatter, but where she would have once stopped to soothe them, now she simply kept going.

Behind us I heard the thundering chase. What else could we do but run with two hungry God-wolves hunting us down?