Page 237 of Hekate: The Witch (Goddesses of the Underworld #1)

We Began Our Journey

The lands of the living were starting to look like the lands of the dead.

Bodies littered across fields and villages, covered in ice and snow.

Which was precisely what I needed. It was in my own cold divinity that I had thought of this idea, an idea that had made Hermes smirk even through his fear and Thanatos gaze at me long enough that I recognized my own callousness.

But I took their reactions the way I had learned to take all reactions from Gods.

With a grain of salt. We walked through the lands, Hecuba by my side.

For comfort, I would sometimes stroke her white fur absently as we saw body after body and she whined.

I pulled out my bag of simples, and worked quickly.

Moly and mugwort, lavender and bone dust, the amber hearts of newborn stars.

It came so quickly to me now, my craft considered anathema to the Gods.

Hermes and Thanatos watched me silently as I worked.

Now at the very last village, obliterated by the cold, I gently placed the last heart I had into the chest of a blue corpse.

He rose as the others did from the endless sleep of death back into a half-life.

Stepping back, I surveyed them all. Once, they were human.

Now, touched by divinity, they were an abomination to every other God.

But to me, they were my own beautiful, merciless creations. I named them for what they were.

I called them Legion.