MELODRAMA ... heroes of olympus

002. the knife in which i cut my tongue

chapter two

the knife in which i cut my tongue

Who do you have to love you?

It was a simple question with what should be a relatively simple answer. Arden knew who was supposed to love her, she knew that they tried. But she also knew that they shouldn't. They should not love and care for someone so volatile in nature, so lenient with their morals and careless with their temper. Or maybe they did love her, maybe for all of those horrid reasons; but loving a monster does not change its nature and apart of her had realised long ago the loving her was nothing short of a death sentence.

Because loving Arden was like loving the riptide, and the riptide only existed for two things; to destroy and to punish.

"Earthshaker, Stormbringer, Father of horses. Hail Arden Jackson, daughter of the Sea God."

Stormbringer.

She could almost taste it along the horizon.

Arden rolled the question around on her tongue for a while before ultimately spitting it out. She didn't need love, not even if her tainted bones craved it. Because she craved lots of things, and it's not like she could control what she lusted for, that was a job for the burning stones in the sky. They were the ones insistent on keeping Arden flawed and hungry and everlasting, as if she were an old folk song on the lips of whiskey coated tongues, passed down through generation upon generation. A rather frightening foreign fable.

It was twisting her into a weapon, one of mass destruction no doubt.

But weapons, they do not weep.

The blood-thirst that had clouded her sense had passed in the night, the scorching flame reduced to nothing but a timid ember. Arden was drowning in her own sorrow, the reluctant come down of the high. There was only a bone-deep weariness left. Her eyelashes were stuck together with misery, it was all she was. This ocean gripped her with a familiar fragile finger, a cold hand pressed heavy against her throat squeezing, begging to pick apart her soul like pieces of frail sand slipping beneath the sea foam.

And really, it was a toothless sort of heartache, for it felt more a pretence to show Annabeth that she was sad. Arden wasn't sad, she was bitter and longed to spit words from her mouth rather than become a withered shell of a human being just like her.

But alas, there was no idiotic brother to lash out at, no half-groggy and messy-haired twin to throw vocal punches at in the early hours of the morn. Arden had always held onto things that hurt her a little too tightly, as if a comforting form of control, as if she loved to feel the kiss of a blade against her neck, as if to feel some kind of cursed chaos.

That was the only thing left. But beneath it all there was a calculation. The universe knew what it was doing when it had thrown Arden to the wind. It knew what it was doing when it created a hunger, a desire, so restless in her stomach it left bruises along her womb. It was maddening, this creature inside of her, it clawed at her stomach with beaks blunt and nails sharp.

This chaos, it was purposeful.

Chaos is madness and madness is just another form of power, albeit a rather ugly creature but still, one that bore the crest of fairness and ferocity all the same.

And whilst Arden had never cared much for power, it still rumbled in her bones. Power and love were the same, maybe if she couldn't be loved she could be powerful, mighty or even feared. The sea knew it long before she did, that she was going to trade affection for perfection, become the monsters she fought, become frightening, scary even.