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[ 001. Homesickness ]
For something that has dictated the majority of her life, magic has a fleeting effect on Lian.
Aiaia is at fault.
She knows that it's stupid to say that about a place, but the island hones a quality that makes it feel so much more than just what it is — trees and lakes and beaches. It could've been Ma's presence, but even now, with Lian at Camp Half-Blood and Ma nowhere to be found, she can feel it in her bones that Aiaia walks along its uninterrupted line: sheathed in foggy clouds, luring sailors to their demise. It is a deadly place; she was born there, a terrible abomination of nature. Witches need magic to survive, to exist, and yet, she is a witch with no magic of her own. She can brew and memorise spells but she cannot truly practice magic.
It bred consuming jealousy in her from a young age when Ma began the school and demigods would show up at their doorsteps to learn from her something Lian never could. She feels it with the same intensity she feels the pain: the absolute need to scratch her throat from the inside, rough and dry, as blood pours out and leaves behind a sharp pain in her stomach. Loudly. And she'd learned to live with it, but now in Camp Half-Blood, it is slowly awakening inside her because it's everywhere.
The demigods are hanging on by threads.
And they never voice it. She never voiced it — let the jealousy and anger fill her up like air in a balloon till she burst and screamed at Ma instead. Moments that she recalls hazily: the phantom spark of magic in her fingertips and her mind chanting their names, Ma's little witches, performing miracle after miracle to win her favour.
But.
Ma did not will for Lian to be born this way, and she did not love her less for it. Inevitably it leads her to circle back: Aiaia is at fault. That wretched place, that gilded palace, home, because another thing that's everywhere at Camp Half-blood is that Lian doesn't belong here.
The only people it welcomes are demigods. Annabeth's initial curiosity concealed that fact for a time, but since day one Lian has been kept distant. By Chiron, by Dionysus — lent a room in the Big House, uninvited to camp activities and with no real place to stay. They're afraid of her mother, a sentiment she's realized they share with lots of people. Circe died a long time ago, but her title has lived on and passed down to generations of witches akin to her. Most of them were famous for their power and the foundation they built for themselves — segregated from Olympus, with Zeus fearing them. But Ma is . . . more infamous, which Lian presumes is why they're being civil.
There are questions.
Annabeth asked a lot of them on the boat; Aiaia becoming a tiny speck and Lian unable to tear her eyes away, even after it disappeared completely. Are you also a witch? Do you know about the prophecy? About the war? What do you know at all? — prodding and prying and relentless. Lian gave her the answers Ma had given Lian, but as she relayed them she realized they weren't really answers at all.
