The Goddessy: Hestia's Revenge

Chapter Nine

Zeus didn't have to know what she had done. She felt fine anyway, for some reason.

But she had seen the memory.

"You two are lucky that Hestia didn't get to you," Zeus pulled a book out and flipped it open. Ares and Rainbow stared at each other. They were standing in a strange, dusty, dark room with a few candles for lighting and a large bookshelf, full of thick books.

"What do you mean?" she said, her voice shaky.

"Hestia's become a soulless monster," Zeus kept flipping through the book. "Anyone standing in her way of what she wants will receive a grave ending. Something must have happened for you two to escape."

Yeah, he doesn't need to know about Heracles, she thought.

"Well, she did attack us with myraks," Ares said, rubbing his sore arm.

"You do realize myraks are a key ingredient to carnatium," Zeus finally showed them the same page Athena had been looking at. There was only one name on the records of people who had been under it.

Cronus.

And now Twilight.

"But there's an antidote, right?" she asked, looking up from the yellowed pages.

"Sadly, we haven't looked for one," Zeus sighed. "Because of its one occurrence, we just assumed it would never happen again. We had other problems to focus on, like when the Greeks and Romans fell..."

"And we were forgotten," Ares finished.

She couldn't imagine living on Olympus for centuries as mortals literally worshipped you, then said you didn't exist. She could only remember hiding her own identity from the world for millennia.

"Is it hard to make carnatium?"Ares tried to keep on their subject.

"It's actually really easy, even though the instructions say otherwise," Zeus said. "But black carnations don't grow very often. I was lucky to find one."

"What do you mean?" Ares pressed.

"I must let you know that you can never tell anyone else," Zeus said. "But... it was me who had found the black carnation."

"How?" she cocked her head.

"I had been by what is now Hestia's lair," Zeus explained, "I had been thinking of ways to make Cronus bring back my five brothers and sisters. My mother, Rhea, had been smart when she had swapped me for a rock, but I had been running out of ideas, until I had stumbled upon a single black carnation. I went inside, and I found a whole garden of them, along with sleeping myraks. I didn't know at the time that I couldn't control them, at least not until Hestia came along, as I didn't know that they were calm near fire."

"Like the phoenixes," Ares interrupted.

"Right," Zeus continued. "And then I had a simple idea: poison Cronus's drink so that he would bring up my siblings. I came up for the recipe for carnatium, learning that black carnations and myrak hair have a special poison that slowly destroys the victim. I also learned that it will affect the person in a certain way if they had their own blood mixed in as well. I spent weeks experimenting, until I had the right concoction. But after Cronus had brought back my siblings, I regretted what I had done, and quickly started trying to make an antidote. But sadly, he died before I could finish my discovery."

"Do you remember that discovery?" she breathed, worried about asking for too much.

Zeus went back to the bookshelf and pulled out a thin leather-bound journal, flipping through the pages.