The Goddessy: Hestia's Revenge

Chapter Fifteen

Zeus stared uncomfortably at the piles of petals as Rainbow and Aphrodite both watched him like a hawk.

"I swear, I don't know how they survived," Zeus picked up a petal.

"Why were they in there?" Aphrodite asked.

Zeus rolled the petal in his fingers.

"Thetis had given me these in case I needed another batch of carnatium," Zeus explained. "But then she came later on, when you were born-" he pointed to Rainbow, "holding the white carnation. She later explained that she had regretted her choice to help me poison my father, and she hoped that you could set things right."

She couldn't ask any further questions about what Thetis had meant because the memories of nearly everything came back...

Two-day-old her had been busy playing with her drool by the time Zeus and Hera had brought her out. The sun had nearly blinded her eyes, and her ears overloaded with the cheers of the other gods and goddesses. All she had wanted to do her first week of life was just to take naps, use the bathroom, and eat. Not be showcased for the world.

Then Hera had finally let her try and nap in her crib, but not until everyone started hovering over her to try and see the new goddess, with many as her new older siblings. She did end up whining for the next fifteen minutes, and eventually rolled over and had started to finally drift off when Thetis had showed up. Thetis had only uttered simple words that meant nothing to her at first as she was given a white carnation: You will have a future unlike any other. But she couldn't process it because she was already asleep by that point. Pretty much the whole time she was younger, half of her hours were spent napping. And then when she went down to Earth, she still spent a good portion of her time fast asleep. Even if it meant dozing off at school.

And then the next week Zeus had taken her to see the Oracle of Athens, and the Oracle kind of just... looked at her strangely, like she knew something in the future was gonna happen. Or it was that she had been rubbing her eyes for the past five minutes, trying to stay awake (really, sleeping had become a big part of her life). The Oracle had started talking to Zeus, and then she had fallen asleep again. That month after must have been snoozefest after snoozefest, considering that she barely remembered what was going on. Despite her seemingly perfect memory, that month appeared to be her one gap.

Then there was the time that kid had tortured her by reminding her of that one night she was attacked by a plant monster from Hestia. He literally had attached leaves and vines around his arms and waist, and had tried to grab her, but then she had zapped his arm and she got a long lecture from Hera for a good while. Then Zeus talked about stuff like emotions, but again, she was already drifting off.

Most of her memories from permanently on Olympus always seemed to involve someone either acting strangely or speaking in phrases she couldn't understand. But then every time she had tried to process it, her mind was already shutting off for the moment, already going into her crazy dreams. Every once in a while, some strange dream would enter her brain and play it for all of her to visualize. One of those dreams was especially strange though, with her running down a dark hallway when she found herself in a room filled with laurel wreaths. When she touched the nearest one, she blew up, and then she found her five-year-old self screaming her head off. Athena had at least come into her room and she didn't leave until the next morning. The next dream was during her first night on Earth, when she was staring at Mount Olympus, then started scaling the mountain, but every time she tried to get to the clouds, coils of vines would pull her into a dark oblivion filled with death balls-orbs of black smoke that killed the victim instantly upon direct contact. And then when she finally made it to ten, there was the dream where she had been watching as Zeus was executed by the Greeks. Her dream at thirteen was the scariest, when she was running through the palace as it shattered, black obsidian replacing the iridescent crystal as vines choked her, and Hades watched it all, with a cloaked figure by his side. At fifteen, she was running through a labyrinth when spikes and myraks all stabbed at her, but then she was caught in a tidal wave and drowned from losing too much blood. Her most recent one was last month, when she had the weirdest dream of all.