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━━ chapter fourteen with the wolves ( jason )
✿✼:*ﾟ:༅。.。༅:*·ﾟﾟ·⭑
━━Jason dreamed he was swinging upside down, wrapped up in a cocoon of chains like a hunk of meat in an ice vault. Everything hurt━his arms, his legs, his chest, his head. (Especially his head. It felt like an overinflated water balloon).
"If I'm dead," he murmured to himself, "why does it hurt so much?"
"You're not dead, my hero," said a woman's voice. "It is not your time. Come, speak with me."
Jason's thoughts floated away from his body. He heard monsters yelling, his friends screaming, fiery explosions, but all of it seemed to be happening on another planet━getting further and futher away ...
He found himself standing in an earthen cage. Tendrils of tree roots and stone whirled together, confining him. Outside the bars, he could see the floor of a dry reflecting pool, another earthen spire growing at the far end and, above them, the ruined red stones of a burnt-out house.
Next to him in the cage, a woman sat cross-legged in black robes, her head covered by a shroud. She pushed aside her veil, revealing a face that was proud and beautiful━but also hardened with suffering.
"Hera," Jason recognised her immediately, and he wasn't exactly happy at this small reunion.
"Welcome to my prison," said the goddess sarcastically (can goddesses be sarcastic?). "You will not die today, Jason. Your friends will see you through━for now."
His stomach lurched. "For now?"
(What was that suppposed to mean?).
Hera gestured at the tendrils of her cage. "There are worse trials to come. The very earth stirs against us."
"You're a goddess," frowned Jason. "Why can't you just escape?"
Hera smiled sadly. Her form began to glow, until her brilliance filled the cage with a painful light. The air hummed with power, molecules splitting apart like a nuclear explosion. Jason suspected if he were actually here in the flesh, he would have been vaporised.
The cage should've blasted to rubble. The ground should've split and the ruined house should've been levelled. But when the glow died, the cage hadn't budged. Nothing outside the bars had changed. Only Hera looked different━more drained and tired than she had been before, like she was actually starting to show her true age.
"Some powers are even greater than the gods," she said. "I am not easily contained. I can be in many places at once. But when the greater part of my essence is caught, it is like a foot in a bear trap, you might say. I can't escape, and I am concealed from the eyes of other gods. Only you can find me, and I grow weaker by the day."
