The Battle of Olympus | III

14. I Have A Terrible Plan

Me desperately begging my mind: spare plot? Spare plot? Please, please, plot.

My brain: no, more Eden and Apollo fluff!

As you can tell, this book is 50% plot and 50% relationship building. It's bad.

He was waiting for me in the same place we had last seen each other, just like I had predicted. It was strange, seeing an unfamiliar face on a person I had once known. Harper just looked up as I approached, a confident smirk gracing his features; my hands, still stuffed in my pockets, clenched at the sight. I had always hated his smirk, ever since I saw it the day he had killed my uncle. It had been the day I swore no mercy on him.

"Aelia," he said breezily. "You're here."

"Don't call me that," I snapped. "If you want me to call you Harper, Hannibal, my name is Eden to you."

He didn't respond, though the mirth had faded and his eyes had hardened.

"My answer's no," I continued. "You were close—very close—but you miscalculated. But I have a question for you. Why are you allied with Claudius? I may have hated you, but I know you, to an extent—all you cared about then was Carthage and her glory, and bettering the lives of the citizens you had once swore to protect—you even begged me for their lives. Why throw all that away now, just for a world where you wouldn't even rule in?"

"Don't," he snapped, but I wasn't done.

"I'm just a pawn in this game, that I know quite well. Claudius just wanted me to surrender so he could supply himself with more of my blood and continue building his army to later invade Olympus, but have you ever thought of yourself? Of your allies? Claudius would double-cross the primordials if he thought he could, though with our infamous madness, I wouldn't be surprised if he's already begun thinking of a way to."

"He's more honorable than you."

"Is he? Don't get me wrong—I've hardly done anything in my life that could remotely forgive my actions in the past, but is Claudius really better than me? I killed him, yes, and the gods punished me for my kinslaying, but have you ever realized you're working for a man who killed the rest of his family, barring me? A man who had no problem killing a tenth of his army, a man who treated his own kin like inferiors? Even I, in all my cruelty, never did."

"And yet you decimated the rest of the world," he said angrily.

That just elicited a short, humorless laugh from me. "Says the man who killed over eighty-percent of my legion."

"They weren't yours—"

"They were people too, and you didn't stop there. Even if you were to argue Cannae was a battle and therefore was within your rights to crush us, what about Saguntum? They had done you no wrong when you decided to lay siege to them; done you no wrong when you decided to slaughter them for refusing to bend the knee to your tyrannical rule. Men, women, children, the elderly, the sick; all those who refused to bow, you killed. Yet you are miles better than Claudius—how could you ever think Claudius would keep his promises?"

"You don't know anything about Chase."

"Chase? Is that what he goes by? I was thinking he went by cu—"

"That just proves my point! You don't know him!"

"He was my father, of course I knew him! I know him better than you! I lived with him for sixteen miserable years! And I know how fast he can drop allies, how quickly he can turn on his own friends he will swear until his deaths he never betrayed—you think I'm horrible for doing all I did, but where do you think I learned it? Claudius is a master manipulator; he will tell you everything you want to hear, but when your survival doesn't benefit him anymore, he'll rip your life from you in an instant."