Butcher

IV

The sun shone down at the Earth as Apollo's chariot flew through the morning sky.

But the moon herself wasn't present to see the rays of light warming the world below.

Instead, she was in a dark, humid and cold cave with an unclaimed demigoddess, both of them following a sociopath.

To be fair to him, Artemis wasn't a specialist on that matter. She wasn't Dionysus or Athena, both of which would probaly make a diagnosis on Percy sentencing him to a psychiatric hospital. Artemis didn't mean to be angry at the boy, but by Hera, did he get on her nerves. It wasn't like the clumsy and noble boy who took the sky for her, but a indomitable beast. Although his loyalty was still there, obviously, it didn't change how ruthless he had become. She saw him in action for months, slaughtering monsters like it was nothing, and always managing to escape from the Hunt at the last second, always outsmarting her. She wasn't a goddess of wisdom, but she shouldn't be outsmarted by a boy, no matter how powerful said boy was.

True, she had her tendencies to be antagonistic to men, but she didn't hate all of them. Percy's case was different. Those tendencies, for example, wouldn't prevent her from acknowledging the sins of a woman, but it was enough for her to receive the title of "man hating goddess", even by her fellow Olympians. And the Hunt didn't really help with this by how they acted around men, particularly at Camp Half-Blood, even burning cabins at times. For most of history, the Hunt was made of girls who had problems with men and this created a culture. For most of the ancient times, girls trying to run away from her fathers who wished to marry them to random, unknown men for status, money, or any sort of benefits to them and their kingdoms and lands, not to their daughters. But slowly, time had changed. Even if the Hunt was still known as the man hating squadron by most on the mythological world, most of the current roster of girls didn't really have a problem with men just because they were men.

True, they did target Percy earlier, but they were just as pissed off as her of him escaping their grasp so many times. But they did not target men simply because they were males.

And about change... Artemis remembered her oath as if she made it yesterday. She didn't take it the same day as she was born, that was Zeus being an idiot by promising anything on the Styx to a less than a day old goddess. When she did make her actual oath on the river of hatred, it was right after Hestia's own oath, motivated by her fool of a brother wishing to marry their aunt. What went through his head, she never knew until recently, for him to even conceive of such an idea, and she quickly swore not to get married and to abdicate of the company of the man right after that incident. She wasn't oblivious to the fact that many considered her one of the most beautiful goddesses in Olympus, second only to Aphrodite herself in the eyes of many, so much so that she had been afraid in the past that even Apollo would propose to her. Who knew what would happen? After all, marriage between siblings was something that happened quite a lot in the divine world since the creation of time. Hell, even many Protogenoi couples were born from the same deities. It was only after a while that Artemis and Apollo developed this brother-sister bond unlike of any god or goddess in the entire Greek (or Roman, for that matter) pantheon.

And she swore not to get married out of fear of ending up like Hera, cheated like there is no tomorrow, being consumed by grief, hatred, and pain. To not be forced into a loveless marriage that she would have been seen as an object. But she did have to admit how much times had changed. There were no girls that joined the Hunt in the last seventy to eighty years because of an arranged marriage. While she admited the change in times, she always accepted that it was probably too late to change her own mind and even if she wanted it, who knew what would happen if she actually broke her oath? Only the Fates and Styx herself, that's for sure. And she didn't really have anyone that would motivate her to do such a thing. Only one individual ever came close, and even then most people wouldn't even consider what she felt for him a "crush", or whatever mortals called a small affection. Love was probably nice to have, but the means to achieve it were simply out of her grasp and out of her schedule, she had bigger things to worry about.