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PROLOGUE ██████████ 000 ! ──────── ❛ the beginning of all. ❜
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▬▬▬▬HYACINTH OLOFSSON HAS ALWAYS KNOWN THAT THE WORLD IS OLDER THAN THE BOOKS TELL.
Myths are not just fables written on old marble or muttered by bards in the gloom. They are not dead stories. They live. They breathe. They wait. Hidden among the folds of the mortal world, among the trains that never reach their destination and the alleys where time stands still, gods and monsters are still there, watching, hunting, surviving. Like invisible scars in history.
Hyacinth had always known it. She had felt it in the way the trees followed her with their gaze, in how the moss shifted to avoid her steps, or how flowers bloomed even when the calendar insisted it was winter. It was as if the natural world recognized her. Waited for her. As if she bore an ancient surname stitched into her soul.
As a child━as small as a closed flower just beginning to discover light━she thought being a demigod was a blessing. A secret magic she shared only with her father. Florian Olofsson had hands that knew how to work the land, fingers unafraid to dig into the mud to bring life from the inert. He could turn a dry patch into a hanging garden, a dead plot into a feast of harvests.
To Hyacinth, her father was a god. Her god. One who smelled of wet earth and fresh sage. He would teach her, with infinite patience, how to care for a basil sprout like it was a baby fox, or how to bury a peach pit so that, if the gods willed it, an entire tree might grow. He did it with soft smiles and enchanted tales. He spoke to her of the secret language of seeds, of how roots listened to the pain of the world, and how even the loneliest flower could reach for the sun if someone whispered that it wasn't alone.
But the earth, even for the children of the harvest, can become treacherous.
As Hyacinth grew, the life they lived began to crack like ice at the end of winter. Moving became a ritual. One day they were neighbors to an old beekeeper in Vermont, the next, tenants of a tiny apartment above a greenhouse in North Carolina. Always on the move, always looking over their shoulders. Why? Because being a demigod was like walking through a forest where every shadow might eat you alive.
