𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗿𝘂𝘀 𝗳𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘀, luke castellan

ᴛʜɪʀᴛʏ-ᴛʜʀᴇᴇ

Alone.

🌎

    KRONOS DIDN'T VISIT HER IN HER DREAMS. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, the titan of time and destruction had left her nights untroubled by his dark presence. That should have brought a sense of relief. After all, wasn't this what she had wanted? To be free of his haunting visions, those twisted nightmares where he whispered ominous promises and showed her glimpses of a future filled with chaos and ruin?

    But instead of relief, Rory found herself consumed by an overwhelming sense of emptiness. The absence of Kronos felt like a void, a chilling silence that gnawed at her very core. It was as if a part of her had been hollowed out, leaving behind an aching chasm. The dreams had been terrible, yes, filled with dread and foreboding, but they had also been a connection—a twisted, dark thread that tied her to something larger, something beyond herself. Now, without even that grim tether, she felt adrift, unanchored in a sea of uncertainty.

    A gnawing fear began to take root in the pit of her stomach, growing stronger with each passing moment. What if she had been abandoned? What if, in her moment of greatest need, she had been forgotten? The thought was like a lead weight pressing down on her chest, constricting her breath. No one would come for her, she realized with a sinking feeling. The fear twisted and curled around her heart, tightening its grip until she could almost feel it squeezing the life out of her. She was utterly alone.

    The realization hit her like a cold wave, washing over her and leaving her shivering in its wake. The room around her felt vast and empty, the silence deafening. She had always known that there were risks, that her life as a demigod was fraught with dangers and uncertainties. But the emotional weight of that knowledge had never felt so crushing, so immediate. It was one thing to face monsters and gods with her friends by her side, but quite another to confront the stark, isolating reality of being cut off from everyone and everything she cared about.

    Kronos's absence raised troubling questions. Had he moved on? Found someone else to manipulate, to twist to his purposes? Or worse, had he simply decided she was no longer useful, no longer worth the effort? The thought stung, not because she wanted his attention, but because it reinforced the terrifying idea that she was insignificant, just another pawn in a game she barely understood. The dreams had been a way for him to exert his influence, to pull her strings and set her on a path he had chosen. Without them, without him, she felt directionless, her sense of purpose slipping through her fingers like sand.

    As the minutes stretched into hours, Rory couldn't shake the feeling of being trapped in a liminal space, a twilight zone between worlds. She was neither fully human nor fully divine, caught in a perpetual state of in-betweenness. It felt like a curse, isolating her from the mortal world she had once called home and the godly realm she would never truly belong to.

    Rory's thoughts spiraled further into darkness as she grappled with the unsettling emptiness of her dreams. She found herself trapped in a relentless cycle of torment, a twisted echo of the nightmares she had endured from Kronos. But in his absence, a new kind of horror had taken root—a relentless onslaught of doubt and despair that threatened to consume her whole. Alone with her own thoughts, every moment of uncertainty, every shred of self-doubt came flooding back with a vengeance, tormenting her with their merciless onslaught. She questioned everything—her worth, her purpose, her very existence. What did it mean to be the daughter of a goddess if she was powerless, adrift in a world that seemed to have moved on without her?

    She tossed and turned restlessly on her bed, the sheets twisted and tangled around her like the thoughts in her mind. The darkness of the room felt oppressive, pressing down on her. She could hear the faint sounds of the night outside—the whispering of the wind, the distant call of an owl—but they only served to accentuate the silence within, a silence that screamed with unspoken fears and unacknowledged truths.