Mortem Obire

Chapter 14

Chapter 14: A testament to the fact that snakes are assholes

A whistle startled her out of her terrible carving, and she looked up to see another of her half-brothers looking down at her – or perhaps, more accurately, her ruined carving. Trying to keep herself busy when she couldn't follow her siblings into the forest made nervousness twist in her gut. "You okay?" Jason asked, peering down at her with those blue eyes that a vast majority of her half-siblings seemed to have. Including her, to everyone else's eyes, that was. "You're kinda destroying that... uh, thing, you know."

"I'm aware," she grumbled, continuing then to destroy the carving she hadn't been able to shape properly. Mostly because her attention was focused elsewhere. "And I'm fine," she said, wincing and resisting the overwhelming urge to bash her head against the table as her infernal sense for truths registered that as a lie. She wasn't fine. Rather, she was incredibly stressed because she was needed to complete a quest, and yet no one believed her when she spoke of that much. What was she supposed to do to prove that she was the plague-spreading daughter of Apollo? Was she supposed to spread yet another illness? One which could potentially be as fatal as the last one she had accidentally caused? She swallowed thickly, scowling and turning her glare back on her carving.

"Um," Jason mumbled, and Harriet just knew he was about to call her out on being a filthy liar when it came to her feelings. Sometimes she wondered why it was so hard to be honest when it came to her feelings and everything they wrought.

"Just let me enjoy lying to myself for a bit longer," she stated, glaring scorchingly at her carving. Every bit of moisture in the wood seemed to vanish into thin air, and a familiar tug came at the very core of her power, and Harriet could only blink as the wood spontaneously caught on fire. "Oops," she mumbled, staring at the fire as it began to spread. Heat, just like the sun gave out, which was soon quenched as a burly kid cracked out a fire-extinguisher and sprayed her desk with the foam vigorously.

"You know," the child of Hephaestus said matter-of-factly, "we usually only get desks being set on fire in our workshop. I don't think I've ever seen a wood carving spontaneously combust without a source of heat..."

"First time for everything," Harriet grumbled, folding her arms and glaring mulishly at the table, even as she felt the stares settle on her, heavy like a weighted blanket.

"Uh... do you want to start over?" Jason asked, glancing at her, a slight nervous expression on his face – as though he were inches away from a bomb about to go off. "There's more pieces of wood you could use. I don't think we'll run out soon, unless you set the tent on fire..."

Someone from the Hephaestus table elbowed him in the ribs. "Don't give her ideas," the girl hissed, and Jason winced. Harriet didn't know whether it was from the pain, or the mental image of the tent on fire.

"Didn't Apollo appear in a ball of fire when we visited on the winter solstice field trip?" another person murmured, and Harriet kept her gaze fixed on the table, not wanting to turn around and face all the stares she could feel boring into her back.

"Well he is the god of the sun, you know... the big, fiery ball of gas... plus a dozen other things," yet another voice chimed in, and Harriet wondered then if any of them were psychic – or had some godly-related insight into the many secrets she kept tucked within the recesses of her chest. "Though I suppose Cabin Seven have never really had any proclivity towards pyrotechnics," the girl continued, and Harriet almost thought she heard another, older, stern voice of a Scottish witch for a moment. Or was she just imagining things? She hadn't hear her old professor's voice in years. "I mean, that ability is more for Cabin Nine – and even then, it hasn't appeared there for years."