The King bearer three

Part 3: Tobias

This was turning out to be a very long day.

Especially when Tobys studies in Runology were so rudely interrupted. Yes, he was an Astrologist, but he justified it in the name of branching out and helping a sibling cheat her finals. Never mind, ignore that. He would much rather prefer to not get in trouble about using his gifts for such a reason.

He was standing in the room with Alegría de Vida, who goes by the nickname "Joy", and was doing some research on the runes their godly mother – Hecate - had inspired in history, as well as the properties of said runes, when he heard a very disruptive sound coming from behind the door.

Most people would say that it wasn't super loud, that it was fine, but... Tobias would beg to differ. He then went up to investigate.

He soon wished he hadn't.

From the moment he opened the door, he...saw something weird. Outside the room, there was a single rock on the ground. A single rock that he, for some unknown reason, felt a strange pull towards. Shrugging his confusion off, he simply picked up the peculiar rock on the ground and left for his cabin.

Then, when he got to his cabin, he simply jumped into bed, too exhausted to change his clothes to sleep... Which was how he ended up with a rock with a strange rune inscribed on it tucked into his back pocket while he lay on his bed, shaking in paralytic sleep. He had lain in a comatose state for an age. He was dreaming. Or at least, he thought he was dreaming...

But, perhaps not. What he saw felt too real. He saw, he had seen, the stars, and every story that had been written in them. He saw Orion, chasing the Pleiades and hunting his fallen prey in the underworld, he saw the Great Bear and her cub, the tale of how that cub came to be and the matricide that followed. He saw the fates, beckoning him to join them in writing all that comes after, to inscribe new names in the stars. Each night, their proposal was the same. In tribute to their names, and as a plea to get them to please stop bothering him already, he redesigned the inside of his room as a shrine to them, the three fates: Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos.

He almost considered restructuring the entire room, so each of the fates would be represented in each of three corners. Eventually, it was the fates that made that decision. They told him to keep the room as it was, to fill the last corner with all the things that made him special, that he loved. When he asked why, it was Clotho who told him in a private dream, the story of their lost sibling, one who represented the people's control over their lives, who Zeus decreed to disappear when "it was proven" that mankind could not be trusted.

Their name was Fílos, Fílos tou Promithéa. Friend of Prometheus, a name they gave themself as the representative for mankind. Tobias always liked Clotho. Clotho told him Fílos did too. He often wondered what Fílos was like, what got them banished from the fates circle. Maybe it was... His mind never found an answer.

The days melted together. He never noticed the times he was awake or asleep, he saw the fates either way. The other campers thought he had gone mad, his conversations with Clotho, on the steps of his school building, inside his room and behind closed doors, were just him talking to himself to them. Another demigod, driven mad by the incomprehensibility of ..., everything. Guilt and fear, mostly.

Not that he cared, it was the same thing that earned him nicknames like TinTin (a play on tinnitus, which he didn't have but wasn't about to explain) and Telltale psycho from the people at school and at camp. Yes, the last one was also because of his truthful nature in the face of authority, but he tended to put more faith in people's intelligence than they had. Those things were easy, easy to deal with, disillusion and ignore. These things were real. More than that they were totally unbelievable. They were things so extraordinary even he couldn't fathom if they were real. Those things.