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She was looking, she thought, into unseeing eyes.
They were glassy and true, reflections of everything—everything, even Eli's swimming gaze, the fear written across her own face. They were books that told the rest of the world's stories. When they looked at Eli—or into her, more like—she couldn't help the chill that ran down her back. They couldn't see, not in any earthly sense, but she couldn't shake the feeling that they were perceiving her in a way she had never been before. They swam with thoughts, it seemed, of Eli's worst fears, her failures, her miseries. She was almost sucked into them.
Her surroundings—or what she could discern from the little amount of time she spent glancing away from the blind eyes before her—were cloudy, shrouded in mystery, just as this woman was. As though Eli were inside the eyes themselves. She looked down to her hands in curiosity and wonder and saw them only barely, just dashes of her pale skin, like her body had become translucent. She was becoming the mist surrounding her.
"Elizabeth Lennox," said the woman behind the eyes. Initially Eli hadn't noticed much of her besides her glassy gaze, but now she understood why: The woman's face was obscured in the hazy mist, too. Eli couldn't so much as make out the color of her skin, much less what her face looked like.
Her voice, however, gave Eli a glimpse into her personality enough: Stern and business-like, like an accountant, though with that mystified tone behind it, like a bunch of different voices were speaking at once. The voice that all the Olympians had. Even Tyche, though Eli didn't exactly have much experience in that area.
"Who... who are you?" Eli managed, deciding it the best course of action in such a blind test.
The haze drifted away from the goddess's face enough for Eli to glimpse a soft smile on wine-red lips, black curls cascading down a pale, shimmering collarbone. "I believe you know."
Eli wet her lips. She had to think very carefully about her next answer—Olympians, goddesses in particular, often became offended or hostile at the tiniest of things. Eli had once tried to compliment Aphrodite on her nose and ended up with a pimple on her nose that was so big, Atlas began to call it her third nipple. (That had been a horrible week for Eli's self-respect.)
She racked her mind, struggling to think of any goddesses that dealt in mist or fog, specifically ones that were blind. But, then again, Eli really only knew stories about one blind Olympian at all... Plenty of monsters, punished by the gods, but rarely the gods themselves.
Suddenly Eli felt very hot and sweaty all at once. If her guess was correct, then she was face-to-face with her future. Literally.
"You're Themis," she guessed, however meekly.
The goddess smiled again. She lifted her arm, the movement causing a ripple across the mist like they were sitting underwater. Eli watched as, out of nowhere, a gold scale appeared in the goddess's hand, tipping evenly across the equal markings in the center.
