The Forest Gods' Reign [Published]

Chapter 16: A Hero and a Speech

.

Running. I was running like a maniac through the woods. My woods. I would know those trees, those rocks, those leafy green ferns anywhere. But why? I did not know. I did not know, and it scared me. Because when you're the goddess of wisdom, you're supposed to know everything.  Not knowing, to put it simply, was not good. Not knowing could be more dangerous than anything else in the entire world. Not knowing could get you killed. And I was not ready to be killed. I was Athena, and I had lived through way too many monster attacks to die this early in life.

So, I kept running. Running for my life - for anyone's life really, because I had no idea what was going on. My feet had minds of their own as they raced through the forest that I knew so well, not slowing down even the tiniest bit for miles and miles.

And then it stopped. My feet were suddenly planted in the dirt, and I could not move an inch. This was worse than the running, but I forced myself not to panic. Instead, I took deep breaths, calming myself down as I glanced around me.

And then my breath caught in my throat. I tried to scream out, but I could not make a sound. Because lying at odd angles in the long grass was a girl, with her wavy, blonde hair fallen around her perfect face, and her expensive clothes were covered in a fine layer of dust and dirt. This was the most beautiful girl in the world: Aphrodite. And she was dead.

I desperately tried to move my feet towards her, to rescue the poor girl, but I could not move a single muscle. Suddenly the world started to spin faster and faster, until all I saw and felt was blackness around me. However, the sullen and glassed-over but somehow still beautiful, brown eyes of Aphrodite were still etched into my brain. She did not deserve to die. It should have been me, for everything that I had done, for all the secrets that I had kept. "Help," the Greek voice of Aphrodite called to me through the frigid darkness...

I bolted upright in a cold sweat as the blackness from my dream faded away, leaving only reality, though I still couldn't shake the vision of the dead Aphrodite from my mind. Breathing hard, I gripped the metal edges of my dark green cot, suddenly feeling homesick for more than one reason.

That couldn't have been just a dream. No, it was too real. Every leaf, every rock had been right where it should have been in my woods. I knew the place like the back of my hand, every little nook and cranny. And I knew had to get home. Here in the Knowing camp, I ironically had no way of knowing what was going on back in the Woods. But while rubbing my sweaty forehead, I remembered that Alec had mentioned a phone around here somewhere. I sighed, my breath coming out shaky and untrustworthy as I put on some clothes and my leather boots to walk outside.

It was early in the morning, so no one but a few Warriors were awake. Five of them stood around the camp like statues of old Grecian heroes staring out at nothing but the air, which was thick with a sticky gray mist. It was not as not silvery and beautiful like in the forest back home. Also, the tall and silent tents loomed above me like Hades's palace in the Underworld; they were not friendly and welcoming like the houses in the Woods. Finding myself comparing everything around me to the Woods, I frowned. Maybe I was more homesick than I thought. Sighing, I made my way towards the one building that the Knowing camp had, which housed the bathrooms, showers, tattoo parlor, and supposedly a phone.

This building was quiet and dark, too, but the old wooden door was unlocked, and it creaked as I stepped into the threshold. On opposite sides of the common area, which doubled as the tiny tattoo parlor, there were two hallways - one on the right was labeled "girls" and one on the left was labeled "boys." I followed the one to the right, of course, though I found nothing but plain, white-tiled bathrooms which I thought were kind of creepy. They had no color at all, absolutely nothing that signified this was a girls' restroom.