"Are you even hearing yourself right now? This is why we believe you're fully competent for this initiative. Whatever you've gone through has been training you for these moments. You don't ever stop fighting, there's always another threat. A threat...
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Pain.
Pain was all I felt as every inch of my body was flickering with orange licks of heat, blistering my very lungs. It snarled and bit and emitted a noxious smoke, suffocating me slowly as I choked at my closing throat. The cracked floor in which I laid, my hands bound above me, scratched my back endlessly, leaving small cuts to ooze onto the stained floor. The crimson anger barely illuminated the peaks of rough, stone hills, turning the place into a burning inferno.
This was my fate, I am bound here for the rest of eternity. Wishing endlessly for my torture to end, to simply burn into a pile of ash to no longer feel this agonising torment.
* * *
I jolted upright in my bed, spluttering for air to rid the imaginary smoke still lingering in my lungs. I gripped the thin silk sheets with my sweat ridden palms. In and Out. In and Out. I chanted in my thumping mind and eventually my racing heart calmed to its normal steady pace. I hastily wiped my hands as much as possible to get rid of the lingering sweat before I swung my feeble legs over to place my feet onto the cold marble floor.
It was just a dream. You survived the trial.
I stared out the wide windows. It streamed in golden light to reveal the delicate clouds sitting in the vast, infinite blue.
After the meeting at the Pantheon, Artemis whisked me away and led me down one of the polished bridges to the Gateway of Olympus. I would be staying in Olympus while I completed my Five Trials, however long that would take.
My first thought when I stepped through the milky portal was: could they own any more marble? Just like Mount Olympus, an infinite number of elegantly sculpted marble buildings and houses sat in a boundless cluster. They surrounded a great golden fountain, it sparkled gracefully as if it ran from the livelihood of it's people. I soon found out that it was the Fountain of Youth in which the Olympians drank from it's sacred waters once a year to maintain their beauty. Monumental, intricately crafted, golden statues of The Twelve towered over the houses, as if protecting them from any foes that may come their way.
Artemis showed me a house situated away from the colossal fountain where I would be living for the next amount of unknown time.
I pushed myself off the cool mattress and changed into a peachy chiton with a pair of white sandals. I strolled out of the impressive bedroom, ate a hurried breakfast and made my way back to the portal to Apollo's temple. After the Trial, he promised me he'd train me, to help me survive. Something told me that he thought the same as I did, that my mother was indifferent to my fate, that I was a mistake, that I was never meant to be born.
