Silver Stranded Stars

4. Scaling Seas

Mina recognizes the broken city of Erebus. Three craters line the red-hazing sky fading to a black of stars. A city dark and done.

Mina wonders if she isn't the same.

Nathaniel faces away from the light, his eyes are glassy shadows as they fly over the slow moving links of black-scaled serpents. The rock where they stand is some sort of broken pedestal, an arch crumbled overhead, leaving two pillared blocks of red stone behind.

Kakos takes a silent step forward. His chest is towards the red-twilight sky, and Mina spots three stars of scars just under his ribs. From where he was stabbed with the Trident.

Why am I surprised he wears the same body? Mina is mildly disturbed to think of what how his back might have healed.

His frame is diminished without the hot burn of his flame. He becomes a more fragile thing, slight. Or perhaps it is just that he has been so beaten.

Mina has some pity for him as she catches the way his skin pulls at the bubbling of skin over one shoulder.

Without the burn of his god-powers, his eyes are a warm copper. He takes another step. His gaze on Nathaniel. He seems strangely indifferent to the teeming mass of snakes around them.

We will not long remain unnoticed.

Mina scans the area: across the sea of black bodies emerges several crumbling structures. Another arena sits not too far away, along with many opulent buildings that seem to form a spiraling main street leading up towards the pinnacle of the town, some sort of horn shaped tower.

From one hell to another. She reaches back and draws out swords. The motion is familiar but empty. Everybody dies.

She lets one blade lift in Kakos' direction. She meets his copper eyes. He stops his forward motion, his fists clenching. He returns his attention to Nathaniel. Nathaniel in turn watches him. Mina tires of them both and watches the serpents. She catches sight of a rare white body among them.

I've seen that one before. It is the last thing I need to see on a day when I have already been weighed heavily by a death.

She doesn't want to remember, but does all the same. She falls back into her younger self crouched in a crevice, watching her father carry her mother's body over to the edge of the cliff, too far back to stop him. Of seeing his final kiss upon her mother's forehead before letting her stand feebly by herself.

Her mother at that time had been a white-ash thing. Bones, green eyes and long black hair. She'd taken it out of the traditional braid of the people of Poseidon, letting it all trail free. Her mother's white gown had billowed behind her as she'd stood looking down. She turned to Vin one last time, calling him over to whisper something in his ear, before stepping away forward, her arms open, embracing the pit below.

Long after her father had left, Mina had descended, shaky, shocked, enraged, to the cliff's edge. After many imagined horrors, she'd found the strength to brave a look. Down the rock face her gaze had travelled, down and down to the ground. Where the desert sand should have been, lay a wreathing mass of black serpents, surrounding the single, larger body of a white. An albino. It had sensed her perhaps, and its body had risen, the great mass of its head pointed her way, fangs hanging out over its jaw. Pale eye-less divots turned her way. "Will you feed us too little screamer?"

Its thoughts had pushed into her, her god-gift working to make its message known. Mina had spent many nights lying awake imagining slitting its great white throat, at wondering at how the red would look against that white skin. Wondering if killing it would make her feel less empty.