Main first chapter! Enjoy :)
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I stared at the ceiling. Then I rolled over and stared at my bedmate.
She stared back.
We held a silent conversation the way only we can.
This sucks, right? My eyes asked.
Her eyes answered, Absolutely.
We stood up in our absurdly large, royal-grade crib and glanced toward the window. It was nighttime outside, and the moon and stars shone brightly in the dark sky.
Everyone else was fast asleep.
Us? Not remotely tired. And I was pretty sure that's not normal baby behavior. But after just three days of life, I'd gathered a few key facts that made that the least of our...peculiarities.
1. We ate as much as a ten-year-old going through a growth spurt.
2. We had the bodies of one-year-olds.
3. Full hair. Full teeth. Beautiful baby-model-tier smiles.
Basically: absolutely cursed. Or blessed. I'm still undecided.
Judging from how often the palace maids stopped to gaze at us in shock, this was definitely not the norm, even in ancient Greece.
Oh yeah.
Apparently, I'm in Ancient Greece.
A 21st-century guy with amnesia, dumped in a pre-Wi-Fi era, surrounded by people who worship literally present, very real gods.
Awesome. Just awesome.
At this point, I'd kill for a Google search bar.
I sighed and flopped onto my sister's lap, her tiny legs surprisingly comfortable. She began stroking my hair, and wow, her fingers were unfairly soothing. She must've unlocked the "Divine Head Pat" skill in the womb.
Anyway, here's the most ridiculous thing I learned in three days:
My sister is strong.
Not "wow, she lifted the baby rattle" strong.
No.
More like "bend metal like it's overcooked spaghetti" strong.
One wetnurse saw us (well, more like my sister) doing a baby-strongman routine out of boredom and promptly fainted.
Flat on the stone floor without any hesitation. Poor girl hit that stone floor pretty hard.
Naturally, rumors spread, and the wetnurses started approaching my small, adorable sister as if she were a glorified punching machine ready to smack their souls out of their bodies.
Meanwhile, they treated me like the crown prince. The "normal one."
Even though I was also a freak of nature! I just didn't have the "bench-press-a-hoplite" muscles she did.
Anyways.
I felt guilty about the whole thing since I was the one who suggested our little performance, but my sister only gave her trademark blank look that translated to Better now than later.
We didn't talk much, as words still didn't flow easily just yet despite our intellect.
But we always knew exactly what the other wanted to say. Another piece of evidence that we were not normal.
Then there were the dreams. The visions. Flashbacks? Flash-forwards?
I wasn't sure.
They dissolved like smoke the moment I woke, but the feeling stayed behind, stuck in the back of my mind.
And of course, the whispers around the palace didn't help.
"Children of the gods."
"Born with omens."
"Marked by fate."
Demigods. Great.
I also started noticing differences between us.
Fire liked me. A lot.
I discovered that when I idly waved my hand near a lamp flame and it… followed. Like a puppy made of fire. I could shape it, brighten it, turn it into little white-hot spheres that danced above my palm.
My sister didn't smile often, but the tiny grin she gave when I made a fireball?
Absolutely lethal.
Too cute.
I almost combusted on the spot. Metaphorically. Scorched the bedsheets a bit, though.
So… pyro powers.
Maybe Apollo? Hephaestus? Some minor fire deity who had nothing better to do?
My sister, though… she was something else entirely.
If I didn't know better, I'd say she had the lineage of Atlas himself...but old uncle Atlas is a bit busy at the end of the world holding up the sky, so probably not.
More plausible guesses: Zeus. Poseidon. Maybe Ares.
Hades? Honestly, the guy gets too much hate. Aside from the Persephone kidnapping thing, he's basically a hardworking introvert. Unlikely, but I'd take him over Zeus any day.
My sister's fingers kept massaging my head, slow and soft.
My eyelids drooped.
Warmth spread.
Sleepiness crept in like a whisper.
Uh oh.
No—
stop—
don't head-pat me into a coma—
shouldn't have…
put my…
head…
zzzz—
I was out like a light.
............
Anger.
Hatred.
A viscosity that clung to her spirit like black tar, like a divine toxin distilled from the fangs of ancient serpents.
The malice coalesced in the upper strata of the world—then fell, condensing into two serpentine forms.
They struck the earth without a sound.
They slithered across the dew-slick grass, scaled the stone wall, and slipped into the window as if passing through the membrane of a living organism.
How could she forgive this transgression? This gross humiliation engraved across centuries?
She had tolerated Perseus's existence among others, tolerated the indignities Zeus seeded down in the mortal plane, tolerated the absurdity of his petty dalliances even as Olympus decayed.
But to repeat the same affront again and again? How dare he.
How dare he.
He knew what she was.
He knew the price she had paid to endure as a goddess of Gaia. As an avatar built from the scraps of her true body, which had been torn away in the war against the star-eating invader from the outer cosmos.
He knew she was a hollowed remnant drifting through eternity, a system cleverly masquerading as a woman.
And yet he still sought to contaminate her existence with his sins.
Oh, she knew of his schemes. His grand design to forge a "true hero," a vessel to survive the next war or unforeseen cosmic calamity. She cared nothing for that ambition.
But he, of all the gods, had been the one to hurt her.
Again. And again.
Sometimes she envied the other goddesses, those unburdened by the throne's crushing weight. But she was the Queen. Olympus's axis. The spine of the divine order.
And a queen does not forgive.
The large snakes—her malice incarnate—glided forward, spectral outlines flickering as their nano-camouflage shifted. They were fragments of her lost body, half-organic, half-mechanical weapons forged in that age when gods still swam amongst foreign stars.
Lethal. Silent. Unavoidable.
They reached the crib.
They reared up, tongues flickering as their thermal sensors locked onto the twin shapes within—and froze.
For in the darkness, two orbs of molten gold stared directly at them.
She was Alcides. The Daughter of Zeus.
An infant monster.
Her gaze alone exerted an inexplicable pressure. An oppressive force that struck the serpents with a nearly physical weight.
If they had been pure automatons, the confrontation would have ended swiftly. But the organic components within them recognized something their programming could not.
That thing is an apex predator.
An entity, a divinity not yet named.
Instinct surged. Instinct screamed.
Run. Hide. Survive.
But the Queen had commanded. And even terror, forged or natural, could not overwrite the hierarchies inscribed into their cyber-organic marrow.
Alcides was furious. Though the snakes could not understand the reason, it was very simple.
Those slithering intruders had dared to threaten her Alkios.
It was almost tragic and comical in a sense.
The serpents were trapped, bound by Hera's command, yet paralyzed by the dread radiating from a baby who should not have enough self-consciousness to hate.
Finally, duty overpowered fear.
With a hiss, they shed their cloaking fields and lunged—one toward Alcides, the other toward her brother, a diversion calculated with admirable, doomed logic.
It might have worked on any other child.
But they had targeted Alkios.
The golden light in Alcides' gaze flared.
And in that moment, the serpents knew the truth a little too late.
They had made a catastrophic mistake.
A terrible smile spread across her tiny face.
Her chubby arm moved.
No, vanished, only to reappear as she wrenched a bronze support bar from her crib with casual, godlike strength.
The first snake met the makeshift spear mid-flight.
A wet, crunching rupture, as blood sizzled midair, and metal and flesh split as the bronze rod punched through its throat.
Without losing momentum, she seized the second serpent by its mechanical neck, its jaws snapping uselessly as she drove it onto the same bronze spike, skewering both abominations in a single, seamless motion.
Two corpses hung from the pike like offerings to some forgotten war deity.
The entire act took less than half a second.
In the canonical tapestry of Fate, the infant Herakles—Alcides—would have strangled the serpents barehanded. Calm, unprovoked, and inevitable.
But this Alcides had something to protect.
She had been born with the blood of Zeus and a goddess's spite burning in her veins, with Zeus's stolen fragments of Hera's divinity coiling in her flesh in the form of breast milk.
Mortals often forgot that Greek goddesses were terrifying. They were often malicious and vindictive, especially in an age when might alone dictated truth and the divine still walked amongst the mortals.
Alcides, though not a goddess, bore their temperament.
Their wrath and their will.
Heaven hath no fury like a woman scorned, mortals said.
How ironic that Hera herself had failed to recall this truth.
The poor spit-roasted serpents learned it quite intimately.
............
This morning, I woke up at dawn… and immediately wondered if I was still dreaming.
Because right there, stuck into our cradle like a trophy from a particularly unhinged safari, was a cyber-snake kebab.
Still dripping.
I repeat, a cybernetic snake kebab, proudly impaled on the railing of our cradle like a trophy.
For a solid ten seconds, my brain refused to process it.
Then, I reflexively lifted a hand to slap myself awake.
Alcides caught my wrist mid-slap and shot me the most deadpan look I've ever seen on a humanoid being.
She then huffed proudly, with a teeny tiny smile on her face.
Are you proud of me?, her eyes asked.
And naturally, as any responsible brother should, I responded solemnly.
"Hell yeah, that's one hell of a kebab."
To which she tilted her head and asked with perfect seriousness.
"What is… a 'kebab'?"
Which led to, as all things do, an impromptu celebratory snake barbecue in our crib.
And that was the moment our wet nurse walked in and saw us.
—Me, a fireproof toddler happily roasting snake corpses with tiny gold-white flames.
—Alcides, holding the skewered snakes with bloodstained hands like an enthusiastic Hannibal Lector.
She fainted in the exact same place she had the previous day.
I swear the indentation on the floor is still there.
For the record, the snakes tasted like an old tire deep-fried in napalm and then stuffed with slightly overcooked chicken.
Michelin-star cuisine, Ancient Greece edition.
10/10, would traumatize a servant again.
Also, cyborg snakes in Ancient Greece? What? I mean...what?
Da Fuck?
Are they Hephaestus's rogue Roombas?
One of Athena's failed R&D trials?
I still haven't figured it out. All I know is: they attacked us, we defended ourselves, we committed justified homicide, and grilled the evidence.
Boom. Legal.
…It was self-defense, your honor.
For the rest of the day, the royal siblings behaved like perfectly normal, innocent, harmless babies.
Gurgling, cooing, and occasionally napping.
Which fooled exactly no one.