Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The sun is high. A beautiful day for a wedding, really, if you like that sort of thing.

Eris has never been married. She likes to think she could, if she wanted to — but her mother’s stayed single, after all, and Eris thinks she might just follow that example, just to spite her for it. Birth a bunch of miserable children-employees to do her endless chores, grind them all into shapeless things or throw them away. Maybe she’ll be just like Nyx, do it all on her own.

Or maybe not. There’s a thread around Eris’s wrist, after all, one that ties her to Nyx, and whatever she does — however she stares at the thread, sometimes, waiting and hoping for it to fray, she never lets it pull too taut. Never lets a knot lock in.

Mistakes are for people who can’t avoid them, and Eris can definitely avoid them. She’s not binding up her own fate like that.

There are other threads around her — she’s a goddess of some consequence, after all, she’s certain to have an intricate fate — but most of them hang loosely, the threads navigable, easily untied before they can snarl. There are few enough gods who can reach the strings to really pull on them, and she’s been careful not to make herself interesting to the likes of Hermes. She needs no tricksters from Olympus thinking a competition’s afoot, and the thread that runs from Hermes’ laurels to her dull eldest brother’s shoulder isn’t one she wants to pull yet.

That’s a knot that can wait. She’s got time.

That’s the great thing about Hermes: he’s a liar, and liars are never far from knotted fates because they never like to solve their own problems. Like Eris, Hermes craves a bit of mess. Can’t resist it. And he can pull on the short threads, that’s instinct for Mischief, but he can’t see them. He just knows when something would get caught, if he tugged on it.

Eris doesn’t have many long threads — the kinds of connections that change the world, relationships that echo out to the boundaries of the universe. It’s better that way.

If she has children, she’ll love them, she’s decided. She’ll teach them how to look for snarls in the threads, which ones to unwind and which ones to pull. She’ll show them all the little corners where destiny gets stuck on the jagged edge of coincidence, and how to grab onto that coincidence and lever it into getting the right string to pull into the right knot. How to strangle a hero with his own rope, or weave a net to drown a king. She’ll teach them everything they need so they won’t be choked by life, won’t be tied to her whim or anyone else’s. She’ll teach them to find the taut lines in the world and walk across them, and never ever fall into the cold hollow of night that yawns far below. There’s a whole web around the world where a god can prance, suspended, above and immune to unfeeling creation.

Their grandmother will have no power to be ashamed of them. Damn her.

But not for now. There’s a wedding today, and the Fates have thrown Eris a line she cannot help but follow — one that shines golden with godlike destiny, strong and sturdy and sure to catch on everything. She woke this morning with a new, glistening thread laced between her fingers, and she was always going to follow it, because nothing’s a more powerful invitation for Eris to involve herself in an occasion than the very, very foolish mistake of barring her from it.

Even when Nyx sent Eris away from the House, sent her out to make her way in the world without so much as a goodbye to her baby brothers, wise Mother Night knew well enough not to actually lock Eris out of the Underworld. Nyx is a cold, hard bitch, but unfortunately not stupid.

”Your work is out in the world,” she’d simply said. ”There’s no value in you remaining here. You may go and see to your mission — I trust you will, of course, do it properly.”

The worst part was, it just hadn’t really occurred to her to care where Eris wanted to be. That hadn’t even registered with her. Nyx doesn’t see the threads, doesn’t know how to pull them, but she’d looped one around Eris’s wrist that day, a thread that’s bright with pain and resentment, and it’ll knot if she lets it.

(Eris watches the thread carefully. She picks it looser when she needs to, when snags threaten to form, but she otherwise leaves it be. She knows better than to actually untie it herself; she doesn’t need a lesson from the Fates about that. They’d have her trussed up head to foot in knots before she could so much as beg for mercy.)

There’s a wedding today, and Eris hasn’t been invited, but she’s brought a gift.

She has Night in her veins, always will — like all Nyx’s children, her ichor runs black, shot through with starlight — and she can slip away from day’s harsh revelations as easily as a comet darts behind a passing cloud. She’s modest, after all, for the uninvited guest that she is: just here to drop off her little gift on the table. A little something from the Garden of the Hesperides, just a nice golden apple done up with a bit of style.

Kallisti, she’s carved into it.

For the fairest.

She pulls the thread gently — ever so lightly, easy now, easy — and Hera sees the apple first, and like that, Eris can feel the knot catch.

It’s a good one, solid gold, strong and snarled, and even she’d have trouble untying it now if she wanted to. Nearly every god in the room’s caught up in its snare, though most of them can’t feel it yet — a string even loops around Apollo’s perfect golden ankle — but Hermes senses something, because he’s drumming his fingers on the edge of his plate like he knows something’s just happened that’s trouble above his pay grade.

Hermes is light-hearted. What Eris wouldn’t give for a light heart.

The argument that begins to ensue is beautiful, almost effortless: it unfolds like a flower blooming for morning, each petal opening up one after another. Eris watches them drawn into it — commanding Hera, convincing Athena, alluring Aphrodite — then try to draw others along with them, with mixed success.

Dionysus — Eris has got to laugh — looks like he’s having an immediate headache. This is absolutely the essence of everything he isn’t, being that it’s an argument that’s ruining a party, and he seems so inherently put off by that concept that his godhood might almost evaporate right on the spot. Eris’s knot barely catches him compared to some of the others, just tied around a few of his fingers, but she’s pretty sure his face just now is all the reward she needs for his participation. Bless him for a simple god.

Most of the others are looking on at the confrontation, trying to find ways to interpose themselves, to settle it down. The bride and groom are not having a lovely, celebratory time.

Two Olympians there, though, remain much more interestingly silent: Ares, with a knot around his wrist, fisted in one hand, looking deliciously tense; and Apollo, who’s steepled his hands together and is resting his forehead against them. He’s staring at Eris like he can see her, so she smiles. Mother did raise her with manners, after all.

It really is a beautiful day for a wedding, and Eris would hate to waste the weather. Besides, she wasn’t invited, so it would be rude to linger when there isn’t even a place setting for her. The knot’s tied — the rest will really handle itself — so she melts back outside and floats up into an apple tree to listen to the birds and the faint music of Olympians shouting.

It’s not long before a voice calls up to her.

“Woven-Haired Eris, Sower of All Strife,” Ares names her. She likes Ares, always has: he appreciates her work, understands the value in writing such a vibrating unease in the world that it shakes itself apart and changes, again, again. “I thought this might be your doing. What seeds have you planted today?”

She shrugs, hanging her feet over the branch she’s sitting on. The threads of this knot are long and pulsing, visceral with import, but she can see down them quite far before they start forking into possibility and uncertain choices. Many things are already woven into the inevitable. “Only the kind you like,” she answers, cheerful. “Though there is some tending to be done, to really see them grow into a proper harvest.”

“Tending amongst my family, I note,” he points out with a little bit of a warning. The thread is still wrapped around his fist: he hasn’t slackened his grip, but he’s still considering it.

That’s the thing about Ares — the glorious, beautiful, powerful thing. He can pull the long threads.

Among the Olympians, they can feel fragments, here and there, of Eris’s power. They do it every day, almost without thought. Aphrodite spools out a line between two hearts. Hermes braids together an adventure. Athena, with patience, untangles some of the long lines; Ares, with fervor, draws them tight. And Apollo — Apollo Far-Eyed, the only one who actually sees the threads — Apollo watches.

There are a thousand ways for gods to touch fate. The strings are all right there. But the threads are Eris’s instrument, and for her alone, they twang in chords. The rest of them only play their part in the song.

Ares feels the long destiny of men. Threads that touch him always wind through his hands, eager for his grasp. His long strides make the world shudder, for history blooms beneath his footsteps. He knows what a lever ambition can be. What a catalyst, passion.

But even he — a god so tremendous a force, so fearless in his intent, that he walks the treacherous long threads without even being able to see them — even Ares has threads of his own that he doesn’t like to pull. There are surprisingly few wars among the Olympians, because Ares has a heart.

This particular knot wraps around his threads to Aphrodite, to Hera, to Zeus. They’re some of his strongest entanglements — long with hope, snarled with pain.

What horrible things love can do to you.

“Roots do tend to grow where the seeds are laid down,” she says without apology. “And where the soil is rich. I can’t do anything about that.” She grins, grabbing a few bruised apples off the tree and piling them in her lap.

Ares scoffs. “You could, if you wanted to.”

“True!” she concedes. “I don’t want to.”

“And if I go along with this scheme?”

Night glitters through her smile: a mystery. “It’ll be beautiful. You know that. Isn’t it always? Don’t I always show you something beautiful?”

She likes Ares. The threads he touches ignite with heat and blood, dragging the world along into places unforeseen. Eris slips down from the tree, gravity easing away from her before she can hit the ground. She shifts the apples in her arms.

He smiles at her, charmed as always by boldness, but he folds his arms over his chest. “I know enough to question it when someone hands me the reins to my own chariot,” he tells her. “What does this cost my family?”

Eris tosses one of the apples in the air a few times, catches it. She adds another after a moment, and then a third, juggling. Ares waits her out. “The gods of Olympus are invincible, Lord Ares,” she says, looking at him between the movement of the apples. “What could it possibly cost you?”

And he rolls his eyes.

She stays with the cascade a while longer. It makes a nice pattern.

“It happens whether you help or not,” Eris tells him. “You can feel that much, can’t you?”

He doesn’t answer, which she knows means yes.

“So make it mean something, then. Not just the vanity of gods and a few broken marriages. This world has gone stale. You feel it too, like a writhing in the skin. It needs to change and grow. Suspended like this —” Eris pauses in her juggling. The apples stop abruptly in the air, hanging in place. One floats just over her hand, hefty with the anticipation of the landing but not quite there. “ — this world will rot on the vine.”

She reaches up for the apple that’s at the top of its arc, stuck just above her eye line, and plucks it out of the air. The other two she lets fall to the ground.

“A charming trick,” Ares says, shaking his head. He chuckles. “But you really are too amused with your own theatrics. First that ridiculous bit inside, and now juggling and melodrama. ‘There’s a war coming, make it bigger,’ you could have just said. I don’t know why everyone thrives on playing poet about it all.”

Eris laughs, undone. “To give a bit of art to history, I suppose. Otherwise it’s just who unhorsed who else, and in what order. It’s more exciting with the flourishes.”

“Perhaps.”

“There’s a war coming, Lord Ares,” she says with deliberacy. “Make it bigger.”

And he smiles. “Ah,” he says. “Well, if you insist.”

Eris floats forward into his space, takes one of his burnished hands and presses the apple into it. “For the fairest,” she says, and presses a kiss to his painted cheek. “I’ll wait for you in Ilium. Save a place for me in your chariot.”

He accepts both apple and kiss with grace; she assumes he’ll accept the other request, too. “Fare you well, Lady Eris.”

“And you, Lord Ares. And my love to the bride and groom, of course — lovely occasion. Excellent decor. Years of wedded bliss, and all that.”

She looks over his shoulder, where Apollo’s come out of the wedding tent and is watching them. The setting sun hangs over his shoulder like a quiver, like he could draw from its fire. “Ta, Lord Apollo!” she calls out brightly, with a wave. “Be seeing you in Ilium!”

His face is unreadable — it’s just the sun, the sun, the sun glaring — but sunset is just around the other side of the apple tree, and Eris knows when to exit a stage. She turns around the tree, where its shadow is long and violet, and she slides down into it — down deep and far, down into the underpinnings of the world, just like her mother taught her so very long ago.

It’s done now. The knot holds fast.

Chapter Text

“Ares,” Apollo calls him. “Come back inside before Dionysus drains your goblet, too. Hermes went off with Father and the rest, and I’m not sure how much longer I can keep Artemis from murdering our overly-celebratory brother if he keeps trying to fix the party drunk and single-handed.”

Ares cocks an eyebrow. “You haven’t really made your case here, you realize.”

Apollo heaves a sigh. “I know. Help me anyway — I’m jealous you escaped, and want you to suffer alongside me.”

“More compelling by the second,” Ares quips. “In a moment, perhaps. Dionysus will keep.”

There’s a truth in that, apparently, which even Apollo doesn’t doubt. Ares is unsurprised when, shortly thereafter, Apollo joins him at the base of the tree, shoulder to shoulder. “Something on your mind?” he asks.

That’s one of those Apollo things he does, asking questions he already knows the answers to. It’s always a little infuriating.

“What comes of all this?” Ares asks.

Apollo rests his hands on the back of his hips, stretching a little to crack his back. Light ripples over him. “You want to know?”

“I asked you, didn’t I?”

Apollo sighs again, his unstoppable habit. “True.”

He pauses, straightening a gold cuff on his wrist.

“War comes of all this, Ares. The end of heroes. And then . . . something else.”

Everyone’s a poet. No one ever gives a straight answer. Ares can feel the world shifting underfoot and sometimes — sometimes — he just wishes he could put a name to the things he feels burning inside his ribs — but no one ever wants to deal in anything but vaguery and metaphor.

“What else?” he prompts — but Apollo just looks at him with that wistful expression that’s both happy and sad at the same time, and says:

“Something new.”

“You’re useless,” Ares complains, though without real bite.

Apollo has the preposterous nerve to shrug.

They both look up into the trees for a while, watching the way the shadows dapple and press against each other in the fading light.

“We all make it to the other side,” Apollo finally says, unbidden. “The family. The way we are. Gods are much harder to change than men.”

“Slower,” Ares corrects. “Slower to change than men.”

“Slower,” Apollo agrees.

Men change with blood and death and loss. Those are harder for gods to experience — they lived pampered existences, and lose little of consequence. Patricide is the biggest risk, and luckily for Zeus, his children all find it too unoriginal a concept.

Few things change gods except boredom.

Maybe that’s why something new seems so tempting to Ares.

Maybe that’s why Eris always seems to understand and share his restless spirit.

Maybe that’s why —

Apollo plucks the apple out of Ares’ hand and takes a bite before Ares can grab it back. “For the fairest,” he explains in triumph, dancing out of reach with a sunrise smile. He always knows when to disrupt a thought, and his ego never seems to suffer from the threat of looking silly.

Ares snorts — his brother truly is a ridiculous creature. But Apollo gives him a long look, daring him to keep brooding: and when Apollo turns to go back inside, gesturing with a roll of his shoulder, Ares follows.