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Wheat fields are beautiful at night. When the sky is clear and navy, blotted with bright stars that gleam for miles. In the Ancient times, it was like this everywhere, Asteria draping the heavens, embracing with Selene of the moon, back before the latter faded and left Artemis with her duties rather than simply watching over the wild huntress in her element. Before Pan’s disappearance left the world to decay with human taint, and the times churned into new ages, skylines shooting up and clouds of grit and smoke choking the fresh air.
The stocks of wheat sway and rustle, soft sibilant lullabies in an otherwise silence; it is far from the city that never sleeps, and the silence is vast and weighty. It balloons and engorges, lapping up anything it can find, pierced only by those fields and the hands that brush against the wheat that stretches taller than the woman they belong to. She is shaded in them, footsteps muffled in the dirt, her nails dirt encrusted, palms calloused.
Demeter doesn’t usually take such young forms, as she has today. That habit is much more frequently observed in her sister and niece, and she has no desire to follow in their footsteps. But. Well, there is something tempting to reflect, here. Someone, rather. Her brothers, and even Hera likes to call her sentimental. In truth, they don’t remember half of it.
She stops at the edges of her fields, the heaviest harvest of the year feasting her domains with rich power as she coaxes it along. A self perpetuating cycle, are the gods, until perhaps they lose their own faith. And, what is there to remain of them when their subjects forget them; when they watch on, disconnected. What is a god without a domain? What is a god without a believer?
Much is forgotten to time, languished and wasted in the past. The Olympians have reigned for a long time: the age of gods, though nowadays their clay creations stake their claim. The age of humans. Demeter thinks it’s closer to the truth than any of her brethren wish to admit to themselves.
In the distance, the wheat gives way to grassy hills, fields and forests, a lake glittering under the pale moon, and beyond that, rows and rows of strawberries. Camp Half Blood is warm and welcoming with prayer, glowing in the embers of the campfire.
It has been five years since the prophecy was spoken, and Demeter’s eldest demigod is set to turn sixteen by the week’s end.
Her daughter prefers double sickles for weapons, and can command the local flora with a precision that has proved deadly to the monsters chasing her. She is one of Demeter’s more powerful children throughout the millennia, but even if she hadn’t been, there is precedence. Demeter just wonders whether it's worth following.
Perhaps she will simply move to the Underworld permanently. Just because Olympus may be a lost cause doesn’t make her brother’s slash son in law’s kingdom null, and Persephone will be there so it’s practically a win-win.
The fact of the matter is that if, in five days, Olympus will be razed to the ground, Zeus won’t see it coming. He has ensured their safety by dragging his brothers into vows, and Styx in upholding them to it.
A half blood of the eldest gods…
Though her brothers tend to forget it, Demeter is, in fact, the second eldest of the Kronides, and the eldest who bears demigod children. Prophecies are tricky, she has listened enough to her nephew's fruitless rants to know this. Phoebus may not have paid her mind as his oracle recited their future, but she had felt his attention scorchingly as her brothers spoke their oaths.
He balances a strange split in worlds, her golden nephew. It has drawn Zeus’ ire more often than not, but domains too are tricky that way. Demeter has pondered this for five years: if fate has decreed her child to carry out this prophecy, would Apollo say nothing and allow for the potential of them all to be burned to the ground?
Zeus would have her daughter killed, but Zeus is a fool. She doubts he will ever realize the implications that she is eldest only after Hestia.
The goddess appears beside her sister in a gust of wind and hearth smoke, silent and calm. Her eyes are pits of fire, gazing intently too at the Camp. It is so distant, too far for the mortal eye to fathom, but the Ancient Greek presence condenses around it so thickly it is impossible for the divine not to marvel. The sweet, bitter sting of times long past, relics of an era. Hestia is made from this Camp, Demeter notices as she hands her elder sister a granola bar with a tut. She is given an indulgent smile, though Hestia doesn’t move to try it yet, her small, child hands flipping it over and over again, her ageless face ancient and knowing and impossibly young. Her peplos the color of the soil and sand, her hair the forest, her skin humming with the impressions of whatever wounds the newest demigod has sustained in arriving.
“You look like her.”
Demeter looks away from her, “yes.”
Hestia closes her eyes briefly, firelight dancing across her face like fireflies flickering away in the night, “do you even know her name, Demeter?”
Demeter doesn’t answer, hands dropping to dip in the soil and sift it until a seed sprouts, “we have existed for very long and very many eons, sister, but our history has taught us very well that time is not linear.”
Hestia splits the granola bar in half and offers one side. Demeter takes it silently as her sister speaks, “indeed, our father was driven mad by prophecy. He set about his own ruin; I fear our brother has been following his footsteps unwittingly.”
“Like father like son,” Demeter scoffs bitterly, “like mortals like gods. So, Hestia, ever-believing the best in us, you are convinced of our demise?”
Hestia shakes her head, smiling slightly, “I only think that the prophecy is less a surprise than how Zeus has taken it. It is only expected that a threat will come from a demigod, that servant to the divine parent.”
Demeter tilts her head, matching the expression, “it’s no wonder our father mistook a rock for him, he’s so dense. When do you think he will violate his oaths?”
“I am not here to quibble about the dalliances of our brother.”
Admittedly, Demeter never really wants to know about the dalliances of any of her brothers. Worst of all when she herself is involved: it gets a little blurry, but she tends to walk the other direction whenever either Persephone or Arion are brought up.
Her lip curls, “let's not pretend it won’t happen.”
“I’m not, but it is not why you wanted to speak with me,” Hestia’s all serenity, despite her firm tone. It’s reminiscent of that time when they were them two alone in their father’s stomach and Hestia is the only one to teach Demeter of the world.
Demeter doesn’t need to breathe, but she suddenly feels tired enough she understands breathlessness. The wheat fields rustle, enveloping them both in their rich embrace and shielding them from any prying eyes or ears. She says, “our king likes to forget that I was the one who nearly heralded our ruin, once.”
She’d even struck up a friendship with the goddess of starvation during that time, which came in handy later when her favorite dryad was murdered. Long story, ended up with a king cannibalizing himself. She likes telling it whenever Athena starts up about Medusa or Arachne, or when Apollo brings up his flayed satyr incident.
“Your apocalypse, yes,” Hestia agrees. Demeter smiles.
It’s a bitter memory, her desperation bubbling in her ichor filled veins the longer Kore had remained missing, and then replaced by wrath at the knowledge of her marriage. Hestia may be Kronos’ favored daughter, but Demeter is the one who inherits his domain, echoes of his own mother. Without her the world withers, the trees sicken, the harvest doesn’t come. The temperatures plummet, the crops wilt. At the slight against her daughter, Demeter kills the earth.
Hestia grasps her hands suddenly, tight enough she can feel her constructed mortal skin give, mottle, break in curved divots shaped like nails, “your daughter spoke to me today. You don’t need to look like her for her to remind me of you,” those firepit eyes grow uncompromising, “you asked me here for counsel. You wonder whether you should smite her for daring to exist.”
“She will likely die either way before reaching two decades,” Demeter points out indifferently, “and within the maws of a monster? Divine intervention would practically be a mercy.”
“Would it?”
Demeter has never been particularly close with any of her demigod children, but she likes to keep watch over them. She cares for them as much as a god can care for such fleeting lives. She likes seeing their victories, and she listens to their prayers, but she does not risk her attachment, not when her grief has wreaked such consequences before.
But she thinks to that day, when the oracle stands before them, swept up in the green mist of Delphi’s spirit, and the rumble of the Styx collecting oaths in her waters. Zeus killed each of his children, one by one, either by his own hands or sending them on quests to their deaths. He is despondent for months, but he does not regret it.
If she does the same as him, and follows his precedence, she supposes she will simply bring the prophecy to completion. Her daughter will die as she reaches sixteen, by her own mother’s hand, that divine parent which she honors in her curved blade. And Demeter will do the rest, just as she once had.
“I do know her name,” Demeter says at last.
They both know she can’t bring herself to carry out the deed. If Zeus comes to his senses and does make the choice himself, well. Perhaps she will start with him.