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Nyx yawned and stretched, smiling. Her fingers brushed against something soft, and she pulled it from beneath the covers, laughing at the golden feather. She knew her lover - what had he called himself, Loki? - had smelled more like one of those feathery Christian things than a Norse god. She flicked it away and rolled over, basking in the afterglow of one of Dionysus's parties.
A few days later, when she remembered exactly why those parties were a bad idea - and having sex with quickly-disappearing strangers an even worse one - she tucked the feather away in a wooden box, and the box into a particularly shadowy corner of her realm. Perhaps, in time, she would show it to their future child and tell her son (or daughter) of their other parent.
* * *
Approx. 4,000 years later
Shadow chased the lanky monster, giggling madly as it stayed just ahead of her stumbling feet. "I'a get yoo!" she squealed, stretching out tiny arms to try to catch it. She was growing faster, but was still clumsy with youth.
She stumbled over something, yelping as she fell into the sand dunes that formed her playground. Her skeletal prey immediately turned, anxiously watching over its small charge. Nyx's youngest child was well known among the denizens of the goddess's shadowy realm, and the punishment for letting her become hurt was even better known. Their mistress's temper had grown short in the centuries since her powers' wane.
"Are you hurt, little one?" it asked, extending a limb more claw than hand.
"I trip some-fing harrd," Shadow pouted, rolling over and immediately digging into the sand. "Sand naot harrd."
Her playmate crouched patiently as she unearthed - unsanded - a small box of aged wood and wrangled with the clasp. Within, she found a golden feather, glowing faintly in the eternal night surrounding them. "What dis?" she demanded, squinting against the light and sniffing it. "Smell funny."
"Ask your mother. I have never seen its like."
The toddler pouted before climbing to her feet. "Carry me!"
* * *
Shadow sulked. Her mother's answer - "it belonged to your father. He did not wish to know you, and I do not know where he may be" - had been very unhelpful.
Besides, of course her daddy would want to know her. She was perfect and adorable! Everyone said so. How could her daddy not want her?
She wandered her mother's realm aimlessly, twitching her nose at the strange way the feather had zinged across her senses, like the lightning from Earth on her night-dark eyes. It was so strange; no one smelled like that whom she knew.
Through the soft desert, past the pond where the sirens bathed, over the meadows of the night-mares, and arou--that smell. The harsh gold-lightning of the feather, coming from the woods "don't ever go there, Shadow, it's not safe."
Shadow dove into the thick undergrowth and tumbled into a shadowy cavern, remembering to change into a kitten just in time. People liked kittens, but children made them worry. She didn't know why.
The smell was everywhere, harsh lightning layered over paler bronze layered over the muck of human and the warm earth of monsters. Other creatures were there too, who stopped to play with her, but she was really only worried about one--
A large face, with soft caramel eyes and a smile, lifting her and holding her close. Warm caresses behind her ears and sweet treats and laughter, all wrapped in the bright crackling of that golden feather.
"Yoo mai daddy? Yoo luvs me?"