Chapter Text
Eris’ cackling laughter had long faded, leaving the fields to cool in an eerie silence only broken by the craws of prey birds and the slick sound of the vultures digging their beaks into wounds. Steam rose from the strewn bodies, spears and blades protruding from corpses and soil as far as the eye could see. Enyo’s dark cloak swirled in the corner of his eye as she rummaged through the bodies of the dead, splitting out coins for their ferry rides and slipping the excesses into her own pouch. Ares left her be, content to let the blood chalk on his skin as he watched his twin boys skitter towards the still-living, stooping over the barely conscious to give Thanatos a few more to cart off with him.
The sky glistened in a picturesque mirage of looping clouds and blurred colours, the orange and red hues heralding good grave digging weather to come. Nyx would soon pull her cloak taught and the battlefield turned miasma would simply be another offering to him only noted on the scribes’ clay tablets as a loss of resources.
Goat blood had long dried over the warriors’ shields, their pleas to him smeared over the grass when it still stood green, but he could still smell it in the wind, thick and dewy above the metal-rich scent of mortal lives lost. Ares stood in the reborn field, surveying the carnage with a lurid smile.
There were enough warriors strewn over the valley that the small palace this battle had been forced by would crumble. This fight was the biggest he had visited since Troy fell and took with it countless mortal hopes. The years following that war had been sparse and unwelcoming to himself and his warkin, as most mortals were fickle little things and died too easily. Most this side of Greece had went to fight in the war, leaving very few behind for any skirmishes afterwards. He reckoned it would be a good few decades before this region seen another war of any significant size. For now, he entertained himself with the smaller scuffles and skirmishes.
The wet noise of fabric wading through blood-saturated soils caught his ear. Ares turned, expecting to find a warrior crawling and heaving through the mud, desperate for his comrades to find him, but instead noticed an elderly woman hobbling around the turmoil. Her grey woollen cloak clung to the bony protrusions of her shoulders, with her long grey hair spindling around her knobbed hand where it clutched her cane. Her spine craned lower than a sagging tree, stooped so far that she almost touched the soil with her nose. As she pressed through the carnage, legs wobbling over the ridges of spines and teetering upon fallen shields, her cane found the shattered bone shining from a man’s arm and snapped through it with a crack. The noise echoed loudly, lingering like stagnant water in the familiar, cloying quiet that soaked into once-fertile soils after bountiful battles.
Despite the mess of the field, the woman continued to walk. Her clothes were damp, staining anew in wreathes of red and brown and black. She had drawn his sister’s eye, but Enyo gave the woman a wide berth, her head rising to watch in the way wary dogs scented air. For a goddess who tended to prod all sorts of things like they were interesting bugs, Ares couldn’t understand why this old woman was any different. He found such a brave old woman very amusing.
Stepping over bodies of ally and enemy alike, Ares approached her. A faint smell of bitter chicory and thyme lingered around her cloak, drifting towards the metallic, bitter stench of wild lettuce where her wrinkled arms peeked from the fabric. An old, frail mortal. She was likely near the end of her lifetime.
“May I help you?” He spoke, careful to not reveal his true form. If this woman was a mortal – as her uninspiring scent suggested – his honest flesh would sear her eyeballs clean and scrub the sinew off her bones. Ares would rather take his dagger and skin a mortal himself, for all the use it had.
“Why yes, dear,” the old woman croaked, looking up to where she heard his voice. Ares peered at her white gaze, seeing her bloodied sclera glisten in the last drops of Helios’ light. She must’ve been blind. A battlefield was already dangerous enough, never mind for a blind elder. “I require assistance before travelling home. There is a great unrest there – much has gone awry.”
Assuming her to be one of the mortals living in the village just beyond the valley this fight had spilled over, Ares grunted and lifted his hand. Across the way, Phobos and Deimos both ceased their squawking at a vulture and began their approach.
“Of course,” Ares said to the elderly woman. “Allow my sons to escort you home. Both are brave and strong, and they will see that no harm befalls you.”
The woman simply shook her head. “Oh, no, young god, I need you.”
She grabbed ahold of the ribbons wrapped around his arm before he could think to move back. Where they were usually neatly tied, they had been unwound and loosened during the battle and now dangled down to his hip. Ares would never cut his tainiai off – gifts of his darling’s trust and the war-prides he so gladly brandished. It felt like the old woman knew this, as she gripped them tightly and used them to tug him down towards her.
His sons’ wafting voices became harried shouts as his world stumbled and spun. The last thing Ares heard was the old crone’s lilting voice, breathed against his ear: “Save the future, Ares Laossous.”
A terrible crawling sensation yanked him back to awareness.
His skin felt hot and cold, a damp sweat gathering on the back of his neck and arms as the feeling of a thousand spider legs trampled over his flesh and gouged into his veins. Hephaestus had once pranked him and Aphrodite with a bed that turned into thousands of his spider machinations. They’d crawled over them both incessantly. Somehow, this felt worse. Less like little toys made for a scare and more like daggers pressing into his pseudo-flesh and tearing at his divinity.
He pried heavy eyelids open. His sight blurred for the first few moments, leaving him to squint at the moving ceiling above him, watching groggily as the yellow-grey surface bobbed and weaved like one of Athena’s crafts taking shape on her loom. He blinked up at it without thought. He stared until the ache under his false skin receded and he could properly see. The pain lingered, but the spiders were gone.
Ares groaned into the space between his lungs and his heart and pushed himself upright. His chest gave a pang at the movement, but he ignored it in favour of breathing as deeply as he could. Gods did not need to breathe like mortals did, but Aphrodite had been trying to teach him ways to calm down quicker and he needed to be as calm as possible in this situation or else he’d end up strangling someone. He felt like he’d been trampled at Troy, but Troy had fallen a mortal decade ago and left him with nothing but an ache in his chest.
The tingling pain behind his eyes, buried deep in his skull, was no worse than the usual ambrosia hangover. Dionysus was rendered comatose on the regular, and Ares was no virgin to a good party. Yet, this hangover felt different from others.
When he blinked, Ares noticed he was in what appeared to be a bedstead of the highest luxury – although it sported only one pillow. A sad mockery of a fur, neither linen nor animal skin, gripped to his slick skin. It reeked like earthy thyme and of himself – that invading, metallic musk that clung to his false flesh after he wore his armour for hours on end. The scent of a fight. The stench of war.
The mortals truly must have found hunting difficult in the wake of their battle if they had covered him with that poor substitute of a blanket. To haul a god into a bedstead and coddle him in subpar fabrics was an interesting choice. Most would’ve left him to bleed out in the dirt.
As he woke properly, the memory of the old crone and her whispering sent a shiver down his spine. He felt sore all over, from his legs to his back. His arms felt too light and his face too tight, as though the skin was pulled taut on a spit above the fire. Most pressingly, there was a continuous ache sluicing along his chest – one that hadn’t gone away the longer he was aware of it. The feeling was a well-known ailment, and he wasn’t even surprised when he looked down to find a long, narrow gash cutting along his front, lancing from collarbone to hip. It was speckled with gold, inflamed and hot to the touch. Why his warkin hadn’t tended to him, or summoned Apollo (who would come, even if Ares had laughed at his latest poem), he wasn’t sure. His children were far smarter than Olympus and the gossiping nymphs liked to make them seem. They would have known the direness of this injury at a mere glance.
Ares’ fingers prodded the wound, pressing into the ichor-wetness before retreating, dripping with warmth. It was warm enough that he would’ve thought it dealt only moments ago.
Uneasy, he gave a scouring glance around himself. The room he was in was too tall and wide to be one of the village houses – the walls were of a flat wood that did not match any mudbrick customs he was used to, and the furnitures were oddly shaped and littered with unusual trinkets. It looked like something he’d find in Olympus, but the humming divinity wasn’t thick in the air and he had that choking sensation that meant he’d been on mortal land a bit too long.
Grinding his teeth together, he threw an arm back to support himself and peered down at his chest again. It ached worse than that damn spear had in Troy. But, whatever had happened with this one, he had not been given nectar. Considering how worried Enyo got around injuries, the fact he’d woken breathless and sore made him more concerned for his family than himself. If his fellow warfeasters and children had not tended to him, something very dire must have happened.
Taking matters into his own hands, he reached into the powers of his domain and thumbed a bottle of nectar from his realm. Most gods had the boon of a storage area within their domain realms and Ares’ Quick Strike was no different – holding both a storage space and an arena for him to train. The nectar he drew out was contained in an odd metal cylinder, which took a moment for him to figure out how to unscrew, but it seemed fresher than any other nectar he had tasted after storing it inside his domain. Either this nectar was freshly brewed within the last week or the metal cylinder held some merit. Likely one of Athena’s ideas. The thought could’ve choked him.
As it was, Ares took care to not spill anything. If Apollo was out of commission or ignoring him, he needed to be at full strength. If something worse had happened – whatever had given him this injury – then he needed to be prepared for it.
Nectar healed gods quicker than other things but Ambrosia was richer and made for larger wounds. Apollo’s healing hands had been gifted for the possibility of anything that ambrosia couldn’t cure.
Ares swallowed down what he could before his throat tingled. In the quiet of the room, with only his pounding heart and ringing ears, he watched the wound shrink an inch either side. It didn’t recede fully, which was expected, but he’d been hopeful of more. Such a potent-tasting nectar had never given such stagnated results. Ares snapped his jaw so hard that every single one of his teeth popped with minute aches.
There was a knock on the door. His head jerked up as a voice called, “Checkout’s at eleven AM sharp, mister!”
Whatever language that was, he didn’t recognise it. His godhood allowed him to understand it without issue, but it didn’t sound like his mothertongue in the slightest. Most mortals should have spoken in that, or some newer but still similar version of what the Hellenes spoke, though the language did not sound like any of the neighbouring countries’ tongues or dialects either.
Now he’d been made aware of it, the distant noise beyond the door was deafening. Voices chattered in that strange language, idle noises of mortals living and breathing. The room stunk of past patrons – something sour and tangy, like old ale. The reek stuck in his throat and made his jaw click shut. Footsteps drew away from the poor slab of wood, unhurried in their uneven gait. He’d only heard past warriors walk like that, or the elderly whose bones had long frayed. Ares doubted his children would have left him in the care of wounded mortals.
With a bad taste on his tongue that wasn’t from the nectar or the room, Ares quickly pulled linens from his realm to swaddle his wound. However, when he pulled them out – as most things in his storage were summoned to him on thought – he found an odd swathe of fabric instead. It had a sticky rim, which he had the distant memory of pressing to the flesh around a wound. How he knew that, he wasn’t sure, as he had never seen anything like this. It creased and crinkled in his palms… palms that had lost some of their natural sun-raw tan and were littered with jagged, uneven ridges of aged scars. He didn’t remember earning most of them. Ares stared at them for a long moment, working his tongue over his teeth and finding them all as sharp as before. His mouth was right, so why were his hands wrong?
Before he could grind his teeth to nothing, his body moved without his mind and quickly splashed some of the nectar over his torso before pressing the fabric to himself. It clung neatly, so thin and tight that it would be unnoticeable under a tunic.
When he stood to dress himself, the world gave a tremulous wobble. He grabbed a post of the wide bedstead to steady himself and instead collapsed back onto the mattress as it crumbled under his grip. Suffice to say, he was not pleased. The bedstead was of such poor quality that it almost gleamed in comparison to the mattress, stuffed with something that was certainly not feathers or straw or wool. His chest throbbed at the pull of flesh from all the movement, and he groaned into the poor-quality sheet.
Ares curled into himself and summoned the bottle of nectar again. It was almost empty and he knew this was his final bottle as well as he knew the back of his hand. He needed to either visit Apollo or brew more for himself soon.
The last dregs of the bronze liquid did little for his wound, but gave him some surety of mind. A god stranded in an unusual place, without nectar and without his kin – he needed to see this fixed immediately.
He reached into his realm for a tunic and came back empty handed. Jaw tight, he peered into his storage and found a fair amount of fabric and oddly shaped linens, but couldn’t make himself put any of them on. In the corner was a chiton – that long, winding bundle of fabric that Aphrodite and Athena had worked together to make, insisting that the mortals would soon be dressing in the same. It was the one his love had gifted him to celebrate the end of the Trojan war, to rejoice in them being able to stow away the snakes disguised as laurel. The war had taken its toll on both of them, but the rich fabric bellied none of that – red with black accents, a winding ocean of soft linen that split on both sides for his ribbons of war to hang free. After quickly dressing in it, Ares found his precious tainiai coiled neatly in his storage and took the time to sit himself in his stagnant arena – a place of warm stone and red skies where the outside world did not move as time passed inside – and retied each one carefully. Whoever had left him in the room must have taken them off him, because Ares had not taken any ribbon off since he had been given it. Although, he must’ve been conscious during it, as only he could access his storage realm.
Aphrodite had started gifting him ribbons, as she started most things. She’d come to him one dawn with a beautifully sewn strip, detailing doves and apples and those white palm flowers, and had kindly wrapped it around his bicep. “The mortals give things to each other for luck,” she’d told him, carefully wrapping the ribbon around his arm and tucking it in neatly. “I can’t let my own lovers best me at my own game.”
Obviously, Ares had accepted that ribbon and the many that came after. To the mortals, it was a sign of luck and safety, another divine ritual for their gods. In Ares’ view, his ribbons were no different than a mortal praying to a god to bless them, to wish them the chance to return from battle, perhaps not unwounded but alive. To him, the ribbons meant love. A sign that, no matter what, Ares would always have a home in Aphrodite’s heart.
He tied the tainiai ribbons as best he could, attempting to loop them exactly where they had been. The weight felt almost unfamiliar against his skin, but his mind crooned sweetly. He had dozens upon dozens of them, as his family had taken to gifting him ribbons as war gifts and boons during his campaigns. He knew who had gifted each one. The wonderful tainiai lined all the way from his biceps to his wrists, each one individually stitched in colourful patterns. Usually, they were neat and their long cords were tucked and wrapped around themselves, but after fighting or sparring, they fell loose to flutter around him. When he moved his arms, they followed like a cloak; pressing colour and thread into the air around him, flaring bright as he moved through battles with ease. When he could not draw his wings, the ribbons eased his mind instead.
Ares dropped a tainiai with a start, realising what the ache in his back was.
Casting a glance over his shoulder, he blinked at the empty space behind him. The blow must’ve injured his head. He couldn’t remember ever having forgotten to unsheathe his wings.
His feathers rippled under his skin at the thought. Where his sister Athena could not hide her wings, Ares was of a different sort. His vulture feathers were longer, fiercer, and often caught on mortals in battle. For this reason, he tended to furl them under his mortal guises, tucking them tenderly away to keep them safe. Except… he distinctly remembered having had his wings out at that battle.
Regardless of reasoning, he let his back split in two. From the gap of his pretend flesh, two dark wings unfurled, spreading wide into his arena’s stagnant air. His feathers ruffled, some crooked and out of place. His primaries gave distant pangs as he stretched and rolled out his shoulders, letting his wings span from one end of his arena to the other. The feathers were bent and ruffled, looking like they hadn’t been tended to in years. An injury on his chest had never affected his wings before.
With his ribbon tying finished, he reached back for his wings and hissed his way through preening them. He preferred to trust this delicate procedure to Aphrodite, who always smiled so prettily at the chance, ruffling her own dove feathers in glee. But his lover was not here, and Ares couldn’t wait that long.
Cleaning and righting them took longer than anticipated, especially when old, molted feathers fell from the plumage of his secondaries. Disasters looked better than his wings did. The time that passed in his arena was inconsequential to the mortal world, but it built up and soon what was a handful of minutes in the mortal plane had become hours to him. Knowing that time still flowed, he was mostly unsurprised when a knock in his room drew him back to the unusual room. Thankfully, he’d managed to get his wings back to fit order.
“It’s five past eleven, mister!”
Ares stood from the bed. He didn’t stumble this time, maybe because his wings were out to fan around him. They settled over his shoulders in a warm embrace, soft even through the layers of fabric over him. His bandages were hidden away under the folds of cloth, unseen even to his sharp eye.
He gave the room a final sweep, noting the soft aura of his shield hiding under a chair cushion and his xiphos propped against the bedstead, and grabbed them both before leaving. They melded into his storage, tucking away, although his shield stuck to his fingers like sticky honey before relenting. It had never done that before.
A mortal stood beyond the door. His eyes glazed over as the mists obscured Ares’ less-than-mortal form, although he smiled like nothing was amiss. Ares wasn’t entirely sure what the mortals would see, aside from a man wearing the clothes they expected a fellow neighbour to wear. Most gods had their own mortal clothing to pick from to dictate their own images, but Ares wasn’t feeling that picky today. Where most mortals couldn’t do anything other than speak of him with words that twisted taught with fear, worrying about corrupting his image was at the bottom of his priorities. Writing was only for the palace scribes, not common folk, so it wasn’t like anyone would remember this. His main issue was whatever had happened to leave him here.
“I hope you had a good stay, sir,” the mortal chirped, giving a short bow. He gave the room a fleeting glance and didn’t mention the broken bedstead. Ares eyed the man’s form-fitting clothes and the cane he clutched, nothing like the hunched stupor of that crone. His garbs looked like something Dio would’ve worn at one of his parties.
“How did I get here?” He asked.
Unfortunately, the utterly blank look the mortal was giving him meant the man was as clueless as Ares felt. “Uh, you drove, sir?”
He drove? Somehow, Ares understood what he meant. He must’ve ridden his chariot. Ares didn’t often bring his chariot along unless Aphrodite was fighting with him, because she liked the ride. She’d been busy with some spat between her most recent pair of favourite lovers, so she hadn’t accompanied him to the battle. He’d need to investigate what happened himself – he’d go back to the battlefield, since that was his only proper lead.
“Have I already paid?” Ares continued, knowing no mortal would dare trick him. This man surely knew who he was, considering his manners. Even vapid mortals knew not to rile the gods.
“Yes, sir,” the mortal nodded. “Please, was our hotel’s experience up to your standards?”
Ares grunted. The man seemed to take that as high praise and fluttered over to a wooden table, where a woman stood in a similar state of unusual dress. A tight tunic that looked too neat pressed over her chest while firm fabric coiled around the entire length of her legs, tapering at her hips and ankles respectively. Somehow, Ares knew these to be trousers, although he couldn’t recall ever having seen something so odd before. Actually… he was almost sure he’d seen a few different looking pairs in his storage world.
Deciding to think about it later, Ares left the building and stepped outside. There were odd chariots lined along the road and the air stank of smoke and something worse than Hephaestus’ forge. It wasn’t often the god of war couldn’t stand a smell, but his nose scrunched all the same. The long winding road he stood beside wasn’t one he remembered being near the battlefield – all there had been there was an endless field, with that small village beyond the valley. Although, he had never seen a road slicked black. Normally they were stone cobbled or pressed dirt.
This ‘hotel’ was the only building for miles. The road stretched and stretched but there were no grasses, only dusty plains. Ares scowled. When he turned to glance at the building, he found it built of a material more unusual than the road. Hephaestus must’ve been meddling again, like that time he created steel and gave it to the mortals to let them run amok with it. Admittedly, Ares had been complaining that the wars were getting too easy to win and the steel had livened things up. But it was the argument that mattered, not the good results.
The sight of the building made his chest ache with something hot. Where were the proper large stones? Where were the mud huts? Ares rubbed his fingers together, spine tightening as unfamiliar calluses rubbed against each other. His wings flapped fitfully before he could calm them, where he decided to ignore the weird architecture and inspect his chariot.
His gold beauty stood idle amongst the mortals’ steel monstrosities, which looked far different from the ploughs he’d seen them last using. The war chariot was disguised as something less eye catching – an oddly low thing with a long, cushioned seat and two wide handles. A motorcycle, he knew, though didn’t know how. Whatever it was, he did find it quite interesting, though he dematerialised it into his storage in favour of spreading his wings wide and leaping into the sky.
He could take a proper look about his surroundings from above. Where his chariot would take too long to gain height, Ares could simply catch a curdle of wind and launch himself high into the sky. His feathers rustled in the wind, soaking up the moisture of the clouds he passed through like they were unused to the feeling. The clouds kissed his face, clawing at his chiton and passing over his shoulders like cool hands. Ares flew through them, coming to the height Olympus was normally at and finding nothing but a blue abyss. Every bone in his body twinged.
Clouds roiled as far as the eye could see. From here, he could gaze down at the world and see the mortals’ gleaming buildings and their cube-shaped chariots. The landscape remained mostly the same, unimaginative desert. There was no battlefield near him, no heady allure of blood on the wind— nothing. There was nothing but dirt, trees and dust.
He swallowed, throat suddenly parched. If he could not find the battlesite that had taken him down, then he would go to the safest place.
Olympus was never far for a creature with wings.
Ares flew higher and higher. The sky spiralled around him and his wings tired quicker than they should’ve. He would’ve blamed his wound if it didn’t feel numb. Where had his stamina gone?
His ribbons trailed around him, coiling with his legs and dancing between his feathers as he flapped and dove through clouds. The winds grew heavier, the sky wider yet darker. Ares strained to go higher but found himself breathless. His wings flapped aimlessly, struggling against the thick air. He looked back to find the mortal ground too close.
With a shout, he clawed at the air— just a little further, a little higher—
But luck was not on his side. The wound had split him deeper than he had realised and it had stolen the strength of his wings with it. As he thought that, the bandages on his chest welled golden with spillage. Ares snarled at the unseeing sky and tucked his wings close to himself. He let himself fall.
A breath away from the ground, he tilted his body to glide along the curve of the land, wings snapping out to catch the breeze. He stirred up dust and dirt as he barrelled past, finding himself following the long swathe of road he had first stepped out onto. He let the momentum flutter away as he snapped his wings out wide and landed outside another building.
This one had the distinctly arid scent of nymphs lingering around it, even if it did look similar to that hotel. It wasn’t unusual for there to be non-mortal establishments, but Ares couldn’t recall ever having visited this one before. There was a flashing word stooped over its roof, declaring it a ‘diner’ in a new script he could somehow make out.
He folded his wings atop his back and straightened his chiton with a snap of his wrist. Glaring at the weird language, Ares strolled into the diner.
Every living being inside stooped into a deep bow. A nymph dressed in an apron behind a counter went three shades paler at seeing him and hurried to bow whilst calling out, “Welcome, Lord Ares – please find rest in our diner.”
He dismissed them all and took a heavy seat by the counter. At his silence, the mishmashed collage of demigods and other blessed beings slowly shuffled back to their meals. The air tasted taught. If he was Eris, he would’ve laughed, but he only scoffed.
The diner was almost quaint. Large panes of glass allowed those inside to look out at the road, with comfortable cushioned chairs lined around tables. There were quite a few people at these squares, most sitting with plates ladened full of food. Ares’ stomach rumbled. Yeah, he could go for a bite.
He pulled out a drachma and set it before the nymph. “Whatever meats you’ve got on special.”
“M- My lord,” the girl squeaked, hands shaking despite her firm attempts to steady them with a tight grip on her apron. She must’ve been a young one, because he didn’t recognise her. “This— I’m sorry, we can only accept mortal coin.”
He should’ve blinked at that, but his mouth said, “Dollars?”
“Yes, my lord,” the nymph nodded along. Ares had no clue what he’d just agreed to but his hand pulled forth a dozen smaller, lighter coins from his storage. A few strips of paper came with them.
He dumped it all on the counter. And gave the nymph a look. Her shaking hands plucked out one of the papers and a few coins.
“This will be enough for a fry,” she declared, showing him how much she’d separated from the main pile. Ares grunted and swiped the rest – drachma included – back into his storage. The nymph burst into motion behind the counter, fiddling with devices that looked fresh out of Heph’s forge.
There was an odd cube hanging on the wall above the counter. A few other patrons were staring at it, listening to the mortal man talking through it. It looked like one of those prophecy orbs, except Ares knew damn well that no sound came from those. On the television, the news presenter talked at great length of the storms grounding planes all over the world. Something had pissed off his old man, but when was that anything new?
For a moment, wings flexing out behind him (much to the stifled gasps of the other patrons), Ares wondered if Zeus’ fury had anything to do with him. He’d sure pissed off the old man his fair share over the centuries, but his father had never raised a hand against him – he just sent him on annoying, tiresome missions. Zeus wasn’t the type to directly harm his kids.
Tapping his fingers on the countertop as he waited, Ares tried to think back to what had happened. It was a small, inconsequential battle that meant nothing to Olympus. Truthfully, it had just been big enough to draw his attention. His twins had insisted on coming along, which had drawn in Enyo, who had invited Eris. A small war team, but enough. Ares had gotten his hands warmed in mortal blood and had a good day.
The only thing different from the rest of his wars had been the old woman. It wasn’t exactly uncommon for mortals to stumble upon a battlefield, but it was very unusual for that person to then proceed through it. He’d been sure the woman hadn’t been able to see him – either not blessed with godsight or already blind – but her words… She’d known who he was, probably before he’d even approached her. And she had been able to touch him while he was disguised, meaning she was no common mortal. The crone had the gall to call him a young god, which he certainly was not, and then had titled him Laossous. Rallier of Men – that epithet wasn’t one people in that region called him often. He’d heard it only a few times in prayers from other parts of Greece, but that small village had preferred to call him Ares Areios.
“Save the future, Ares Laossous.” That was what he remembered before waking. The old crone had tucked her mouth near his, breath rife with rot, and chilled him to the bone at the same time.
Just what had that old crone meant? The future… Ares wasn’t a prophet, that was Apollo, gifted yet cursed with the Sight. How could those cryptic words help him any? He couldn’t do anything if he didn’t know what to fix. It sounded like some crude riddle one of his siblings might’ve given to a mortal to torment them until their death.
The nymph pulled him from his thoughts by placing a ceramic mug in front of him. The dark liquid inside steamed heartily, curling around him with a rich, nutty scent – coffee. He couldn’t remember ever having seen something like it, but his fingers itched for it all the same.
Warmth seeped into his numb fingers when he wrapped them around the mug. The buzzing chatter of the other patrons gnawed at his ears, low and hesitant but present. Every single one of them wore something similar to those mortals in that hotel. Had he been knocked into a coma or had fashion changed that fast? Ares was certain he hadn’t travelled outside of…
Had he? How did he know he was still in Greece?
The breath that caught in his lungs rattled like a death wheeze. It would’ve made his uncle proud but all it did was make the nymph girl’s hands shake more as she pushed a plate of glistening meats and eggs towards him. Ares spared the odd cuisine a short glance before deciding he really didn’t care. If a nymph wanted to poison him, he’d show her why every living being whispered his name with fear.
Coffee nudged aside, he took to the plate with his hands, picking up slick, greasy slices of meat and pressing them into his maw. He felt half-starved in a way he hadn’t since that accursed jar, though there was no hollow pit to his stomach now. In fact, his body was as fit as he’d left it – muscles still corded under his ministrations and his wings still pricked at the air and twitched at the vibrations of people moving around him. Everything should’ve been the same, yet even the way his hair sat over his brow, a stripe of red licking down into his vision, left him feeling unsteady.
Ares was not used to being a stranger in his own body. He was War – he knew himself as well as he knew his domain. To fight was to be one with flesh and soul. To fight was to pant for breath atop a field dripping in blood. Fighting was stretching his wings out to catch a volley of arrows and sending them hurtling back towards their shooters with a simple flick. Fighting was rising from a mortal’s chest with blood in his mouth and a full stomach.
The uneasy hitch beside him made him turn his gaze towards the poorly disguised cyclops sitting two stools away. The man was shying away, fingers white and quivering around his own mug of coffee. His gaze was pointedly trained on the sheathe of paper in front of him, trying to read like his eye wasn’t bulging with his roaring pulse. Blinking slowly, able to smell the weakness of the creature, Ares licked the grease from his sharp fingers and let his chest rumble pleasantly as he turned back to his own plate. His now empty plate. That had been tasty. He’d not eaten anything like it before.
Ares ignored how the cyclops’ breathing went shallow at the noise. Better he fear him than bother him.
“More,” he called to the nymph, pulling the same coins and note she’d taken from his storage realm. The metal bounced on the counter, spinning right into the girl’s hands.
“Yes, my lord,” she agreed, not looking at him as she took to ferreting around her machines. Ares quickly lost interest in her jerky motions and wrapped his slick fingers around the coffee mug to drain it. The coffee slid down his throat like hot guts through a vulture’s beak. His wings twitched and fluttered before he could stop them. The other patrons, very carefully, did not look near him.
The juices of his meal left slick marks on the white ceramic. Ares had barely set it down before it was refilled by the nymph. She set another plate down in front of him, piled with more meat than before, like she could see how hungry he was. Only then did she take back the other plate, as though she’d worried Ares would demand a trade in her own diner.
He tucked back into the meal, head dipping as he tried to savour the meats. They tasted different – cooked in an interesting manner and seasoned with something he’d never smelt before. His tongue welcomed the flavours like old friends, but the taste itself was enough to make his head whirl. Distantly, he knew he was drooling, thick globules of saliva dripping off his tongue and catching around his sharp teeth, but nothing quite mattered as he chewed and crunched his way through something warm, a meal cooked for him over something much nicer than a ragged campfire. It reminded him of the weekly dinners his family held – he’d evidently skipped out on a few too many if he was unravelling so easily over one meal.
When he was done, he finished his coffee again and sat back, swiping weakly at his mouth as he let his wings curl against his back. His stomach was sated and his hands felt deliciously grisly. The television buzzed on in the corner, talking about earthquakes and typhoons. Ares watched the footage intently, watching twenty-foot waves crash over beaches and drag screaming mortals out to sea.
It wasn’t unusual for the old man to throw a hissy fit every now and then. Zeus was poor tempered at best, but Poseidon deciding to act up at the same time almost never happened unless there was something going on. The most recent time Ares could recall was Halirrhothius. His uncle had raged for weeks, even after Ares had won the trail and been acquitted. Sure, Ares had encouraged his birds to circle over Poseidon’s other kids for the following few weeks, but nothing had been able to stop the sheer destructive force of the waves as they seized and quivered under his uncle’s rage. Eventually, Zeus had received so many prayers from mortals pleading to anyone for help from the waters that he’d unleashed his own thunder and summoned them all to an emergency meeting. He’d chewed his brother out in front of them all – something not even Demeter had been able to hide her smirk at.
As far as Ares could remember, that was the last time the skies and seas had shrieked together.
He snorted. The noise sent the cyclops’ newspaper scattering across the diner floor. As the pages fell, Ares caught a glimpse of the date on the front page— before quickly dismissing it.
When he stood, the cyclops fell to his knees and cowered as his shaking hands scooped up his paper. Ares tossed a discerning glance over the other patrons, finding them all resolutely staring at their own plates. Amused, he gave the nymph a parting nod.
“Good food,” he praised, and turned for the door. He’d make it up to Olympus no problem after a feed like that.
“Thank you, Lord Ares!” The nymph’s shaking voice called after him, her stuttered consonants broken in half as the door swung shut behind him.
The sky beckoned him, radiant and empty. He let his wings stretch out and leapt.