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In the three seconds that the club took to reach his body, Polites was frozen to the spot.
The eye above him, singular, tinged with red and tangled with veins, glared down at him with one single, shaking pupil. Polites’ gaze darted around frantically, but no one else seemed to see, too busy dodging or whacking the cyclops’ legs with reckless abandon. He opened his mouth but no sound came out, and—
The club was close above his head, now. His fellow crew members rushed past him, footsteps echoing off the rocky surrounds of the cave. He begged his feet to move along with them, but all that happened was his fingers clutched for a sword that, for some godsforsaken reason, wasn’t in his hands. Odysseus was far to his left, barely visible in his peripheral, but was preoccupied. Eurylochus was nowhere to be seen, and, though he was glued to the spot, some part of him went gods I hope he isn’t dead and—
Then time seemed to speed back up to normal and the club whooshed down at his body, and it was barely a second before Polites was pushing someone who had run too close out of the way, and there was blinding pain, pain, pain, scorching his body with blood. His glasses skittered off his face, cracked. He faintly, distantly heard a squelch, then his own mouth moving to form words that he could not make out, and then there was screaming and Odysseus flickering out of his blackening vision and he was gone.
(And there was the snipping of thread, and the twisting and unravelling and the way time itself seemed to unfold into a tapestry of light and darkness and colour and undecipherable patterns and he who was he? felt only mild, dampened horror as he saw it unravel and his string added back to the cacophony and—)
…
“My brothers!”
And Polites staggered on trembling feet, eyes blown wide, as he heard his comrade running ahead of him, shouting instructions to a terrified crew. Before he could think, he gasped in a shaky breath, phantom pain still tingling under his skin. The few still standing still around him glanced at him, confused, but he managed to play it off as shock. It was— he was dead, and maybe this was some kind of— daydream, nightmare, some terrible mind trickery imposed on him by the gods, but that didn’t deter from the fact that he thought he was dead.
Polites shook his head. There was no time, and his friends were counting on him to contribute at least a little bit. Wasn’t it he who brought them to this cave, who didn’t notice the danger until it was too late to escape?
With that comforting thought rattling around his head, Polites ran up, again, again, again, hand on his sword. He ignored the déjà vu churning in his gut as he slashed at the cyclops’ heels, heard Odysseus call out commands that he remembered him saying before, but he hadn’t said that before but that burning pain and those crunching ribs was too real to not have happened, and he was distracted and suddenly there was a club, dropping from above his head, and his feet may not have been frozen to the ground but he had naïvely thought that this monster was slow, and there was a literally ear-splitting crack and his vision went white and—
(The tapestry again. His own worn thread, unsnapped, a pair of tiny knots in the thread, and the unwinding of time.)
…
“My brothers!”
And Polites staggered on trembling feet, eyes blown wide, and he knew it wasn’t just a dream.
There were eyes on him, he knew; watching his breathless posture, trembling hands, the probably-incredibly-sudden change in his demeanour, but even as Odysseus paused his speech briefly to stare at him for a moment, he couldn’t bring himself to care. Not when he had done this twice, already, not when he felt someone bump against him as they ran and he knew who without looking up.
Odysseus didn’t run off immediately. The pair locked eyes. What? Odysseus mouthed.
Polites shook his head.
…
“My brothers!”
And Polites staggered on trembling feet, eyes blown wide, and was staring at not the cave ahead, but at the distinct form of a goddess.
Polites should have been expecting this, really; still no one knew how the gods interacted with time, in no small part due to the Fates, or Apollo’s prophecy, or Kronos’ existence, and Athena had always been… a mentor, or maybe a guide, two steps ahead of Odysseus at all times since that boar, back home on Ithaca (gods, how he wanted to return to Ithaca). Even as he fell, time and time again because he wasn’t as fast or as strong as any of those heroes in the war, he could still faintly make out that particular shade of blue if he turned his head fast enough. A side effect of having some sort of proximity to her for the past however many years, he supposed.
Still, it was a shock when Polites was pulled into Quick-Thought— or, at least what he remembered Odysseus describing it as. He barely swayed on his feet, which he was proud of, but that was quickly overshadowed by the need to drop to his knees because that was a goddess in front of him.
“Pallas Athena,” he gasped, “What— what are you doing here?”
There was a hand on his shoulder. “You may rise,” Athena said, voice just monotone enough that he couldn’t pick out any emotion behind it, “There are more… concerning matters at hand, if you will.”
Polites stood on shaky feet. The air around him seemed to have cooled bitingly, though he was still in the cave. The walls were tinged with blue, and his crew around him had slowed to a near stop. So this was Quick-Thought.
“What would that matter be?” he said carefully, though he had a niggling feeling in the back of his mind that he knew what it was already, because he had died, and died, and died (and yet, the Keres had never appeared to him in his not-quite-final moments, no matter what flavour of gruesome or peaceful death he had achieved this time) and he had come back.
Athena seemed to read his thoughts— maybe she could do so, he wasn’t sure. “I have become aware that your time doesn't follow a particularly… linear path,” she said, and that was twice she had hesitated in their short conversation so far, which did not bode well, “and so I have reason to believe that someone— a god, perhaps— has been the cause. Are you aware of this?”
Polites’ heart raced. “Yes.”
Athena, if she was a mortal, would probably be smiling. “Good.” A pause. His hands clenched, then released. “I will assist your escape.”
He blinked, stepped back. “What?” He said, then, fully comprehending her words, “Are you— what do you want me to—”
He swore he could see a ghost of a smirk spreading across the lower half of her face— the only part he could see— but when he blinked it was gone.
“At ease, mortal,” she said. Another pause, more prolonged this time. “You know that Odysseus is my Warrior of the Mind.”
Polites frowned at the change in topic, but nodded.
“Though I have trained him to treat situations in a fully logical manner,” she said, in a way that almost made his expect to see her pacing around Quick-Thought, “he still had his weaknesses. By that, I mean—”
Athena cut herself off. “Let me rephrase. If you were to die, I now realise, Odysseus would likely go insane. That is why I am assisting you, not simply to fix your particular issue.”
Polites resisted the urge to inform her that yes, Odysseus and I have been friends for years now and grief can make people act a little illogically, or this time looping thing is pretty concerning actually and should probably be the bigger concern, but he bit his tongue. She wanted to help his friend, in whatever twisted way the gods saw help. She did not mean harm.
In any case, she was the Goddess of Wisdom for a reason.
“I understand,” he said, tacking on a second later, “Pallas Athena.”
The goddess stood up somehow straighter than she already was. “Well then.”
Quick-Thought ended with a wave of Athena’s hand, sending the world back into now-dizzying motion. Polites ran further into the cave with his comrades, somewhat reminded of his first time around; only hours ago for him, but it felt like months. He yelled out a warning early, as he had begun to do over the last few loops (“He’s got a club!”). It sent some of the less experienced crew members scattering, but none of them died so that was good, if not an improvement.
(Polites had always been the first one to die. Maybe the Fates were making some kind of joke out of him.)
(Polites always thought he was supposed to make the jokes.)
Athena’s blue in the corner of his vision was stronger than before; maybe that was because he had seen Quick-Thought, maybe that was because he was paying attention to it now; in any case, it was nice to know that someone knew what was happening.
Satisfaction, or something along those lines, settled in his stomach. He had someone else on his side, and an Olympian at that! He would get out of this. He would get out—
One of the younger crew members was in the way of the club. Polites wanted to live. Polites wanted the crew to live more.
Polites sprinted at the young man, bodily shoving him out of the way. He saw him almost yell a retort in his direction, but the club was swinging down, down, down, and he did not know whether or not to savour the taste of blood in his mouth and his lungs that only lasted a second before his skull caved in.
(The Fates stilled their ever present thread-spinning for a fraction of a fraction of a second— though, what was a second to them, really?)
…
“My brothers!”
And Polites staggered on trembling feet, eyes blown wide, and he wanted to cry.
He channelled that energy into hysterical laughter.