Archive of Our Own

“I mean, I’d say Dan Heng could help you out, but I don’t think he’s read up on Kremnos either.”

Caelus said this around a mouthful of sandwich, seated sideways on his stool with his legs swinging beneath him. He was the shortest of the three by enough that his feet failed to reach the floor, leaving him to idly kick his heels against the metal support whenever he got bored. At present, he seemed to find Phainon’s difficulties considerably less alarming than Phainon did.

The three of them had settled in the central hub between lectures, eating submarine sandwiches because they were halfway through the second semester and Castorice had decided that allowing any portion of her non-refundable meal plan to go unused would constitute a failure. She insisted on getting lunch for all three of them, which had left Phainon with a chicken teriyaki and bean salad he was still trying to reconcile with the concept of salad. There was lettuce in it, technically. He supposed that made the classification automatic to some degree.

“What about the historical reference library downtown?” Castorice picked at the charms hanging from her bag, frowning when one of the little clasps came loose beneath her fingers. She really had to invest in a new bag soon if she seriously planned on buying more merch.

“I’m planning to check it out later today.” Phainon pushed a piece of chicken around his container. “I pored through their catalogue online, though. None of my searches brought up anything useful.”

“None at all?”

“Nothing,” Phainon sighed. He had spent most of the previous night searching up interesting and slightly different terms on the web portal.

Castrum Kremnos. Kremnoan history. Ancient Kremnos. Kremnos religion. Kremnos Nikador.

He had tried every variation he could think of, and the database was determined to return papers about unrelated archaeological sites, modern political disputes, and one magazine article about the developments of Kremnos-inspired architecture in new model homes, which itself seemed dubious and not searched very well. None of it answered the question his professor had actually assigned.

Caelus took another bite of his sandwich before saying, “Well, you should’ve known what you were signing up for when you put the class in your schedule. Didn’t you check the professor’s rating online?”

Phainon looked at him. “I did. The rating was not good.”

Caelus’s expression became sympathetic. “How bad?”

“Two point one. And there wasn’t another section available.”

That was the entire problem. He needed the course for his program, and there was no other professor teaching it this semester. Dropping it meant adding another term to his degree, which meant another term of tuition, another rearrangement of his work schedule, another delay to everything he had already planned around graduating on time. He had spent the last several months arranging his remaining credits. History 418 was supposed to be one of the easy victories.

Instead, his paper required primary sources concerning a civilization whose surviving records appeared to have been swallowed as greedily as Caelus scarfed down his sandwich.

Caelus reached over and patted him on the arm. “Don’t worry. I’m sure everything will work out just fine.”

Phainon gave him a doubtful look.

He took the Skytrain to Okhema Central, then transferred to the streetcar that ran down the aptly named Cerces Avenue. Phainon wasn’t particularly religious. Agnostic was probably the closest thing to an accurate description, though he had never been particularly interested in the question of whether anyone was listening when people prayed.

Still, as the streetcar rattled its way through the city, he said a small prayer in Cerces’ name. Just a quiet thank-you for the chance to attend school here, so far away from his hometown. A chance at an education, once he could have only dreamed of a couple years ago. It was easy to forget what an insane privilege that was.

Okhema was built into mountainous territory, which was much easier to appreciate from the Skytrain than it was once you were actually on the ground. From the elevated tracks, the shape of the city was obvious. Mountains rose behind the buildings, layered over one another.

On the street, you couldn’t really tell. The city itself was a mixture of old and new. There were plenty of newer buildings, glass and steel in abundance. Developers had spent a great deal of money making sure nobody could ever accuse them of being interesting.

Then there were the older parts of Okhema, with considerably more personality. Old marble buildings crowded the streets, many of them several storeys high with carved stonework. Some had been turned into restaurants or offices or expensive apartments. Others survived as they were, their original purpose lost beneath decades of repairs and renovations. The buildings gave the streets the feeling that they had been lived in for a very long time.

The historical reference library was a good example. It had been built to resemble a shield. If there was anywhere in Okhema where someone could get away with building a fortress and filling it with books, this was it.

The subject was right up Phainon’s alley. War history, specifically. As cliché as that might sound coming from a twenty-something history major, he had always been interested in it. Politics, religion, economics, geography. None of them existed in isolation once people started drawing borders. It was a little grim, maybe, but Phainon had never been bothered by that.

He walked straight up to the entrance and went inside. The lowest level of the library was sprawling, considerably larger than the building’s exterior suggested, and the public seemed to have sprawled out with it.

There was a café built into the library on the left, heavily populated despite the prices Phainon had heard about. He had looked them up once out of curiosity and decided it was better not to look again.

He found the nearest directory posted on the wall beside the elevators. The elevators themselves were made entirely of glass, clear enough that you could see in and out of them as they travelled between floors. Phainon vaguely remembered reading that they were designed to resemble the open-air hydraulic elevators that had once existed in Okhema thousands of years ago.

He scanned the directory and found what he was looking for on the fifth floor. History and Historical Reference. A little ironic, considering the name of the building, to have it all stowed so far away. He crossed over to the elevator, pressed the button for five, and stepped inside.

A woman slipped through the doors just before they closed. She had long brown hair and kind, sleepy-looking eyes, the sort that gave the impression she had either just woken up or had been awake for far too long.

Phainon smiled politely and asked, “What floor?”

She glanced at the buttons, then at him. “Wherever the wind takes me.”

Phainon wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. He looked at the buttons again before offering, “Well, the wind is taking me to the fifth, if that works for you?”

She nodded, and he let the doors close. The elevator began its slow ascent.

Phainon turned toward the glass and watched the library fall away beneath them. From above, the lowest level looked even larger, all those people scattered across the floor and absorbed in their various pursuits. The balconies and walkways connected the different sections together.

The woman looked out through the glass too, hands clasped gently. “It’s impressive, isn’t it?”

Phainon glanced at her reflection in the glass before looking back down at the library. “Yeah. Whoever designed this building must’ve really loved their work.”

“No, no,” she said, smiling faintly. “I meant the people. All so absorbed in their own lives, yet they ripple out into each other in fascinating ways.”

Phainon followed her gaze. A librarian pushed a cart between the shelves. A worker at the café pushed a coffee across the counter. A man stood near the entrance, looking around as though searching for someone he hadn’t yet spotted. They were all occupying the same little piece of the world.

“Hm,” Phainon said after a moment. “I guess I never really scale back and think of it that way.”

The elevator gave a soft beep and came to a stop. The doors slowly parted, and the woman stepped out first. Phainon waited a moment to let her go.

She turned back with a small smile. “I hope you find what you’re looking for in here.”

“Thanks. I hope you find the same,” Phainon said, though he wasn’t entirely sure what that meant in her case.

She smiled again and continued down the corridor, off to wherever the wind had decided to take her next. Phainon watched her go for a second before turning toward the huge lineup of shelves. He made for the K section quickly, following the signs until he found the appropriate row.

He scanned the spines from top to bottom, searching for anything with Kremnos in the title, and found several names that looked close enough to raise his hopes before he realized his mistake.

Castrum Kremnos. Not Kremnos.

“Oh, come on,” he muttered under his breath.

He turned around and headed back toward the section for the letter C, suddenly conscious of how obvious his mistake probably looked. Rationally, he knew nobody had been watching. Nobody in a library cared what some random guy was doing with the shelves unless it involved public indecency. There were people here who had their own research to worry about, their own deadlines, their own cold coffees sitting beside them.

Still. That had been a serious aura loss.

He reached the C shelves and found the section marked CA. His eyes moved steadily along the spines, passing over ‘Carthage: Tales on Getting Everyone Very Angry’ and ‘Caesars, Conspiracies, and Other Terrible Career Choices’ before finally landing on a gem.

Castrum Kremnos. For the first time since his professor had assigned the paper, Phainon was looking at the name on something that existed other than a search bar.

The book looked old, old enough that he felt a little guilty pulling it from the shelf. Its spine had browned considerably with age, the white it must have once been reduced to a tired, wrinkled cream. The corners were softened from years of handling.

Phainon carefully slid it free. He ran a hand over the cover, brushing away a thin layer of dust.

The Rites and Rituals of Castrum Kremnos: An Introductory Volume to Strife.

He stared at the title. “Well, that’s catchy,” he murmured. Definitely not a run-on-title at all.

He flipped the book open, and the smell reached him first. It was the particular smell of an old book, dry paper and dust and something faintly sweet underneath it. It reminded him of the sole bookstore in his hometown, a cramped little place where everything was covered in dust and the owner had decided that organizing books by genre was an unnecessary burden. He had spent hours there as a kid, nearly causing avalanches.

The inside of the cover bore a faded illustration that made him pause. He assumed it was a historical depiction of the Corpus of Nikador, though the figure looked different from the modern representations he’d seen. Large, metallic-looking wings sprawled behind a slightly spindly body, its surface rendered in the same pale quartz colour found throughout many of Okhema’s oldest buildings. Even in the faded ink, the figure stood with severity beneath the weight of its wings. Underneath, in small lettering, were three titles.

The Giver, Master of Legions, Lance of Fury.

Phainon stared at it for another second before turning the page. The title page simply repeated the name of the book and, beneath it, clarified that this was the second edition. There was no author listed that he could see.

That was odd. He flipped through the book, taking care with the pages. They were thinner than he expected, yellowed along the edges and soft with age. The text was dense, filling nearly every page with paragraphs, footnotes, references, and the occasional diagram. Whatever else the book was, it wasn’t going to be a quick read.

But it was actual information. Phainon closed the book gently around his finger to keep his place and looked down at the title again. It would do.

After the world’s most normal commute back to his apartment—which thankfully was only a short distance from campus—Phainon got to work on the meal he had prepared earlier in the week. He ate, changed into his gym clothes, and headed back out, spending the next hour working through a decent session before making the short walk home again. A shower later, he was in his pajamas on the couch, something mindless playing on the television in the background, with The Rites and Rituals of Castrum Kremnos open across his lap.

It was clear almost immediately that the book hadn’t been written recently. Its vocabulary and turns of speech belonged to a style of historical writing Phainon hadn’t encountered in anything published within the last eighty years.

He glanced through the table of contents first, running his finger down the list of chapters. Most of it was what he had expected. There were parts on religious practices, military customs, social structures, the organization of the city, and various sections on daily life.

The first several pages gave a general description of Kremnos, written as though the author expected the reader to walk through the city alongside them. They described the streets and temples, the markets, the soldiers stationed in different parts of it. There were details about what a visitor might have smelled in the marketplaces, what they might have heard from the temples, what sort of clothing they would have seen passing by.

He kept reading. The television continued murmuring in the background, eventually becoming little more than white noise. His tea went cold beside him. At some point he realized he had been sitting in the same position long enough for one leg to go numb. The descriptions had pulled him in so completely that he could picture the city around him, and he read well past when he had intended to stop.

It wasn’t until he reached a section he’d noticed earlier in the table of contents that he finally slowed.

Summoning Rites: Worship and Guidance from Nikador.

He turned the page. The rituals were recorded in detail.

There was a list of items required for the rite, but they only seemed to be common items. There were instructions for their arrangement, the order in which certain actions were meant to be carried out, and notes about the circumstances under which the ritual could or could not be performed.

Then came the spoken portion. Phainon sat up. The words were written in the common alphabet, but they weren’t Common.

He blinked a few times to make sure he hadn’t misunderstood what he was looking at. Kremnoan. The language that was supposed to be lost.

Ancient languages did not always disappear. Like society, they evolved. Some had survived because the civilizations that spoke them had survived in one form or another. The Common tongue, for instance, could be traced back to the language originally spoken in Janusopolis. Their society had endured, changed, expanded, and carried its language with it into the Common Era. Okhema had done much the same.

Kremnos was gone. Its civilization had disappeared thousands of years ago, and with it, the language that had belonged to its people. There were fragments, inscriptions, names preserved in other languages, archaeological records and scholarly attempts at reconstruction. But the actual language was lost to time, and to a lack of people carrying it forward.

And yet here it was. His first thought was that it couldn’t be real. What if the book wasn’t a reliable source at all?

He wanted to read the words aloud. It was one thing to see Kremnoan written in the Common alphabet, it was another thing entirely to hear it. Phainon wanted to know what the language would sound like coming from his own mouth, even if he had no idea whether he was pronouncing any of it correctly.

Well. It was already quite late. If he was going to read the words aloud, he might as well do the ritual properly.

He looked over the list of required materials again. None of it was particularly exotic.

The book called for a white cloth, though it specified a particular kind of linen. Phainon didn’t have fancy linen. He did have a clean white cloth that was probably pure cotton, which seemed close enough. He spread it across the kitchen counter and smoothed out the wrinkles with both hands.

Next came a small bowl and a half-empty bottle of red wine from the back of the cupboard. The instructions called for small objects made of metal, specifically for Nikador. Phainon considered this for a moment before opening the junk drawer and taking out a handful of steel screws. They would have to do.

The candle was a little more embarrassing. He only owned one, an apple-pie scented candle he’d bought because it had been on sale. The ancient Kremnoans had not been particularly concerned with whether their ritual spaces smelled like baked fruit, as far as he knew. Still, the book hadn’t specified a scent. He set the candle in the middle of the cloth and placed the box of matches beside it.

Then he brought the book over and left it open to the two pages he needed. He washed his hands at the kitchen sink, dried them, and returned to the counter. From what he knew of Amphorean ritual practices, clean hands marked the beginning of a rite, and the lighting of the flame formally began it.

He struck a match. The little flame caught the wick, and the candle began to burn.

Phainon looked down at the first line of the invocation. The words felt awkward in his mouth. There were sounds he was not making correctly, which made him hesitate halfway through before forcing himself to continue. By the time he reached the end of the first line, he was fairly certain he’d butchered the entire thing.

There was nobody around to correct him. That was probably for the best.

He placed the steel screws in front of the candle, as instructed, then paused. The next part required a request, the entire purpose of the ritual.

Phainon looked at the page. What did he actually want?

He supposed that if Nikador was willing to answer, he would like to know more about Castrum Kremnos. That seemed reasonable. Preferably from a dependable source, enough information to write an excellent paper and finally put History 418 behind him.

“I’d like to learn about Castrum Kremnos. From a reliable source, ideally. Enough to get an excellent grade on my paper would be nice.”

He quickly poured the wine into the bowl before he could reconsider the entire evening. In general, throughout most Amphorean cultures, a libation was meant to follow the request, and he had already spent enough time wondering whether he was doing any of this correctly.

Then came the closing lines. He stumbled over the first word, stopped, and tried again. The second attempt was slower. He shaped each syllable as carefully as he could, relying entirely on instinct. When he reached the final word, he was relieved.

He leaned forward and blew out the candle. The lights went out.

Not just the candle. Everything.

The television died and the refrigerator stopped humming. The little green and red standby lights on his appliances vanished. The apartment dropped into complete darkness so suddenly that Phainon couldn’t tell whether he had closed his eyes. Then he yelped and slammed his foot into the bottom of the counter.

The lights came back on all of a sudden. Phainon was still leaning over on the ground, one hand around his foot, and had to blink rapidly against the brightness. He groaned as he pushed himself up, narrowly avoiding smacking his head against the bottom of the counter as he stood.

There was a man standing on the other side of the kitchen counter. He was gorgeous.

He had long blond hair that faded into red at the tips, red like the tattoos that adorned his body. He was shirtless, mostly, and his body was absolutely ridiculous. Completely ripped, muscles everywhere, the sort of physique that looked unreal. And that face belonged on the cover of every fashion magazine in and out of print.

Phainon stared at him. The man stared back, looking mildly pissed.

Phainon screamed.

The man’s expression darkened.

Phainon was less concerned with the fact that the man looked angry than with the much more pressing question of why there was a complete stranger standing in his kitchen. He backed up quickly, nearly tripping over himself, and fumbled with the nearest drawer. His hand closed around the first thing he found, a wooden spoon. It would have to do. He was way too broke to be getting robbed.

The man scoffed when he saw it. “You summoned me here, human. Why do you have the audacity to look shocked before me?”

Phainon stared at him. “Uh… what?”

The man sighed, turning his head slightly as though he were addressing someone who wasn’t there. “This is why I stopped taking house calls hundreds of years ago. Humans have grown jumpy. Too weak.”

Phainon’s grip tightened around the wooden spoon. “Who are you calling weak? Who—who are you?”

The man looked back at him. Then he smiled. It was a very nice smile. It was also a little terrifying. Unfortunately, it was really difficult for Phainon to appreciate the terrifying and sexy part.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked. “You’re in the presence of Nikador.”

Ten minutes later, Phainon was sitting on one of the stools beside the counter while the Titan went through his refrigerator. It had been a strange ten minutes.

Initially, Phainon had accused him of being a cosplayer who had broken into his apartment, tampered with the power box, and decided that robbing a student in his sleep was worth the effort. Then the stranger had opened his palm. Like magic, red gems had appeared in it. There had been no pocket involved. No sleight of hand. He had placed them on the counter. His tattoos had started glowing, too.

Phainon had stopped accusing him of being a cosplayer after that. Unless cosplay engineering had gotten really advanced lately, he was pretty sure that display was enough to convince him.

Now the stranger was standing in front of the open refrigerator, taking inventory. Phainon had half a carton of eggs, some leftover vegetables and bread, the final two containers of meal prep, and a bottle of orange juice that was approaching a questionable age. Maybe a few other items.

Phainon sat quietly on the stool and stared at the gems. “So,” he said slowly, still looking at the gems rather than the being rifling through his fridge, “the Titans are real?”

Nikador reached into the refrigerator and pulled out an apple. “Of course we’re real,” he said, turning it over in his hand. “Has it truly been so long that you question even our veracity?”

“I mean…”

He wasn’t sure how to explain that the problem wasn’t exactly that it had been a long time. The Titans were history. Ancient history, at that. There were entire academic fields devoted to arguing over what the Titans had actually been and whether the surviving accounts could be trusted at all. There weren’t supposed to be Titans standing in your kitchen eating your groceries.

Said Titan took a large bite of the apple.

Phainon stared. “You’re eating my apple.”

Nikador paused mid-chew. “You summoned me here.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean you can just devour all of my food.”

Nikador looked down at the apple, then back at him. “You called upon Nikador, Master of Legions, Lance of Fury, and you object to an apple?”

Phainon looked at the half-empty refrigerator. “I have seven dollars until Friday.”

Nikador stared at him for a moment. Then, with absolutely no shame, took another bite.

“Okay, okay,” Phainon said, still trying to make sense of the situation. “So the Titans are real, and there’s one in my kitchen. What exactly am I supposed to do for you?”

“Do for me?” Nikador looked genuinely puzzled by the question. “You realize that you summoned me here, don’t you? That is my purpose at the moment.”

Phainon blinked. “Oh. You mean the stuff I said during the ritual. You want to help me out?”

“I do not wish to help you out,” Nikador said. “But I have no choice. I cannot return to the godly domain until you have been granted your blessing.”

“Oh.” Phainon looked at the book still sitting open on the counter. “So, as a resource about Kremnos, you sent yourself?”

“This was not fully in my control,” Nikador said, sounding increasingly irritated by the conversation. “But what better source could you need than the King of Kremnos? Present me to your teacher so that I may leave.”

Phainon glanced toward the windows, all of them covered by curtains. “Uh, that’s not really going to work out. My professor wants a written essay, for starters, and it’s the middle of the night anyway.”

He seemed to consider this. “Hm. I can see that.” His gaze drifted toward the curtained windows. “To think that Okhema, too, would one day have a day and night cycle. Interesting.”

He turned back to Phainon. “Very well. Escort me to the best chambers you have.”

Phainon stared at him. “You mean a bedroom?”

“Yes.”

“This apartment only has one, and it’s mine.”

Nikador frowned as though Phainon had presented him with an unreasonable logistical problem. “Well, you cannot expect a god to sleep on the floor.”

Phainon swallowed.

“I will tear this kitchen down," Nikador added.

That seemed like a threat worth taking seriously.

“Right. Bedroom. Sure.”

He led the Titan down the short hallway, pointing toward the first door. “That’s the bathroom.” Then he opened the door on the right and flicked on the light.

His bedroom wasn’t particularly spacious, but it was comfortable enough. A couple of posters were on the walls. There was a queen-sized bed taking up most of the room, with enough space left for a dresser, a closet, and his desk. Everything was clean, if a little cramped, and the bed was made with the purple-and-yellow sheets he’d bought because he liked the pretty colours.

Nikador looked around. “That is your kline?”

Phainon frowned. “My what?”

Nikador looked at the sheets. “Why is it adorned in such hideous colours?”

Phainon looked down at them. “What? What’s wrong with my bedsheets? Purple and yellow go great together.”

The god of strife rolled his eyes. He began removing his jewelry, setting each piece aside with more care than Phainon would have expected. Then he started undoing the chiton covering half his body.

Phainon immediately looked away. “Uh,” he said, suddenly very interested in the hallway, “need anything else, or…?”

“No.”

“Great. Okay. Goodnight!” Phainon pulled the door shut behind him and stood in the hallway for a moment.

He had a Titan in his bedroom. A Titan who had threatened to destroy his kitchen if he wasn’t given proper housing arrangements.

Phainon looked toward the couch. It was going to be a long night.

Phainon was woken abruptly by the sound of shuffling. Then something kicked his knee. He blinked his heavy eyes open, still halfway trapped in sleep, and found Nikador standing over him with his arms crossed, looking down at him.

He was wearing little more than a length of fabric around his waist and thighs, the minimum required to preserve his dignity. The rest of him was on display, his ridiculously sculpted chest and shoulders totally bare. His breasts spilled even over his forearms, so plump and round that it looked absurd.

Phainon stared blearily for several seconds. “Do those come with milk?” he mumbled.

Nikador kicked his knee again, harder. “Human. Show me how to operate your baths. I wish to bathe.”

That got Phainon out of his chest-induced stupor. “Right. Yeah. Bath.”

He sat up and got to his feet, keeping the blanket wrapped around his own waist despite the fact that he was fully dressed in a T-shirt and pajama pants. There were simply some things he preferred not to expose.

Nikador followed him into the bathroom. Phainon leaned into the shower and turned the handle, making sure to angle himself enough that the god could see what he was doing over his shoulder. Water immediately began pouring from the showerhead, steady and hot. The pressure in the apartment was one of the few things Phainon had no complaints about. For a place this cheap, he’d expected considerably worse.

Nikador watched the water fall for a moment before huffing. “I could find a waterfall if I desired that.”

Phainon looked back at him.

“The water is draining out,” Nikador continued. “I require a bath.”

“Ohhh.” Phainon turned off the shower. “You meant that literally. Okay.” He reached down and started running the bath instead.

Nikador watched him fill the tub, his expression becoming increasingly unimpressed as the water rose. “Your bath is very small.”

“Well, beggars can’t be choosers. I take what I can get for a good price.” Phainon shrugged. “Most of the apartments I looked at didn’t even have a bath in them. Just a shower.”

Nikador looked at him. “You are a beggar?”

“Nope.” Phainon reached for one of the bottles lined up beside the tub. “I’m a student. I work at the university too, actually. But I want to work at a museum in the future, if possible.”

He pointed out the bath gels, explaining which ones were his and which ones Nikador could use without accidentally smelling like whatever aggressive floral fragrance Phainon had bought on clearance. He showed him how to turn the water off once it reached the desired level, then explained how to pull the plug when he was finished.

Phainon grabbed a towel from the cupboard and placed it beside the sink. “All right, Mister Nikador. Enjoy your bath.”

Nikador turned toward him and frowned. “You do not have to keep calling me that name.”

Phainon paused at the doorway. “I don’t?”

“I was not always called Nikador.”

Phainon frowned. “What should I call you, then?”

“I will accept Mydeimos.”

Phainon stood in the bathroom doorway, one hand still resting on the frame. “Okay.”

He waited. Nothing else happened.

“All right,” he said. “Good talk.” Phainon closed the bathroom door behind him, letting out a long, slow breath.

Mydeimos. He said the name under his breath, testing the syllables. It sounded heavier than Nikador, darker. He’d have to look it up in his history textbooks later, assuming his internet connection hadn’t been permanently fried by a divine EMP.

Walking back into the kitchen, the reality of his situation truly began to set in. He looked at the white cloth still spread across the counter, the steel screws scattered next to the apple-pie scented candle, and the half-empty bowl of cheap red wine. It looked less like a grand mystical ritual and more like the aftermath of a very strange, very sad Tuesday night. To make things worse, the candle’s label read “Summon Serenity,” which felt like a cruel joke considering the only thing he’d summoned so far was a mild headache and the suspicion that his screws were cursed.

Through the thin bathroom door, he heard the heavy splash of water as a literal god attempted to cram his ridiculously sculpted, larger-than-life physique into a standard-issue, cramped apartment bathtub. There was a low, resonant groan of displeasure from inside, followed by the distinct sound of ceramic groaning under immense weight.

“Please don’t break the porcelain,” Phainon whispered to the empty room. “The landlord will keep my deposit.”

He sighed and opened the refrigerator, staring blankly at the tragic inventory. The apple Mydeimos had taken was one of two. That left him with half a carton of eggs, a withered bell pepper, and a bottle of orange juice that was rapidly turning into vinegar. If he was going to survive through a ferocious god of strife living in his apartment, and if he was going to get enough information out of him to pass History 418, he was going to need reinforcements. And by reinforcements, he meant groceries. Maybe he could cook to save his life.

He pulled out his phone to verify his financial situation. His banking app confirmed the grim truth: exactly $7.42 left in his account.

“Hey!” Phainon called out, stepping closer to the bathroom door. “Mydeimos? Do gods eat breakfast?”

The water splashed, and nothing else was said. Phainon rubbed his temples. He looked back at the kitchen counter where the red gems still sat, catching the morning light filtering through the cheap curtains. He walked over and picked one up. It felt surprisingly heavy, warm to the touch, and completely real. If he could figure out how to pawn a gemstone before his 10:00 AM lecture, maybe this ritual wasn’t a total disaster after all.

A short while later, Phainon stood at the stove, carefully managing the heat under his cheap non-stick pan. Today was a day of absolute luxury: two eggs and two whole pieces of toast. One full slice for each of them. He felt a minor twinge of financial guilt as the bread dropped into the toaster, but considering he was hosting a roommate who could easily tear down his kitchen when angered, it felt like a necessary investment.

The bathroom door clicked open, and a moment later, Mydeimos walked into the kitchen. He was back in the clothes he’d arrived in the night before. Now that the room was flooded with bright, unforgiving daylight, Phainon could actually appreciate the outfit properly. The shirtless chiton, the heavy metallic accents, the glowing red tattoos against his ridiculous physique—he looked exactly like a character stepped right out of the high-fantasy video games Phainon used to play back when he actually had time for nerdy hobbies.

Mydeimos stopped near the counter, looking around with a deeply critical eye. “Where is the platter of cheeses and grapes? Your offering of blood and bones?”

Phainon paused, spatula hovering mid-air. He honestly couldn't tell if the Titan was being serious or just trying to be difficult. He decided to pivot.

“I hope you’re joking about the bones. Uh…” Phainon said, turning back to flip the eggs, “I’ve got a platter of cheeses, well, just one kind of cheese, really. Eggs and bread are coming your way too.”

Mydeimos let out a low scoff, taking a seat on one of the barstools at the counter. He mumbled something under his breath about Phainon being a beggar again.

As the eggs slid onto two mismatched plates, Phainon looked over his shoulder. The reality of the situation was starting to truly sink in. Sitting at his counter was an ancient entity, an entire bastion of historical and cosmic wisdom. He had a million questions for History 418, but a grander, more fundamental curiosity suddenly won out.

“Hey,” Phainon asked, setting the plates down. “So, what actually created the universe?”

Mydeimos picked up his piece of toast, examining it with mild suspicion. “I do not know.”

Phainon blinked. “Huh? Aren’t you a god?”

A heavy, profound silence filled the kitchen. Phainon could practically see the gears turning in the Titan’s head as a look of slow realization dawned on him. He realized that Phainon knew nothing.

“While I am a Titan,” Mydeimos said, his voice dropping into a flat, measured tone, “none of us are all-knowing. Did your people truly learn nothing after we left?”

Phainon gestured toward the stove. “Technology. All electric.”

“And you believe this is an impressive feat?”

Phainon’s eyebrows climbed. “I mean, yeah? It’s electricity.”

The Titan snapped his fingers. The candle sitting on the counter—still surrounded by the remnants of last night’s ritual—flared to life. Mydeimos picked up his toast. “Electric,” he repeated dryly.

“Okay, first of all, electricity is extremely useful.”

“So is fire.”

“You can’t really power a refrigerator with fire.”

“I could. And I could do much, much more than that.”

Phainon slowly lowered his fork. “I don’t want to know what that means.”

They ate in silence. Phainon poked at his eggs, still watching the candle out of the corner of his eye. The flame was perfectly steady, its warm light flickering against the cheap kitchen walls. Yesterday, the idea of a Titan existing had been too much to even get into. Now one was sitting across from him eating eggs and mocking his technology.

Phainon sighed and took a bite of toast. “So,” he said, “if none of you know what created the universe, what do you actually know?”

Mydeimos looked at him over the rim of his cup of water. “A great deal. My victories.”

Phainon pointed his fork at him. “You know, for a being who supposedly wants to help me with my paper, you could stand to be a little more talkative.”

“I have been here less than twelve hours.”

“And in that time you’ve eaten two of my apples!”

“One apple.”

“You were in the refrigerator for a very long time.”

“I was assessing your supplies. They are deeply underwhelming, you’ll have to visit the market soon.” Then, after another bite of egg, Mydeimos said, “Ask your questions.”

This was the reason he’d performed the ritual in the first place. The opportunity he’d spent hours searching for, the primary source his professor had demanded, sitting across from him at his kitchen counter. He reached for his phone.

Mydeimos watched him suspiciously. “What are you doing? I will not have my voice trapped inside that little device.”

Phainon looked down at his phone. “You realize it’s not actually trapped in there, right? Fine. No recording.”

He opened the notes app instead. Then he typed the first question.

Castrum Kremnos: Religious and Military Practices

He glanced up. “All right. Let's start with something easy.”

Mydeimos leaned back in his chair. “Very well.”

“What was daily life actually like in Kremnos?”

He looked toward the window wistfully. “Long ago,” he began, “Kremnos was a heart, beating louder than anything you know. The mountain itself breathed with the rhythm of our hammers, and the sky above was stained with the glorious smoke of—”

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

The shrill scream of Phainon’s phone shattered the atmosphere. The candle flame leapt violently, turning a sharp, angry shade of crimson before settling back down.

The Titan’s knuckles whitened around his fork. “What is that wretched wailing? Kill it before I crush it.”

“Oh! Shoot, sorry!” Phainon scrambled for the device, frantically tapping the screen until the alarm silenced. He looked at the time and felt his stomach drop. “Man, I need to leave for my lecture right now. Professor Caenis is a stickler for attendance.”

Mydeimos stared at him, his brow furrowed in genuine disbelief. “You are leaving? Now? After demanding I recount the glories of my home?”

“I have to! It's a thirty-minute trip to campus,” Phainon said, already rushing toward the sink to dump his plate.

The Titan stood up, his massive frame completely eclipsing the kitchen light. He crossed his arms over his tattooed chest. “This is unacceptable. Let me come with you. I will eliminate this ‘Professor Caenis’ so that I may be rid of this debt and you can return to your duties here.”

Phainon nearly dropped his fork into the sink. He spun around, eyes wide. “Uhh, don’t do that… please don’t do that. I actually can’t pass the class if you murder the woman grading me.” He offered a weak, incredibly tense smile, desperately hoping the Titan of Strife possessed some hidden sense of humour.

Mydeimos stared down his nose at Phainon, utterly unamused. “Well, I am not staying in this cell you call a dwelling while you are away studying your nonsense. If I must endure your world, I will see it.”

“Right, yeah, except…” Phainon’s eyes trailed down from the Titan’s sharp jawline, past the heavy metallic accents. “I don’t think you could come to my campus dressed like that.”

A sudden, unexpected wave of heat hit Phainon’s face. The sheer thought of a hundred other university students staring at the Titan—or worse, snapping photos—made him feel genuinely, deeply queasy.

Mydeimos looked down at himself, then back at Phainon, his expression turning thunderous. “You dare criticize the traditional garb? First my diet, then my home, and now my appearance? Fine. You have insulted me enough already.” He stepped forward, towering over Phainon with an imperious glare. “Give me clothing.”

Mydeimos was currently halfway inside the wardrobe, rifling through the hangers with a level of aggression that made the wood groan.

“Haikas,” Mydeimos growled, tossing a perfectly good flannel onto the floor like it was a piece of garbage. “Your clothing is terrible.”

“Hey, careful with that! That’s my good interview shirt,” Phainon protested, hovering anxiously by the door.

With a heavy grunt, Mydeimos finally pulled something passable from the depths of the closet. He held up a pair of tailored grey slacks and a tight, athletic black long-sleeve tee. “These will suffice for your ritualistic gathering.”

Before Phainon could even nod in relief, the Titan reached for the knot of his chiton. “Whoa, whoa, wait—!” Phainon gasped, his brain short-circuiting as the heavy fabric began to slide down Mydeimos’ shoulders. He whipped around so fast his neck popped, staring hard at the paint on his bedroom wall. His face was burning hot. Behind him, the rustle of fabric was accompanied by a low, rumbling chuckle that vibrated right through the floorboards.

“Are the mortals of this age blinded by the sight of a warrior?” Mydeimos mocked. “Or is it merely your own fragile disposition, human beggar?”

“It’s called basic privacy!” Phainon shot back, focusing intently on a water stain near the molding. “We don’t just drop trousers in the middle of a bedroom without warning!”

“Done,” Mydeimos announced a moment later.

Phainon took a breath to steady himself and turned around. The word woah died in his throat.

In terms of raw height and frame, they weren’t actually completely mismatched. Phainon had always been on the broader side, but that was where the similarities ended. The grey slacks were a few inches too long, pooling awkwardly over the Titan’s bare feet, but the shirt was the real crisis. The athletic material was stretched to its absolute atomic limit, threatening to rip the seams with every breath.

“Uh! Hold on, don’t move,” Phainon blurted out.

He lunged toward his dresser, pulling drawers open with chaotic energy and tossing socks aside. He was positive he had something more forgiving. Finally, his hands snagged a lightweight, black button-up shirt he’d bought for a semi-formal event last semester. It was cut a little looser, meant to drape rather than cling.

He spun around and shoved the black button-up into Mydeimos’ hands. “Put this on instead. Please. For the sake of my GPA.”

Mydeimos eyed the garment but didn't argue. He peeled off the suffocating athletic shirt—Phainon looked at the floor this time—and shrugged into the button-up. When Phainon looked back, he let out a long, audible sigh of relief. It was still a tight fit around the shoulders, and the fabric strained slightly when the Titan moved his arms, but it was a little less atrociously tight. With the collar open and the sleeves rolled up his forearms, Mydeimos no longer looked like an ancient deity of warfare—he just looked like a remarkably intimidating, wildly attractive modern guy who probably spent twenty hours a week at the gym.

Mydeimos adjusted the cuffs, frowning at his reflection in the long mirror on the wall. “Acceptable,” the Titan muttered, though his tone suggested it was barely a step above rags. “Now. Lead the way to this scholar. Let us see if their intellect matches their arrogance.”

Maybe it seemed a little weird that Phainon tapped his card twice, for another man to get onto the train to campus with him, but he was hoping once again that nobody paid him any mind. The transit gate beeped twice in rapid succession. He guided Mydeimos through the turnstile ahead of him, a firm hand pressed against the small of the Titan’s back.

“Just move, keep moving,” Phainon whisper-shouted under his breath, his eyes darting around the platform unnecessarily. Nobody looked twice. The morning commuters were a wall of moving bodies, after all.

When the Skytrain finally screeched to a halt at their destination, Phainon let out a breath he felt like he’d been holding since the apartment. By some miracle, they had made it to campus without Mydeimos smiting a commuter or shattering a window. He had only stared out at the mountain range and sky in silence.

The walk to the humanities building was a blur of brick walkways and dead leaves, Phainon practically power-walking to keep up with the Titan’s long strides, despite the fact that they were just about the same height. When they finally slipped through the heavy double doors of the large lecture hall, Phainon’s heart rate finally dropped to a manageable double-digit number. The room was already half-full, air thick. They took two seats in the very back corner, far from the podium where Professor Caenis was setting up a dreadfully cluttered PowerPoint.

Mydeimos sat down, the wooden desk creaking ominously. “So, this is where your ‘intellectual’ master resides…” He leaned his chin in his hand. “This assembly is not structured communally. Why do you debate here? It smells of burnt beans.”

“It’s called espresso, and no, we do not debate in here,” Phainon whispered back, pulling his notebook and a pen out of his bag to look busy. “Please keep your voice down? Professor Caenis has a hearing like a hawk, and if she catches you, we’re both dead.”

Down at the podium, the projector flickered to life, casting an old textual diagram detailing the fundamental hierarchies of the universe. Above it, the slide title read: Scholastic Nousporism: The Mind over the Elements.

“Seriously?” Mydeimos murmured, his voice dropping so low it was a mere vibration through the wood of Phainon’s desk, “Are they teaching you of the debates in the Grove?”

“Today she’s covering how Nousporists argued against the scholars who thought all matter was just composed of air, water, fire, and earth.”

Mydeimos hummed. “I remember when the texts were carried out of those gardens. The scholars used to argue until their throats were raw under the olive trees, throwing stones into the fountains to prove whether the water held a mind of its own.”

Down at the front, Professor Caenis cleared her throat into the microphone, the high-pitched squeal of audio feedback making their ears ring.

“Good morning,” Caenis began, tapping her laser pointer against the podium. “As you can see, we are going to examine the chapter on the structural revolution of Scholastic Nousporism. When the early masters of the Grove Schools began dismantling the elemental dogmas—the rigid belief that the universe was merely a soup of fire, earth, air, and water—they introduced a theory of rational intent that shapes Pan-Amphorean academic institutions to this very day.”

Mydeimos watched her quietly, his chin resting in his hand. He looked unfazed by her calling his era’s science ‘primitive.’ If anything, a faint, almost imperceptible smirk touched the corner of his lips, as if he were sitting in a room full of children.

Thank god, Phainon thought. He’s just going to watch.

When the lights finally brightened and the sea of students began packing up their bags, Phainon lunged for his backpack. They made it out of the lecture hall and into the sunlit courtyard of the humanities building. Phainon was just starting to think he might actually pull off the stealth mission when a familiar voice cut through the chatter of the crowd.

“Phainon! Hey!”

Caelus and Stelle were jogging across the brick walkway. 

“Hey. Who’s this?” Caelus asked.

“Ahaha, right!” Phainon let out a forced laugh. “This is my good friend, Mydeimos! We were just checking out the campus, but we should really be getting home now—”

“Home?” Caelus repeated, his eyebrows shooting up as his gaze lingered on Mydeimos’s severe, aristocratic jawline. “With Mydeimos..?”

“Yeah!” Phainon blurted out, a bead of cold sweat forming at his hairline. “He’s... my new roommate!”

Stelle crossed her arms. “Phainon, you only have one bedroom.”

“Right, yeah, well,” Phainon stammered, scrambling for a plausible lie. “It’s a temporary situation. Air mattress on the living room floor, you know how it is. Don’t worry about it at all.”

Mydeimos glanced at Phainon, his expression clouding. “An air… mattress?” the Titan murmured, his voice a low rumble. “You expect the Lance of Fury to sleep upon a cushion of mere—”

Phainon forcefully nudged his elbow into the Titan’s ribs, nearly bruising his own joint in the process. “—a cushion of comfort! Yes, exactly, he loves it, loves the hospitality! Really gotta go now, nice seeing you two!” He grabbed Mydeimos by the hand and dragged him away, waving back at Stelle and Caelus with a smile over his shoulder.

By the time they unlocked the apartment door and stepped inside, Phainon’s nerves were completely shot. He slammed the door behind them as the faint scent of apple-pie candle greeted him.

Mydeimos immediately tore at the top buttons of the shirt, letting out a sharp grunt of irritation.

“Are we going to discuss what it is you must know?” the Titan murmured. “I am growing tired of this constant delaying of my freedom.”

“Hold it, buddy,” Phainon said, kicking off his shoes and dropping his bag onto the floor. “I only came back to drop you off and make you some food, but I’ve gotta get straight to work. I have to be at the campus library in less than an hour.”

Mydeimos’s eyes darted warily toward the kitchen, specifically targeting the tragic, mostly empty refrigerator. “You summoned me here and now you intend to do nothing? You waste the time of a deity you know nothing about.”

“Well, I didn’t think the ritual would actually work!” Phainon blurted out, throwing his hands in the air. “Let alone send a flesh-and-blood Titan to occupy my place.”

Mydeimos stepped closer, his brow furrowing as he looked down at him with genuine curiosity. “How did you come to learn of the invocation if you did not even believe in the Titans?”

“Man, I would call myself agnostic, first of all,” Phainon muttered, rubbing the back of his neck as he walked over to the small shelf next to the television. “I don’t really have time for a religious crisis about what I am or what’s out there right now. But the words were in this book.”

He pulled the heavy, yellowed volume off the shelf and held it up.

“It was the only resource I could find on Kremnoan history that actually had original text fragments.”

“Hand that over.”

He snatched the book from Phainon’s hands and walked heavily over to the kitchen counter, laying the text flat beneath the light. He scanned the dense paragraphs and the ancient diagrams.

Phainon stood a few feet away.

“You can read?”

Mydeimos paused, looking up from the pages with a glare so intense it nearly lugged the book right at Phainon’s face.

“My existence would not function if I could not understand the prayers of mortals, no matter what language or dialect they choose to whisper them in. The words shape the path, but the intent is what binds.”

Phainon raised his hands defensively, backing up half a step. “Okay, okay, my bad! It’s just... I thought the Titans didn’t really have followers anymore? Not the same way you used to, thousands of years ago. Nobody is building temples to the Lance of Fury in the Okheman suburbs, you know?”

Mydeimos let out a low, analytical hum, his focus shifting back down to the text. “It is not a matter of temples, nor do mortals need to speak my title specifically for me to hear them. I embody strife. It is a concept woven into the fabric of your kind.”

He leaned his weight against the counter. “Whenever a soul deeply seeks something with unwavering, desperate focus, when there is a martial pursuit, a conflict of wills, or occasionally a desire for revenge, I feel it distinctly. It pulls at the tether. But a ritual like the one you performed acts more as a beacon.”

Phainon stared down at his notebook, his mind spinning with the implications of what he’d just heard. He really should have taken that down as notes. Shaking himself out of the academic daze, he turned toward the kitchen.

“Right. Well, before my brain melts, I need to get some calories in me.”

He stepped toward the refrigerator, his hand reaching for the handle, but he was cut off before he could touch it. “Step aside. I will feed us.”

“You?” Phainon let out a dry, nervous laugh. “You know how to use modern appliances? Is cooking also a pursuit under the domain of strife?”

Mydeimos said nothing. He simply slid Phainon out of the way with a nudge, pulled the refrigerator door wide open, and began rummaging through.

Phainon closed the apartment door softly behind him, the heavy click of the deadbolt signaling the official end of a long, exhausting day. His shift bled directly into a late-afternoon seminar, and by all accounts, he should have been completely running on fumes. Instead, he felt great.

He wasn’t sure if it was a being good at everything because he’s a god thing or a being a god because he’s good at everything thing, but the meal Mydeimos had whipped up before Phainon left had been incredible.

Stepping into the living room, Phainon dropped his heavy backpack onto the floor. The television was murmuring quietly in the background, still playing the regional news channel as he’d left it. But the real welcome was the rich, savory aroma drifting from the kitchen.

Phainon walked over to the counter, his mouth instantly watering. A metal pot sat on the stove, half-covered by its lid, a gentle plume of fragrant steam escaping into the air. He peeked inside to find another flawlessly prepared dish waiting for him.

He leaned against the particle-board counter, looking toward the hallway where his bedroom door remained firmly shut.

He hasn’t tried to kill me yet, Phainon thought to himself with a tired, genuine smile. Maybe I can go without my bed for a few more days if the food is going to be this good.

Two days passed in the same manner, settling into a rhythm that was as productive as it was completely surreal. Whenever Phainon wasn’t at a lecture or working his shifts, the two of them sat alone at the kitchen counter.

Mydeimos would talk through the sprawling history of Castrum Kremnos while Phainon typed frantically on his laptop. The physical notebook simply hadn’t been fast enough, the Titan was a god of very few words most of the time, but when he spoke of his own kingdom, the information came in an absolute torrent.

It had been a massive adjustment. Sharing a cramped, single-bedroom apartment with an ancient deity of warfare wasn’t covered in the residential tenancy agreement. For one, Mydeimos had a deeply ingrained habit of treating every task like a sacred act to be done as well as possible. When Phainon asked him if he could help crush the aluminum recycling to save space, he hadn’t expected the Titan to use a single, focused stomp that not only flattened the cans into wafers but left a perfect, permanent heel-print in the kitchen’s mats.

It was late on Thursday afternoon when the fragile peace shattered. Phainon was hunched over the counter, his eyes bloodshot as he cross-referenced a complex battle formation.

A sharp, sudden knock at the front door made them both freeze.

Before Phainon could even push himself up from his barstool, the lock clicked. The door swung open, and Caelus walked right in, a plastic bag of takeout containers dangling from his fingers.

“Hey, Phainon! I tried texting you, but your phone was sending me to the ringer. I brought that curry you like from down the street—”

For starters, Mydeimos was sitting casually on the living room sofa, completely absorbed in the television. Phainon had managed to find a pair of grey oversized sweatpants and an old, faded graphic tee for him.

On the screen, a hyper-cheerful blonde host was aggressively detailing the science of a perfect mirror-glaze cake during a baking championship, which had quickly become Mydeimos’ absolute preferred program over the last forty-eight hours.

Even worse was the kitchen counter. Phainon’s laptop was open to a highly detailed spreadsheet calculating historical timelines next to a scattered pile of handwritten charts, notes, and maps. Resting right in the center of the mess, catching the afternoon sun, was the pile of raw, glowing red rubies.

“Uh,” Caelus said slowly, lowering the bag of curry. “Am I interrupting a black market ruby sale? Are you guys selling smuggled blood diamonds out of your kitchen?”

“Oh, uh. Mydeimos here is the son of a jeweller,” Phainon said, his hands hovering over the counter with frantic energy. “He’s actually got some other cool golden pieces in the back. This is all just the stuff he has to drop off later. Isn’t that right, Mydeimos?”

Mydeimos looked up from the television screen at Caelus, ignoring Phainon’s pleading expression.

“Oh. It is you,” the Titan murmured, leaning back into the sofa cushions. He gestured vaguely toward the kitchen with his chin. “Tell me, does Phainon have a peculiarity to just say whatever the first thing in his brain is?”

Caelus slipped off his shoes and walked right over to the couch, sitting down next to Mydeimos without a single shred of hesitation. “Yeah, maybe a little. I mean, don’t get it twisted, he’s got a sharp tongue too, but when he’s not in debate mode he’s pretty much on standby.”

Mydeimos let out a low, resonant laugh.

Phainon’s jaw dropped. How was Caelus already making him laugh??That wasn’t fair at all.

“Really?” Mydeimos looked back at Phainon over his shoulder, a look that was both terrifying and blinding. “I’d like to see him in a verbal bout, then.”

Caelus, completely oblivious, started passing Mydeimos the plates and drinks from his takeout bag. “Oh, totally. Hey, Phainon, got any beers?”

“Just a second, let me get them out of the fridge,” Phainon muttered. He used the distraction to quickly and carefully scoop the glowing red rubies off the spreadsheet and sweep them straight into his junk drawer, sliding it shut with a quiet click.

Caelus leaned back, looking up at the ceiling. “So, Mydeimos, how’d you and Phainon meet? I didn’t realize I hadn’t met all of his friends.”

Phainon braced himself, terrified of what the Titan of Strife might say on the fly to a normal college student.

Mydeimos took a casual sip of his water, his eyes tracking a contestant on the screen who was currently crying over collapsed puff pastry. “He called out to me in the dark. He spent hours in devastation, begging for my wisdom to relieve his suffering, crying out until he finally got my attention.”

Caelus nodded sympathetically, opening his container of curry. “Oh, cool. Man, finals week really is a nightmare, huh? I’ve been praying for a miracle too.” He took a bite of rice before looking back over. “Do you have any social media?”

Phainon practically sprinted back into the living room with the beers. He forcefully wedged his way onto the couch, deliberately sitting right between them.

“Mydeimos broke his phone recently,” Phainon said, handing a cold can to Caelus and keeping his body angled to shield the Titan. “Completely shattered. He’s completely off the grid right now.”

“Really? Are you sure you aren’t smuggling things, man?” Caelus teased, cracking open his beer with a faint hiss. 

Before Phainon could construct another elaborate lie, Mydeimos reached over Phainon’s lap, took a small spoonful of the curry Caelus had offered, and sampled it. The Titan’s brow furrowed in analytical concentration as he chewed, and Phainon concentrated on his throat as he swallowed it down.

“Huh,” Mydeimos murmured, staring intensely at the plastic container. “From what province does this delicacy hail?”

Caelus grinned, clearly pleased by the reaction. “The curry? Pretty good, right? It’s a Xianzhou spot my buddy Dan Heng likes. They’ve got the right kind of rice that you don’t see as much in Amphoreus.”

Phainon watched the Titan’s eyes narrow. He realized that the single bite was going to result in Mydeimos snapping his fingers and teleporting to and from a grocery store with all kinds of new ingredients by tomorrow.

Well, not actually teleporting them. For some reason, Mydeimos had seemingly lost his godly teleportation powers because of whatever had forced him to accept Phainon’s prayer in the first place. Because of that, Phainon had given Mydeimos a spare set of apartment keys. It would have been weird not to. Phainon didn't plan on keeping him captive at home, at least for now.

Besides, Mydeimos didn’t even need to borrow Phainon’s seven dollars. The Titan possessed an infinite supply of ancient coins tucked away somewhere. Phainon had caught a glimpse of them earlier; some looked really, really old, likely centuries of historical offerings he’d received over time. Armed with those ancient tokens, he was perfectly capable of going out to do whatever he wanted.

So far, “whatever he wanted” mostly just amounted to walking to the local grocery store, walking back, and making absurdly high-quality food. Oh, and he had also brought home a plush, expensive new blanket yesterday afternoon. Apparently he utterly hated Phainon’s purple-and-yellow colour choice for the original blanket and pillow cases and refused to look at them anymore. Rude.

“It has merit,” Mydeimos decreed as Phainon snapped back to reality, leaning back against the cushions and pointing at the TV with his spoon. “But the woman on the screen is ruining her ganache. A tragic display of weakness.”

“Right?” Caelus agreed, immediately getting sucked back into the show. “She completely rushed the temperature control!”

Phainon sat rigidly between the two of them, taking a slow sip of his own beer.

They were sitting at a small table inside a café, the glass windows shielding them from the heavy wind outside. Phainon had finally been paid, and the arrival of actual digits in his bank account brought a profound wave of relief. More than that, he’d started feeling guilty for keeping Mydei cooped up in the apartment like a dirty secret. The Titan deserved to see something other than the four walls of the living room and the steam of his baths.

Phainon sat with his laptop open, frantically jotting down notes on the ancient Kremnos Festival as Mydeimos talked him through. The heavy library book sat between them, too.

Mydei had been reading through it on his own time, and Phainon was dying to know what the Titan thought of it. Did he consider it a reliable source? Was it inaccurate? But every single time Phainon tried to pry, Mydei would immediately veto the question, flatly stating he wouldn’t give his verdict until he had finished the final page.

Phainon opened a new paragraph in his document, his fingers hovering over the keys as he began to write about how modern assumptions of Kremnoan culture being purely barbaric were unfounded.

It had taken a lot of late-night reflection on the couch to realize that he had internalized those exact same biases. When he had first summoned Mydei, he expected only a cruel, unyielding god of blood and violence. But over the last few days, a different reality had emerged.

Despite the fact that the Titan was always willing to argue with him over everything from cooking temperatures to household aesthetics, he was also quietly caring. He helped with the dishes without being asked and folded the laundry meticulously. He routinely asked if there was more he could do around the place.

It made Phainon feel another sudden pang of guilt for tethering him to this world for so long. He wasn’t even sure what the parameters were for the blessing to be considered officially fulfilled. Was it when some cosmic force decided Phainon knew enough about Kremnos? Was it when he typed the very last sentence of the essay? Was it when Caenis finally graded it and handed it back? Or was it some secret fourth thing?

It was going to be incredibly bizarre to get used to living alone again, when the time came. The couch layout absolutely sucked, but coming home to a living presence in the apartment was nice. Because the presence knew so much about Castrum Kremnos, of course.

Phainon pulled himself out of his thoughts, his eyes drifting over to watch Mydei sip a trendy, iced espresso drink through a plastic straw. Today, the Titan had borrowed Phainon’s black knit turtleneck, paired with the grey slacks and a lightweight, structured charcoal coat he had dug out from the absolute depths of Phainon’s closet. Phainon hadn’t even known he owned that coat, but looking at it now, he decided it should just belong to Mydei permanently. Consider it a modern offering, because the tailoring suited him too well.

As Phainon watched him drink, Mydei’s expression suddenly went completely shocked. Phainon immediately spun around in his chair to look at whatever was behind him.

A woman was walking into the café, weaving her way through the tables. She was wearing a striped grey-and-white knit beanie with tiny nubs on top that looked like cat ears. Her long, messy grey hair—a shade that looked uncannily similar to Caelus and Stelle’s—spilled out from underneath it, framing a relaxed, slightly mischievous face. She wore an oversized, black off-the-shoulder top that billowed slightly as she marched straight toward their table.

She ground to a halt right beside them, her bright eyes locking entirely onto the Titan.

“Little Lion!” she exclaimed, a massive  grin breaking across her face. “I’ve been looking all over for you!”

Phainon’s heart cemented itself firmly in his throat. Little Lion? Did Mydei have a girlfriend? A modern, beanies-and-iced-coffee-drinking girlfriend?

“Za—Cifera,” Mydei coughed out, his chest expanding as he violently slammed a heavy palm against his own sternum. The poor guy had clearly just sucked a massive gulp of iced espresso straight down the wrong pipe. “You are. Here.”

The woman rolled her eyes, her massive grin morphing into a little pout. “Ugh, please, Little Lion. How many times do I have to tell you? Introduce me as Cipher when we’re out. It sounds way cooler.”

Phainon looked between the two of them, his internal alarm bells ringing at absolute maximum volume. Cipher was objectively quite gorgeous, like Mydei, but there was an erratic, vibrating energy to her that felt completely distinct from Mydeimos’s heavy, grounded severity. Her features were more catlike.

“What are you doing in Okhema?” Mydei demanded, his voice dropping into a harsh, hushed whisper as he glared up at her. He shot Phainon a subtle, meaningful glance. “The domains of amusement and trickery are far from this district. Did you exhaust your options for elation elsewhere?”

Cipher didn’t look the least bit intimidated. She simply pulled out an empty chair from the neighboring table and spun it around, sitting backward on it with her arms crossed over the top rest. “Oh, come on. When word got out that the great Mydeimos of Fury had suddenly dropped off the grid to answer a desperate, unwavering request, I just had to see what kind of situation you’d managed to get yourself stuck in!”

Phainon blinked, realization clicking in his brain as he processed Mydei’s bizarre emphasis on amusement, trickery, and elation. He looked at the cat-ear beanie, then at the way Mydei was rigidly tracking her every move. Was she… another one?

Before Phainon could wrap his head around the idea of a second ancient entity crashing his coffee date, Cipher leaned across the small table, her eyes scanning Mydei’s outfit.

“Interesting clothes you’ve got on, sweetness,” she cooed. “Starting to dress conservatively now? That’s too bad. You’ve got a rockin’—”

In a flash of pure reflex, Mydei slammed his heavy hand directly over her mouth, cutting her off with a sharp warning glare. Cipher’s eyes crinkled with absolute delight above his palm.

“I am wearing Phainon’s garments,” Mydei said, rolling his eyes as he slowly pulled his hand back, resting it heavily on the table.

Phainon’s chest gave a violent, unexpected lurch. He tried to stare intently at his laptop screen, his face flushing a furious, hot crimson as he gripped his pen too tightly.

Cipher caught Phainon’s sudden distress instantly. A massive, shit-eating grin spread across her face as she looked from the blushing student to the scowling war god. “Oh, really?” she purred, leaning her chin in her hands. “You haven’t even gone out shopping for proper clothes with him yet? What a meanie roommate.”

Mydei’s jaw clenched.

Feeling the pressure rising to a dangerous degree, Phainon cleared his throat and closed his laptop half an inch. “Uh, sorry,” he began, looking at Cipher’s grin. “We… We can take him shopping today, if you want. I just got paid.”

“I do not believe that will be necessary,” Mydei grunted, his fingers tightening against the cup as he threw Phainon a deeply warning look. “We have history to document, and your financial tokens are far better spent on—”

“Ooh, never mind, I like this guy!” Cipher cheered. She clapped her hands together, her cat-ear beanie shifting slightly on her messy hair. “Let’s go, Mydei and roommate! Chop chop!”

Mydei closed his eyes. 

Phainon walked a few paces behind the pair, deliberately reminding himself of one important fact: he was at the mall with Nikador and Zagreus. He had to keep repeating it in his head, because otherwise he might actually slip into forgetting. He might start thinking that Mydei was just his unusually giant roommate and Cipher was… someone.

Actually, she seemed like she’d do pretty well as a normal human. It was a weird thing to think about an ancient entity, but her vibrant personality reminded Phainon of some of his own friends. Despite the relentless teasing she was currently levying at both him and Mydei as they walked, she was nice too.

As they made their way past the storefronts, Phainon’s academic and personal curiosity began to wander.

Do the Titans date each other? Do they have crushes?

He knew that romantic pining fell under Mnestia’s domain, not the domain of either of these two, although maybe there could be some structural overlap. Could trickery be romantic? Maybe. Could strife be romantic? Probably. Phainon’s own crushes had always been few and far in between, but if he was being honest with himself, he had always held a secret fantasy about having a lover who was willing to try to pummel him into the ground, and vice versa. That sounded highly romantic to him, not that he’d ever voice it.

They finally reached a popular clothing store, and Cipher immediately dragged them inside, trailing her fingers along the items before she and Mydei began picking out all sorts of things for the god to try on.

Rifling through racks himself, Phainon held up a graphic hoodie that just said “UNEMPLOYED” across the chest in bold letters.

Mydei shot it down instantly, tracking Phainon with a glare that promised a disgusting dinner tonight, but Cipher let out such a loud laugh at the joke that Phainon couldn’t bring himself to regret it.

Eventually, Cipher and Phainon found themselves outside the row of fitting rooms while Mydei vanished inside with a heavy armful of hangers.

“So, where’d you hear about the ritual? They’re really rare these days. Nobody really gets asked on house calls anymore.”

Phainon quickly checked their surroundings, making sure there were no shoppers or retail employees listening in on them. The hallway was empty.

“I found it in a book, actually,” he whispered. “Got it at the reference library downtown.”

Cipher’s brow twitched.

“Hm, that’s strange. I didn’t think any surviving records of those Kremnoan texts were still in general circulation. Well… what do you think of good old Lance of Fury so far?”

Phainon braced himself, a little worried that this was a trap or some kind of divine test. He carefully chose his words. “I’m…literally blessed to have Mydei around. He’s scary when he’s angry and holding a wooden spoon, don’t get me wrong. But he’s also really smart and actually willing to talk to me about his culture.” He paused, looking at her cat-ear beanie. “Is it okay if I ask you something?”

“Go for it,” Cipher nodded, leaning her back against the fitting room wall.

“Mydei implied he didn’t choose to accept the gig and come down here, and he can’t teleport around right now. Do you know what happened? Or… Do you know when he’ll have to—when the blessing will be considered officially given?”

Cipher’s brow furrowed, her gaze drifting toward the closed door where Mydei was changing. “Well, I wasn’t there when it happened. But I think he’d stopped answering prayers in general for a while. You know, not ritual callings, but like—uh…”

“The small ones?” Phainon supplied, remembering a certain conversation in the kitchen. “The ones you can just sense when someone prays to the specific concept you embody?”

“Yeah! Nice going, human, you must learn fast,” Cipher smiled, punching his shoulder lightly. “Yeah, so I think it has been a very long time since he answered a lot of those everyday prayers. We don’t have a quota, exactly, but if we fall behind on maintaining the tethers, we can get into a little trouble with the higher order in the pantheon. When you decided to do a full-blown ritual, they must’ve not given him any choice but to go for it. As for when it’ll be over…I’m not sure either, hehe. My last ritual response was a hundred years ago, I’m a little jealous. I think they’ve still got a cult for me out in Dolos, but they never get the lyrics to the invocation right…”

Before Phainon could process it, the fitting room door clicked open. Mydei walked out, and Phainon’s breath caught cleanly in his throat.

Okay, fine, whatever, Phainon thought. What he’s wearing now suits him way better than any of my clothing selections.

He looked like a biker in a movie. He was wearing a structured black leather jacket over a light grey tank top that was artfully distressed, just tight enough to show off a hint of his ridiculous abs without tearing the fabric. Pair that with fitted black jeans and heavy combat boots, and the raw, dangerous magnetism of the god of strife was completely undeniable. He adjusted the lapel of the jacket, looking at Phainon.

“Verdict?”

“V—Ver… uh, dict,” Phainon stammered, his tongue tangling over the syllables. He cleared his throat violently, his eyes darting from the smooth leather of the jacket down to the sliver of abs, before snapping back up to Mydei’s face. “Yeah. It’s good. It fits. Better than the sweatpants, definitely.”

Mydei stared at him, his intense gaze tracking the faint flush creeping up Phainon’s neck. Then, all at once, the terrifying aura of the Lance of Fury completely evaporated.

The Titan looked down at himself in the mirror, his posture stiffening as he awkwardly tugged at the hem of the distressed tank top. His ears turned a sudden, unmistakable shade of pink, contrasting wildly with his fierce tattoos. He shifted his weight, suddenly looking incredibly self-conscious in the modern streetwear.

“The… the fabric is intentionally damaged,” Mydei observed belatedly, his voice dropping an octave as he frowned deeply at a small aesthetic tear near his ribs. “Is it truly acceptable? It feels highly irregular. I look like a rogue highwayman.”

Cipher let out a delighted, cackling laugh next to them, leaning heavily against Phainon’s shoulder. “Oh my gods, look at you! You’re pouting. The great Master of Legions is super shy!”

“I am not. Stop talking,” Mydei snapped, though his eyes darted back to Phainon. Maybe he was silently begging for a genuine reassurance. Phainon couldn’t help but smile at the deity from his history books.

Mydei cleared his throat, abruptly turning back toward the fitting room to hide his ears. “Very well,” the Titan murmured, his voice muffled by the door. “We will take these clothes.”

The walk back from the transit station was a quiet one, their hands full of heavy paper bags from the mall.

Cipher had disappeared. She vanished into thin air the exact moment they stepped inside the elevator of Phainon’s apartment building. When Phainon gasped, Mydei simply sighed, explaining dryly that she probably did it just to get on his nerves because she knew he lacked his teleportation abilities.

They stepped into the apartment after a click of the key, kicking off their shoes by the entryway before heading down the short hallway to the bedroom. Phainon flicked the light on, setting his armful of bags onto the wooden dresser so Mydei could organize his new wardrobe however he wished. Sitting right there on the corner of the dresser was the elaborate golden jewelry the Titan had shown up in on that very first night. It caught the yellow glow of the ceiling fixture, easily the most expensive, fancy thing that had ever rested inside the cramped pad.

Mydei set his own bags down beside the gold, but instead of unbuttoning his new jacket, he paused. His heavy gaze dropped to the queen-sized bed, then shifted to Phainon.

“Are you not uncomfortable without your kline, nightly?”

Phainon waved a hand airily. “Psshh, nah. I’m not weak like that. It’s fine, really.”

Mydei frowned slightly, his fingers tracing the lapel of his leather jacket. “Are you certain you do not wish to switch for the night? I can occupy the smaller cushion in the common room.”

“Nope. It’s really fine,” Phainon insisted, shifting his weight. “So, what’s the plan for dinner? Gonna poison me tonight to get back at me for the hoodie joke?”

To Phainon’s surprise, Mydeimos let out a genuine, low laugh.

“I have only ever killed someone who performed a ritual for me once,” the Titan murmured, dark amusement glinting in his eyes. “And it did prove to be an efficient way of getting out of providing the blessing.”

Phainon felt a sudden, chilly sensation prickle across his skin. Sometimes, in the middle of all the domesticity and the reality television episodes, he truly did forget that Mydei had lived a long, long time.

He had likely seen and done things Phainon couldn’t even fathom. Had he set ancient cities aflame? Had he possessed a retinue of lovers at his absolute disposal? Had he attended sprawling, decadent feasts held entirely in his own honor?

As they turned and began walking down the short path toward the kitchen, Phainon couldn’t help but ask. “What… what actually led you to kill that person?”

Mydei’s expression sobered, his strides slowing as they entered the kitchen space.

“It was during the siege of the Oros Valley, many centuries ago,” Mydei began, his eyes fixed on the empty stovetop as if looking straight through the wall. “A mortal king performed the invocation. He spent three days in the ashes of his chapel, weeping, pouring out oils, and begging for the Lance of Fury. His kingdom had been raided by a warlord, and his wife and children had been abducted and brutally murdered. He desired absolute, bloody revenge.”

Phainon leaned against the opposite counter, completely captivated. “That sounds like a textbook definition of strife. Why wouldn’t you grant it?”

“Because as I envision it, strife requires unwavering pursuit of a cause, not a mask for one’s own hypocrisy,” Mydei said, his jaw tightening slightly. “I manifested in his court, ready to bleed his enemies dry. But as I walked his palace to assess his garrison, I discovered his true nature. The king had used the chaos of border wars to conquer a smaller, peaceful mountain tribe. He had brought them back in chains, keeping hundreds of people beneath his own palace floors, forcing them to forge the very weapons he intended to use for his vengeance.”

The Titan let out a cold, sharp breath.

“He claimed he wanted justice for his family, but he was merely furious that another predator had proven stronger than he was. A tyrant wrapped in the cloak of a victim, desecrating the concept of a warrior’s struggle. When he handed me the ceremonial cup of wine, I shattered it against his throat. The tethers dissolved instantly.”

Phainon stood still, the weight of the story hanging heavily in the quiet kitchen. He looked at the god of war, who was now quietly turning around to inspect the pots and pans for dinner.

He had a code. A deeply structured sense of strife that Phainon was only just beginning to comprehend.

Mydei began pulling a fresh carton of eggs and some greens out of the refrigerator, his movements quiet as the silence stretched between them. The Titan set a pan onto the electric stovetop.

“I have bared a fragment of my past to you, Phainon,” Mydei said softly. “Yet I know very little of yours, save for your tragic seven dollars and your frantic typing.”

Phainon blinked, caught off guard as he leaned back against the counter. “My past? I’m an ordinary guy.”

“You told me you wish to work in a museum someday. Why? Why do you bind your brief, fleeting lifetime to the ghosts of history?”

Phainon rubbed the back of his neck. He looked down at his own mismatched socks, trying to figure out how to put it into words.

“I guess… I worry about everything that disappears if nobody looks after its memory. Like Kremnos. It was this massive, living heart of a society, and now it’s just a footnote in a syllabus that some people argue about. If we don’t dig through the dirt and tell the actual stories, then it’s like those people never even existed. I want to be the one who keeps the doors open so they aren’t forgotten.”

He looked up. The Titan was staring at him with an expression that made Phainon’s heart do a strange, erratic flip. Mydei let out a low, soft hum, turning back to the stove to flick the dial. The element began to glow a warm, vibrant orange.

“A pursuit of life against the ultimate erosion of time,” Mydei murmured, a faint trace of approval in his tone. “A worthy conflict, Phainon. Perhaps your choice of vocation is a form of strife after all.”

The weekend arrived, bringing with it a quiet morning that was decimated by a heavy knock on the bathroom door. Phainon had just shut off the water and stepped out, steam billowing around him as he tied a white towel around his waist. He cracked the door open, wiping a hand across his wet face, only to find Mydei standing in the hallway.

The Titan stopped mid-knock. His golden eyes darted down. He stood entirely frozen, blinking once, then twice, before his usual stern composure snapped back into place.

He cleared his throat, looking up to lock eyes with Phainon. “Where do the mortals of this city go to beat each other?”

Phainon blinked, completely thrown off. “Huh? Like… the arcade? Beat each other how?”

Mydei frowned, looking deeply irritated by the misunderstanding. “I am a war deity, human. I mean where do your people go to exchange blows? To test their mettle.”

Phainon’s mind went somewhere entirely different and terrible for a split second when he heard the phrase exchange blows, his chest giving a sudden, hot lurch before he frantically reined his thoughts back in. “Oh! You mean strength training? Like a martial arts ring or something? Well, we could go to my gym in a bit. I’ve missed so many days this week because of the essay anyway.”

Mydei stared at him, his gaze slowly drifting down Phainon’s torso one more time.

“Very well,” the Titan muttered, his ears tingeing with a very faint, localized pink, probably from the steam of the shower.

Before Phainon could say anything else, Mydei grabbed the edge of the door and slammed it completely shut in his face. Phainon stood alone in the steamy bathroom, staring at the wooden panels with a stunned smile.

They walked into the gym a short while later. Mydei was borrowing Phainon’s gym clothes since they hadn’t had the foresight to buy him any workout gear at the mall. Luckily, the athletic shorts fit perfectly, and a simple black tank top worked fine, doing a phenomenal job of showing off the contour of his biceps.

Phainon gave the Titan a quick rundown of the layout, guiding him from the stretching area by the entrance to the cardio section, then through the free weights and the rows of isolation machines. Mydei smiled when he noticed the suspended television screens, especially when he realized one of them was tuned into a daytime cooking show. Phainon then pointed out the sauna room in the back, the studio where some group classes were taught, and the sparring area complete with a heavy-duty boxing ring.

They started with a warm-up, and Phainon quickly realized that Mydei was impressively flexible during his stretches. The C in Castrum Kremnos must have stood for calisthenics. From there, they moved on to the treadmills for a quick jog, which rapidly escalated into a silent competition. Neither of them wanted to back down, repeatedly slapping the arrow keys to increase the speed until they had spent a brutal half-hour sprinting side-by-side.

After cardio, they hit the machines to test their strength. Mydei easily maxed out the stack on the pectoral fly, but Phainon surprisingly managed to beat the Titan’s record on the abdominal crunch machine. When they moved over to the free weights for a few sets of Romanian deadlifts, Phainon stepped up to spot him. He had to focus entirely on the ceiling lights to keep from staring at how the shorts clung to Mydei’s thighs as the god moved around.

They finally dropped by the fountain to refill their water bottles, both of them breathing heavily and covered in a light sheen of sweat.

Mydei wiped his brow with the back of his hand, his golden eyes locking back onto Phainon. “Now,” the Titan murmured, “let us spar.”

Phainon leaned against the fountain, taking a long gulp of water. “Well, we can’t really do any fencing, obviously. But see that boxing ring over there? Are you okay with some hand-to-hand?”

Mydei gave a ferocious nod of agreement, an intense expression that Phainon guiltily stored away in his mind for later.

They soon stepped inside the elevated ring, the heavy ropes snapping taut behind them as they adjusted their gloves. Mydei had solemnly agreed beforehand to keep his supernatural abilities completely in check so he wouldn’t accidentally kill Phainon, but the moment they squared up, the casual roommate dynamic completely vanished.

The spar began at an absolute sprint. Phainon lunged forward first, throwing a quick left jab that Mydei ducked with a fraction of an inch to spare. The wind from the miss tore past the god’s ear, and Mydei’s eyes flared with mad delight. He countered with a heavy right hook that Phainon managed to block, the impact vibrating straight through his forearms and rattling his teeth.

They were matched almost perfectly in sheer stamina, spinning back and forth across the canvas like a storm. Whenever Phainon managed to slip past the Titan’s guard to land a quick strike to his ribs, Mydei would immediately adapt to it, shifting his weight to weave through Phainon’s defenses and clip his shoulder roughly.

Neither of them could land a consistent amount of clean blows, turning the match into a grueling, high-speed game of physical chess.

As the minutes bled together, the heat in the ring became suffocating. They were both utterly drenched in sweat, skin gleaming under the fluorescent lights above. Every movement brought them crashing right back into each other’s space, caught in each other’s orbit, their chests colliding, their breaths coming in ragged, synchronized gasps. Phainon could smell the scent of his soap mixed with the raw, heavy heat radiating off the god’s body.

Whenever they locked up in a tight clinch, Mydei’s damp shoulder pressing hard against Phainon’s cheek, the sheer physical intensity and the proximity made Phainon’s head spin. Gloves smacked against leather with loud, echoing cracks that began to cut right through the ambient noise of the gym.

Neither of them noticed when the music over the loudspeakers seemed to fade out overhead. It wasn’t until Phainon ducked beneath a sweeping jab and backed off to reset his stance that he finally caught a glimpse of the perimeter.

A small, quiet crowd of spectators had formed around the edges of the ring. Several students had stopped lifting entirely, sitting on their benches to watch, while a couple of campus trainers stood by the water station with their arms crossed, openly marveling at the sheer speed and technique on display.

Mydei noticed them too, but he didn't lower his guard. He merely let out a low, breathless huff, a drop of sweat rolling down his fierce, tattooed jawline as he held Phainon's gaze with an expression that was blindingly hot.

They called a draw right then and there, both of them tapping their gloves together with a mutual nod, blue on red. Neither of them wanted the mounting attention of the crowd.

As they climbed out from between the ropes, a couple of girls from the group class stepped closer, batting their eyelashes at Phainon and complimenting the intensity of the match. Phainon, face already red from the effort, offered a polite smile and thanked them for their kind words.

Before the conversation could go any further, Mydei’s booming voice cut straight through the chatter from a few paces away.

“Phainon. Move along,” the Titan called out, unstrapping his gloves with a sharp tug. “You stink of desperation and sweat. Mostly the sweat.”

Phainon let out a breathless laugh, waving a quick goodbye to all the girls as he hurried to catch up with his roommate. “Yeah, yeah, alright. It’s called a workout, Mydei. You don’t exactly smell like an apple pie right now either.”

They grabbed their water bottles and headed straight for the locker rooms. The heavy doors shut out the ambient noise of the gym, replacing it with the humid scent of tile cleaner and running water.

Phainon dumped his damp gear into a locker, grabbing a clean towel from his bag while Mydei began peeling off the borrowed black tank top. As the steam from the communal stalls started drifting into the locker area, Phainon realized that getting all that sweat washed off was going to be an absolute necessity before they even attempted the trek back to the apartment.

“No baths in here, your highness. Need me to show you how to get the water going?” Phainon asked, leaning against the cold metal lockers as he shook out his fresh towel.

Mydei looked pissed, his jaw clenched as he glared at the rows of stalls. He peeked inside the nearest curtained cubicle, staring at the wall-mounted metal nozzle before begrudgingly turning back to nod at Phainon.

Phainon stepped into the small stall to give him a hand with it. The hardware was almost identical to the setup in his apartment, but he figured the god might have just forgotten.

The deadline for the essay was looming, with one week left until the midnight cutoff. The problem wasn’t a lack of material anymore, but the sheer, overwhelming volume of it. Phainon’s laptop was bursting with accounts that no modern scholar had ever laid eyes on. Reviewing his notes for the umpteenth time, he realized he could parlay this research into a master’s proposal. He could actually see himself doing fieldwork too, traveling to the ancient ruins of Castrum Kremnos that Mydei described with such vivid reverence.

Currently, he was sitting in the faculty lounge of Castorice’s department. Castorice and Mydei were getting along swimmingly, a development Phainon hadn’t anticipated but found highly validating.

At some point over the weekend, Mydei had discovered a popular animated show centered around little multicoloured chimeras, and it turned out Castorice was an equally avid fan. The two of them were deep in a surreal, rapid-fire discussion, weaving appreciation of the cartoon’s arcs together with debates on Epicureanism and the will to power.

Phainon sighed, dragging his eyes back to his screen. He reread the same paragraph once more, but the academic jargon was beginning to turn to mush in his brain.

“You okay?”

The question came in perfect unison. Phainon blinked, looking up to find both Mydei and Castorice staring at him owlishly.

Before Phainon could answer, Mydei shifted closer on the lounge sofa. The Titan leaned over his shoulder to look at the screen, the solid, comforting heat of his frame pressing right against Phainon’s side. He reached out, his large, warm hand sliding gently over Phainon’s fingers to pull the laptop screen down half an inch.

“Your mind is wandering, human,” Mydei murmured, his deep voice dropping into that private, resonant register. He tilted Phainon’s chin up with a gentle, lingering brush of his knuckles. “If you exhaust yourself now, who will finish documenting my victories? Rest.”

Phainon swallowed hard, his face flushing a furious, hot crimson under the weight of the war god’s undivided attention. He didn’t pull away from the touch. “I’m fine, just standard burnout,” he mumbled, his voice a little breathless.

Castorice watched them from across the low table, a small, bright smile tugging at the corners of her lips. She adjusted her papers.

“You really should take a breath, Phainon,” Castorice noted softly, her eyes crinkling. “Though, I have to say, it’s wonderful to see you like this. You’ve seemed a lot more cheerful lately.”

Phainon’s heart did a violent, frantic thumping against his ribs. He shot a panicked glance at Mydei, but the Titan merely let out a low hum, a smug smirk tracing his plush lips as his hand slid from Phainon’s chin to rest heavily, comfortably, against the small of his back.

The next night, the apartment was filled with the rhythmic screech of virtual tires and the bright neon glow of the television screen. Stelle was over, sitting cross-legged on the floor right in front of the coffee table, leaning in with intense focus as she tried to teach Mydei how to handle a racing motion sensor controller well enough to finally beat Phainon.

Watching from the kitchen counter, Phainon rested his chin in his hand, a sudden, heavy wave of realization washing over him. He had realized just how deeply integrated his life had gotten with Mydei over the past week.

His friends knew Mydei now. Cipher had dropped by another couple of times, which technically meant Phainon knew a friend of Mydei’s, too. The boundaries between his mundane student existence and the cosmic domain had completely blurred, and he couldn’t keep lying to himself anymore. He couldn’t keep pretending that the heavy, tightening ache in his chest about Mydei leaving was just because he’d lose his direct access to Castrum Kremnos lore dumps.

As he watched Mydei flounder his way through the controls, the Titan’s heavily ringed fingers looking completely ridiculous pressing the tiny plastic buttons while Stelle frantically tried to guide him through a drift, Phainon realized he knew exactly how he felt.

He knew he was going to lose the upcoming race on purpose because he wanted to see Mydei get all victorious and cocky, flashing a smile with that blinding, competitive heat. He knew he’d naturally start setting the mismatched plates out on the counter while Mydei worked on the finishing touches of whatever incredible dinner he’d put together this time. He knew they’d bicker over the seasoning even with a guest present, a rhythmic back-and-forth that neither of them would take to heart.

And most of all, he knew that once Stelle gathered her things and left, hugging them each goodbye, they would stay up to chat at the kitchen counter late into the night. It wouldn’t be because Phainon needed a single sentence of information for his history essay. He would do it simply because he wanted to listen to Mydei’s deep, resonant voice a little longer. He wanted to feel the steady, comforting heat that radiated off the Titan for just a few more minutes before the inevitable happened.

Because eventually, the paper would be submitted. The blessing would be fulfilled. Mydei would be down the hallway for the last time, or back up in the sky, or wherever it was the Titans went when their ritual tethers dissolved. And Phainon would be left completely alone again on his couch, exactly like he had been that very first night, with nothing but a bland, pre-prepared meal in the fridge and a borrowed library book sitting quiet on his table.

It played out exactly as Phainon had known it would. Phainon finally let out a heavy yawn, even though he was still deeply captivated by the story Mydei was telling about a famed girdle ring worn by the high guard of Kremnos.

They split up to change and get ready for sleep. Phainon changed into his pajamas first while Mydei used the bathroom, and then they switched places. When Phainon brushed his teeth, washed his face, and finally clicked the bathroom light off, he stepped out into the hallway only to find Mydei completely blocking his path to the living room. The god was leaning against the narrow corridor, his broad shoulders filling the space.

“Mydei?” Phainon asked, blinking in the dim light. “What are you holding onto the walls for? I know you might be used to sandstone and ivory, but my drywall isn’t going to collapse.”

“You are walking improperly,” Mydei murmured. “I can see it in your stance. Your back must ache.”

Phainon let out a dry huff, crossing his arms. “And what about it? Who was the one who kept asking to be taken out for some boxing and then immediately pummeled me when given the chance? I’m recovering right now.”

“It is not the gym,” Mydei countered. “Your sofa is entirely unsuitable for a puny mortal frame.”

“We don’t have to do this conversation again,” Phainon sighed. He reached out, his hand touching Mydei’s bare, warm arm to gently budge him out of the way. “Just let me through so I can grab a glass of water from the kitchen before I hit the couch—”

Before he could finish the sentence, Mydei’s hand shot out. His fingers bunched into the fabric at the front of Phainon’s shirt, tanking him forward until they were standing completely face to face, their breaths mingling in the dark.

“The water is already on your bedside table,” Mydei commanded. Beneath the sleeves of his shirt, the hidden lines of his tattoos began to throb with a faint, angry crimson glow. “Move it.”

Phainon gulped, his throat suddenly feeling like sandpaper. He found himself profoundly, desperately thirsty, and needing that water more than anything else in the world. Mydei let go of his shirt and followed right behind him as Phainon walked straight into the bedroom.

The plush, expensive blanket Mydei had picked out at the market had thoroughly grown on Phainon over the last couple of days—a rich black and red fabric detailed with little woven leaves along the edges. 

Phainon sat down cautiously on the edge of the mattress. “Uh… you need something else, or?”

“Are you going to move over or not?”

“What? You want to share with me?”

“Do not make a grand spectacle out of it. I am tired,” Mydei snapped defensively. He reached over and flicked the bedroom light switch off, plunging the room into darkness. Always darkness, with him.

Phainon’s eyes took a moment to adjust, but a slim, silver beam of moonlight filtered through the edge of the curtains, casting just enough light across the bed sheets. He quickly scrambled backward, scooting his back right up against the wall to clear out space.

True to his word, Mydei joined him under the heavy blanket. Luckily, the bed already had a pillow for each of them, meaning there would be no crisis of territory.

Phainon squeezed his eyes shut, trying desperately to force himself to sleep, but the effort was fruitless. The Lance of Fury was lying less than a foot away from him under the exact same blanket.

This was a being who could tear Phainon’s entire world down with a single flick of his wrist, and he was choosing to share a bed instead.

Phainon could tell Mydeimos was still wide awake, too. The unmistakable giveaway was the metronome pattern of his breathing right beside him.

Taking a small, cautious breath, Phainon spoke softly into the dark.

“Hey, Mydei?”

“What?” came the deep, muffled rumble from the adjacent pillow.

“You said before, back at the café, you said you weren’t always a god. What does that mean?”

The bedroom plunged into a silence. He worried he had crossed a line, ruined the fragile peace, and messed the whole dynamic up. He waited with bated breath, staring at the ceiling, bracing for a sharp retort. Instead, Mydei spoiled him with one more story.

“I had a mother, once. And a father,” he began. “They ruled over Castrum Kremnos as a strong, unbroken pair, back when the very colours of the world were so much more vivid. So vivid that you would not be able to truly imagine it now in your pale era.”

He shifted slightly beneath the black and red. “I was born into that court, both highly gifted and deeply cursed by the fates—cursed not to die. Regular weapons could not pierce me. Disease passed over me. Men tried to end me, vicious beasts tried, and eventually, my own father tried out of terror of what I would become. But I wanted only to survive. I strived for that single breath with every ounce of my blood, and therein, the very concept of strife was born. It manifested through my own will to follow that path, and through my people’s collective support of my survival. That was how humans became Titans in the old days.”

Phainon lay entirely paralyzed against the wall, blown away by the sheer magnitude of the myth unfolding in his own bed. He swallowed the lump in his throat, his curiosity entirely overriding his caution. “Are… are all the Titans from back then still around? Did you all know each other?”

“No to both,” Mydei murmured. “Mnestia, Talanton, Georios… many of them vastly outdated my time on this plane. I am one of the youngest to ascend, in truth, alongside Cifera. And no, there were many more Titans before our current memory. Great anchors like Kephale and the Demiurge, who vanished entirely when the last of the black tide was vanquished from the borders for good. Half of Thanatos fell, survived now only by a single twin. And Aquila… Aquila eventually grew completely mad under the weight of the sky and had to be…”

Mydei abruptly quieted, the story cutting off into a stark, heavy silence that settled deep into the fabric of the dark room.

“I’m sorry,” Phainon said softly, his voice barely a whisper in the vast dark of the room. “I didn’t mean to ask something so… invasive.”

“Do not apologize,” Mydei replied, the mattress shifting slightly as he turned his head on the pillow. “I know your nature well by now. You say what comes to your mind the exact moment it arrives. Predictable. Just like sparring with you. Now, tell me something of your past. Of your family.”

Phainon swallowed hard, his back pressed against the cool drywall. He stared at the sliver of moonlight on the ceiling, gathering his thoughts. “I also once had a mother and a father,” he began, his chest tightening a little. “They were not so lucky when that series of wildfires happened. You may not have heard of it, but our town was right near a massive forest. I was an adult already when it happened, but… it’s been hard. My sister studies in Janusopolis now. We keep in close contact, and we get through it together. That was actually when I started to truly care about stories. About keeping things alive.”

The silence that followed was different this time—softer, less heavy with the weight of ancient empires and more grounded in the quiet of the apartment.

“While for me it was a lifetime ago,” Mydei said, his low voice carrying a rare, unfiltered gentleness, “it is a deep pain to lose those you cherish. I am sorry for your loss, Phainon.”

“And I yours,” Phainon murmured. He let out a small, self-deprecating huff. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make the topic so sad.”

“Stop apologizing,” Mydei chided.

Phainon sighed, his mind drifting as he watched the dark silhouette of the Titan beside him. The physical proximity was dizzying, making him bolder than he usually was. “Can I… can I touch your hair?”

“No,” Mydei said flatly. But a second later, he leaned his head distinctly toward Phainon’s side of the bed.

Phainon reached a hand out, his fingertips brushing against the long strands. They felt remarkably soft, longer now than they had been on that very first night, as if his hair grew at an accelerated pace. In the deep shadows of the room, the hair looked like a single, even colour, obscuring the vibrant red gradient he knew was there.

As his fingers gently combed through the loose strands, Phainon asked another question that had been lingering in his mind.

“Why don’t you respond to many prayers anymore?”

Mydei remained perfectly still under his touch, his breathing steady. “Because often, those who pray to strife do so merely in hopes of inflicting pain unto others. I do not object to that on principle—I am no peacemaker, nor am I a pacifist. But I believe that revenge should be left in human hands. If the true core of strife is dedication, then that dedication should be enough to pursue on its own, without needing my guidance.”

A noble reason not to, because it had cost him his own freedom, in a way.

Phainon’s hand paused for a fraction of a second in the Titan’s hair. He let out a nervous breath. “Hey, don’t get mad at me, but my family actually grew up in Oronyx lands.”

Through the dim moonlight, Phainon could see Mydei’s jaw tighten, shifting his face slightly away but not entirely pulling out of reach.

Phainon let out a soft laugh, his fingers gently smoothing down a stray lock of hair near the Titan’s temple, trying to fit more acts of adoration into whatever this was. “Come on, don’t be like that. I’m starting to think strife has more character.”

Before the final word could fully leave Phainon’s lips, Mydei’s hand shot out, cutting off his speech. “Silence, heretic. Your tongue is far too reckless.”

Phainon’s eyes widened in the shadows. Driven by a sudden spike of adrenaline, he yanked his other hand out from the covers, reached up, and flatly slapped his own hand over Mydei’s mouth, sealing the Titan’s lips shut in return.

Mydei parted his lips and bit down on the meat of Phainon’s index finger, sharp enough to send a jolt of shock straight through Phainon’s system.

Mydei pulled his hand back too, resting his head heavily against his own pillow once more. He stared up at the ceiling, his jaw set stubbornly as his chest heaved, though he didn't move an inch further away. 

“As I said, predictable,” the Titan muttered into the quiet room.

They threw a small get-together in Caelus and Stelle’s apartment to live-watch Phainon submit his essay. All of their friends showed up, even Cipher, who meshed perfectly with the crowd and proved to be an exceptional liar about how she and Mydei met and became friends.

“We’re coworkers!” she claimed with a straight face. Half of the truth, at best.

While the party went on, Phainon sat at the dinner table, frantically rereading every single page of his final draft.

Caelus slid by, dropping a red plastic cup full of neon-coloured jungle juice right next to his hand. Phainon didn’t touch it, knowing it might obliterate him before the deadline hit.

Caelus slapped his shoulder anyway, yelling, “Lock in, man! One hour!” before Dan Heng sent Phainon a deeply apologetic glance and steered Caelus away by the elbow.

A moment later, Mydeimos walked up to the table. He set down a perfectly prepared plate of food, and that, Phainon would absolutely eat. He also set down a much needed bottle of water.

But right next to the laptop, the Titan slapped down The Rites and Rituals of Castrum Kremnos. The very book that had caused this entire mess, and saved his ass and his degree, assuming the essay wasn’t garbage.

Phainon looked up from his screen, eyes adjusting.

“Finished it?”

Mydei gave a firm nod, and snatched a chip off of the plate.

“So, are you here to finally tell me if it’s accurate?” Phainon asked, his chest tightening as his eyes darted to the clock. He took a bite of food, and pointed at the screen with his pinky. “I’ve got less than 30 minutes to completely scrub every single citation referencing it if it’s fake.”

Last week, Phainon had finally figured out who the author actually was. For some inexplicable reason, the writer’s name had been hidden away, credited only once in a tiny line within the acknowledgments at the very back of the volume. Not even a full name, just the given name. Bizarre.

“To you, this book may appear old, but I know what an ancient text would look like. Even if this was penned two hundred years ago, very few candidates could have written it apart from me. I had a strong suspicion about who could’ve written something so accurate,” Mydei murmured, his deep voice cutting through the ambient noise of the party. He leaned a little closer, his broad shoulder brushing against Phainon’s. It kept happening lately. “But I could not be entirely certain until my eyes found that credited name at the end.”

He paused, his dark eyes locking onto Phainon with a strange, playful intensity. “Tell me, human… you claim you appreciate the timely word of Oronyx, and you approve of Nikador’s strife. But have you ever called upon the wisdom of Cerces?”

Phainon blinked, completely thrown off. “Uh, in general as a history student, or just an undergrad, maybe? But not that I can explicitly remember—”

Then, a sudden memory hit him like a physical blow. He vividly recalled a passing, half-whispered prayer he had murmured while walking, right on his way to the reference library downtown.

“Wait,” Phainon gasped, his eyes widening. “I did? It was right before I found this book.”

Mydei let out a low, knowing laugh. “I see. Like Cifera, there are certain Titans who thoroughly enjoy spending their time hiding among humans. Tell me, did you speak to anyone memorable in that library before your hands found this text?”

Phainon’s mind raced backward in a rush like he was staring at the building directory again, two feet headed straight to the historical archives.

He remembered the elevator ride, and the person who he had shared it with.

“I hope you find what you’re looking for in here.”

He let out a sharp gasp. “You don’t mean… the person credited as Calypso in the back of the book is?”

“Cerces indeed,” Mydei confirmed, his jaw tightening slightly. “I’m certain. She intentionally set you up to find that ritual in a text she wrote herself, thereby setting me up to be dragged into this exact situation. A solution to both of our gripes.”

“What the hell…” Phainon whispered, his brain collapsing in on itself like a fallen house of cards.

“I already knew Mnestia fiercely wanted me to return to completing my duties,” Mydei continued quietly, his gaze drifting over the crowded room. “But they are still considerate. Janus technically could have created a passage out for me at any given point over the last few weeks. All three of them were in on it from the very beginning, most likely.”

“Wow,” Phainon said, a hollow feeling opening up in his stomach. He frantically tried to mask the sudden, sharp spike of vulnerability he felt, a pawn in a game much bigger than he knew. He fumbled his words, forcing a tense, casual smile as he closed a tab on his screen. “So… now you know it all. I guess it’s great, right? Once this essay hits the system, you’re completely free. You can finally leave my box of an apartment and it won’t… it won’t hurt you anymore.”

Mydei froze. His golden eyes narrowed, his features hardening into a mask of disbelief. “You won’t… I mean, it will not bother you when I depart?” the Titan asked, his voice dropping into a dangerous, dangerously quiet register.

“Why would it bother me?” Phainon blurted out, laughing weakly. He kept his eyes glued to his keyboard, completely trapped in the agonizing belief that he was entirely insignificant to a wise and breathtaking beautiful being.

He was just a week-long blip in an immortal’s existence. Why would the god care if a human beggar missed him?

Mydei looked at him, and for a fraction of a second, the terrifying facade of the war deity cracked completely. He looked hurt. Deeply, profoundly hurt.

Without another syllable, the Titan backed away from the dinner table and turned straight toward the balcony door.

“Wait, Mydei—” Phainon started, instantly pushing himself up from his chair to go after him, but the digital clock on the wall suddenly flared red.

11:55 PM.

“It’s time! It’s time!” Caelus yelled drunkenly, sprinting over with a wild grin.

Suddenly, the entire apartment of friends surged forward. Stelle, Caelus, and other classmates and friends surrounded the dinner table, completely caging Phainon into his seat like a human wall. They were cheering, laughing, and clapping his back as the final minutes ticked down.

“Submit! Submit! Submit!” the crowd chanted.

Phainon frantically scanned the gaps between their shoulders, his heart hammering violently against his ribs. “Mydei?” he called out over the noise of the room, his voice tight with rising panic. “Mydeimos!”

There was no answer.

Trapped in the center of the cheering circle, Phainon’s trembling hand hovered over the trackpad. He dragged the final PDF file straight into the digital dropbox. He hit the submit button.

The screen flashed with a bright green confirmation checkmark at exactly 11:57 PM.

The entire room erupted into an absolute roar of cheers, people throwing paper cups and hugging each other like it was a New Year’s countdown. But Phainon didn’t celebrate. He practically shoved Caelus out of the way, bursting through the crowd, and ran.

He lunged for the balcony, and then the kitchen. Both spaces were empty. He threw open the bathroom door. Empty. He sprinted out into the carpeted hallway of the building, his breath coming in ragged, terrified gasps as he looked left and right.

There was absolutely nobody there. The wind howled against the heavy glass windows at the end of the corridor.

The history essay was submitted, History 418 dealt with. The blessing, too, was now complete. And Nikador was gone.

For the next three days, Phainon sulked in his apartment. It didn’t escape him that Mydei had left traces of his existence everywhere. It wasn’t like the movies where some cosmic amnesia wipes the protagonist’s memory at the end of the script; the raw proof was carved into his reality.

The heavy red rubies were still resting right where he’d left them inside the kitchen’s junk drawer, waiting to be sold on the black market. The plush black and red blanket with the woven leaves was still spread across his mattress, smelling faintly of the soap they’d shared. The plastic stopper was still pushed firmly into his shower drain to draw a bath, and the elaborate golden jewelry still sat on his dresser, catching the dim afternoon light, untouched, as if Mydei would walk through the door to collect it at any moment.

The physical reminders only made the internal conflict worse. Phainon knew the myth of Icarus, knew the inherent danger of getting too close to a blazing, divine sun, and yet he still found himself wanting to reach for the very thing. He should have done it willingly. He should have looked the god in the eye and admitted the truth instead of hiding behind a shield of detachment, even if it burned his hands.

Now, his apartment wasn’t just as bad as he thought it would be when he lived alone, it was dreadful. In the oppressive quiet, every stray ambient sound from the street was amplified to a maddening degree. He came home to absolutely nothing, a heavy silence that somehow felt both overwhelming and completely empty.

Castorice tried to invite him out several times over those three days, her texts lighting up his screen with gentle worry. He thanked her each time for asking, but the words felt hollow. He knew he wouldn’t be able to be remotely enjoyable around people, so he stayed anchored to the couch, watching the dust motes drift through the living room.

When the loneliness grew too sharp, he dragged his laptop over and reread his typed notes on Kremnos, but the text just drove him up a wall. He hated himself for listening to Mydei’s rule about not filming his voice while he told stories. A deep, agonizing worry began to settle into his chest—the terror that he would forget the cadence of Mydei’s voice entirely as the months bled on. How much longer could his brain remember the exact pitch of that rumble? He knew his own memory’s limits; if he didn’t have the old family videos saved on his hard drive, he would have forgotten what his parents had sounded like years ago.

The slump was bad enough that his sister called him from Sunday evening, meaning someone, likely Stelle or Caelus, had tipped her off. She made him assure her that he was okay on money, that he was actually eating, and that he was sleeping enough. Then her voice softened, and she apologized that she couldn’t be there to hold him in person, because she knew he was a little clingy when things got heavy. Phainon let out a wet sniffle, calling her an asshole under his breath, and she let the insult slide without acknowledgment. They both tacitly ignored that part, but only because she knew drawing attention to it would upset him more.

When he was a kid and he scraped his knees, he would cry from the sharp sting, and if anyone explicitly mentioned that he was crying, it always made him tear up ten times harder.

He hadn’t cried in years now. The funeral had been enough for a lifetime, draining whatever well of grief he had possessed. But as he stared at the empty stool by the kitchen counter, he realized he could cry for a god if he needed to; humans had been crying for gods since the very dawn of time.

He hoped that he wouldn’t accidentally send a phantom message out into the cosmos to the concept of strife. He would not want to trouble Nikador with his human longing ever again.

The text dropped through the metallic return slot with a heavy, final thud. That was it. History 418 was officially behind him, the dropbox cleared, and the physical link severed.

He turned around to leave the reference library once and for all, the absolute exhaustion of the last three days weighing heavily on his shoulders, until he froze.

Near the rows of desktop computers stood a woman with long brown hair and kind, sleepy-looking eyes. He didn’t even try to pretend to himself that it was a coincidence. That was Calypso.

She caught his eye and offered a small, knowing tilt of her head, gesturing toward the heavy glass exit doors. Phainon followed her out onto the library plaza, where the crisp wind was forcefully cutting through the concrete walkways.

They moved to a quiet stone bench a short distance from the entrance, sitting down side by side.

Calypso adjusted the lapels of her coat and looked over at him.. “So,” she began. “How did you enjoy the book?”

Phainon let out a dry, hollow laugh, staring down at his worn sneakers. “I loved it. Especially the part on rituals,” He paused, his chest tightening as the memory of the party and the sudden, empty hallway rushed back. “But I went and… left a bad review of the book, so to speak.”

Cerces tilted her head, a sympathetic smile touching her lips as she caught the questionable little metaphor. “A bad review? And you think you can’t take the review back?”

“He looked hurt. I hid behind my paper because I couldn’t comprehend why a god would care about me, and now he’s completely gone.”

“Listen to me, Phainon. Titans are concepts, yes, but we are also born from the will of mortals. You think Nikador answered your call only because a pantheon checklist forced him to? We could not truly force his hand. He answered because your strife matched his own.”

She reached out, tapping a finger firmly against his laptop bag. “You wanted to preserve his people’s history. If you truly want to see him again, stop believing your battle is already lost. If the core of strife is dedication, then let that dedication be enough. Lay everything you have into strivings for another chance. He is a god of calamity, Phainon—he won’t turn his back on a real fight.”

The tragic inventory of his refrigerator had finally been replaced, funded entirely by a very awkward, incredibly guilt-ridden trip to a high-end estate jeweller downtown. Phainon had only pawned a single one of the mountain rubies from his junk drawer, but his stomach had twisted into knots the entire time he was at the counter. It felt like liquidating a piece of Mydei. He had explicitly promised himself that the rest of the gems would remain entirely untouched in the dark of his drawer.

The resulting influx of cash, however, had given him the capital to buy exactly what he needed for his next move. The kitchen counter was entirely covered once again. Not with notes or ritual items, but with massive, detailed topographical maps of the Akraean range.

If Calypso—Cerces—wanted him to lay everything he had into striving for another chance, he wasn’t going to do it half-heartedly. He was planning an actual, boots-on-the-ground trip straight to the physical ruins of Castrum Kremnos. If the god of calamity wouldn’t answer a casual house call, Phainon would have to go knock on his front door.

He was in the middle of highlighting a potential route when a rhythmic, heavy scratching sound coming from his balcony made him freeze.

Phainon slowly lowered his highlighter. His heart gave a sudden, violent thud against his ribs as he stood up from the barstool. He walked over to the glass sliding door.

Cipher was holding a massive, greasy brown paper bag that smelled intensely of the specific Xianzhou curry.

Phainon quickly unlocked the door and slid it open, letting the heavy wind rush into the living room. “How did you even get up to the third floor without the elevator?”

“Please, like a few flights of stairs is going to stop the Titan of amusement,” Cipher scoffed, breezing past him into the apartment without an invitation. She dropped the heavy bag of takeout straight onto his maps, unconcerned with historical preservation. She looked around the room, her sharp eyes instantly locking onto the open passport on the table. A massive, slow grin spread across her face. “Oh. Oh, wow. Look at you. You’re actually going to go pick a fight with him in his domain, aren’t you?”

Phainon flushed a quick, hot pink, but he didn’t back down. He crossed his arms. “He told me that dedication should be enough to pursue on its own. I’m just putting in the work. Do you know where he is?”

Cipher hopped up onto the kitchen counter, swinging her legs back and forth as she opened a container of curry. “I’m not allowed to give you coordinates, I’m not risking my tail for that! But I can tell you that he’s been absolutely insufferable up there. He keeps staring down at Okhema, pouting, and refusing to touch his blades or his knives. Here I thought I’d be treated to his cooking more often… you really need to fix your mess.”

Phainon looked back down at his topographical charts. Castrum Kremnos had next to no physical ruins left; thousands of years of erosion and border shifts had reduced the once-mighty fortress to nearly nothing. The only structure that had survived intact was the ancient, isolated throne room, perched high on a jagged peak in the Akraean range. It was anything but ideal.

Cipher noticed his expression and let out a bright, dismissive whistle. “Oh, don’t you worry, I’ve got an idea for that part. Ever prayed to Janus for safety in passage?”

“My sister knows a lot more about classical theology than I do, what exactly do I pray for?”

“To get to your destination, duh?” Cipher laughed, tossing a plastic fork at his chest. “But eat first, or Mydei will really knock the daylights out of you.”

She ripped into the greasy paper bag, the rich scent of curry filling the room. Phainon watched her cautious movements, a sudden spike of skepticism hitting him. “Hey, if you’re a god of trickery, is this whole setup just a trick?”

“I’m not even that mean, you know. I happen to like you, little roommate. You can throw a ruby in from the junk drawer to sweeten the deal for Janus and I, if you wnat.”

Phainon’s stomach did a guilty flip at the mention of the gems. “Nope! No more selling his things,” Phainon said quickly, rubbing his neck. “But you must really care about him, to come down here for this. Thank you for doing that in my stead. I promise I’ll be a lot more responsible if he gives me another chance.”

He hesitated, his face turning an entirely fresh, burning shade of hot crimson as he looked down at his mismatched socks. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his heart thumping wildly against his ribs. “Uhh, and about Titan and human relationships? I mean, I want Mydei back as a friend, but is there any way..?”

Cipher froze mid-bite, her fork hovering a few inches from her face. “You want to do more than just split utility bills! I knew it! I knew those little neck-blushing sessions during the baking championship weren’t about the temperature, you want to see his Lance of Fury—”

“Cipher, please,” Phainon coughed. “Just answer the question.”

She swung her legs back and forth, even less vertically gifted than Caelus. “Look, roommate, if you’re asking if there’s some law against it? No. The pantheon does not care about who we choose to spend our time with. Except for Mnestia… that witch. Now, stop pining and eat your food. I paid the good money I stole for it!” Cipher commanded, pushing a container toward him.

They finished the food and ended up watching a re-run episode of the baking show. Phainon found himself slipping into his slump again, staring at the screen and remembering how his roommate had scoffed at the contestants’ poor timing.

Once the episode's credits rolled, Cipher hopped off the couch and stretched her arms and legs out. She instructed him to wait exactly thirty minutes while she went to “work her magic,” after which he was supposed to say a prayer to Janus. Before Phainon could ask what that prayer entailed, she gave him an encouraging wink and vanished right into thin air again, leaving him alone.

He spent the next half-hour pacing, his eyes glued anxiously to the digital clock on the stove. Part of him, logically, assumed that the passage Titan probably ran a very high-end travel agency in the human world and was about to hook him up with a budget last-minute charter flight to the northern airstrip.

When the thirty minutes finally lapsed, Phainon stood by the sofa, unsure of what to do. Sitting comfortably on the cushions or standing casually in his socks didn't feel very polite for a divine request. Stepping into the center of the living room, he awkwardly knelt on the rug, folding his hands together. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly.

“Janus,” Phainon whispered into the quiet apartment, his voice trembling slightly. “Please help me fix my mistake. I want to see Mydei again. I can’t bear to lose anyone else.”

A woman’s melodic laugh echoed softly through the quiet apartment, and a portal ripped open right over the living room rug. It was glowing a vibrant orange and was shaped into a triangle, the thin lines warping and twisting in a way that was difficult to perceive, as if the structure existed outside of the third dimension. Phainon stared at it for a stunned second, a hysterical thought flashing through his mind that he could officially say goodbye to his apartment security deposit.

He hurriedly brushed his sweaty palms against his jeans, took a sharp breath to steady his racing heart, and stepped directly inside the glow.

The transition of spaces was instantaneous. The warm scent of his apartment vanished, replaced by a sudden, biting rush of thin air that made his lungs sting. He stumbled slightly as his shoes hit cracked, uneven stone, emerging into the sprawling ruins of a massive ancient structure. It was late evening here; the deep purple light was rapidly falling out of the sky, casting dramatic lines of shadow across the peaks surrounding them. The space was enormous, but thousands of years of neglect were obvious. Massive chunks of the ancient stone seating were completely missing, and fractured pillars lay toppled across the weathered foundation.

Sat right on the cold stone ground instead of on a throne was the fortress’s king. Nikador was leaning, one long leg stretched out while his other knee was bent, his large hand resting casually on it. He was looking entirely off into the vast expanse of the sky. Up here, free from the suffocating light pollution, the stars were blindingly clear, and must have felt familiar to him.

Phainon took a hesitant step forward, the crunch of gravel beneath his soles echoing loudly in the silent ruins. Mydei’s long hair was brushing against his bare back. The Titan had returned to the exact traditional garb he had worn before, the fitted dark pants, sweeping red cape on his shoulder, and the heavy golden armor plates that fit seamlessly across his body. He was only missing the metallic armbands and his elaborate necklaces, leaving his shoulders completely bare to the wind.

Hearing the footsteps, Mydei turned his head. The moment his sharp eyes locked onto Phainon, his expression instantly soured.

Phainon didn’t care about the icy reception. Driven by pure dedication, he ran across the stone platform and ground to a halt right behind him. Panting heavily from the altitude and the panic of the last three days, he leaned down with his hands resting on his own knees to catch his breath.

“Mydei,” he gasped out, his voice shaking against the mountain wind as he looked at the god’s rigid shoulders. “I—”

Mydei let out a bitter scoff, his shoulders tightening. “You have more questions to ask of me?” he asked, his voice cutting through the thin mountain air like a blade. “Is that why you have come here? To squeeze more paragraphs out of a dead kingdom?”

“No!” Phainon blurted out, stepping closer despite the freezing wind. “No—I came here for you. I didn’t mean what I said back at the apartment, Mydei. I hate having the place to myself. It’s not true that I’d be fine when you’re gone.”

Mydei slowly rose to his feet, eclipsing the starlight as he cracked his knuckles. He turned around fully, his red cape billowing wildly behind him.

“Why say this now? Your paper is secure. Your modern masters are pleased. The tether between us should be severed.”

Phainon nervously scratched the back of his neck, completely leveled by that blistering stare. “I thought—I wanted to ask for more from you,” Phainon admitted cautiously. “But then I thought that was wrong. You’ve already done so much for me. The one thing that’s felt wrong this whole time is that I don’t ask for help. Having a god assist me with absolutely nothing to gain for himself just felt unbalanced. I should be able to do it all myself, and not feel alone. Isn’t that everything strife stands for?”

Mydei took a slow, heavy step toward him, closing the distance until the heat radiating off of him was the only shield Phainon had against the mountain freeze. “You understand history, heretic, yet you understand nothing at all,” Mydei murmured, his deep voice vibrating right through the stone beneath their boots. “You believe strife is merely a transaction? A balance sheet to keep, of misery and reward?”

He leaned in slightly. “True strife is the absolute friction of forces refusing to yield to the erosion of the world. When you screamed at your desk, when you strived with your meager seven dollars to preserve a dead memory, you were not asking for a handout. A warrior does not bleed for a king because of a paycheck, Phainon—he bleeds because the struggle itself has merit.”

Mydei’s fingers twitched against his side, his voice dropping into a rougher, lower register. “I did not assist you for a tribute of hardware screws or Oxidized wine. I remained because your stubborn defiance of your own limits was an invocation I have not tasted in centuries. If you desire my presence, you do not bargain for it. You strive for it.”

Phainon swallowed, his fingers curling anxiously against the sleeves of his crewneck. “Then…” His voice caught beneath the weight of Mydei’s gaze, but he forced himself to continue. “Then will you come back with me? Please? I’ll be good. I’ll be your finest disciple if that’s what you want. I’ll learn everything I can, and I’ll—” He stopped only when his lungs demanded it, his face burning beneath the cold. “I just want you to come home, Mydei.”

The Titan laughed. It rolled from Mydei’s chest with startling warmth, carrying out across the ruined fortress until the mountains returned the sound.

“A finest disciple?” Mydei repeated, amusement curling through every syllable. “You make a grand offer for a mortal who cannot pronounce the names in the books he reads.”

“I can learn.”

“I am sure you can,” Mydei reached for the clasps at his wrists. The heavy gauntlets were removed and tossed aside. Phainon watched his bare hands flex, broad fingers opening and closing. “A disciple must demonstrate devotion.”

“How?”

The answer came with a grin. “Fight me.”

Phainon was not dressed for this, his sweatshirt was already doing a poor job of keeping the cold from his skin, but none of that mattered. He nodded.

They moved apart across the ruined stone. Phainon raised his hands, uncertain whether he was supposed to imitate a stance like boxing or trust his instincts. Mydei watched him settle into position, then adjusted his own posture, weight shifting onto the balls of his feet.

Phainon took the first step. Mydei turned his body, and his palm struck Phainon’s shoulder with force that sent him staggering several feet across the stone.

Phainon laughed. He lunged again.

This time Mydei caught his wrist. It was ridiculous how clearly Phainon noticed the sensations, ridiculous enough that his concentration faltered. Mydei used the opening immediately.

He twisted Phainon’s arm aside, stepped behind him, and swept his leg out from beneath him. Phainon hit the ground with a startled grunt, but Mydei released him before the impact could truly hurt. Phainon rolled onto his back, staring up at him, breathless.

Mydei extended a hand.

Phainon took it.

They fought again.

Phainon stopped trying to anticipate Mydei and started really watching him instead, the angle of his hips, the way his fingers flexed. Mydei gave him enough room to try, enough room to fail, and every time Phainon managed to surprise him, the Titan’s expression brightened with unmistakable approval, which became its own kind of intoxication. He wanted to see that smile when he managed to catch Mydei’s own wrist. He wanted the approving glint that appeared whenever he recovered from being thrown. He wanted to prove that all the things Mydei had once called stubbornness could amount to devotion after all.

By the time the stars had fully emerged above the mountains, the cold had become irrelevant. Phainon’s sleeves were pushed up, his white hair sticking to his forehead, and his palms stung. It made him feel alive. Every time he rose after being knocked down, Mydei was waiting to do it again. Every time Phainon came forward, Mydei met him.

Eventually, Phainon managed to catch him. It was barely a true victory. He hooked an arm around Mydei’s wrist and used his weight to pull him off balance, stumbling with him until both of them crashed against the stone. Phainon landed first, Mydei bracing himself above him with one hand planted beside Phainon’s head.

“There,” Mydei said quietly. “That is devotion.”

Phainon stared up at him hopefully, chest heaving. “Does that mean you’re coming home?”

Mydei’s jaw slowly unclenched. “You are thoroughly relentless, Phainon,” Mydei murmured.

He didn’t pull away and scoff. As Phainon’s hands slid up from the cold stone to firmly grip the thick nape of his neck, Mydei let out a small, quiet gasp. The absolute authority he usually carried completely dissolved under Phainon’s touch. The Titan sank down, his heavy shoulders relaxing as he allowed Phainon to dictate the space between them, his dark gaze locked onto Phainon’s lips in silent, desperate anticipation.

When Phainon pulled him down to close the distance, the kiss completely leveled the god of war. Mydei let out a low, breathless noise into Phainon’s mouth, a soft, resonant sound of pure surrender that vibrated straight through them both. The fierce competitor melted completely, his full, sweaty weight pressing down but his movements turning compliant, letting Phainon set the pace. Phainon claimed his mouth with deep hunger, his fingers twisting firmly into the long, thick strands of Mydei’s hair to hold him close.

Large, heavily ringed hands, which had just thrown Phainon across the stone, now came to rest tentatively against the mortal’s chest, fingers curling into the fabric of the crewneck. They tore at each other’s breath, a competition itself, parting for a fraction of a second only for Phainon to press back in, his lips bruising Mydei’s with a raw desperation that the Titan eagerly accepted.

When Phainon finally allowed a sliver of space between them, the freezing alpine air rushing between their flushed faces, Mydei remained resting heavily against him. His forehead was pressed to Phainon’s, his breathing ragged and uneven, his ears a dark, unmistakable crimson in the starlight.

“Yes,” Nikador whispered, as his hands clung gently to Phainon’s shirt. “You can take me home, Phainon.”

A couple of weeks later, Mydei was laying on the bed under the red and black blanket, groaning annoyedly and glaring at the ceiling as Phainon rushed back into the bedroom.

“Sorry, sorry!” Phainon said breathlessly, waving his hands defensively as he kicked his legs over the mattress. “I just got the notification on my phone, I really need to check the grade! We can get back to it in a minute, I promise.” He plopped onto the side of the bed, shivering a little because he was only in his boxers after being pulled away so suddenly. He whipped his laptop open, his fingers flying across the keys as he typed in his password and navigated straight to his student online courses website. He clicked open the assignments tab, found the slot for History 418, and opened the document.

Mydei sat up beside him, shuffling beneath the heavy fabric before letting out a soft hum and laying his chin on Phainon’s bare shoulder. They both waited in the quiet room as the webpage slowly loaded, the progress bar creeping across the screen until—

An A. Holy shit.

Phainon stared at the letter. He looked at Mydei excitedly, his chest swelling with so much sudden, erratic joy that he couldn’t contain it. He turned and started pressing a rapid-fire barrage of kisses straight to Mydei’s head, peppering them between the soft strands of his hair. “Thank you, thank you, oh my god,” Phainon muttered between kisses. “I’m so relieved. I can graduate now. I seriously can’t believe this is real.”

Mydei rolled his eyes under the relentless onslaught of affections, but the corner of his lips twitched upward. “I am… proud of your efforts,” the Titan muttered softly. “Though your academic masters merely acknowledged what the King of Castrum Kremnos already dictated to you.”

Phainon pulled back with a brilliant grin, carefully setting the laptop onto the bedside table before sliding himself entirely under the warm blanket next to him. He let out a long, contented sigh, sinking into the mattress. “Yeah. I’m just so glad this is over. You know, I was really curious before about when the blessing would officially count as completed. I guiltily only wanted it to count as done when the grades finally came back, but I guess it ending the second I submitted the essay made the most sense logically.”

Mydei shifted beside him, his eyes suddenly darting toward the window as he looked away. It was an expression Phainon had come to know intimately over the last few weeks—it was his exact, telltale sign of guilt.

Phainon propped himself up on an elbow, narrowing his eyes. “Mydeimos. What’s that look for?”

Mydei let out a low, rough hum, his large fingers restlessly tracing the edge of the blanket. “The blessing did not count as finished on the evening you submitted your paper,” the Titan murmured, his voice dropping into a quiet, heavily defensive register. “It was fulfilled a week earlier, after I finished telling you about the harvest rituals.”

Phainon’s jaw dropped. “What?”

He stared, recalculating the timeline. Mydei had been completely free of the contract before the get-together at Caelus's apartment even happened.

“What?” Phainon repeated, a massive, disbelieving laugh bubbling up in his chest. “But you kept living here— You wanted to stay with me, but you didn’t tell me?! You let me think you were going to dissolve into the air at midnight?”

Mydei turned sharply and punched his shoulder hard, his face burning as he tried to shield his pride. Phainon barely reacted to the blow before he was already laughing, wrapping both arms around the Titan and pulling him firmly against his chest.

“Nope, nope,” he said, burying his face against Mydei’s hair before Mydei could escape. “I told you we’d get back to it, didn’t I?”

Mydei grumbled something unintelligible against his shoulder.

“And now,” Phainon continued, squeezing him closer, “I have two things to celebrate.”

Months bled into a domestic routine, and before Phainon knew it, his statement of purpose for grad school was submitted.

He had spent a long, agonizing week detailing his foundational interest in Castrum Kremnos, carefully weaving the “unorthodox primary text fragments” he had uncovered into a research proposal.

The dedication paid off. He was accepted into the master’s program at the same university. His primary supervisors seemed incredibly nice, with the distinct, glaring exception of Professor Anaxa. Anaxa was rigid, and by all accounts he’d heard from others, completely terrible to work under, but he had quickly approved of Phainon’s extensive background knowledge on theory. Phainon couldn’t exactly tell him one of his major sources slept on his left shoulder every night.

To bridge the gap in their finances, Mydei had decided to start having a regular human job. Given his intense obsession with reality cooking competitions, he had successfully found employment at a local boutique bakery located right down the street from their apartment. The master of legions was currently spending forty hours a week managing sourdough rises and maintaining the temperature control of the industrial ovens. The bakery’s revenue had practically doubled, mostly because the neighborhood was fascinated by the wildly intimidating guy working the pastry counter in a tightly fitted black apron. The apple pie scent clung around their apartment.

Between lectures and bakery shifts, their sparring routines had only grown more coordinated. They demanded to fight each other almost every week, returning to the ring until Phainon had gotten significantly better. He could actually dodge the Titan’s sweeping hooks without stumbling, though the post-match showers remained an absolute, flush-inducing necessity.

The real test of Phainon’s nerves, however, arrived when his sister finally took the train down from Janusopolis to visit, determined to meet her brother’s mysterious new roommate. Their dinner devolved almost immediately when Cyrene pulled out a massive digital archive of their childhood photos. Phainon sat at the counter, his face burning as his sister shattered her loyalty to him and proudly displayed pictures of him at age ten, crying over a scraped knee, alongside old, sun-drenched photos of their parents by the forest borders. It was a torturous experience that Phainon hated just as much as he hated playing racing games with Mydei now—Stelle’s persistent coaching had worked out too well, and the Titan was now a menace with a controller, routinely driving Phainon off the tracks.

During a quiet moment over dessert, Cyrene gently asked Mydei about his own family. He didn’t have any photographs to share, of course, but as he sat under the kitchen lights in one of Phainon’s oversized purple sweaters, he spoke fondly of his mother’s strength and a little less fondly, but still with a quiet, deep respect, of his father’s drive. Phainon hung on every single word, his hand tracing the edge of his glass as he listened to the living myth soften into a son.

The rest of their circle was thriving, too. Castorice had successfully managed to finish her complex university meal plan spendage, a feat made significantly easier now that their friend group had grown to include Cipher. The Titan of amusement was more than happy to show up at any given hour to eat absolutely everything left on their plates, poking at all the charms and keychains of Castorice’s new purse, sometimes bringing her even more of them.

Inevitably, the truth about the missing mountain ruby had to come out. Phainon had braced himself for a catastrophic lecture when he finally confessed to selling it for cash to afford the plane ticket he didn’t end up needing at all. Instead, Mydei had simply stared at him for a ten-second interval before breaking into a booming, resonant laugh. He had laughed and laughed until his shoulders shook, openly mocking Phainon for being so broke. The guilt Phainon had carried for weeks completely evaporated.

They took the Skytrain together many times after that, the city’s layout becoming a familiar backdrop to their shared life. On a particular weekend afternoon where neither of them was scheduled for a shift or had any pressing academic or personal duties, they decided to head downtown.

The early spring wind was kicking up heavy gusts as they stepped off the transit platform. Phainon reached sideways, his fingers sliding securely into Mydei’s large, warm palm. He claimed his hands were cold, an excuse Mydei accepted with a slow, knowing squeeze of his ringed fingers. They walked up the main avenue, the towering concrete structure of the historical reference library rising up ahead of them.

“See? I told you it’s shaped like a shield!” Phainon said proudly, pointing a finger toward the massive, curved stone facade that stood stark against modern glass buildings and elegant marble buildings alike.

Mydei ground to a halt on the pavement, his sharp eyes scanning the carved stonework and the open-air balconies. A small, genuine trace of surprise crossed his features. “Hmm. You were not lying, heretic. That actually looks like a shield.”

They walked through the heavy double doors into the sprawling lower level. Before they hit the archives, Mydei gestured toward that still overly popular café on the side, demanding they pick up a pair of trendy iced drinks that were being advertised. Phainon relented without a single complaint; with his new stipend and the remainder of his paycheck, he finally had significantly more than seven dollars to his name.

They picked up their orders, the plastic cups sweating in their hands, and walked over to the open-air glass elevators together. Phainon pressed the button for the fifth floor, the machinery groaning softly as the lift prepared to carry them up to the historical reference section, where his entire journey had started.

As the elevator doors slid shut, sealing them into the quiet space, Phainon watched the bustling library floor fall away beneath his feet, all the people going about their lives, unknowingly impacting each other. He looked at the reflection of the ancient war god standing right beside him in a modern leather jacket, and he supposed Caelus had accidentally been entirely correct in the end.

Everything worked out just fine.