Chapter 99: Ten Hours
He sat there, eyes closed, watching the world through the spread of his shadows. Every street. Every city. Waiting.
Daedalus had told him the story of his life. Long enough ago that the faces were gone from memory, but not the stench of it.
There had been demigods so steeped in their parents’ favor they thought themselves untouchable. The strongest of their kind, draped in blessings, held up as living proof of divine blood.
And like fools, they’d turned it into a contest. Not for survival. Not for peace. Just to prove which of them was the better child.
The gods had encouraged it. Backed their champions. Fed the fire.
Until it burned too hot. Until it threatened to take the whole world with it.
Then the gods did what they always do.
They stepped back. Pointed fingers. Shifted the weight of their own disaster onto the same hands they had filled with power.
The leaders—once praised, paraded, and protected—were stripped bare. Their blessings torn away. Their cities closed to them. Cast out like the war had been theirs alone.
Once great, now forgotten, they had been cast out from their homelands, turned away by the very gods who had once claimed them. Pride stripped, blessings torn away, they carried nothing but hatred and despair.
They had come to Daedalus—an exile himself, driven from Athens for killing his own nephew. He had understood their pain, or at least pretended to. Kael could almost picture it: the old inventor taking them in like wayward children, offering shelter where no one else would.
Once the gods’ chosen. Now bitter shadows of what they were—still chasing the same arrogance that ruined them.