The moon hung low over Selenthos, its silver light bathing the city in quiet reverence. From her celestial sanctum—a temple woven from starlight and silence—Selene watched.
She did not breathe. She did not blink. But she felt.
The temple never truly slept when Selene was awake. What mortal eyes read as quiet—tapers guttering low, priests hushed in prayer—was to her an open ledger, a map of breath and heartbeat. From the argent court above to the cool veins of stone beneath, the world moved in measures she could feel: the echo of sandals on marble, the slow sigh of pages turned, the precise exhale of a man who had just announced himself to the gods.
Across the veil of dreams, she saw her son. Daryn.
He moved through the mortal world with the grace of someone half-remembered by the stars. His blade sang. His magic stirred. And his heart—oh, his heart—still burned for the sister he had lost.
He came like a small storm wrapped in determination. Daryn's steps into the archive were not stealth so much as necessity: a boy who had been remade by ocean and moon, traveling the thin corridor between memory and law. Selene watched him not as a goddess watches a subject but as someone who had once learned to hold a child in the dark and listen until his breathing told her everything she needed to know. The sight of him so close to what she had chosen to hide made the sanctum itself tremble in ways the priests could never name.
Selene pressed a hand to her chest, where no mortal heart beat, but where sorrow nested like a bird.
She remembered the young girl with the clarity of light through water. The sound of her teeth on a ribbon, the way she would press a found pebble into a palm as if it were a kingdom. Mothers were supposed to forget small cruelties; gods were not given that luxury. Selene had carried the ledger of that loss like an iron coin: heavy, private, intended to weigh decisions into directions she believed would spare her son from a fate she could not bear to witness again.
But he had found the archive, and he had spoken her name—Seris.
The moment he whispered it, the balance trembled. The curse she had cast—woven from moonlight and desperation—shivered at its edges.
When Daryn's fingers brushed the crystal tablet—when his mouth shaped the name—Selene felt a pinch that was not only possessive but medical. A misaligned stitch in a garment she had thought mended. She had made calculations, balances, bargains that used memory as currency: a tether for a life, forgetting for survival. She had thought she knew the cost. She had not counted on his hands finding the margin.
She had bent the laws of the gods to keep him. Each time he died, she pulled his soul back, rebirthing him into her light. But the price was memory. He never remembered her. Never remembered the lullabies sung in moonlight, the prayers whispered over his cradle, the tears shed when Hades claimed him.
Until now.
Now, he remembered Seris. And soon, he would recognize her and perhaps acknowledge her importance in his life.
She did not intrude. Gods can unmake and remake with a thought, and Selene had the power to drown that chamber in silver and hush the record into nothing. But the ledger of choices she'd written to herself was knotted into a larger loom—the laws, the witnesses, the small human scars embedded in priestly hands. Pull one string too violently, and the weave might unravel in ways that would not spare anyone. So she watched as a mother who kept her palms off a wound while her child learned to touch the scar and understand it.
Seeing him read Seris's name was like being given the sight of a future she had tried to protect against and now could not protect from. There was shame in that—not the cold, imperial shame of being found out, but the raw, private kind that makes a goddess's shoulders stoop. She had saved a life at a price she assumed he could never have borne; now she had to bear the knowledge that he would bear it a different way: by choosing, not by being chosen.
Her first impulse was not to punish or to entreat; it was to remember everything she had weighed. She remembered the pact with Hades spun across a night when the underworld's hunger could not be satisfied by coin alone.
She remembered the tether's sting and the lull of rebirth, the nights she spent sewing small comforts into the margins of the bargain so that the child would wake not into an empty cradle but into a life that could be lived. She also remembered the nights when she woke because the memory-swap sounded deep in the temple like a bell tolling, only she could hear. Each toll was a debt, and each debt..... a decision.
She watched Lyra stand close, steady as stone. The priestess's face was a careful map of loyalty and caution. Selene was grateful eventually—gratitude for the mortal who would take risks she, as a goddess, could not afford to display—and yet her gratitude twisted with guilt for Lyra's aid had transformed secrecy into conspiracy, and conspiracy carried its own dangers.
When Daryn left the archive with the tablet pressed to his chest, Selene felt the soft, precise pull of consequence. She could, with a thought, call him back into a dream, soothe the edges of his outrage, fold the ledger into silence, but she did not. Not because she wanted him to be angry, but because she feared the alternative: a life of choices he had not made.
She had kept him unknowing to protect him from grief that might have turned his blade inward; she had not wanted him to become someone who demanded payment from a world already heavy with debts. But knowledge, once found, is not bread to be withheld; it is a fire that either warms or consumes.
Selene turned to the pool of prophecy at the center of her sanctum and watched the ripples Daryn's discovery made. Visions slid of Daryn in battle, Daryn in pain, of him standing before gods with eyes sharpened by accusation; with fire in his eyes.
She saw Lyra beside him, the duo moving as a quiet, dangerous team; Kaelen watching from the shadows, and Thalos sharpening his blades.
Then she saw herself—veiled, distant, aching.
Along with the slow, inevitable attention of Olympus bending toward a mother who had hidden an account.
"I did this," she whispered to the stars. "I shaped him. I cursed him. I loved him."
The stars did not answer. They only watched.
Though the pool offered options—scenes of confrontation and entreaty, of argument and supplication. Each possibility had a cost, and Selene counted them like a miser counting coins.
In the private moaning between hours, she allowed herself the smallest grief: the memory of Seris's laughter at a summer table, the way a child's glance can rearrange a goddess's priorities overnight. That recollection sat beside the ledger like a photograph stuck under a ledger's corner—proof that not all calculations were clean. It made her almost human: capable of regret, capable of the quiet, and a useless wish that she had chosen differently.
But being almost human did not free her from consequence. So she made a decision quickly and coldly afterward: she would not erase what had been found. Instead, she altered the frame around it. If the boy had the tablet, then the gods and the temple would know it was possible to find the ledger; if that knowledge spread, it might force old bargains into daylight.
Forced bargains could be renegotiated. Negotiation could be weaponized. She would prepare for both.
Selene did not plan to move openly; instead, she began to braid small defenses into the temple's shape—soft, subtle gestures a god can make that feel like a coincidence to mortal minds. She whispered to the archive's seals, not to close them, but to be easier to find for those who asked with honest intent and harder to exploit for those who sought advantage.
Shifting a single notation in a lesser scroll so that any would-be archivist following a safe, greedy trail would find an alternative ledger and be led away from the truth.
For this was theater and caution braided together, and it cost her nothing, gods seldom pay willingly... a sacrifice of total control.
She thought of Daryn as he walked back into moonlight, tablet pressed to his chest like an accusation against a sky that had always been indulgent to itself.
In her watchful mind, she filed the image: ....a son who would not be reshaped in secret again. He would stand and ask for a right, and she would be there at the lip of the hall—not to take his place, but to feel the tremor of what he demanded and to brace herself for the crack that demand might make in the world's brittle order.
When the day faded and the temple settled into its slower breath, Selene let herself a small, private promise: she would be at the edge when he called the gods to account. She would not decide for him again. But she would not stand aside, either. She would be a mother who acknowledged that love can be a kind of violence. She would try to be, besides a goddess, the person who could bear the consequences of both.
Selene stepped into the moonlight as her form dissolved into mist. She would not interfere... Not yet,...But she would watch.
And when the Trial came, she would stand at its edge—not as a goddess, but as a mother praying that this time, he would choose her. Not because of fate. But because he remembered.