This place was more red than black now.
It was tender in the way Thanatos
did not like to admit that he was.
‘I need your permission,’
I said as we approached him.
Hermes, to his credit, was still quiet.
Thanatos smiled only at me.
‘What kind of permission is that?’
Thanatos asked me easily,
but he was looking at Hermes
with a deep suspicion.
‘There is another immortal war
about to erupt andI need your permission,’
I repeated, this time with emphasis.
His eyes widened as Hermes nodded,
testifying to my words.
‘How can I help, Hekate?’
Thanatos’ voice was firm now.
I smiled at him and told him my plan.
We Began Our Journey
The lands of the living were starting to look like the lands of the dead. Bodies littered across fields and villages, covered in ice and snow. Which was precisely what I needed. It was in my own cold divinity that I had thought of this idea, an idea that had made Hermes smirk even through his fear and Thanatos gaze at me long enough that I recognized my own callousness. But I took their reactions the way I had learned to take all reactions from Gods. With a grain of salt. We walked through the lands, Hecuba by my side. For comfort, I would sometimes stroke her white fur absently as we saw body after body and she whined. I pulled out my bag of simples, and worked quickly. Moly and mugwort, lavender and bone dust, the amber hearts of newborn stars. It came so quickly to me now, my craft considered anathema to the Gods. Hermes and Thanatos watched me silently as I worked. Now at the very last village, obliterated by the cold, I gently placed the last heart I had into the chest of a blue corpse. He rose as the others did from the endless sleep of death back into a half-life. Stepping back, I surveyed them all. Once, they were human. Now, touched by divinity, they were an abomination to every other God. But to me, they were my own beautiful, merciless creations. I named them for what they were.
I called them Legion.
Legion
It was a plan full of risk.
More likely failure.
But it was all we had left.
The giants were powerful
and the Gods were weakening.
So I looked upon my thousands,
once corpses left to decay.
