Chapter Text
"A strike, a pause, a message from God
Does that make me His daughter?"
- The Hand, Annabelle Dinda
The story ends like this: With a drink too many and a lonely road late at night. A single occupant, seen too late. The screech of tires and the blaring of a horn. A pair of widened eyes, lips parting to shout– what? A protest? A plea?-- only to have the breath knocked out of them a second later, any sound they might have made drowned out by the cracking of ribs. A fleeting moment of weightlessness followed by crushing impact followed by liquid warmth seeping into cold ground. Red fading into black.
The story ends like this: A baby born too silent, too still. The sickening pause of something’s not right– heart skipping a beat, stomach dropping, the body already knowing what the mind refuses to accept. A mother’s frantic, hushed denials crescendoing into piercing wails from an anguish too devastating for words to express. Even that, however, pales in comparison to a god’s grief. A god’s wrath.
In one world, Hermes screams his fury into the world, past even Olympus’ borders, because how dare they? How dare the Fates take his son from him? He demands compensation. He demands a different outcome. He demands his son to live.
The Fates do not listen, of course. They never do. They are not meant to, not even to gods.
In another world, however, a newly freed soul does.
The story starts like this: In one world, a soul flickers once, twice, before fading away. And in another, Luke Castellan takes his first breath.