Chapter Text
"...The cultic activity centered on the Hermogenēs appears to have originated in Arcadia, specifically the northern slopes of Mt. Cyllene. Local tradition diverges from the ancient norm here; it is said that Olethros, the ruinous son of Hermes, manifested at the Trikrena (the Three Springs) when the divine ichor of his father suffused the waters. This event seems to have provided the basis for his function as the Olethros—the personified destruction that is both required by, and a necessary precursor to, renewal..."
— Peloponnesian Mystery Cults, Vol. II
Hermes hummed a faint, whimsical tune as he descended from the high palaces of Olympus, adjusting his petasos as he went.
His father, the god-king Zeus, tasked him with freeing Io, his lover, from the jealous wrath of Hera. Or, Hermes considered, stretching his neck and fluttering the wings at his ankles, from the clutches of that boring servant of hers.
What was his name again? That giant? Something dull, certainly.
Hermes twirled his caduceus idly, feet bouncing as he touched down on mortal ground.
Ah. Argus. Yes, that was the name.
A dull creature, all eyes and solemn reverence. The sort of man who thought loyalty to Hera gave him the right to glare at interlopers, as if her schemes were sacred and her anger almighty.
Perhaps they were, but Hermes simply called it an inconvenience.
Still, he would do what was asked of him. He was Zeus’s herald, the messenger of the gods, and though he loved to dance and skip through plains and mountains and the whispering wind of Arcadia, he never shirked his duties.
He whistled—a bright, airy tune—and let his divinity spill from him in waves. The sound and light of it silenced the animals nearby. They scattered, frightened. He did not notice, or rather, he didn’t care.
He had bigger fish to hunt.
Slowly, or too fast, depending on who laid eyes upon him, Hermes changed.
With casual irreverence, he plucked the petasos from his head and gave it a shake. His hair grayed at the temples, streaks of silver bleeding through the once-rich black. Wrinkles etched themselves along his brow and cheeks. His frame shrank, his radiance folding inward, until the godly became mortal. Where he had worn the short chlamys of a messenger, bare underneath, now hung a simple chiton, loose and faded, draping over a body that no longer glowed.
Hermes smirked, the lines around his mouth deepening. He waved the caduceus, and in its wake came sheep and goats; a small herd, docile and wide-eyed, grazing in his presence as if they’d always known him.
A lesser skin is worn, and yet the duty remains unchanged, for I am the keeper of all herds, he thought, whistling a lilting note as he walked across the plains. His feet made no sound, but the unnatural silence was drowned out by the soft bleating of the flock.
A simple man, herding sheep, as he wont to do, just so happening to cross paths with the servant of the queen of the gods. Such meetings were rare in a mortal lifetime, as brief as they were.
But not unheard of.
The summoned herd followed without question. Hermes did not need to lead them; they obeyed, because he had called them into being, and they knew his will.
Absently, he extended a hand. With a flex of thought, a pipe of reeds coalesced in his fingers—his son Pan’s latest version of the syrinx.
A fine thing, he mused, turning it between his fingers. He closed his hand around it, grinning. A trick will be born from this.
He laughed softly to himself, a ripple of glee escaping as he bounced on the balls of his feet. His whole body buzzed with contained mischief.
A clever trick, he thought. And fun.
Not wasting another moment, Hermes brought the pipe to his lips and began to play. The tune spilled out as he walked through the green, notes rising high in the air, carried easily by the wind. He smirked when he caught sight of his target, the sly tilt stretching wider when Hera’s servant spoke, but never once did Hermes break the rhythm.
“My friend,” called the giant, enamored by the music, “whoever you are, well might you sit with me here on this rock, and see how cool the shade extends—pleasant for a shepherd’s seat.”
Hermes let the tune trail off, softening into silence.
He pretended, then, became what he was not. A mortal, cautious in the face of something long-lived. His expression shifted, a flicker of uncertainty drawn across the artificial lines of his face. But even as he slowed, he catalogued everything: the giant’s thousand eyes, the shade of the tree, and the cow tethered to its trunk. Io, Hermes recognized at once; the girl-who-was-no-longer-a-girl, the lover-become-beast.
He smiled hesitantly. His fingers drifted down, fidgeting with the flute. A human gesture, plucked from memory. The little habits of flesh-bound things he'd watched, mimicked, and now worn like a mask.
It was always a performance, this pretending. But it had its uses, Hermes admitted freely. Especially with the lovers who didn’t scream when he took them, though they often screamed when he left.
“I am but a simple shepherd, O giant,” Hermes replied, voice pitched in the low, submissive tone mortals used when addressing the ancient and the powerful. “But I would not break your good faith by denying so simple a request.”
And so Hermes sat.
And so Hermes played, and laughed, and observed under dark lashes as the giant listened.
How those thousand eyes blinked slower… and slower… the longer he played.
The song was threaded with divinity—woven with rest, with drowsiness, with dreams. A lullaby for immortals. For Hermes was an Olympian, and there were few who could resist his will.
Certainly not a simple giant.
“Tell me, shepherd,” Argus said, his voice beginning to drag with the weight of sleep, though not yet fallen. “Laid as we are beneath this pleasant shade, seated as comrades in the warmth of day—”
Still awake. Still too aware.
Hermes couldn’t yet reach the girl. Couldn’t yet wrap her up like a gift and carry her back to Olympus, tied with ribbons of triumph and victory. That was frustrating. But the best tricks, Hermes knew, were those that waited.
He was a trickster.
It was in his ichor, etched there by the hands of the Fates themselves.
“What is this novel instrument,” Argus asked, curious, “upon which you thread such lovely tunes?”
Hermes smirked, then immediately masked it beneath a humble smile.
“This?” he said. “This is a pipe of reeds, made when the god of the wild, Pan, mourned the nymph he could not hold. Such was his grief that he crafted this from the reeds she became. And in his graciousness, he shared it with us, the shepherds.”
“What a great invention…” Argus began, his voice slow and drowsy; his thousand eyes were already closing, one by one, heavy beneath the unrelenting insistence of the lullaby Hermes had been weaving.
Song and divinity. That was all it took.
Hermes let the illusion peel away from him like old paint from a shattered vase. The caduceus settled in his hand, and he waved it once over the giant’s slumping form, strengthening the spell he’d already laced into every note, just to be certain.
Argus would not be rising again, not before Hermes had done what he came to do.
He hummed, absently, letting the tip of his staff tap against the grass. The twin serpents hissed and coiled around each other, their bodies threading like dancers.
Argus lay slumped, his all-seeing eyes closed.
Vulnerable.
Hermes stilled. He glanced once toward Io, the cow-girl, chained and watching him with glassy, hopeless eyes. Then back to the giant with a considering air. He didn't have to ponder for long. With his decision made and a sharp flick of his wrist, he summoned his sword, the gleam of it catching the sunlight.
But—
One eye snapped open.
Hermes sneered.
He twisted, just barely avoiding the slow, lethargic strike of a blade that Argus had pulled from thin air. The giant moved like one half-drowned in dreams, but he still moved.
Hermes punished him for it instantly.
Faster than mortal eyes could follow, he slashed through the air, blade biting through flesh and bone, its cruel edge sharpened to cut even through immortality.
Golden ichor burst forth in a fine arc, shimmering as it fell.
Before Argus could shake off sleep entirely, he was dead.
It seems I did not thread sleep into him as carefully as I should have, Hermes considered, brow furrowing.
He looked down at the headless body, all its eyes still closed, forever slumbering in death. Then to the head lying in the grass beside it.
He huffed, bent low, and picked it up, ignoring the way ichor smeared his fingers. He held the head for a beat, watching it with unreadable eyes. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he tossed it over the cliff.
It crashed against the rocks below, each collision caving the skull in before it finally cracked open with a dull, muffled echo. A burst of gore erupted next, splattering blood, brain, and bone across the slope with a macabre sort of grace.
For a moment, he stared at the golden-painted rocks with the cool indifference the gods were known for, then turned, skipping lightly toward the cow.
“Now, now,” Hermes sing-songed, already slipping the knot loose from where she’d been tied. “As the king of the heavens so graciously decreed, you’re to be brought back.”
He smiled, easy and bright.
“Let’s return you to your lover, shall we?”
Once the girl had become a girl again, shaken from the forcefully made turning of flesh, already set to cry her grievances to her god-king, Hermes made a stop.
He could’ve gone to Olympus, boasted about his victory, presented his triumph as if it were a story told only for applause. Instead, he wandered, as he often did. But not aimlessly.
This time, he didn’t search for laughter or chaos or lust to busy his hands with.
This time, he walked toward something with purpose.
Trikrena. The Three Springs. The place where the Pheneatian mountain nymphs had washed him on the day of his birth—new and gleaming with ichor, still wrapped in swaddles, already impossibly more than the hands that held him. And as a god, he remembered. It lived in him. The way the water had gleamed, stilling as if it knew what he was and would be. How the nymphs had trembled in terror-filled reverence, bathing the newborn god they’d serve for an eternity and more.
It was a quiet place; one of the few he could tolerate. A space even he returned to—rarely—when he wanted stillness and calm.
He wanted it now.
Not for rest or, heavens strike him, reflection. Hermes simply wished for purification, because he was holy, and his skin had been stained by lesser blood.
He looked down at his hand. Gold specks clung to his bronze-dark skin, tiny stars that hadn’t come from the sky, but from the body of something unworthy.
Hermes sneered.
He lifted his hand and waved it lightly. His clothes vanished with the gesture, dissolved into nothingness with a small flex of divinity.
He stepped into the water bare, but he felt no shame. Hermes was radiant, deathless as all gods were. Whoever laid eyes on his eternal, perfect form would be called blessed, but only if fortune smiled upon them, for his whims were as unpredictable as the flip of a coin.
With slow, deliberate movements, Hermes set to wash his skin, savoring the moment as he rarely did. The spring that had bathed him as an infant god now traced the same limbs, centuries older and wiser. The blood rinsed easily, peeling off in soft curls of gold, like stars falling from the dark heavens, that sank into the spring, leaving the surface shimmering and his flesh restored to what it always had been: perfect.
He glanced at it with indifference. A murder done. A task completed. He had done what was asked of him.
There was peace in duty.
Hermes sighed, tipping his chin toward the sky.
The last rays of Helios stretched down into the spring, painting him in bronze and gold. A small moth, pale-winged and unhurried, drifted low over the pool, circling twice, drawn to some warmth the dying sunlight alone couldn't explain, before settling on a reed at the water's edge.
A faint smile touched his lips. He raked a hand back through his damp curls, watching the sun catch on his damp skin. The moment would’ve been improved by the press of a body beside him, pliant and reverent and his alone to keep, someone to make this victory sweeter—if only briefly, and only because he willed it so.
But, alas.
This was merely a cleansing before the long walk back and the inevitable boredom of his report to Zeus.
His hands moved automatically, dipping and trailing.
Until they paused.
Hermes frowned, his gaze dropping to his forearm. A thin line marred the perfect skin, shallow, and already partially closed.
A scratch from Argus's dying strike—a lucky blow from a barely-awake thing. It shouldn’t have happened.
Still, it had.
Annoyance flicked across his face as a single drop of golden ichor welled up and fell. The spring caught it, and where the blood touched, the water ignited, glowing far brighter than the sun above allowed.
Hermes cupped the springwater against the wound. The flesh was already mending beneath his palm, stitching itself whole, but the water refused to dim. At the water's edge, the moth lifted into the air, drawn into the orbit of the unnatural light.
He blinked rapidly, an alien motion that belied an even stranger breed of emotion.
Hermes, he who restlessly raced through all realms, stood frozen, and around him, under the fading sky, the spring blazed to life.
Luke was burning.
Pain boiled him from the inside, wrecking the soft tissue hidden beneath skin and muscle as his blood sizzled. The heat gnawed him open, softening him like meat peeled from the bone. Or maybe he was fracturing, turning into millions of grains of dust. But no. Not just yet. Maybe he was split between two impossible states: half-dead, half-alive, both clawing at his flesh with a stubborn ferocity that threatened to break him.
Death was his destiny and his redemption. But life was the pride of a Titan too scared to die, and too proud to fade alongside a mortal man who had been far too daring.
Daring enough to house a Titan.
Daring enough to claim the curse of Achilles.
Daring enough to stab himself in the very place the curse had left him vulnerable. And with that blade, take down the ancient thing nestled behind his ribs, fused to his marrow, rooted so deep it had become impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
And Luke had dared.
He had.
“Foolish mortal!” Kronos thundered inside his skull, voice splitting through the hollows of bone.
Black spots bloomed across Luke’s vision. The world itself flickered, confused—
Was it solid? Was it liquid?
He squinted, then winced. Even that was too much. Pain crawled behind his eyes like fire-fed glass. Maybe it was just his dying brain, he thought, head lulling. Maybe this was how death worked.
His thoughts scattered like birds startled into flight. And like those birds, they flew, untethered.
Only to be yanked back again.
Kronos’s voice thundered, catching them mid-air, dragging them down like leashes hooked to feathers, just long enough to make Luke hear. And to make him suffer the end, just as Kronos was.
End, it echoed in his mind, distant. It felt important, that word. His fingers twitched, or maybe they didn’t. Perhaps he only imagined the motion.
Did he still have fingers? He couldn’t tell.
Did gods ever know what the end felt like? Deathless beings as they were, did they understand death? Or was it just an endless slumber? Not quite nothing, but not quite presence either. A sleep you never woke from, still breathing but frozen mid-thought.
Hypnos and Thanatos were twins, he remembered.
Twists of color circled behind his eyes, a kaleidoscope of fractals of light and broken sound, dizzying, rippling through what little remained of his vision.
Slumber. That was the closest thing to death he could imagine.
“You doomed us!”
Kronos again.
His voice echoed across the place they shared, though it always had been the place the Titan had claimed, curled inside Luke like rot inside a peach.
“How do you think they’ll take it? Your little rebellion? What do you think will happen to the others—the demigods you recruited? The ones who followed you?”
Luke wet his lips, trying to force his tongue to shape the words. A pathetic wheeze escaped him instead.
“Your chance to change the world, to do something actually meaningful with your wretched life… and you ruined it.”
He tried again. The words came late, slurred, torn from him. They hurt, sharp and jagged, like glass scraped from the back of his throat, dragged out one shard at a time. Talking wasn’t talking anymore; it felt closer to bleeding.
“Percy…” Luke croaked, barely hearing himself. “He promised—”
“What good are promises, boy?” Kronos cut him off with that same voice, disdainful and distant, yet wrapped in a gentleness that was never meant to soothe.
It was a cruel trick his master employed: softness used like a knife, a trap laid in wool, only to hide the razors underneath.
Stupid, hopeful Luke always fell for it.
“Gods do not keep promises,” the Titan went on, almost idly. “They do not change. They are what they’ve always been: endlessly selfish, endlessly above, unbothered by the burdens they leave behind on their mortal children.”
He paused, letting the silence stretch just enough to turn heavy. Instinctively, and uselessly, Luke braced against the inevitable.
“Do you think your father will change? And if he does, will it matter?”
Somehow, this whisper sliced deeper than the shouting ever had.
“Will he look at the next lost child—one not yet born, not yet broken—and give them the love he never gave you? Will he save them, Luke? When he never even tried to save you?”
Luke’s breath caught.
Something inside him folded tighter. Not quite breaking, because there was hardly anything left to break. Still, he felt it fold in on itself like burned paper, already ash around the edges.
“He never bothered, did he?” Kronos said, quieter now, but not kinder. “And that’s why you’re here.”
Luke didn’t answer. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe it was better that way.
Even so, the voice came again, patient and poisonous, coiling soft around the inside of his skull.
“Poor little mortal boy,” Kronos crooned. “Laid dying beneath the golden throne of his father, and forgotten… even in death.”
Luke had thought death would be the worst thing that could happen to him, but hearing those words… the hurts he’d carried buried deep in his chest, spoken aloud, exposed, and stabbed again with such careful precision—
It broke something in him he hadn’t known could still break.
He shut his eyes. A soft exhale left him, pained and quiet, the last breath of something small and suffering.
They said death was a comfort. Luke wanted it. Desperately.
“Foolish boy!” Kronos screamed again, and this time it sounded different—panicked, perhaps.
The world twisted.
Colors bled together, as though some painter had been too indecisive with their palette and kept mixing shades without thought. Just like the kids from Cabin Seven, with paint on their fingers and cheeks, laughing under the sun. Like Lee and his wide, bright grin, explaining color theory to a newly arrived Luke who had pretended not to care but had listened anyway.
“I will not be dragged into this mortal rot with you!” Kronos howled, the command cracking like thunder, as if he thought screaming could stop the descent, or shape it with the fingers that had once bent time.
But what was time good for now?
Nothingness was already at the door, and it did not ask permission.
Luke didn’t speak. He couldn’t. He only closed his eyes again, ignoring the dizziness surging behind his eyelids, and oh—he was burning.
Burning and burning and burning.
Everything inside him felt like it was melting.
What a wonder. Nothing wasn’t silent, he mused. Vacant would be a better description, an emptiness so absolute that not even noise had meaning. Still, he could hear Kronos’s voice cursing against his ear, but it was fading now. Distant, weaker, like he, too, was being pulled under by the same affliction, or whatever its divine equivalent might be.
Luke almost laughed, but he didn’t have the strength for it.
Then everything rolled back—
Nothing became everything.
And burning became something else entirely.
Drowning. As if the fire had not been enough to torment him, and now the sea itself wanted its turn.
Like Poseidon had seen this mortal man—
This traitor who had made his son bleed—
And sentenced him to water as punishment before the end.
Water.
Water.
Water.
It was in his lungs.
Luke couldn’t breathe.
He couldn’t breathe.
He choked, his eyes snapping open like he’d been jolted by lightning. Every nerve lit up in agony. He felt too big for his own skin, stretched taut, filled with something immense, something wrong, something much more than him.
And it didn’t stop.
It kept going.
And going.
And going.
He was going to burst.
Something behind his eyes cracked and shattered, and the world around him, shapeless and writhing with too many colors, fractured with it. Thin splinters of reality cracked open right in front of him, and—
It all folded in on itself.
He went weightless, just for a single, suspended heartbeat of nothing, and he wondered: was this the end?
No.
He was dying.
He was drowning.
He was—how?
Water was everywhere, inside him, around him, flooding through every sense. But he wasn’t breathing. He couldn’t breathe. There was no air, just pressure, and cold, and—
Light.
Luke kicked. Without thinking, without knowing how he could even move now when he couldn’t just moments ago, Luke thrashed upward, chasing the bubbles from his last dying breath, reaching for the light because some stubborn, vicious part of him still refused to die.
He broke the surface with a ragged gasp. Air tore into his lungs, burning like fire as he coughed, heaving, water blinding him as it streamed from his hair.
Alive.
How?
How how how—
A sound snapped his attention back. Luke turned before he could think, the half-formed questions turning to ash on his tongue as white-hot panic erupted all at once. His muscles tensed. His breathing quickened, struggling to hold air that refused to be kept. Terror blinded him. Yet, his eyes darted past the dizzying blur time and time again, bracing for an enemy he couldn't see.
Then he froze.
What is this? his mind screamed, skidding for purchase, frantic with the effort of making it make sense. What is Hermes doing here—here—in a lake, in the middle of nowhere?
His stomach turned.
No.
He’d been dying, on the marble floor of Olympus. He’d been burning alive, drowning, dying.
Instinct took over before thought could catch up to it. He had died once already today; he wasn't about to stand around gawking while it happened again.
His eyes swept the treeline, the shoreline, calculating the distance to cover and the cover he’d need—the fast, ugly math three summers of war had beaten into him until it was pure reflex. War didn’t care that he was unarmed and dripping wet. It only cared about angles and escape routes.
But as his gaze swept back to the shallows, the math broke.
Luke stared.
And Hermes stared back.
Equally stunned, perhaps. He stood a few meters away, unmoving, bathed in the heavy light of the lowering sun. His gaze locked on Luke with open wonder, that too-blue divine shimmer pulsing beneath long, dark lashes.
God, his mind whispered, cautious. This one’s a god. Remember their cruelty.
Naked, Luke realized, a spike of revulsion twisting in his gut. But disgust was a distant, useless emotion compared to the colder calculation running under it. His eyes darted to the water’s edge, locking onto the caduceus lying in the moss. Even the twin snakes were watching, their dark eyes fixed on him, tongues flicking the air.
He didn't wait.
Luke lunged.
He didn't have a plan for what to do with a god's staff—bludgeon him, threaten him, bargain for his life, he hadn't gotten that far—but war had drilled one unbreakable rule into his bones: never stay unarmed in front of something that can kill you, and never, ever go into a fight unarmed if there was a weapon within reach. Gods lied. Gods smiled while they let you burn. He'd learned that lesson from the inside, and he wasn't about to unlearn it just because the water in his lungs had turned, impossibly, back into air.
His hands locked around the staff—
The twin serpents hissed, baring fangs at a hand that wasn't Hermes's, coiling tighter around the caduceus in open protest, but they didn't strike. Beneath his bracing palm, the moss blackened and curled in an instant, wilting as if autumn had passed through in a single breath.
Luke froze, staring down at the dead reeds in his fist. That wasn't him. That couldn't have been him.
Could it?
Across the water, Hermes went very, very still.
He half expected the god to lunge for it, strike him down where he stood for daring to lay hands on a weapon that wasn't his to hold. Instead, the easy, indulgent wonder that had been sitting on Hermes's face dropped away entirely, replaced by something sharper: genuine astonishment.
It didn't last. Delight came flooding back in, brighter and hungrier than before. Hermes made no move to take back the staff.
"Ω,” he breathed, soft with something close to reverence. “Ω, θαυμαστον τι ει συ.”
Luke didn't loosen his grip. If anything, he brought the staff up between them, gold catching what was left of the light.
Hermes didn't stop. Instead, the bastard looked pleased.
“Τεκνίον…”
Luke recoiled, blinking rapidly, disoriented. What the hell had he just heard?
Was that… Ancient Greek?
Why was his father speaking Ancient Greek like it was still ancient times? Why was he here, in a lake? Why was he naked—
He shoved the thought of father down before it could fully form. Whatever this was, he wasn't about to handle a strange god that word for free. Not to a Hermes who looked at him like he'd never seen him before in his life. Not to any Hermes, if Luke was being honest with himself.
Hermes continued, wading through the water with slow, exaggerated care, every motion telegraphed as if Luke was a flighty animal ready to bolt. Even so, confused, snarling Luke didn’t move. He was afraid, his heart hammering behind his ribs, but he still bared his teeth because he wasn’t a coward.
The god cooed again, voice low and soft, that same old tilt of time in his words—archaic. Familiar and unfamiliar at once. Luke’s brain struggled to follow it, as though something had been knocked out of alignment. Maybe dying had shaken loose the part of him that understood language. Or maybe it was the shock.
“Μη φοβοῦ, πλάσμα ἐπιφυλακτικόν· οὐ θέλω βλάψαι σε.”
Hermes stepped closer.
Luke jabbed the staff toward him, more warning than strike, though his arm was steady enough that it might as well have been both. His eyes stayed locked on the god’s face, refusing to blink first. He didn’t trust himself to speak—not when he had no idea what language might come out if he tried.
Hermes tilted his head, eyes glinting like something not quite human. Nothing like the father Luke remembered.
“You don’t speak?” he asked, curious. A puzzled expression flashed across his face, amusement rose along with it.
The words slid through the haze in Luke’s mind. His brain scrambled, clawing for sense, and somehow, this time, the meaning stuck.
“Of course,” Hermes murmured. “Of course.”
He looked at Luke like he was watching a star fall exactly where it was meant to.
“A newborn god,” the god whispered, and the words landed like fate being sealed. “Even born whole, you wouldn’t yet know how to speak. Clever, and already stealing. How very like me."
I'm not a god, Luke thought, before he'd even finished processing the words. I died. I'm human.
Hermes took a step closer, and there was reverence in the way he moved, like Luke was a shrine he had every right to approach.
“Born from me,” Hermes said, wonder blooming slow across his face. “Only me. From my own ichor, bled like an offering into the spring where I was first bathed after birth.”
His eyes glinted strange in the low light.
But they weren’t kind.
“As if the world wanted to remake me,” Hermes breathed. “But made you instead. Mine, then—mine alone.”