✸ Preamble of the Stars ❜.

EMERALD green towered over the horizon, a sheen haze of mist coating the overgrowth. It smelled like a rainy morning filled with pearls of dewdrops. However, as a hooded figure slinked from beyond the shadows caused by the barricading trees, wishing to track what their queasy senses could find— all they could taste was fear and imminent death.

The woods was clear— that much their sight could offer. Night took over, cloaking the sky with uncertainty. If it weren't for the surplus shade the trees provided, the figure would've had the capability to clearly see.

However, their hindred sight did nothing to stop them from trekking the same path as the muddy footsteps, hooves— both large and small.

"Mist," The figure cursed as the cascading overload of rain began to wash away the footsteps. Taking off their hat, revealing the visage of a young maiden, droplets of water began to pile over her eyelashes, accumulating over time until it rendered their vision as well.

Offered with no choice, she disregarded her hat and threw it off to the side. It was beginning to annoy her how much she needed to learn a night vision spell. Wait. A night vision spell. How could she forget?

Before she could cast a spell with a flick of her fingers, a blood-curdling scream resounded through the woods. Hairs on her arms stood as it forced her to relive a sound she had heard once, in the same setting, on the same day.

It cracked through the eerie atmosphere that had already settled over the woods. Could it get any worse than this? If it weren't for the golden blood coursing through her veins, she would have wished she dropped dead on the floor than traipse into looming trouble. Trouble you don't find in school or at home, but in a horror fantasy flick you probably would find in the cinema.

Her eyes scanned the clearing, sensing the woods for a snap of thread— hanging by a widow's creek. Under the overpour, her hearing has been blighted by the rush, sight scanted, and smell mocked by the overwhelming scent of wet soil and taunted nature. She sniffed, hauling the atmosphere for something out of line, something incongruous.

Then, she heard a sound that startled her down to the cavity of her thorned ribcage. The sound was distinct like the sound of a ticking time bomb but deliberate like the placement of a chess piece. Hardly there but her position offered more than what she could have hoped for. She was near. They were near.

This caused the girl to murmur a strained trail of curses, immediately opting for a sprint as she weaved through the sunless scope of land. How ever sunless the horizon may be, she figured it wouldn'tbbe entirely lightless. The moon was missing, why was that? It was rarely out of sight in these parts of Long Island, especially in these clearings, from here on up to the valley. It was a nightly occurrence, during the last weeks she stayed in the camp, for the moon to douse her celestial volition upon the slumbering forms of creation and their resplendent dreams.

Her light had always been requested, hardly ever dreaded for it brought forth a sense of comfort by the devout procession of the haruspex. After the solemnity of Selene's unbecoming (Despite this, she remains the personification of the moon.), Artemis took her place in the sky of dusk and starry intersections— reigning over it with robust conviction. But like the Moon Titaness, Artemis ruled in absence tonight.

It made her wonder. Was the goddess angry or was the world caving in on her, resisting her fighting urge to change the fate of one person?

The girl did not have the simple luxury to answer her own rhetorics or to look up as she was busy trying not to get her head knocked up by a thick, winding branch. They seemed to reach out for her, like fingers clawing at her skin, restraining her from reaching the golden peak.  However, there was one thing the girl was good at, running away from things that want to harm her.

Well, that is certainly not the case as she is about to find herself in the middle of one.

She heard a clamber of shouts in the distance, a loud nervous bleat, then some kind of knife cutting through the air. What she dreaded to hear came next, a piercing roar that riled up the atmosphere. It seemed to carry heavy weight like hundreds of anvil suspended without a rope because as soon as it cracked through the air, dropping like large obsidian dimes on a glass floor, wind flourished away from the source as if wanting the sweet escape the girl craved for all her life.

"Thalia!" She heard a tiny voice scream, a mere squeak alongside the low scratching sounds coming from the Furies. The girl did not know what to feel, dread or pity— the gods know what these poor children have been through (and they had none the pity to help). Especially now, the Furies, Hades' little cronies from beneath the world above, have sought the arteries of halfbloods for as long as she could remember. They were ruthless and unkind, always reveling on the hunt. She remembered the last time she met the three— remembered how they ruined every halfblood she got herself acquainted with, and that was way before when Rome fell.

Alecto. Tisiphone. Megaera. Three little bitches she vowed not to willingly see again, especially after their last encounter. She hoped Tisiphone didn't hold a thousand year grudge, of course not on the hope of her previously severed wings (Imagine having to endure a week of your wings growing then being torn out again by a spell casted by a student of Hecate, the horror.).

The girl was in sight, as well as the predicament she was about to face.

Three huddled figures were seen on the other side of the field, awaiting the fate of their friend who was busy battling the monsters that came out of Hades' wake. 

Narrowing her eyes at the Furies, she slowly slinked towards the children crowded on the side of a tree, one of which appeared to be a satyr. She deduced that the kid was some protector for these three. Talk about responsibility.

Without making a sonic change in the atmosphere, she crouched down and ambled over to them with determined steps. A hand reached out to grab the satyr by the shoulder and hurled him backwards. 

Before the satyr could bleat or the boy could slice her ivory skin with a weapon digging in his pocket, the girl silenced them with her gaze. The little girl beside them was shaking and looked utterly confused yet frightened by the added player in the party. 

She put a finger over her lips, urging them to not make a ruckus-- which will therefore cause the Furies to revert their attention to them. 

"Who--"

The satyr shushed the blonde boy and scooted away, as if marveled by the sight of the girl with peculiar burgundy eyes that seemed to be seething with a rather conspicuous aura. She did not pay the mind to notice their appearances and began to walk forward.

Careful not to bring attention to herself, her squinted eyes gave way to an imagined path that would soon lead her victorious. It was obvious she had done this before. From the way her hand grappled the air to summon a flourish of energy, to the way she sunk her boots downwards to assume a stable position, her breath labored, heart pounding slightly in her chest. She knew what she was doing. She knew how to save a soul.

"Knave." The rain halted, the air stilled, and the sky stunned. Hades will hate her for this... Then, a flash of light poured out of her hands like ashes from a golden urn, blindingly silver, divine like a cosmic body. Alecto whirled around, a scaled hand around a child's throat, and looked as if she had been presented the ghosts that laid within Pandora's box. Before she could utter a word and Tisiphone to zone in on her with a nasty snarl on her face (Oops, she hasn't forgotten), the girl muttered a phrase in Greek, shooting for three birds with one stone.

In the tapestry of time, we are but threads, interwoven and entangled with one another. This Is How You Lose The Time War.

// the cosmic nobody.