It started as a whisper. As a sigh in the roiling flesh that was embedded beneath Bellona’s sternum, as a nearly imperceptible groaning in the nuts and bolts that held her spirit together. It was carried like the soft downy of a feather along a breeze, along Sam Winchester’s breeze, when he’d traipsed into her life.

And she’d welcomed it - had opened her arms in reception and forced the iron gates of her heart to do the same. She hadn’t been frightened by the looming thunderstorm of what she felt for Sam. The thunder beneath his amber eyes had treaded the path to her with tip-toe steps, too light to be heard, too demure to be startling, and had struck her chest with its most alluring bolts. It sent a tickle up her throat, croaking up the creases of her interior until it forced a smile onto her face.

But not all incidents can be quite so opportune.

Some stirrings come in a hurricane. This breed of storm is nothing like the one that seeped from Sam’s pores. Rather, it was its bane, sowing concoctions of tribulation and adversity wherever it went, reveling as it left behind budding misery for mortals to reap.

Even worse still, these tempests held no eye. No break from its fury, no chance to flee for shelter from its wrath. No chance to breathe. They were an onslaught of seething winds and rain, a death sentence for any unfortunate soul who dared travel near it. They were the epitome of power, and resisting its outrage was futile.

They’d devastated Bellona Wesson. A cyclone of her own, whose name was not yet known and identity not yet diagnosed, was pivoting above Kaiser Medical Center - above Bellona and her mother.

It had been days since the start of Stanford’s fall semester. Weeks since Agnes Wesson’s most recent - most unsuccessful - biopsy. Months since Agnes had first discovered something was wrong with her, had first noticed an abnormal aching in her chest. And mere weeks until the woman’s final days rumbled across the earth, a storm complete in itself, separate from any other and inevitable unless the doctors could decrypt her illness.

Alas, the collective minds of all the medical professionals in California could not piece together the puzzle that was Agnes Wesson. All biopsies came back negative. Their results were confused, strands of what would be footholds on the hike to Agnes’ diagnosis were jumbled beyond recognition. Much like the minds of every specialist that peered upon her situation.

“It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” they would tell Bellona after they’d analyzed the lack of results a test provided. “She has a lump on her neck. Not too large, about the size of a pea, and definitely not cancerous, so it doesn’t add up to her current state of being. She should be healthy. She looks healthy. But it’s like her body is trying to tear itself apart from the inside-out.”

It wasn’t until that afternoon, during Agnes’ weekly visit to the Medical Center, that a new specialist had given the Wesson women a definitive answer. “Her white blood cells are bursting, and we can’t figure out why. I haven’t seen anything like this. Ever. If I didn’t have years of schooling under my belt…”

At this, the woman grimaced, her lips pulling against themselves in what appeared like an attempt to drip off of her chin. She clutched her clipboard closer to her chest. “It looks like they’re lighting themselves on fire.”

Bellona frowned. “Excuse me?”

She was sitting next to her mother’s hospital bed. Had been, for the past five hours, a routine she’d developed since the appointments had begun. Kaiser Medical Center had become a second home to her, and she loathed it. It was a learned behavior - her despisation for the dull, fading walls, and for the way the patterned hospital gown reflected off of Agnes’ skin and made it appear sallow.

She’s become convinced it was a parasite to Agnes. More parasitic than whatever disease was crawling through her now, leeching the life out of her before the illness got the chance. They were amidst a race to chew through the bindings of Agnes’ life force, and when they were through, the older woman would not be the only casualty. Bellona would shrivel, too. Until she became a mere ash portrait of what she used to be.

“The white blood cells are heating,” the doctor began, a flyaway piece of cherry hair reaching down to flirt with her brows. “It’s like fire is running through the cells, circling around itself until it combusts. Her white blood cell count is depleting at a rather alarming speed.”

“That doesn’t sound like a diagnosis,” Bellona sighed. Her mother reached out to enclose Bell’s hand in her own, pressing her warm, summer gaze upon her. To comfort her.

It wasn’t working.

Bellona pressed her lips together, hoping they would work as floodgates to clog the opening at the corner of her eyes. It was a cruel reality she lived in. Her mother was dying. There was no way around that now, no way to avoid that wicked, black word - death - as much as she despised the way it rubbed against the lobes of her mind. It was her truth. Her candor, the thing the universe had given her to hold onto.

And it was vile. She wasn’t even the person who needed solace. It shouldn’t have been her heart that needed to be put at ease, it was her mother’s. She was the one in danger, she was the one whose string was slithering awfully close to the reach of the Fates. It was selfish of Bellona, to desire peace to usher luxury when it could bestow life for another.

“Dr. Schultz,” Agnes began. “Would it be alright if I spoke to my daughter alone? I’ll only be a minute, and you can come back as soon as I’m finished.”

The doctor gave a tight-lipped smile and left the room, closing the door behind her with a firm thud. Bellona swallowed, an empty protrusion squirming down her throat, and turned to face her mother. Even in sickness, Agnes’ eyes were piercing. They were a furious green, a color of greed that warned to be cautious, for the owner of these emerald irises would never stop wanting. Would never deny her soul its ambitions

But where others would cower, Bellona only grinned. She knew these eyes like she knew her own heart. They were not unlike each other, after all. Tempestuous, ambiguous, never showing their true cards and never ceasing to bow beneath the whims of the wind.

Agnes smiled, and the flame beneath her gaze warmed.

“Bellona,” she cooed, fingertips dancing along the outline of her daughter’s face. “My sweet girl.”

Bellona leaned towards the touch, furiously wiping away a stray tear. Her fingers shook with terror- of the unknown, of the future, of both of these things together, because she could not say anything with complete certainty anymore. She couldn’t even utter, with a sure and steady diction, that in a few weeks she would once more be able to feel the tickle of her mother’s touch as it drifted across her skin.

“I need to apologize to you, my love,” Agnes whispered.

Bellona shook her head. “You don’t have to apologize for anything. None of this is your fault, you couldn’t have known-”

“I did.”

A frown etched itself onto Bellona’s brows, wrinkling her forehead and creasing her velvety skin. “You...knew? But if you knew you were going to get sick, then why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I’m not sick,” Agnes breathed, a laugh buffeting in the currents of her voice.

Bellona’s head fell to one side. Her face scrunched, the ends of her mouth wavering, she gazed at the wraith that lied before her, anguish nestled in the diamonds of her irises. Agnes was decaying. The skin on her cheeks was slipping between her skeleton, her bones protruding in a way that was crudely violent - at least to the fragile flesh of Bellona’s heart. Agnes was sick. More so than the doctors realized, if she was negligent of the very fact that she was ill.

A single tear scurried down one of Bellona’s cheeks, and it imprinted into her pores, a burning reminder of what she had and what she was going to lose.

“Oh, Bell, I’m sorry,” Agnes said, reaching once more for Bellona. Bell conceded and offered her hand to Agnes’ grasp. “I know you think I am, but I’m not.”

The older woman’s eyes slipped briefly off of her daughter’s face to land on the door. They were telescopes in their own respect, seeing past the door’s guise and into the universe beyond, instantly scrutinizing with a mere glance what occurrences lingered beyond. But not sharing. No, never sharing, because Agnes was a closed and selfish door. She would keep those treasures to herself.

And Bellona didn’t blame her. Whatever footsteps she glimpsed in the opening beneath the door, whatever hushed whispers she surmised were just on the other side - those rags were riches to Agnes in her last moments. So Bellona would settle for the sliver of gold Agnes gave to her - a promise that no one was eavesdropping, delivered by the fact that Agnes opened her mouth to speak.

“I need to tell you something, and you need to listen closely,” Agnes breathed, her words a sickly odor pounding against Bellona’s paper skin.

But she listened. “Anything, Mom.”

Agnes shot up in her seat, torso hovering in a dangerous tedium over the edge, fingers gripping with snow-white knuckles onto the sheets. Bellona moved to ease her back down, but something in Agnes’ eyes stopped her. A fire. One buried deep, but sizzling on the surface now, prepared to spill onto whatever prodded it.

Agnes’ string of syllables blurred when she spoke, and Bellona was suddenly grateful for the closeness - and clarity - that Agnes’ precarious positioning provided. “I’m dying because you are.”

Bellona frowned, her lips peeling to speak in denial, but a single finger on her chin stopped her.

“Hush,” Agnes hissed. “You must listen.”

Bellona nodded, not missing a shard of the irony that wafted through the air. Her mother was weak. Skin held together with nothing but the IVs and cords of the hospital’s machines, she was but a voodoo doll - one incision away from intimacy with the sodden earth beneath her. Yet, she hovered. Hovered with a fist of iron-leaden power. Over Bellona, over her nurse’s wishes to move her to hospice, over her own body. She should have been dead already, according to the doctors. Yet, she hovered.

“Though I have raised you as such,” Agnes began, her speech blurring once more. “You are not fully human. You are a descendant of Hestia, as am I, and this comes with a great burden. I assume you’ve learned about the Greek gods? In your studies?”

Bellona nodded. Of course she had. Mythology had been one of her favorite subjects in her undergraduate studies, but that sentiment held no weight now. Those stories - tales of heroes and monsters, gods and magic - were the realities of bedtime stories. Of rotting old books in equally rotting libraries. They were not her truths. What lied before her was. It was tangible, it was real - it was her mother, on her deathbed, spurting fantasies of a made-up world that only she believed in.

A wisp of a smile danced across Agnes’ features. “It is one of my many regrets that I didn’t tell you about this sooner. I’d thought keeping you in the dark would give you the best chance at happiness, if only for a while, but there’s no time for ignorance anymore.” She paused, her smile fading. “Our bloodline has been cursed, Bellona. Long ago, when the gods refused to bow to a rising new power, they were stripped of all their abilities, and were left with nothing but a mimicry of their prior immortality.”

“Are...are you trying to tell me you’re Hestia?” Bellona sputtered. “A goddess?”

A fervent headshake from Agnes, a frustrated reflex to Bellona’s disbelief. “Hestia is not one person. It’s a title - a job. One that I have reluctantly taken, and one that I must now give to you.”

“What are you-”

“There can only be two members of one bloodline,” Agnes interrupted. “It was part of the curse, meant to restrain our power. But when one member starts dying, the other does as well, and there comes a point - an ultimatum - where a pendant must be used. The pendant has the power to revive its user, but it kills the other member of the bloodline when it does. That way, the count of members never exceeds two. And now you’re dying, Bell. You’ve started the ultimatum on its course.”

Bellona tried to force a laugh from between her lips, but it died there, finding its ending in the same place it began. It fizzed, raging in sporadic outbursts as it popped, just as Bellona’s heart would rage - seeth in fury until it faded away and she had nothing but an aftertaste.

But Agnes continued spewing her daydreams. “I know it’s you, it must be. You’ve started to die. You just don’t know it yet. If I had started it - if I had started to die first - they would be able to give me a diagnosis. But the white blood cells lighting themselves on fire? Doesn’t it sound like it could be the product of a curse, one that was placed on a goddess of fire?”

She was right, in her own way. Her circumstance wasn’t a courtesy of the failure of men, it was a failure of the gods. A death of a god. Yet, Bellona found herself defying her mother’s words. After all, how could she believe them? It was foolishness, to so hastily trust that her past was riddled with ethereal deities that had never existed.

Bellona’s fingers, now made of wintery stone, fell from her mother’s grasp. Agnes’ head collapsed on her pillow, her ebony locks billowing in a cloud around her head, and her features were contorted with dejection.

“You don’t believe me,” Agnes spoke. But it was a whisper when it left her lips, too delicate to repeat or to linger on for too long.

It was this whisper that broke Bellona. This whisper made of the last winter winds, the last breath of a stark and rude verity, sliced into Bell, leaving crimson rivers of iniquity in its path.

Moments passed, and Agnes insisted with a weakened fortitude that Bellona at least get tested. Agnes had even gone so far as to call the nurse back in and plead with her, swallowing her liquid-filled fears that threatened to pour from her eyes as she did so.

Bellona wanted to deny the testing. There was no way there was a sickness hidden deep inside her, as her mother insisted, a sickness that had acted as a harbinger for an age-old curse. So Bellona felt an adamant, desperate desire to deny. She, girl of daydreams and flower petals, yearned to spend her every breath denying her mother the right to her imagination.

But it was just that - imagination. Not real. Not dangerous. Not some sharp-toothed monster lingering in the shadows of a thirty-minute biopsy. Just an unpleasant parasite, abusing her mother’s disadvantage and making her confuse reality and make-believe.

And so, when the nurse suggested that a biopsy might be helpful - that it might shed some necessary light on what had first appeared as a cancer in her mother, and now most definitely was not - she agreed. She stopped denying. If only for her mother’s sanity, she stopped.

As she followed the nurse to a testing room, it was her only hope that, when the results came back negative, it would ease Agnes’ mind and allow her to live in peace during her final days.

Without the parasite that was her imagination.