Godsforsaken

Chapter 48: Hestia

“Hey short stuff! Need a hand?”

Hestia jumped up at that, startled by the first intelligible words she'd heard in gods knew how long. Her eyes fixed on me immediately, past the flood of goblins. She was quite short but goblins were much shorter still and she was standing on top of her bed, so she had no trouble seeing me over them.

Her eyes widened as our gazes met and the expression of not having slept in months melted away, to be replaced with one of excitement. Her eyes almost literally sparkled and she waved her arms around, trying to draw attention to herself. At first I thought it was to make sure we could see her but then I realized that it wasn't as air-headed as I had expected the gesture to be.

Most of the goblins had been too engrossed in rubbing themselves against the force field keeping them from Hestia to notice us but a few of the ones that didn't have a front-row seat to the goddess on her bed had taken notice of when I'd called out to her and had begun to turn around but Hestia's frantic flailing kept their attentions squarely on her. And, in all fairness, it was somewhat mesmerizing, with the way her boobs kept bouncing up and down as she jumped.

Gods but she had a rack. I really, truly was not a boob guy but you had to be blind not to notice these. They weren't quite as big as Syr's but they were on a much, much smaller frame.

“The barrier is really tough, by the way,” she called out. “Absolutely no chance of anything hitting me!” The tone was taunting but the words had clearly been directed at us, telling us that we could go wild.

“May I?” Melinoe asked.

“Go for it,” I said.

Both me and Yume could have killed those goblins with fire but we would have set Hestia's tholos on fire in the process. Alisha could have shredded them with tornado lances but I wasn't sure the tholos would have withstood the impacts. Selene's miracles would have been a waste. Athena and Anna had few ways of dealing with many enemies at once. I had no idea what Hermes could even do beside his weird quicksilver magic. And with the weird way Qi techniques worked I wasn't entirely sure Hestia's barrier would protect against them. And so that left Melinoe's bizarre purple magic.

Of course, Alisha could have just ripped the air out of the goblins' lungs but honestly I was kind of curious what Melinoe could do. I had never seen magic like hers. Purple normally signified gravity magic, like the kind Albrecht had used against me, but this wasn't that. Where gravity magic was a kind of lavender color, Melinoe's magic leaned more towards amethyst or orchid purple.

What? Don't look at me. I grew up among tailors. I'm not limited to sixteen colors.

Either way, Melinoe's magic was more reddish in hue, a color I had never seen before. Alisha and Yume had spent an evening comparing notes with Melinoe about magic but so far neither of them had told me anything about what her magic was.

Come to think of it, all three of them were unusually tight-lipped about what had happened that evening. I'd never thought of myself as the jealous sort but I knew I would be addressing what had happened there before long.

But until then I supposed Melinoe might as well make herself useful. And she did.

She drew the knife she used as a focus and purple magic wafted out from her, questing out like tendrils of smoke, wrapping around every single goblin in the tholos. When they were all wrapped up in purple Melinoe raised the knife and brought it down in a savage slash through the air.

The tendrils of magic cut off from her and black raced down them like lit fuses. I half expected the spell to cause the goblins to explode once the black hit them but they didn't. One could argue that that would have been a kinder outcome. Instead the black that had crept over the purple magic spread over their bodies, turning them black just slow enough for them to feel the pain and realize the horror of what was happening to them. And a moment after they had turned entirely black they collapsed into piles of black ash.

“That seems a little terrifying,” I said as the last goblin collapsed.

“It really isn't,” Melinoe said. “The more evil a creature is, the faster it spreads. With a thinking, feeling mortal it would take forever for the spell to show any effect. It's a spell for dealing with large groups of evil creatures, like goblins. And, as you saw, it takes a while to cast.”

“Fair,” I said, then turned to Hestia. “Hey short stuff, think you can lower the barrier now?”

Hestia barely even hesitated. She made an arcane gesture, there was a ripple of magic, and then the barrier fell. Not a moment later she flung herself at me. With any other person, in any other situation, I would have assumed her to throw herself into a hug but this was Hestia, so I knew better. This was an assault.

She threw herself at me head first, trying to headbutt me. I did not dodge, however. Instead I reached forward and grabbed hold of her forehead, arresting her forward momentum and causing her to stumble and come to a halt.

“Who are you calling short you jerk?!” she demanded. She tried to strike me over and over again but she was too small, her arms too short. But she did not relent. Instead of backing off and finding another angle to attack from she just stood in front of me with my hand on her forehead, windmilling her arms at me as she ranted: “I held out for months against those awful things, all on my own, never getting more than a wink of sleep! The entire time they kept crowding around my barriers, showing me their awful green junks. I died over and over again from hunger and thirst and exhaustion and I just kept reviving in my bed, with the barrier still up and those awful things still there. Nobody came to save me and when someone did the first darn thing they do is to make fun of me!”

I let out a toneless chuckle. On the one hand I'd been calling her that for years precisely because it never failed to set her off but on the other hand I could see just how much of a toll the situation must have taken on her. Every time I'd met Hestia in the past she'd been comically upset about something minor and I'd delighted in pissing her off a little more. But this time around she wasn't upset about something minor. She had been through something harrowing, something I couldn't even imagine going through. In some ways, the terror of having these creatures just inches away from her for so long might have been worse than the pain of letting them have their way with her might have been. It would certainly result in the exact same nightmares. I supposed she deserved a break from me fucking with her, just this once.

“You were really brave, you know?” I told her, my voice much softer than what I usually used around her.

“I was,” she whined. She was still upset but she had dropped her arms and she was looking up at me with an expression of indignation that would have looked a lot more dignified if she hadn't puffed up her cheeks as far as they would go.

I let go of her forehead and gave her a soft smile before poking one of her puffed cheeks, making her let out the air with a comical little fart noise that made me snort.

This was precisely why I couldn't handle Hestia. She seemed so... innocent. Of course I was well aware that Hestia was millennia old. Of course I was aware that on a physical level she was all woman, all grown up, even if she was so short. I was even aware that Hestia was capable of acting very mature and serious when it was necessary for her to do so. But none of that changed the fact that almost every single time I had met the goddess of hearth and home she had acted like a spoiled brat. A spoiled brat with tits the size of cantaloupes.

But it was that innocence, even more so than her being a goddess of the hearth, that reminded me of Alisha.

At a casual glance Alisha seemed very innocent as well, to the point where more than once we'd run into people who had thought I was taking advantage of a clueless young woman who didn't know what kind of relationship I expected of her. But in truth, early on in our relationship Alisha had made it abundantly clear that she was perfectly mature and that she knew exactly what she wanted from me, even more so than I had back then.

And that was the big difference between the two. Alisha was a passionate, mature woman, wise beyond her years, who seemed innocent to those who didn't know her.

Hestia, meanwhile, was the virgin goddess of the hearth, a goddess of incompatible aspects, a divine oxymoron. She was both nurturing and in need of nurturing, both mature and virginal. It was the whole reason she looked the way she did, short and with a youthful face and hairstyle and yet possessing a grown woman's curves.

Alisha was a mortal woman, vibrant and alive and contradictory in a way only mortals could be.

Hestia was a goddess, pulled this way and that by the way people believed her to be, and it resulted in her acting far more immature despite her divinity.

But that didn't change the fact that both of them could act unbelievably silly sometimes. Except with my little elf I found it endearing. With Hestia it was exasperating.

Or at least, usually it was exasperating. Now it was something else. This goddess forced to be impulsive and childish by her very nature had been put in a position of sheer horror for months and it made me feel for her.

“You did great holding out all on your own,” I told her gently as I poked her other cheek, the one that was still puffed up.

“Thank you for saving me,” she muttered and fell forward to hug me.

“You should thank Melinoe,” I told her, “she killed the goblins.”

Hestia stuck to me a while longer before she peeled herself off. She looked around at everyone who had come to save her, then bowed down. “Thank you for saving me, everyone.” She got up, then looked around once more. “So, introductions?”

**

Introducing Hestia to my girls took quite a while and, as I had suspected, Hestia took an immediate liking to Alisha. I had already decided to let the ladies talk for a moment before I broached the topic of whether Hestia wanted to come and join us but before I could, Hermes pulled me to the side.

“Are you certain you want to ask Hestia to join us?” he asked quietly.

“I thought you agreed that we need every capable fighter,” I said.

“I do, but... how do you think she'll react if she sees what the goblins do to the women who weren't smart enough to hide behind a force field?”

I was about to give him a biting reply but he continued before I could: “Never mind what happens if we fail. Athena knows what she signed up for, as do your women, presumably. But if we fail we are delivering Hestia to the exact fate she spent the last months dreading.”

“Without us, nobody is getting rescued anyway. The crown already decided to act only once we've opened the gate for the Heroes of Elysium. So the question isn't whether we risk exposing Hestia to this but whether we risk the only probable rescue operation to go awry.”

“So you just want to force Hestia into this?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “First of all, Hestia is a goddess. She acts like a child at times but she's as old as your dad. And you are old enough that if you were mortal you would have been nothing but stardust long before I was born, so don't go treating her like a child. Second of all, who said anything about forcing anyone?”

He blinked in confusion.

“Telling the gullible mortals what to do is what you guys do but it sure as shit isn't how us mortals do it,” I said. “I'll ask Hestia if she wants to accompany us and if she'd rather stay here in her little force field then she can. But I don't think she's going to.” I nodded over at her, at the way she was laughing with my girls.

“You think she's happy to risk herself just because she's had something to laugh about for the first time in months?”

“No,” I said. “I've seen the way she acts. She's seen something terrifying. She's spent the last months hiding. But if she just keeps hiding she will never get over it. And I think she knows that. She'll need to face it sooner or later, or it'll haunt her for the rest of her immortal existence.”

He considered my words for a moment, then said: “I never took you for the empathetic type.”

“I try not to empathize with gods,” I said. “Because in most interactions you guys tend to be the bad guys, too arrogant and stuck in your ways to admit you were wrong. But this... this is different. Nobody here did anything to deserve what happened here.”

“Maybe we did,” he said. “Maybe these guys have finally had enough of the way we treat the mortals.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“You know, before I saw the Holy Maiden and her lickspittles I actually thought this was a revolt organized by you,” he said and his words stopped me cold.

“You really think I'd do something like this?” I asked.

“Well, not you, specifically, but people like you. People we wronged and who gathered power until they could do this to us. It seemed like poetic justice, somehow.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It seemed like it was personal,” he said. “You don't bring goblins into something like this unless you want the women to suffer. And then there's what they did to the mortal residents of Olympus.”

“The saint candidates,” I said. “Dare I ask?”

“Most were given the choice of whether to forsake their gods or be made sport of. They aren't just torturing the Olympians, they're trying to erase us by taking away our worshipers.”

“So you still think it's someone with a grudge?”

“Kind of,” he said. “After learning that Outsiders were involved I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with resentment but that it was an Outsider ploy to destroy the world. I had assumed the rest of the world was already overrun and that they were breaching the other realms now. But learning that one of our kin sold us out paints a different picture. One of us hates us and wants us to suffer so badly that they're even willing to side with Outsiders to make it happen. It kind of makes you wonder if you might deserve what's happening.”

“That's unusually introspective for an Olympian.”

“I had months with nothing to do but fight monsters and contemplate how we got here.” He paused to nod over to the girls, who were wrapping up whatever conversation they'd been having. “Now stop asking me about my feelings and talk to Hestia.”

I snorted. “Got it.”

**

After a few minutes of just being a girl Hestia was back to her usual self, which is to say she was acting like a little girl pretending to be a dignified lady.

“Felix Tailor,” she said as I approached. “Your women already filled me in on what you are doing here. So let me say this again now that I'm slightly less emotional. Thank you for coming to save me, to save us.”

I blinked. This was the first time a goddess aside from Athena had thanked me. It felt bizarre, like it was something that shouldn't have happened, but I would have to be lying if I said it didn't make me happy. “You're welcome,” I said, then caught myself. “But I actually wanted to ask you something.”

“You want to ask whether I'm willing to help you, don't you?”

I felt my eyebrows raising.

“Did they already talk to you about it?” I asked. I could see my girls shaking their heads behind her.

“No, but what other reasons would you have to free me?”

“Because I didn't like the idea of a horde of goblins doings gods know what to you?” I asked and now it was her turn to blink as a soft blush touched her cheeks.

“That was surprisingly considerate of you,” she said.

I shrugged. “But yes, I was also going to ask you if you wanted to help.”

“I do,” she said instantly. “I might not be the strongest of the Olympian but...” She held up a hand and a fireball appeared in it. “I'm not helpless either.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Things are going to get harrowing.”

She fixed me with a stare, her expression more serious than any I'd seen from her before. “I've spent the last five months sitting in a force field, with nothing but goblin grins and goblin junks for a view, intermittently thirsting and starving to death. Things were already harrowing. And if I can save others from a fate like this or worse, it'll be worth it.”

I reached out and patted her head. “Thank you.”

She smacked my hand away. “Jerk.”