Blood trickled down Serenity’s arm where the salamander’s teeth had penetrated his robe and bit into his arm. It was painful, but not too bad. The only real problem was that it wasn’t healing the way he was used to. 

It was just like after the summoner, but this time he knew what was going on. He was in his mana elemental disguise as Tom Cooper and that disabled his healing. He’d be fine as soon as he could shift back to his preferred form. Any of his preferred forms. The other option was a healer like Blaze, but there was really no need to bother him.

Serenity did kind of wish he had a bandage. He hadn’t planned to be hurt and the blood was getting all over his sleeve and even dripping down onto the outer robe. Sure, his blood in this form wasn’t red, but he doubted multicolored elemental-blood dried any more cleanly and he liked this robe. He twisted his sleeve around his injured arm and clutched it with his fist; that was inadequate but also the best he was going to manage for now.

Serenity yawned; he was tired. He was low on both mana and essence as well as being injured. It might be only midmorning, but it had been a long day. A glance at his internal clock told him he’d lost track of time more than he thought; it wasn’t midmorning, it was midafternoon. It had still been a long day.

It wasn’t over yet, either. Serenity checked over the building as best he could without entering it; with the residue gone, that was relatively simple. He even spread out his aura and leaked a little Death mana, just in case, but nothing happened. The marks he’d left behind would be gone within hours; that was the best he could do.

Serenity turned and floated towards Liam. Team Two was scattered, with two near him, Mike near Liam, and the others spread out in between. Everyone other than the two swordsman was watching the distance, away from the building, but no one seemed to have seen anything. He approached Liam first, but their commander, Roberts, noticed him first.

“Mr. Cooper. Are we done here?”

Serenity nodded. “Yeah. It’s safe to examine now. I doubt anyone will find much.”

Roberts smiled at that. “Not my problem. I don’t think we’ll be back here soon. It’s too late to start on another building, so we can head back to base with you?”

As it turned out, Serenity’s robe was salvageable only because Ita had some Skills that let her repair armor as though it had never been damaged. Apparently, robes counted as armor even though they hadn’t done him much good once the shield failed.

The entire situation left Serenity with an itch he couldn’t do anything about. Yes, he’d found Liam, but it hadn’t led anywhere. Well, it led to the building, but no farther. There had to be something more he could do!

The only thread that led on from the building was Poseidon’s request. Serenity wasn’t sure if it really led anywhere but at least it was a place to start. What was the message, again? Serenity had to ask Aide to replay it for him.

Find my sister and tell her that she was wrong; Father survived. The last war never ended and now he has killed me. If you cannot find the Lady of Strategy, seek the Messenger Lord; he will know how to find her. Tell them the Lord of Earth and Sea has fallen at the hands of his father and place my trident in their hands; they will know how to lay me to rest once my killer is dead. Beware the Lords of Light and Lightning for I do not know where their loyalties lie. Other than the two I have named, the only one I know you can trust is the Guard at the Deep Gate; should he have turned against us, it would be far worse than merely my father’s survival.

From the myths, Poseidon was Cronus’s son. Pretty much all Serenity knew about Cronus was that he wasn’t Chronos, God of Time, despite the similarity in the names. A quick search revealed more; apparently, Zeus usurping power wasn’t the first time it happened. The first time was when Cronus took it from his father Uranus, if Serenity read this correctly. It was disconcerting to see Gaia called out as Cronus’s mother when Serenity knew Gaia as the spirit of the planet, but what that really meant was that the names Serenity used for things had roots in the old myths.

A little more reading revealed that the era of Cronus’s rule was called a Golden Age. That wasn’t that unusual, but a line a bit farther down the page gave Serenity the chills.

The period in which Cronus ruled was called the Golden Age, as the people of the time had no need for laws or rules; everyone did the right thing, and immorality was absent.

It was the most insidious thing he’d ever read. Serenity’s mind went back to the control the Night Fire seemed to have and shivered; he definitely didn’t want to let Cronus have control of … well, of anywhere. 

Serenity moved on to the next part of the request. The Lady of Strategy had to be Athena, didn’t it? Athena and Ares were the war gods, and Athena was known for her wisdom. Unfortunately, she wasn’t Poseidon’s sister; she was his niece. Of course, that assumed that the legends tying them together were even accurate; what Serenity could find on Poseidon indicated that there was evidence that the myths had changed over the years; Athena seemed to be a more recent deity than Poseidon and Poseidon himself might once have been counted as the chief of the gods, not Zeus. All his research had done so far was confuse him.

Serenity could assign names to the rest without too much difficulty - the Lord of Light would be Helios, while Lightning would be Zeus. The Messenger Lord had to be Hermes. The Guard at the Deep Gate was harder to parse. If it meant a deity, Hades came to mind as the Lord of the Underworld and keeper of Tartarus, but it definitely wasn’t clear. Unfortunately, knowing that the Lady of Strategy might well not be Athena threw the rest into question as well. He needed help.

There were several people he could probably ask, but the most obvious was someone he knew had lived through the time period. That meant he needed to ask either Amani or Psyche; Amani’s recent life was from the fall of A’Atla, while Psyche clearly knew and feared some of the players. If he remembered correctly, she’d said that Apollo died in the fall of A’Atla and pinned the blame for Rissa’s curse on Helios. 

Wait. Apollo was the Roman version of Helios, wasn’t he? Serenity had assumed they were the same person, but that wasn’t necessarily true.

A little more digging said that no, Apollo was Apollo in both Greek and Roman mythology. He was the only major god Serenity could find that used the same name. Helios was the equivalent of Sol, not Apollo. They were all Sun gods, which only made matters more confusing. None of the myths mentioned the death of Apollo in the fall of Atlantis; in fact, Serenity was confident that many of the myths had him alive far later than that.

Psyche was probably the better person to ask in terms of being in the right circles, even though her knowledge was potentially blurred by thousands of years having passed since the events in question. Amani’s knowledge was current to when A’Atla fell. Serenity knew just how much millenia could blur memories; there was a lot of the Final Reaper’s life he didn’t remember well. That meant he didn’t know which was the better choice.

Amani was available; he could ask her at dinnertime. That made her the better choice, at least for now. He could call and ask Psyche for more information if he needed to.

Serenity set the broken trident on the table. He’d spent long enough digging through myths that it was almost dinnertime. He wasn’t sure who would show up, but the chances were good that it would be only Rissa, Amani, and Serenity. Ita showed up sometimes, but she generally preferred to eat alone. Blaze, on the other hand, usually had dinner with the other healers; he’d said something about food making good connections. Serenity often found him waiting outside with some coffee in the morning, but not at dinnertime.

Serenity settled in to wait while he read all of the information he could find on Poseidon. Separating out the fiction helped a lot, but even the nonfiction was internally inconsistent and clearly built up from stories that were almost certainly at least largely fictional; Homer’s Odyssey was as good as any of the sources and it was at best a fictional retelling of events. 

Serenity had to admit that in many ways it was about as good as you were going to get for events from three or four millennia ago; stories warped with time even when people tried to keep them constant. That could happen even within an individual’s lifetime. With the lifetimes that were possible to higher Tier people, it was almost guaranteed. It was even worse over the same length of time when there wasn’t anyone to remember the past.

Before he could get too depressed about the low quality of the information he had available, Amani arrived. For once, she was first, at least if he didn’t count himself.

Amani bounced over to the table, then froze when she saw what was on it. “Why do you have a broken hierogram on the table?”

Serenity blinked. He must not have heard that right; he hadn’t understood the word. “A what?”

“A broken hierogram.” Amani approached closer. “It looks like Ea’s symbol. He - how was Ea’s symbol broken?”

She’d used it twice, so that was the word she meant. Hierogram had to be English had the hier- like in hierarchy and -ogram like histogram. A pair of quick searches told him that “hier” was either talking about rulers and organizational structure or it just meant sacred, while ogram seemed to mean art or something like that. Hierogram must mean “sacred art.” It was probably a specific word in her language that required an extremely obscure one in English. Serenity would have preferred for the translation bracelet to use multiple words.

He started to try to look into Ea, but he wasn’t even certain how to pronounce it. If he spelled it the way he thought she was saying it, he was more likely to get results about a game developer than about a god. Even if he did find out something about a deity, it would probably be just as off as the information he’d found about Poseidon.

“Who is Ea?” Serenity thought he’d pronounced it the same way she had, even if he didn’t recognize the deity in question. Maybe this was why the man who spoke to Serenity didn’t resemble the myths of Poseidon all that well?

“The Lord of A’Atla,” Amani stated as if it were obvious. Her eyes were wide and fixed on the broken metal on the table. “The only way ... you weren’t lying when you said A’Atla sank to the bottom of the sea for centuries or longer, were you? Ea would never permit that, but he also didn’t permit his sigils to be broken.”

Lillene

Yes, there definitely are other people Serenity could ask for help. D’Nehr, the First Guardian, would have been a good choice. Admittedly, Serenity doesn’t know enough about D’Nehr’s past to know why it would be such a good choice…

 

hi·er·o·gram

noun

noun: hierogram; plural noun: hierograms

a sacred inscription or symbol.