I was an ordinary mortal girl who lived at the foot of Mount Olympus.

Caelum, King of the Gods, descended from the heavens for me once, transforming himself into a shower of gold. He took me to the peak of Olympus over every other god’s objection.

He built a shrine on the mountain that belonged to me alone, every god on Olympus knew the same truth: I was the only mortal love of Caelum’s endless life.

Then I gave birth to our daughter, Nia. The Fates declared her a cursed child whose existence would bring disaster to the gods, and Nia and I were sent back down to the small cottage at the foot of the mountain.

Seraphina, Goddess of Flame, said she could help cleanse Nia of the curse, and with Caelum’s quiet consent she came every month and burned my daughter with divine fire.

Nia screamed under that fire, sobbing for me . I ran into the temple to beg Caelum to stop it, and I found him in bed with Seraphina.

The pure, holy Goddess of Flame was moaning beneath him.

They threw me into the depths of Tartarus, where Seraphina handed me over to the Erinyes to be torn apart day after day.

When Nia turned five, they finally let me out, but by then my Nia had been burned to ash.

The day I was gathering her ashes, the message stone in my room suddenly lit up, and a projection flickered out of it: Caelum, as he had been five years ago.

His eyes were full of joy and anticipation, and his voice was so gentle it almost made me believe time had folded back on itself. “Sweetheart, is it a boy or a girl? Did our child inherit my power?”

In the projection his expression shifted, and the smile froze on his face.

That was when the door of my room was pushed open, and the present-day Caelum, five years older than the man in the stone, strode inside.

I turned the message stone around so the Caelum from five years ago could see Nia’s urn with his own eyes.

“It’s a girl,” I said. “But she didn’t live long enough to inherit your power. She was burned to ash.”

In the projection, the younger Caelum looked like he had been struck by his own lightning. His mouth worked open and shut before he finally forced out a pale, brittle smile. “Sweetheart, you’re joking. Tell me you’re joking.”

I shut my eyes, wishing it could have been.

The Caelum behind me, the one who lived in this present, had no idea who I was speaking to, and my silence only made him angrier.

“Didn’t you tell everyone Seraphina burned Nia to ash? Who exactly are you—” He flicked his hand and the message stone tore itself out of my grip, flying straight to him.

He glanced down at the projection, and his voice cut off.

The face inside the stone was five years younger than his own, and the eyes staring back were red with hate.

For a split second his whole body went rigid, then he caught himself and hurled the stone into the corner.

“You really are getting bolder,” Caelum said, his voice cold with contempt. “A stretch in Tartarus didn’t teach you anything? Now you’re faking time projections just to get my attention?”

He stood over me, looking down.

“I don’t care what game you’re playing,” he said, his tone flat. “Seraphina hasn’t slept for two days because of your lies. Now go to her temple, kneel, and apologize.”

I lifted my head and gave a small, broken laugh.

It was absurd. Seraphina had destroyed my home and burned my daughter alive with her own hands.

And now my child’s father was telling me to kneel in front of her temple and apologize.

The laugh seemed to cut him. He saw the despair in my eyes, the hollowness, and something flickered in his own.

“Don’t worry,” he said, softening, as if he were granting me a favor. “Just apologize, and I won’t let her punish you too much.”

“That’s not possible,” I started to say, but he didn’t wait. With a wave of his hand, Kratos and Bia were already there, lifting me by the arms, and in a single breath they had me outside Seraphina’s temple.

A heartbeat later I was on my knees in the doorway, pinned down.

It was the same as it had been for five years: a mortal woman with no defense against the will of the King of the Gods.

Seraphina felt the disturbance and came out. She wore pale gold, her face composed in that careful, divine pity she had perfected, and she glanced down at me with a delicate curl of disdain.

“Mortals are so disgusting,” she sighed. “Faking her own daughter’s ashes for the King’s attention. But Nia was innocent, and since you’ve apologized, I won’t hold this against you.”

She raised a hand, and a golden cup floated toward me, brimming with flame. “Bring Nia here. This is her cleansing fire for the month.”

The blood roared up in my chest.

She knew. She knew this so-called divine flame had already burned Nia to nothing.

I couldn’t hold it back, and I struck out and knocked the cup from the air.

Flame burst loose. Seraphina didn’t move, and a few embers caught the hem of her gold robe, eating a black scar into the fabric.

Her eyes went cold in an instant.

Caelum was in front of her before the flame settled, his fingers wrapped around hers, his face dark. “Elara, don’t push your luck. Seraphina is trying to help our daughter and this is what you do? Apologize. Now.”

I stayed silent and glared at them, my eyes burning with hate.

They had burned my daughter alive and now they wanted me to apologize. I would rather flay them both. I wanted these high and holy gods to feel what my daughter had felt.

Seraphina caught the defiance in my eyes, and her own narrowed.

“Filthy mortal. Your blood is what tainted Caelum’s divine line, and it’s because of you Nia was born cursed. Instead of repenting, you keep trying to stop me from cleansing her. Poor Nia, to have such a cheap, vicious mother.”

She lifted her hand, and a ball of golden flame hit me square in the chest, the heat scorching my hair black in an instant.

It was like being thrown into a furnace, and my organs were on fire.

I screamed. The pain was something a human body was never built to hold. I rolled on the ground, clawing at the stone tiles until two of my fingernails tore off, blood and burnt flesh smeared together.

I couldn’t stop thinking that this had happened to Nia. Once a month, for five years.

How much had it hurt her, and how frightened had she been?

The thought closed around my chest like a hand, and I couldn’t breathe.

Caelum stood there watching me writhe in the fire, his face giving nothing away, though something flickered behind his eyes that almost looked like ache.

When I was nearly unconscious, he finally lifted a hand, and the flames went out.

I collapsed on the stone, dragging air into my lungs. My skin was a map of blisters and char, and most of my clothes were gone.

Caelum walked over and looked down at me.

“Enough,” he said, his voice flat. “Apologize to Seraphina. Admit you were wrong, and we can put this behind us.”

He paused, then added, “I’ll heal the burns.”

I almost laughed.

What was this supposed to be? Hit me, then hand me candy, as if I should be grateful to these gods, as if I should love them for it.

I pushed myself up onto one arm, shaking everywhere.

I looked him in the eye, my voice coming out raw.

“Caelum. Seraphina was never trying to cleanse Nia of any curse. She burned our daughter alive.”

“Nia’s ashes are in that urn, right now. You can take them and verify.”

His face went dark all the way through before I could even finish.

“Even now,” he said, the rage a low hum in his throat. “Even now you’re saying this. Don’t you have the slightest hope for our daughter? Do you really want her dead?”

“She really is dead. You have to listen to me,” I tried to say.

He waved his hand, and a wall of force lifted me off the ground and slammed me back against the temple’s stone pillar. Blood came up out of my mouth, and I crumpled at the foot of the steps with half my body gone numb.

A flash of contempt crossed Seraphina’s face, then smoothed back into tender concern.

“Don’t be angry.” She laid a hand on Caelum’s arm, her voice gentle and restrained. “Mortals are simply low. She’s not worth your anger.”

His expression eased. He slid an arm around her shoulders and turned away, and the two of them walked back into the temple together.

I lay on the steps, the taste of blood in my mouth drowning out everything else.

My burns were still weeping, and even the wind made me curl into myself.

But I had stopped wanting to move.

I had said what needed to be said, and he had not believed me.

He would never believe me.

Then the message stone in the corner flickered to life again, and the Caelum from five years ago was there.

He took in the state of me, the burns and the blood, and his pupils contracted to pinpoints.

He threw himself toward the projection, his voice cracking with fury and grief.

“Elara! What happened? Who did this to you?”

I looked at his face in the stone and couldn’t speak.

I wanted to know too. How had it come to this.

Ten years ago, Caelum was the King of the Gods, and I was an ordinary mortal girl at the foot of Olympus.

He came down to the mortal world on one of his sky rounds. He saw me, and he took me up to the divine mountain.

Right beside his own temple, he built a palace for me. Just me.

For thousands of years he had been the most infamous flirt among the gods, and now, for the first time, he cut ties with every lover he’d ever had. There was only one mortal in his life: me. He said it to my face. “Sweetheart, I love only you.”

I believed him then. When I got pregnant he was out of his mind with joy, and he poured half his divine blood into me because he was afraid my body wouldn’t hold the bloodline of a god.

He set aside the business of the Council, and every day he came down to my little palace, laid his hand on my belly, and listened for movement.

But the day Nia was born, the Fates appeared in my birthing chamber.

“Mortal vessel, divine blood. Her fate is ill. If she stays on Mount Olympus, she will bring ruin to the whole divine world.”

Caelum stood outside the chamber all night, and he didn’t come in to hold her.

The next morning he had me and Nia sent down from the peak, back to the cottage at the foot of the mountain.

His attendant brought his words. “I am the King of the Gods. I can’t risk the divine world. Once the curse is dealt with, I’ll bring you back.”

I thought he just needed time. The prophecy had shaken him, and he would come around.

But a month later, Seraphina was at my door.

She had been Caelum’s lover once, and when he brought me up to Olympus, she had been the loudest voice against it.

She glanced at Nia in my arms, her brow drawing in slightly, like she’d caught the smell of something unclean. “So this is the cursed child? It’s true, then. Mortal blood is too foul. It’s polluted the divine bloodline into this.”

She turned to me with pity and contempt layered on her face, and she gave a soft laugh that crawled up my spine.

“Caelum sent me. I can use divine flame to cleanse the curse from the child.”

My grip tightened on Nia, and I pulled her closer. “Is there any other way? She’s only a month old.”

Seraphina looked at me the way you might look at a stubborn animal. “Elara, you are a mortal. What right do you have to question the methods of a god? Caelum has already agreed. All you have to do is cooperate.”

She lifted a hand, and Nia floated out of my arms. Under her power I had no strength to resist at all.

She laid Nia on a stone slab, and golden fire wrapped around my baby.

I will hear that scream for the rest of my life.

Nia’s tiny body arched on the slab, her limbs jerking. Her skin went red, then black, and the smell of burning filled the room.

I lunged toward her, but Seraphina threw out a hand and the divine force sent me flying back into the wall.

“Don’t interfere.” She didn’t even turn her head. “You’re a base mortal. You’ll only deepen the curse.”

When Seraphina finally stopped and left, there was a patch of skin on Nia’s chest that was charred completely black. I held her. She had cried until her voice was a rasp, and her tiny fingers clutched at the front of my dress while she wouldn’t stop trembling.

That night I carried her up the mountain, one step at a time. I walked for three days and three nights, and I made it to the doors of Caelum’s temple. I was going to beg him to pour a little of his power into her, to save her, to stop Seraphina from doing this again.

But when I pushed the door open, I heard Seraphina’s voice.

The same goddess who was always so proper, so holy, so untouched in front of me, was moaning.

“Yes… Caelum, harder.”

I went still in the doorway.

Nia was still seizing in my arms. Her little body kept jerking, and her fingers were locked into my dress.

Seraphina felt me there. She didn’t panic, and she didn’t even reach for a sheet. Sprawled across Caelum’s chest, her body covered in bruise-dark love bites, she just lay there.

Caelum frowned at me. He was sweating, still buried inside her. “Get out. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

It was like ice water down my back. I opened my mouth, wanting to say Nia was dying, that she wouldn’t last, that I was begging him to help her.

The words wouldn’t come. Not one.

Seraphina pulled herself up off Caelum’s chest. She studied me with a small, lazy smile, like I was a servant who’d shown up uninvited.

“Good timing.” Her voice was still ragged from before, drowsy. “Pour Caelum and me a cup of mead. I’m thirsty.”

Then she leaned back down to his ear. “Don’t mind her. She’s just a lowly mortal. Keep going.”

Caelum slid an arm around her waist, rolled her over, and pinned her under him.

I stood in the doorway with my seizing daughter in my arms, and I watched.

I wanted to leave.

I couldn’t.

An invisible force had nailed my feet to the floor: Seraphina’s power.

Even as she took Caelum’s thrusts, she turned her head and looked at me, and she smiled just a little.

“Don’t be in such a rush to leave,” she said, her voice broken up by her own breathing. “You’re his woman too. Doesn’t it make you happy to see him happy?”

I shut my eyes, but a force pried them open again.

She made me watch, and she made me listen as her moans grew louder, deliberate.

I don’t know how long I stood there. The hate inside me almost burned through my skin.

Finally Caelum seemed to tire of it. His voice came down, flat and unreadable. “Seraphina. Enough.”

Seraphina froze for a beat, then released her hold on me.

Caelum waved his hand once, careless, and Nia and I were back at the cottage at the foot of the mountain.

Nia ran a high fever all night. I held her the whole night, wiping her forehead with cool water. When the fever took her under, she mumbled for me. Mama.

I hated.

I sent what Seraphina and Caelum had done out into every mortal city. I ran down the mountain to the divine courier station and had everything carved into message tablets: Seraphina burned a child every month in the name of cleansing a curse, Caelum allowed it, and no one ever cared whether the child lived or died.

The story reached every temple. Mortals tore down Seraphina’s statues and ripped up her holy portraits.

I thought it might force them to stop.

I was wrong.

At the Council of the Gods, every divine voice condemned me. A mortal had dared to slander a goddess.

They threw me into the depths of Tartarus.

Caelum did not stop them. He looked at me with a faint annoyance. “Elara. I’ve spoiled you, and now you dare to disrespect a goddess. Sit in the abyss and think about what you’ve done. Come out when you’ve learned your lesson.”

At the deepest level of Tartarus, the Erinyes were chained.

They were Seraphina’s.

They wound serpents around my throat and poured poisoned mist into my ears. Every time I began to lose consciousness, they dragged me back, and they made me watch the scene in the Golden Hall again: Seraphina’s moans, Caelum’s cold face, Nia going limp in my arms.

Again. And again.

I lost track of time.

I just wanted to live long enough to see Nia.

When Nia was five, they finally let me out, and I half-crawled back to the cottage.

I opened the door, and I saw it: Nia, burning to ash in front of me.

I threw myself at the flame and tried everything, but the divine fire would not go out.

I sat with her ashes the whole night and couldn’t summon a single tear.

That same night, fireworks burst across the sky over Mount Olympus. Caelum had lit them himself, for Seraphina, and the two of them stood under the cascade of light, accepting the congratulations of all the gods.

I finished telling all of this to him, one piece at a time. In the projection, the younger Caelum’s eyes had gone red and wet.

His whole body shook, and his voice came out cracked. “Elara. Tell me what to do. Tell me how to change this.”

I looked at him for a long time. “If you can do anything, make sure the me from five years ago doesn’t get pregnant.”

Caelum was always going to end up with another goddess, and I couldn’t change that about him.

The only thing I had left to want was for Nia never to come into this world. Never to live through any of this.

The younger Caelum trembled. He couldn’t say anything, and in the end he covered his face with his hands. A single tear slipped between his fingers.

And in that moment, the door of my room opened.

The present Caelum walked in carrying a box of healing salve. He must have come to treat my burns.

He had heard the last sentence, and his expression went dark.

“Pregnant?”

Something jealous flashed in his eyes. He caught my chin in one hand and forced my head up.

“Who were you talking to?”

Before I could answer, he wrenched the message stone from me, and the moment his own divine power registered in it, a small, possessive smile touched his lips.

“Sweetheart, I see. You’re jealous.” He looked at the burns on my body, and something softened in his eyes that wanted to be tenderness. “Seraphina is the Goddess of Flame. A mortal cannot defy her. You understand?”

He took out a salve infused with his own power, and his touch was light, almost gentle. “Her fire was a little hot. I’ll speak to her, and she won’t treat you that way again. Stop being difficult. Apologize to her at the Council tomorrow, and this will all be behind us. All right?”

I watched his hand on me.

Five years ago, he had cradled my face and told me I was the only one. I told him I liked white roses, and he had planted the whole divine mountain with them, with his own hands.

And now he was sleeping with another woman and asking me to apologize to the one who had killed our daughter.

My silence wasn’t what he wanted, and something cooled in his face.

He was about to say something more when Kratos and Bia burst through the door, panicked.

“Lord. There are projections covering Mount Olympus. All of Seraphina.”

Caelum’s hand on me went still.

Kratos’s voice shook. “It’s footage of her burning Nia. And of her and you, in the temple. It’s reached every mortal city and every temple, and the people are tearing her statues apart.”

His face went black with rage.

“Who did this?”

Bia kept her head down. “We can’t trace it. The projection carries your divine signature, so no one else can dispel it.”

His grip on me clenched, and the pain forced a sound out of me.

“Elara.” He caught my chin again. Eyes narrowed, he studied me, burns and all. “How did you copy my power? Was it the half of my blood I gave you?”

“Do you understand what this means? If mortal faith collapses, all of Olympus falls.”

I was almost lifted off the ground and could hardly breathe. I forced the words out between my teeth. “It wasn’t me.”

He gave a short laugh. “Who else?”

He let go, and I slid down the wall to the floor.

He didn’t want my explanation. He just announced it. “Tomorrow, at the Council, in front of every god and every mortal, you will withdraw these accusations. You will apologize to Seraphina in your own voice.”

I lifted my head. “No.”

He crouched down to my level, his voice dropping quiet.

He spoke calmly, and it was the calmness that made my skin go cold. “That isn’t up to you. If you refuse, I will find Nia, no matter where you’ve hidden her, and you will never see her again. I won’t risk her growing up around a mother as twisted as you.”

Every drop of blood in my body went cold.

He was threatening me with Nia. If he found her ashes, what would he do to them?

I couldn’t even think about it. I stared at him with red, burning eyes. I couldn’t move, the burns were still seeping, and I couldn’t have stood if I’d tried.

After Caelum left, I dragged myself across the floor to the corner and found the message stone.

I asked the Caelum from five years ago. “Was it you? The projections over Olympus?”

The answer came instantly.

“Yes. Anyone who hurt you or Nia, I won’t spare a single one of them.”

“Including myself.”