POV: Aphrodite
Leadership cracks under grief.
I don't know if grief is exactly the right word for what I'm carrying after today. Grief is what you feel when something is lost. What I'm carrying feels more like the weight of something found — something I can't put down now that I know it exists. My father is alive. He's in a prison that is still running, still fed by forces that don't want it to stop running, and the path to him runs through a kingdom that the map marked with a word that made Kai go quiet for a beat before he translated it.
Cursed.
The word has been sitting behind everything else since he said it, not loudly, not at the front of my mind, but there — the way a sound you can't identify sits at the edge of your hearing and refuses to resolve into something familiar. I keep returning to the way the sigil pulsed on the map. Steadier than the others. More patient. As if whatever is running that prison has been running it long enough not to be in any particular hurry.
