Centuries ago, when your mother was still perfecting her spells, a trickster named Odysseus fought in a great war of heroes. After all unnecessary blood was shed, he had to spend years on the open sea, encountering obstacle after obstacle slowing him down. That is what he gets for angering Poseidon. To incur the wrath of the gods is to have your entire life transformed into something even you can no longer recognize. Risking the might of the immortals is something no one should do. Even one of their own heroes.

The war has begun. You can tell from the ringing in your ears, the slow tilt of magic between your fingers, that the cascade of events has already been set in motion. You and Aleksander are already hurtling towards your intended fates, the leap of faith utterly dizzying but still everything you need to complete your mission.

In fact, you'll be starting on that today. Although neither you nor Aleksander will truly know if Alina Starkov is alive until you lay eyes on her, the odds of her survival seem to be growing by the hour. Genya Safin hasn't given up hope, you can tell that from one look at her. Then again, Genya believes a lot of things, and you've had reason to doubt where her true loyalties lie every day since you rescued her from the First Army. Genya says she believes Alina dead, but she says whatever will get her away from you whenever your paths cross.

Genya is lying to you, most likely. You can see it in her eyes whenever she looks at you or Aleksander, how the only thing she can identify in either of you is some horror beyond her comprehension. She's not wrong to worry; you do want to kill her friends, if they're still alive, and you will hurt her if she betrays you in anything other than thought. This is how change is made. Does the farmer think of the feelings of the stalks of wheat as he prowls through his fields with a scythe? No, only of the children he will feed with his bountiful crop.

So your motivations are different from hers, so you've had centuries longer than her to learn the consequences of letting your goals slip away from you. If you let the enemy get even one tenuous foothold over you, they'll use it to choke you out. You want to shake her by the shoulders until she understands that.

This is what happened to the Hellenids, can't she see? A race of people blessed by your gods, and the rest of the world hunted them to extinction. There is no such thing as peaceful coexistence when the otkazat'sya hate Grisha to the point of burning them alive as witches. Either you establish yourself as enough of a threat that they dare not kill you, or you roll over and let them slaughter you in droves.

Genya does not comprehend the full extent of what generations of hatred can do to what seems like a prosperous society, however, and so she holds her breath and walks with light footsteps around you as if that will make the threat of your presence any less severe. It's funny, the two of you talked quite frequently when you were still Y/N Stassov, former mapmaker and then-star oprichnik, but you suppose your transition from being Alina's good friend to wanting her dead may have burned a bridge or two. In your defense, Alina stabbed you first.

Genya's a false lead on information on Alina, then, and by extension, so is David. You found him not long after you saved her, and although you're fairly certain that she's been feeding him rumors on how you and Aleksander are utter monsters, he's still here within the bounds of your camp, so there's not a whole lot they can do to damage your movement. Not yet, at least.

What motivates you to believe that Alina may still be alive comes from Aleksander himself. He's been having visions lately, brief snippets of scenes that solidified into real experiences. He sees her, he tells you. He sees her in places she should not be, with people he does not recognize. He could be mad, or, far better, David's connection could still be fragile and present. She could actually be there.

The first thought you had upon hearing of his visions is that you wish your mother was still alive. It is something you have repeated to yourself several hundred times since she was murdered, but it remains true nonetheless. Hecate was a gifted witch, and who better than the goddess of magic to help you understand the relationship between Aleksander's visions and the truth of what is happening to Alina at this very moment?

You have no doubt that were she here, Hecate would be able to reforge the connection in a heartbeat, strengthen the visions until Aleksander could appear by her side whenever he pleased. However, your mother is a ghost to you now, out of your reach until you cross the Styx for good and choose death over life once and for all. The only one who can help you with magic is yourself.

You do your best to confirm Aleksander's rumors, but seeing as you are not the one with the stag's connection, you can only pick up when his mind is briefly torn between locations, not what he's seeing nor if they are real. The only thing you can do is seek out the other end of the connection. You have to find Alina.

Aleksander took a while to accept this when you first brought up the idea to him. He argued that both of you going on a wild goose chase to hunt down the Sun Summoner would risk the safety of your recovered Grisha. The answer is that only one of you can go, and seeing as Aleksander is the one who has known these Grisha the longest, you suggested that he stay here while you seek out Alina.

He had not liked that either. Whenever the two of you part ways, you have a habit of running away from him for anywhere between weeks to centuries. You had laughed when he mentioned that, and swore that you no longer wanted to be separated. Loneliness doesn't suit you, nor him. At the end of the day, he agreed to let you go, but only after making you swear that you would hurry back as soon as possible.

Your scouting trip begins the next morning at dawn. Aleksander's vision involved glimpses of the sea and churning waves, so you travel to the coast, borrow a boat from a First Army shipyard, and take off. You begin a tracking spell to scour the open seas for Alina's craft. You watch ribbons of emerald magic soar from the bow of your ship, scattering in all directions in search of the Sun Summoner. Hopefully, they'll get back to you soon, and then you can report back to Aleksander with the truth of her health or a dead body. Either works for you, you just need certainty.

As you travel farther from the Ravkan shore, however, the skies begin to darken, the wind kicking up with an almost unusual speed. Storms aren't uncommon on the sea, but it is strange how soon this one descends upon you. You've had your fair share of seafaring time in all your centuries, having spent a good few years charting destinations from nation to nation as you reinvented life after life. You've seen storms. This one is unnatural.

Lightning flashes, a wave crashes over the railing of your ship and suddenly, you are not alone. The sky lightens enough for you to make out a silhouette standing on the deck, a figure where there had been empty wood before. You raise your hands in preparation to cast a spell as you realize just what it is.

There is a man on the ship. A man, but somehow not, translucent like a spray of water frozen in a human form. He looks at you, and you realize with a shuddering breath that you know him. This is Poseidon, god of the sea, and he died decades before your mother.

Yet here he stands before you now, perhaps not in corporeal flesh but still here, a spirit attached to a physical form. This should not be possible, but your eyes do not deceive you.

You incline your head quickly. "Lord Poseidon." It may have been years since you have greeted a god, but that does not mean they will be any less willing to overlook the normal respects paid to immortals.

Eyes still fixed on the boards of your ship, you flinch when you hear him speak. It is his voice, the memory of it still lingers in your head even if distorted through water and sea foam. It rattles against your temples, trying to force its way into your mind like a spell. "Rise, child."

You hesitantly raise your gaze, but Poseidon remains there nonetheless, refusing to vanish like a mirage into the waves around you. "How are you here?" You gasp out.

His gaze hardens. Poseidon was one of the eldest gods; you had forgotten what it was like to be so close to that much power. In one flash of his eyes, you can feel a tidal wave building strong enough to wipe out a city, an earthquake capable of cleaving the very ground in two. "You wished us gone forever, did you not? We have been trying to reach you for quite some time, daughter of Hecate. You refuse to listen to us."

You shake your head slowly. "I mourned you. All of you. I prayed for you to come back, and you did not answer me then. I am making a new world, one that will not kill its heroes like it murdered you. Why would any of you have a problem with that?"

Poseidon stalks forward, dark brows furrowing. His visage is stony, as if cut from the very abyss of the ocean itself. He frightened you as a child, you remember hiding behind your mother whenever he came to pay a visit. He still has that effect on you now, but this time, you keep your back straight and eyes locked on his.

"You go about this the wrong way," he spits. "You make a monster of yourself. All of the Hellenids are kept in place by you. Our memory rests on your shoulders. We wanted a hero, daughter of Hecate, someone to finally bury our legacy with all the glory we deserve. You are letting that son of darkness twist your mind."

Your hands curl into fists by your sides. "You have no right to question my judgment. You died, all of you, because you stuck to the old ways. Maybe I've changed, but it's what's keeping me alive. If you wanted a better hero, you should have survived long enough to keep them safe."

Posideon glares, great and terrible god. "You would do well to heed our warnings, Hecari. Even ghosts have power. Remember this."

He raises his arm, and the entire sea comes to life around him. You watch with horrified eyes as the waves grow at a breakneck pace, reaching up so high you think they might drench the sun itself. All at once, they come crashing down towards you, an entire sea of water plummeting right on top of your ship. Your eyes close just before the water hits you, and the darkness swallows you whole.

It takes a while to open your eyes. Consciousness comes back slowly, running out before you like an athlete in a contest. You realize that you are lying down, and when you are able to carefully raise your eyelids, you recognize the scene around you as your room in Aleksander's base. You have no memory of making it back from your ship to this place. In fact, you have no memory of surviving Poseidon's message.

You look to your side and see Aleksander seated there, hands clasped as if in a prayer. You want to tell him that it is not worth the effort, but he seems too relieved that you're alive to care about the nuances of trying to properly reach the gods.

He reaches out to take your hand. "How do you feel?"

You swallow to clear your salt-dry throat before speaking. "Fine. What happened?"

Aleksander sighs. "That's exactly what I would like to know. My scouts found your ship a matter of hours after you took off. They say you were lying on the deck, completely unconscious and unresponsive to their attempts to wake you. They thought you dead. So did I."

You can imagine that scene quite well. Aleksander in his study, already worrying about whether or not you would come back to him, only for his scouts to race in with a story of finding your fallen body. It would not go over well for anyone involved.

"So they brought me back, then," you murmur, "that does clear a few things up."

His grip tightens on your hand, but he forces himself to relax. "What did you see out there? Did she do this to you?"

You shake your head slowly. "No. No, not Alina. It was–" Your voice cuts off painfully, and it takes a few moments to regain your strength enough to continue. "I saw him. I saw Posideon. He spoke to me."

Aleksander's brow furrows. "Impossible. Your gods are dead. They cannot reach us."

You let out a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. "I know. That's what I thought all this time, but I know what I saw. He was there, Aleksander. He was there, and he warned me that if I stuck to this path, I would risk the wrath of the gods."

Aleksander seems just as confused as you are. "Why would he care? He abandoned you in death."

"The Hellenids are a dead race," you answer him. "They get their strength from memory, their power from their permanence in the cultural consciousness. If I ruin their legacy by making the streets run red with otkazat'sya blood, their image is tainted. That impacts how they live out their afterlife in the Underworld. It permanently alters their spirits."

Aleksander's voice is a low growl. "They shouldn't have died, then."

A weak smile tugs at the corners of your lips. "That's what I told him, actually, but he didn't take to that all too well."

Aleksander glances at your interlocked hands, then back at you. "Forget him. If all Poseidon can do is issue threats from the Underworld, there is nothing he can do to stop you. We are remaking the world, my love. We are changing the progression of fate. We are better than your gods."

"That we are," you decide. "He can only offer advice. We will keep going. If he tried to stop me, it means Alina truly is somewhere out there and he was trying to hide her existence from me. We can train our troops, pursue your visions. Has David made any progress?"

Something dark flashes across Aleksander's face, and you frown. "Has something happened?"

"David's gone," Aleksander mutters through gritted teeth, "He waited until you had left and tried to run. Genya led him out."

Your eyes briefly flicker shut with disappointment. Genya had been smart to wait until she sensed a weakness to launch her escape. If both you and Aleksander had been present, there was no chance she could leave; there would always be at least one of you close by to keep an eye on them. With you gone and Aleksander subsequently distracted, of course she would seize the opportunity to make a move.

You just regret that David was lost in the process. Although the Durast's attempts at limiting the extent of Aleksander's pain had been minimal at best, he was still a brilliant man, and you can only assume that he's now in the hands of the enemy. You can tell by the newly darkened black lines cracked into Aleksander's hands, as well as the faint residue of blood on the front of his kefta, that Genya has been subsequently punished.

Punishment will not bring David back, however, nor will it stop the rest of your rescued Grisha from noticing that perhaps the sense of loyalty amongst your soldiers is not at its strongest. Hope is a dangerous thing during a war, you've learned, too little of it could cause a hundred men to lose to as few as ten. You need your troops to rally their spirits, to believe in their leaders more than ever before.

You and Aleksander launch a few new assaults on First Army men, bringing in even more refugee Grisha than before. The numbers swell, the attitude at your base improves. That's all you can do for now. It takes everything in you to keep it together. You saw Posideon. You saw Poseidon. He should be dead. He is dead. Yet he appeared to you anyway, and with a warning no less. The gods do not like to be ignored. This is not something that you can shake all that easily.

Yet shake it you must. Your war is picking up steam now, a fierce wildfire unable to be put out. There is no stopping this, only shaping it, and you refuse to call it all off now. If you could not save your people, at least you can save Aleksander's. The Grisha deserve a world that will protect them. If you must snuff out some of the nonbelievers, well, every war has its costs. This is yours.