Post-Battle of Manhattan, in the ruins of Midtown.

The fires hadn’t gone out yet. They flickered across shattered glass and crumbling concrete, licking the metal skeletons of buildings that had once pierced the clouds. Smoke choked the skyline. Blood smeared the streets in streaks of red and gold. Somewhere beneath the ruin of a collapsed parking garage, you lay still. Not dead—not yet. But close.

You couldn’t feel your legs anymore. Your vision stuttered in and out, your breath a rattle in your throat. There was a gash across your ribs, too deep to fix without nectar, and your fingers, the ones you’d used to fix weapons, hold hammers, tighten bolts for your team, were trembling, blood-slick and useless.

But you kept your eyes open. You had to. Just a little longer. Your friends were gone — scattered to get help, or to keep fighting what was left of Kronos’s broken army. You were alone now. And still, in the pit of your stomach, something kept whispering: don’t die yet. Don’t go before you know the truth. You’d lived your whole life in the Hermes cabin. Unclaimed. Always a guest. Always the spare. Even when you proved yourself in battle, when you built the bomb that stopped a drakon, when you stood in the way of a Hyperborean giant to buy time for younger campers — there was never a sign. No symbol. No flash in the sky.

Nothing. The gods had watched their children bleed in this war. Some came. Some didn’t. Yours never had.

You coughed, tasting iron. You pressed your palm to the wound, weakly, refusing to die like this, unclaimed by your godly parent and abandoned. Suddenly, the wind shifted. Not naturally, no, this was something else. The air grew heavier, tinged with molten metal and coal smoke. The ground vibrated beneath your broken body.

You turned your head just enough to see the figure walking toward you, a silhouette through the haze of dust and ruin. He moved with a limp, dragging one leg behind him, supported by a cane of twisted, glowing bronze. His shoulders were massive, covered in soot-stained armor forged in the heart of volcanoes. His beard was thick, singed in places, and his eyes—Gods.

His eyes were furnaces. Flickering, eternal. Not cold like Olympus. Hot. Alive. He stopped a few feet away and stared at you. And for a long, painful moment… he just looked. Not with the detachment of an immortal. Not with pity. With regret.

“Gods,” he said, voice gruff and cracking. “I should’ve come sooner.” He stepped closer. His breath shook.

“I’m Hephaestus.”

You choked on a breath. The name rang like metal through your chest. And then he said it.

“I’m your father.”

Something inside you shattered — something that had been wound up and held together with rusted wire and hope for years. The words slammed into your chest harder than the drakon had. Tears pooled in your eyes, spilling down your bloodied cheeks. Hephaestus dropped to one knee beside you, the weight of him making the ground groan. His hand hovered over your wound, shaking.