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PJatO - Chapter 15: Rhea
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“So she sewed you up in her thigh?”
“Yeah,” Keenan confirms, and her smile is timid and unsure. She knows as well as I do that the whole story sounds totally ridiculous. “Apparently it’s a thing. Zeus did it for Dionysus,”
“But Mr. D’s a god,” I point out. “How come that didn’t happen to you? You were in there for, what, a couple thousand years?”
“I guess. I don’t know,” Keenan shrugs. “I’m glad I’m not a god, though. Or goddess or whatever,”
Frankly, I’m glad, too, but I don’t know how to say it or even if I should. I haven’t known Keenan for that long, really, but it matters to me. That she’s not a goddess, I mean. It matters somehow.
I watch her for a moment as she absently touches the silver ring she now wears on the middle finger of her right hand. It’s a delicate thing; a slim band of silver in the shape of an arrow wrapped around her finger. It’s a gift from her “mother,” Artemis, and I’ve been teaching her how to use it. Well, maybe it’d be more accurate to say that I’m trying to teach her.
The ring is a weapon in disguise, as demigod weapons often are. Two weapons, actually. If Keenan twists it clockwise, her trusty kopis materializes in her hand. It’s really a replica of her first weapon. The one I found for her had been reduced to a puddle of molten bronze by her electrotechnics during capture the flag. This new one is a copy, right down to the bear’s head on the pommel, but, like the ring, it’s silver rather than bronze.
If she twists the ring counterclockwise, a silver bow appears, instead. It’s slender and light and powerful, and Keenan is a disaster at archery.
So, I’m trying to teach her. Really, really trying.
But she doesn’t have the patience for it. Her fighting style is sudden and rough and chaotic, perfect for the hack-and-slash kopis but utterly wrong for archery. She can’t center herself, can’t take that vital second to breathe, to focus. She loads and fires at random, and the results are littered all over the archery range: stuck in the ground, in the trees, in a passing satyr (he’s fine). One arrow miraculously clipped the outer edge of the target, and it was at that point that I called a break.
Keenan had thrown down her bow and stomped into the shade at the edge of the range. I waited a beat and followed after, plopping into the grass beside her. She ferociously shredded tufts of grass and I let her sulk for a good ten or fifteen minutes before I drew her into conversation.
The last day or so hadn’t been easy for her, I knew. She wasn’t quite the camp pariah, but people stared and pointed and whispered. And Lena was downright mean. Objectively, I guess I could understand her anger. Keenan had electrocuted her twin sister within an inch of her life, there was no denying it.
But it wasn’t her fault. And Kaya shouldn’t have brought her along on the flag raid-- gah. Whatever.
My attempts at conversation had been largely unproductive since Keenan mainly offered curt, monosyllabic answers, and, while I have infinite patience for slow learners, I wasn’t about to let her get away with all this petty maundering. Yes, her life had been complicated by the events of the other night, but she wasn’t the only demigod with godly parent issues. I wasn’t going to let her feel sorry for herself, and, yeah, fine, she’d used up my patience.
So I asked her about the stag and the crescent moon that still burned beneath her orange camp shirt. She’d hunched her shoulders and her eyes had darkened to slate.
“I don’t know,” was her answer. Three words. We were making progress.
I knew she was holding something back, and I kept prodding until I got the whole story— the harpies, the midnight ramble through the forest, her encounter with Artemis.
She told me the story of her ancestry, and it was like something out of legend. Hades, it was straight out of legend—Artemis and Callisto. It was an infamous story; Aeschylus had written a whole play about it, but the work had been lost over the course of time.
Artemis had told Keenan the whole story, but I took it with a grain of salt. Gods aren’t beyond a few embellishments here and there, and I had no doubt Artemis would want to make herself look good.
Callisto had been a nymph and a Hunter, one of Artemis’s personal retinue. She was beautiful: blonde and curvy, rose-complexioned and dimpled – just Artemis’s type, apparently.
“She loved her. Like, really loved her,” Keenan had said. I could see a deep blush working its way into her cheeks. “It was so obvious, even after all this time.”
But Artemis wasn’t Callisto’s only admirer. Zeus had set his sights on her, too, and what Zeus wanted, Zeus usually got. It didn’t matter to him that Callisto had taken vows as a Hunter; he used it to his advantage. He came to Callisto in the guise of Artemis, tricked her and seduced her.
And, as these stories so often go, Callisto soon realized she was pregnant. Although she tried to conceal her condition from the rest of the Hunt, she was soon discovered. Furious, Artemis transformed her into a bear and set the Hunters on her. But, even as a bear, Callisto was still a Hunter herself and managed to evade them.
She escaped into the wild and eventually gave birth to a human son named Arcas. But, only moments after his birth, the Hunters discovered her. Again, she tried to escape, but she was weak from childbirth, and she was cornered in a matter of minutes.
Artemis brought her down with a shot from her silver bow, but as the haze of her rage cleared, Artemis realized she had been tricked, manipulated by Hera, Zeus’s jealous wife. Not content with Callisto’s fate as a bear, Hera had filled Artemis with wrath, driving her to murder.
“But the damage was done,” Keenan said, sounding far away. “Callisto died in her arms,”
Taking pity on her, Zeus placed Callisto in the sky as the constellation we know today as Ursa Major. But even after her spirit had passed on, Artemis sensed there was still life within the bear’s body. There was another child: Arcas’s unborn twin, a baby girl.
Artemis rescued the child from Callisto’s body and sewed her up in her thigh. Although the baby had already been carried to term, Artemis kept her hidden, knowing that Hera’s grudges could last centuries.
Thousands of years later, in the aftermath of Camp Half Blood’s battle against the forces of Kronos, Hera was too preoccupied with other matters to notice when Artemis finally released the baby and gave her to the grieving father of a demigod who had fallen during the Battle of Manhattan. The mortal man raised the baby as his own.
And, of course, that baby was Keenan.
I hadn't said anything after she finished her story. I mean, in my defense, it was a lot to take in all at once. Still, as I considered it, the truth could have been a lot worse. At least she wasn’t a goddess. I was inordinately grateful for that. She was just a demigod. A really, really old, twice-blessed demigod, but still one of us.
I was careful about asking my questions at first, since this seemed to be a sensitive subject, but Keenan was happy to answer them. Through the course of the story, she had relaxed and dropped the walls she'd put up over the last day and a half. I saw that, far from being a burden, the truth of her parentage was a point of tentative pride, which was a vast improvement over the tears of a few nights ago.
Keenan's devotion to Artemis was surprisingly fierce. It was a deep, visceral thing that showed whenever she talked about her. Privately, I thought maybe she'd been craving a mother figure all her life without really realizing it. She doesn’t see herself as Zeus’s daughter.
“Apparently my hair was blonde when I was born,” Keenan is saying conversationally. I was totally zoning out, but now I return my thoughts to the present. “But when I came out of her thigh, it was auburn like hers. Now it’s brown. I don’t know what happened,”
A patch of sun filters through the canopy of leaves above our heads, dappling her hair a blaze of copper fire. She really couldn’t be more wrong, and it’s in that moment that everything slides into place: she really is Artemis’s daughter.
In the back of my mind, I know many things.
I know that I am Hera’s legacy and that Hera hates all of Zeus’s children. I know that demigods like Keenan aren’t born every day and that Artemis brought her to camp for a reason. I know that something is coming. Something big. Clouds on the horizon.
I know it won’t always be like this.
And afternoons like these?
They won’t last.
“Yeah,” Keenan confirms, and her smile is timid and unsure. She knows as well as I do that the whole story sounds totally ridiculous. “Apparently it’s a thing. Zeus did it for Dionysus,”
“But Mr. D’s a god,” I point out. “How come that didn’t happen to you? You were in there for, what, a couple thousand years?”
“I guess. I don’t know,” Keenan shrugs. “I’m glad I’m not a god, though. Or goddess or whatever,”
Frankly, I’m glad, too, but I don’t know how to say it or even if I should. I haven’t known Keenan for that long, really, but it matters to me. That she’s not a goddess, I mean. It matters somehow.
I watch her for a moment as she absently touches the silver ring she now wears on the middle finger of her right hand. It’s a delicate thing; a slim band of silver in the shape of an arrow wrapped around her finger. It’s a gift from her “mother,” Artemis, and I’ve been teaching her how to use it. Well, maybe it’d be more accurate to say that I’m trying to teach her.
The ring is a weapon in disguise, as demigod weapons often are. Two weapons, actually. If Keenan twists it clockwise, her trusty kopis materializes in her hand. It’s really a replica of her first weapon. The one I found for her had been reduced to a puddle of molten bronze by her electrotechnics during capture the flag. This new one is a copy, right down to the bear’s head on the pommel, but, like the ring, it’s silver rather than bronze.
If she twists the ring counterclockwise, a silver bow appears, instead. It’s slender and light and powerful, and Keenan is a disaster at archery.
So, I’m trying to teach her. Really, really trying.
But she doesn’t have the patience for it. Her fighting style is sudden and rough and chaotic, perfect for the hack-and-slash kopis but utterly wrong for archery. She can’t center herself, can’t take that vital second to breathe, to focus. She loads and fires at random, and the results are littered all over the archery range: stuck in the ground, in the trees, in a passing satyr (he’s fine). One arrow miraculously clipped the outer edge of the target, and it was at that point that I called a break.
Keenan had thrown down her bow and stomped into the shade at the edge of the range. I waited a beat and followed after, plopping into the grass beside her. She ferociously shredded tufts of grass and I let her sulk for a good ten or fifteen minutes before I drew her into conversation.
The last day or so hadn’t been easy for her, I knew. She wasn’t quite the camp pariah, but people stared and pointed and whispered. And Lena was downright mean. Objectively, I guess I could understand her anger. Keenan had electrocuted her twin sister within an inch of her life, there was no denying it.
But it wasn’t her fault. And Kaya shouldn’t have brought her along on the flag raid-- gah. Whatever.
My attempts at conversation had been largely unproductive since Keenan mainly offered curt, monosyllabic answers, and, while I have infinite patience for slow learners, I wasn’t about to let her get away with all this petty maundering. Yes, her life had been complicated by the events of the other night, but she wasn’t the only demigod with godly parent issues. I wasn’t going to let her feel sorry for herself, and, yeah, fine, she’d used up my patience.
So I asked her about the stag and the crescent moon that still burned beneath her orange camp shirt. She’d hunched her shoulders and her eyes had darkened to slate.
“I don’t know,” was her answer. Three words. We were making progress.
I knew she was holding something back, and I kept prodding until I got the whole story— the harpies, the midnight ramble through the forest, her encounter with Artemis.
She told me the story of her ancestry, and it was like something out of legend. Hades, it was straight out of legend—Artemis and Callisto. It was an infamous story; Aeschylus had written a whole play about it, but the work had been lost over the course of time.
Artemis had told Keenan the whole story, but I took it with a grain of salt. Gods aren’t beyond a few embellishments here and there, and I had no doubt Artemis would want to make herself look good.
Callisto had been a nymph and a Hunter, one of Artemis’s personal retinue. She was beautiful: blonde and curvy, rose-complexioned and dimpled – just Artemis’s type, apparently.
“She loved her. Like, really loved her,” Keenan had said. I could see a deep blush working its way into her cheeks. “It was so obvious, even after all this time.”
But Artemis wasn’t Callisto’s only admirer. Zeus had set his sights on her, too, and what Zeus wanted, Zeus usually got. It didn’t matter to him that Callisto had taken vows as a Hunter; he used it to his advantage. He came to Callisto in the guise of Artemis, tricked her and seduced her.
And, as these stories so often go, Callisto soon realized she was pregnant. Although she tried to conceal her condition from the rest of the Hunt, she was soon discovered. Furious, Artemis transformed her into a bear and set the Hunters on her. But, even as a bear, Callisto was still a Hunter herself and managed to evade them.
She escaped into the wild and eventually gave birth to a human son named Arcas. But, only moments after his birth, the Hunters discovered her. Again, she tried to escape, but she was weak from childbirth, and she was cornered in a matter of minutes.
Artemis brought her down with a shot from her silver bow, but as the haze of her rage cleared, Artemis realized she had been tricked, manipulated by Hera, Zeus’s jealous wife. Not content with Callisto’s fate as a bear, Hera had filled Artemis with wrath, driving her to murder.
“But the damage was done,” Keenan said, sounding far away. “Callisto died in her arms,”
Taking pity on her, Zeus placed Callisto in the sky as the constellation we know today as Ursa Major. But even after her spirit had passed on, Artemis sensed there was still life within the bear’s body. There was another child: Arcas’s unborn twin, a baby girl.
Artemis rescued the child from Callisto’s body and sewed her up in her thigh. Although the baby had already been carried to term, Artemis kept her hidden, knowing that Hera’s grudges could last centuries.
Thousands of years later, in the aftermath of Camp Half Blood’s battle against the forces of Kronos, Hera was too preoccupied with other matters to notice when Artemis finally released the baby and gave her to the grieving father of a demigod who had fallen during the Battle of Manhattan. The mortal man raised the baby as his own.
And, of course, that baby was Keenan.
I hadn't said anything after she finished her story. I mean, in my defense, it was a lot to take in all at once. Still, as I considered it, the truth could have been a lot worse. At least she wasn’t a goddess. I was inordinately grateful for that. She was just a demigod. A really, really old, twice-blessed demigod, but still one of us.
I was careful about asking my questions at first, since this seemed to be a sensitive subject, but Keenan was happy to answer them. Through the course of the story, she had relaxed and dropped the walls she'd put up over the last day and a half. I saw that, far from being a burden, the truth of her parentage was a point of tentative pride, which was a vast improvement over the tears of a few nights ago.
Keenan's devotion to Artemis was surprisingly fierce. It was a deep, visceral thing that showed whenever she talked about her. Privately, I thought maybe she'd been craving a mother figure all her life without really realizing it. She doesn’t see herself as Zeus’s daughter.
“Apparently my hair was blonde when I was born,” Keenan is saying conversationally. I was totally zoning out, but now I return my thoughts to the present. “But when I came out of her thigh, it was auburn like hers. Now it’s brown. I don’t know what happened,”
A patch of sun filters through the canopy of leaves above our heads, dappling her hair a blaze of copper fire. She really couldn’t be more wrong, and it’s in that moment that everything slides into place: she really is Artemis’s daughter.
In the back of my mind, I know many things.
I know that I am Hera’s legacy and that Hera hates all of Zeus’s children. I know that demigods like Keenan aren’t born every day and that Artemis brought her to camp for a reason. I know that something is coming. Something big. Clouds on the horizon.
I know it won’t always be like this.
And afternoons like these?
They won’t last.
In which there is a massive information dump and the author regrets telling the story in this fashion but can't take it back. At least there's the hint of action in the near-ish future.
Oh, well.
Anyway, I totally bastardized a real myth. I'm not even sorry.
The universe of Percy Jackson belongs to Greece, Rome, and Rick Riordan.
Comments and criticism are welcome. I know the format is confusing. In hindsight, I should have made Artemis and Keenan's conversation last a little longer. Live and learn.
First: [link]
Previous: [link]
Next: [link]
Oh, well.
Anyway, I totally bastardized a real myth. I'm not even sorry.
The universe of Percy Jackson belongs to Greece, Rome, and Rick Riordan.
Comments and criticism are welcome. I know the format is confusing. In hindsight, I should have made Artemis and Keenan's conversation last a little longer. Live and learn.
First: [link]
Previous: [link]
Next: [link]
© 2013 - 2024 partial-quatrefoil
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I actually think it's a very good connection to the original myth. While not entirely accurate, sometimes you have to sacrifice accuracy for a creative license. So Keenan is Artemis' daughter, but not technically Artemis' daughter. She's the thousand-year-old daughter of Zeus and Callisto, twin sister of Arcas (Who has been dead for thousands of years) and only happened to be released into the mortal world by Artemis. That's just awesome. 