“Persephone,” Athena whispered. The queen of the underworld and Demeter’s daughter, stolen from the summer lands and dragged below to be the bride of Hades. It made sense that she had died faster than the rest. She was half-dead already, one side of her an ageless, golden-haired maiden, and the other a rotted, sagging corpse. When Athena closed her eyes, she could see Persephone’s demise: the black skin slowly consuming the peach, the blue eye becoming cloudy, then milky, and finally falling into her skull. She swallowed and frowned, unsure whether the vision was true or just the product of her imagination.

“I’m sorry,” Athena whispered. “I was sorry the first time she was taken from you. You know that. I wanted to get her back.”

Demeter sighed, and the skin moved them with an uneven rattle. “What do you want, Athena? Why have you come, dressed like a harlot, asking stupid questions?”

“It’s high noon in the desert,” Hermes snapped, blowing sweat off of his upper lip. “Was she supposed to come wearing a high-collared robe?”

Athena placed a hand on his arm. Demeter’s words didn’t bother her. They didn’t feel insulting so much as grandmotherly, and she regretted not covering her tattoos and taking out her nose ring. It was lucky that the purple streaks in her mahogany hair had mostly grown out.

“If you seek to stop this, then leave me out of it,” Demeter said. “I want to lie here until I tear. I want to rip into leathery ribbons and be carried away by birds.” She laughed another low, papery laugh. “If you want answers, go to the Oracle. She will guide you.”

“The oracle? The oracle at Delphi?” Hermes scoffed. He looked at Athena. “There’s nothing there but a half-ruined temple and mushroom-induced hallucinations. There never has been.”

“She didn’t say anything about Delphi,” Athena muttered. Of course she’d never considered going to the oracle. There was nothing mystical about that temple in Greece. The only thing that had once made it wise was the fact that Apollo had deigned to imbue it with knowledge. But he hadn’t hung around there for centuries. He hadn’t hung around anywhere that she knew of. They had all scattered across the globe, becoming hermits and nomads, and maybe it was that as much as anything that had spelled their doom. They had lost one another. She hadn’t seen any of them, save Hermes, for over a hundred years, unless you counted the dreams and flashes. And now she was looking for them all, scrambling around to save them, when she hadn’t really cared for most of a millennium.

“Please,” she said. “Just tell me what you know.”

“You can’t stop it, Athena,” Demeter said. “I see the feathers blooming under your skin. You’ll be weak. You’ll be too late.”

“But there is a way to stop it.”

“I don’t know. Not without great cost. There are tools that might help.”

“What kind of tools?” Hermes interjected, impatient as usual.

“Those that you have known before,” Demeter said. “Some of them walking are nearly as old as you are. They are threads that were cut, and then rewoven.”

Hermes turned to Athena. “What is she blathering on about?”

“Reincarnation,” Athena said thoughtfully.

“Oh,” Hermes snorted. “So we’re Buddhists now, are we?”

“What would they be good for?” Athena asked, ignoring him.

“What they were always good for,” Demeter answered. “They still are, fundamentally, what they were.”

Hermes stepped closer to the eye. He seemed to hesitate to speak to it, but in the absence of a mouth, there were few other options. “I still don’t understand,” he said awkwardly. “How will humans, even reincarnated ones, help us to stop … whatever this is?”

“You still don’t know what this is,” Demeter said.

“This is the twilight of the gods.”

The skin shook as the goddess laughed. Pebbles bounced on her surface at the vibrations. Athena and Hermes shifted their weight uncomfortably. It was like standing on a drum.

“The twilight of the gods,” Demeter said when the rumbling had stopped. “But not all of the gods. Some of us are the bitches of fate and will persevere.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re not fighting our deaths. You’re fighting a war. A war against your own. And you will lose.”

“A war against our own?” Hermes asked. “Why would we fight each other? We’re dying.”