Rage against the heavens: ten more minutes

The weight of children is a peculiar thing. It has nothing to do with the solid, comforting heft of a sleeping toddler in your arms, nor the wiry struggle of a child fighting against an early bedtime. No, this weight is metaphysical, a pressure on the soul. They are anchors and kites all at once, tethering you to the raw, bleeding earth while their spirits strain for the heavens. They can be your most profound pride, the living embodiment of every hope you never dared to voice. Or, they can crystallize into your most exquisite regret, a permanent, silent accusation of every misstep and failure. In the grand, often brutal, calculus of existence, they are everything. And yet, in their fleeting, unformed state, they can feel like nothing more than a promise whispered on the wind, too fragile to last the season.

There is an innocence ascribed to them, a cultural myth we cling to. We call it purity, a blank slate. I suspect it’s less a moral quality and more a simple consequence of newness. They are fresh from the source, their edges still soft, their perceptions unclouded by the endless compromises and cynicism that life grinds into us. If there is anything in this world worth defending with absolute, unyielding fury, it is not a plot of land or a political ideal. It is that fragile, fleeting state of possibility. It is the right to simply be, before the world tells you what you must become.

My current field of study on this philosophical matter was providing… complicating data.

“You look a fucking weasel!”

The declaration, shrill and utterly devoid of malice, cut through the tranquil air of the Torrington garden. I would have chastised the language, but the sentiment was currently overshadowed by a more pressing observation: the speaker was my daughter, and the subject of her critique was, in fact, bearing an uncanny resemblance to a mustelid with the way he was gaping.

Alabaster Torrington, son of Hecate, sputtered, his face—all sharp angles, pointed nose, and narrowed eyes beneath a shock of dark hair—twitching in a manner that did little to disprove the weasel hypothesis. “You said a bad word! You can’t! Also, I’m not a weasel.”

“Whaaa—” he tried again, his voice cracking with a frustration that seemed too vast for his small frame.

Thalia, my little storm cloud, planted her hands on her hips, a portrait of righteous indignation. Her voice dropped an octave, a poor imitation of a line she’d undoubtedly overheard from one of the far-too-many action films I’d left playing in the background. “English, Weasel Torrington, English! Do you speak it, motherfucker!”

Maybe letting her watch pulp fiction was a mistake. What was I even saying? It was definitely a mistake but like for my defence, my daughter was adorable and worse, she knew it.

A sigh, long-suffering and weary, floated from beside the rose bushes. Elpida, my eldest, emerged like a phantom of reason. “Thalia, don’t call him like that!” Her intervention was a formality, a gesture toward civility that she already knew was doomed. She possessed a stillness, a gravity that made her seem decades older than her sister, even though the gap was a mere handful of years. She was the moon to Thalia’s sudden, violent squall.

I pressed the pads of my fingers against my temple, a dull throb beginning to pulse behind my eyes. It was a fascinating sensation, this phantom pain. A body like mine, which had been reforged in thing that could incinerate continents, shouldn’t be capable of something as mundane as a headache. Yet, here I was. The human condition, it seemed, was less a state of being and more a particularly persistent virus.

“Rowdy, aren’t they?” The voice was a low rumble, like stones grinding together deep underground.

I turned from the spectacle of my progeny’s diplomatic efforts to face the Torrington’s patriarch. A month ago, this man had been or at least had looked under his glamour like a ghost clinging to a corpse, his body ravaged by a sickness that was anything but natural.

Now, he looked like he’d wrestled Father Time into a headlock and stolen the old man’s lunch money. His skin, once sallow now glowed with rude health. His frame, once gaunt, was filled out with solid muscle. He had the vigor of a man who had not just found the Fountain of Youth, but had bottled it and was now considering a lucrative export business.

“I honestly expected a lot of things,” I admitted, my gaze drifting back to the children. “Awe. Fear. Perhaps a tense, strategic alliance negotiated through the careful exchange of candy. I did not anticipate a linguistic debate punctuated by profanity and mustelid-based insults.”

Alabaster’s father chuckled, a dry, rasping sound. “They are children. Children of the gods, yes. Beings with power in their blood and destinies sketched out in the constellations. But beneath all that… they are still children. If anything, this is a good thing.”

“A good thing?” I gestured vaguely toward where Thalia was now making faces while Alabaster’s hands began to shimmer with an emerald light. The air around him thickened with the ozone scent of magic, the Mist itself coiling at his command like a loyal hound. “Torrington, they look two seconds away from swearing a blood feud that will haunt their descendants unto the fifteenth generation.”

As if on cue, Thalia, with an expression of serene concentration, made a pinching motion with her fingers and flicked it toward Alabaster before shooting “Sand attack!”

A small, perfectly formed puff of sand materialized from the pristine, sand-less lawn and shot directly into his eyes.

He screeched, a sound of pure, undiluted outrage. The nascent magic around his hands sputtered and died. “Did you just throw sand in my eyes?! How?! Why?! There isn’t even any sand here!”

Thalia’s response was to repeat the gesture. Another pinch, another flick. Another puff of sand, this one with a few specks of glitter mixed in for good measure.

Thalia used sand attack again, it was very effective.

She was, to my immense and complicated pride, weaponizing reality itself for the sole purpose of being a petty nuisance. She wasn’t summoning sand; she was convincing the universe that, in this specific location, the concept of ‘sand-in-eye’ was a fundamental and necessary truth.

A genuine wave of shame washed over me. This was bullying. Plain and simple.

“I am genuinely sorry, Lawrence,” I said, the words feeling inadequate. “This is… new. Thalia has never exhibited this particular brand of… assertive social engagement.” It was the truth. I had seen her quiet, I had seen her fearful, I had seen her unleash power that could unmake the foundations of a building. But this casual, creative torment was an unforeseen development.

Sure, I could have understood if the two of them didn't get along. Sometimes, it was like that after all. People no matter how much I wish it could be the case sometimes didn't click at all.

What I wasn’t expecting was for Thalia to bully the son of Hecate because this was what my daughter was doing. On one hand, I was proud because clearly this was fate showing that I was better than Hecate in every way like look, even my daughter is styling over Hecate’s son like a devil may cry protag.

On the other side, I liked Alabaster. He was a bright kid and his tsundere act that he sometimes did only made him look like a human shape version of a grumpy black cat which not gonna lie was cute as fuck. The fact that he wasn’t dumb helped too.

Still, Thalia, my Thalia, a bully. I have failed. I guess there was only one thing left at this point “Thalia, sweetie make him eat sand!”

“Weren’t you the one bemoaning what is happening before our eyes my lord?”

“It’s clear that I had failed Torrington, failed in stopping my daughter from being a bully so there is only one thing left I can do, support my daughter wrongs!”

“Shouldn’t it be the contrary? I thought parents were supposed to make sure their children are the best versions of themselves?”

“Think Torrington, think! It is clear as say that my daughter is a bully and thus pushing her to be the best version of herself mean pushing her to become the greatest bully in existence? One with so much power that Fate and other primordial forces can’t but cower!”

“I don’t that this is the conclusion that should have been reached.”

“We live in a world of monsters and gods. Shoulds are suggestions. Nothing more, nothing less! Still, don’t worry.”

I put steel and honesty in my voice “Still, if it goes beyond what is acceptable, I’ll act. Don’t worry about it. I made a promise to your son, a bet with him and I can’t.”

“Don’t need to give me insurance. Something told me you would if anything goes wrong but even then, I don’t think anything wrong will happen. I don’t want to interrupt them to be honest.”

“You’re telling me you're okay with my kid being a bully to yours. You know that the point is that we are supposed to be good parents, better parents than they are, you know?”

“I know.” He was quiet for a moment, watching as Alabaster, now blinking furiously, began tracing a complex symbol in the air, his little face a mask of furious concentration. “It’s just… it’s sad to say, but I haven’t seen my boy act like this in years. He’s five years old. Right now, for the first time since he could talk, he’s acting like it. He’s not measuring his words, he’s not hiding what he is, he’s not trying to make himself smaller, less other, just to have a conversation. The weight… it’s lifted. Just for these few minutes. And that is a sight I would pay any price to see.”

His words struck a chord, resonating with the memory of my last conversation with Alabaster. The boy’s confession, delivered with a gravity that belonged to a war-weary veteran, that he felt separate from humanity, a different species altogether. How could he not? When your first memories are of shadows with claws, when your lullabies are the whispers of things that want to eat you, when the adults who are supposed to protect you look at you as if you’re speaking in tongues when you describe the monster under your bed—a monster that is real—how do you learn to be open? How do you learn to trust? You build walls not out of malice, but out of the simple, desperate need to survive. You forfeit your childhood at the altar of continued existence.

“I understand,” I said, and the words were heavy with genuine comprehension. Perhaps Thalia’s behavior wasn’t a deviation. Perhaps it was the opposite. Maybe this was what happened when a child who had carried a universe of fear on her small shoulders finally found someone who wouldn’t break under the weight of her truth. Someone who could take a face-full of magically-conjured sand and shout back. This wasn’t cruelty; it was recognition. A brutal, sand-filled form of play that said, I see you. You are strong. And I am strong, too. Let’s see what that means or maybe I was seeing too much in something when there was in reality nothing.

I was probably thinking a lot of nothing. Thalia wasn’t a social butterfly.

The thought was so startling I almost laughed. My daughter, the tiny, terrifying social pioneer.

“They’re waiting inside your house?” I asked the older Torrington, not taking my eyes off the children. Thalia was now attempting to balance a pebble on her nose, having apparently grown bored of sand-based warfare. Alabaster watched her, suspicion and a flicker of fascination warring on his face.

“Yes, they are,” he confirmed. “Should we join them? We’ve kept them waiting.”

I had created a device, a map of Los Angeles etched not on paper but on a sheet of polished obsidian. It didn’t show streets or landmarks. Instead, it pulsed with life. A seething, crawling mass of green pinpricks represented the city’s monstrous population, a festering infection hidden beneath the veil of the Mist. And among them, few and far between, shone points of gold. Demigods. The map had failed its primary purpose—finding Thalia—but it had revealed a secondary, equally pressing truth: the city was a hunting ground, and the hunters vastly outnumbered the prey. Convincing the parents of those golden lights to meet us had required a potent incentive: a promise of their own, smaller versions of the map. Knowledge, in a world like this, was the only currency that mattered.

“That meeting is crucial,” I agreed. “But so is this.” I gestured to the garden, where a tentative, grumpy truce seemed to be forming, involving the shared examination of a particularly interesting beetle. “Ten more minutes. Let us have ten more minutes where the biggest problem in the world is our children being called a name they don’t like and sand where it doesn’t belong.”

Alabaster’s father smiled, a real, unguarded expression that smoothed the cares from his face. “Yes,” he said, his voice soft. “Ten more minutes would not hurt at all.”