While Adresteia flew into Troy in her owl form, Athena finished picking the shrapnel from her legs, willed them to heal, and then travelled to the building that had once been Apollo’s temple on the slopes of Mt. Ida, overlooking Troy itself. Built outside the walls of Troy, surrounded by only a small village to protect the accumulated offerings of Apollo’s worshippers, it had been the logical sacrifice to bring Apollo into the war on the Trojans’ side.
Greek soldiers were not truly paid for the risks they took. They were furnished with the cheapest food, wine, and weapons – enough to keep them combat ready – if they wanted to take money home to their families to make up for the years of lost income, they needed to seize whatever spoils of war they could and resell them, either to the merchants who maintained the army’s supply line to Greece, or – often – back to the people they had robbed. Harvested crops, livestock, private reserves, jewelry, furnishings, and even people were all chattel for the Greek soldiers, who were desperate to mitigate the costs of being drawn into years of war hundreds of miles from home. And they had to hope that their regents didn’t decide to take their spoils for themselves.
When the Greeks had heard about the Trojan temple, fat with offerings they could easily resell, they had given little if any thought to whom the temple was dedicated. They had immediately began talking about the spoils that it might hold inside. When Dionysus used Aphrodite’s curse to pervert Agamemnon’s mind, his men gladly followed him to the temple and raided it. With Dionysus spurring them on, they had not only raided the beautiful temple, they had desecrated it. They had eaten the food, carried off the wealth, and taken anyone they found as slaves. One of their captives had turned out to be the daughter of Apollo’s high priest, and thanks to Aphrodite’s magic, Agamemnon had done terrible things to her. His men followed suit with every priest, priestess, and worshipper they could catch. Of course, Apollo got his revenge, and his excuse to join the war, which had been Athena’s aim when she set Dionysus about the task.
But then, Dionysus, emboldened by the hedonistic savagery of the Greeks, had taken the temple for his own. Everything the Greeks had done, he carried out ten-times over, turning it into the most depraved dungeon of carnal misery that any Achaean or Trojan had ever seen. So bold were Dionysus’s worshippers, that when Athena appeared before the temple, two of the men attempted to take her on the steps. That had been laughably short-lived; it had been a long day, and the war goddess found herself lacking the patience to use her traditional theatrics to intimidate the men into submission. She used her portal bracelet to stuff one man inside the other, more or less killing both of them.
A dozen more like them surrounded Athena as she walked into the temple. Dionysus himself lounged upon the defaced statue of Apollo, using the naked bronze body as a throne. The war had changed him greatly. Once he had been a congenial and even comical figure. He’d indulged to the point of excess, and encouraged his followers to do the same, but he’d usually respected an outer limit – he wanted everyone to have fun, and that wasn’t possible unless everyone was afforded some measure of respect. But then he’d shadowed the Greeks as they’d raped and pillaged the lands around Troy. He’d acquired a taste for sadism and blood, and with Zeus refusing to intercede in the war, he’d been free to explore those impulses, often with borrowed magic.
Where once he had been a portly, rosy-cheeked, wine-soaked clown, he was now a lean, severe looking, dark figure. His light, easily removed garments had been cast aside in favor of studded leather. Though it had been died to the color of dark wine, Athena could still make out a few faded Trojan tattoos on the sleeves that left no question what sort of beast had donated its skin. Dionysus smiled at her; it was a chilling expression, even to Athena, and it revealed another change – sharp fangs.
“Dear sister!” he said, “I am so glad to see you! No one else in the family has accepted an invitation to my revelries. Would you like something to drink?” He gestured for one of his guards to bring forth a struggling young woman and the man slit one of her wrists – already crisscrossed with scars and scabs – and guided the red blood that streamed out into Dionysus’s goblet.
“It’s funny,” Dionysus said as he sipped the woman’s sanguine vitality, “It looks like wine, but that’s really where the similarity ends. For one thing, I’ve had to completely abandon the notion of vintage. Younger is certainly better; freshly pressed infants are the best. It’s the closest thing to pure Ambrosia you will ever taste. It does not intoxicate the mind, but rather the soul.”
Compassion had always been a muted emotion for Athena, but this strained the limit of her pragmatism.
“I have need of your magics,” Athena said.
“Oh, do tell?”
“Not in front of so many prying eyes,” Athena asserted. Dionysus’s worshippers had been drawn from Greeks, Trojans, and other peoples; there was no telling who might still be reporting back to King Priam.
“Well, then I’m not interested,” Dionysus said dismissively, “I’m disinclined to skulk off into some shadowy corner with you unless it involves some debauchery. Although… perhaps if you offered such debauchery, I might reconsider. Tell me, virgin goddess of war, have you ever sucked a man’s cock?”
“I did not come here to negotiate for your assistance,” Athena said, “My summons was not a request, it was an order.”
Dionysus laughed, “And what right have you to order me about? The rulers of the Constellar Palace have not seen fit to stop me yet; why should I give a care for their guard dog?”
“The Constellar Palace is gone. Zeus and Hera are gone. Our family is in diaspora. Cross me, and you will have only me to deal with. No one will be coming to intercede on your behalf.”
Dionysus studied her for a bit, “You’re not lying, are you? Well, what you say may be true, but I think it is you who are at the disadvantage. You are outnumbered, in my temple, and my men have iron weapons.”
“You gravely underestimate me,” Athena said.
“Well, let’s find out,” Dionysus clapped, and his men attacked her.
Athena abandoned her stoic façade and embraced the war goddess aspect of her persona. It had been a terrible day – decades of planning had been ruined, and now her little brother thought that she could be felled by some frail mortals? This would be the closest thing she would find to catharsis today.
Athena banged her shield with her spear to draw attention to it, and then activated the gorgon’s gaze – half the men closing in on her looked straight at it and froze where they were, trapped in a catatonic state. She extended her spear and spun it in one hand – the blade caught the man closing on her from behind on the jaw, and cut upward through his mandible, eye-socket, and cranium. The brain damage was enough to drop him, if not kill him. She laid the spear across the top of her shield and thrust with it, like a scorpion striking with its tail. The spear point caught the man in front of her between the eyes, splitting his head in half. She swung the long weapon in an arc back to her right, intercepting the four remaining men advancing on that side. She caught one along the throat, effectively killing him, and split another’s rib cage. One ducked to avoid the swing, and the other fell down trying to do the same. Athena spun around and drove her shield into the ducking man with an uppercut that started at his crotch and traveled up to his face, splitting him open. The man who’d fallen scrambled to his knees, but Athena thrust her spear through him from behind. It skewered him like a spit-roasted pig, the head of her spear knocking out his teeth before she ripped it back out. The six men paralyzed by her shield were given more merciful deaths, their throats slit before they could recover from the effect.
The remaining guards and slaves in the room fled out the back of the temple, leaving Dionysus alone with his sister. In an explosion of motion, he transformed into a flock of bats – Athena had never seen anything like it. All of her kin could shapeshift to some degree or another, but she’d never seen anyone turn into multiple things at once.
The bats tried to fly away, but she pounded her shield again repeatedly, ringing it like a gong and disorienting the creatures. She flashed the shield’s gorgon effect again, and a third of the bats fell to the ground. Dionysus recoalesced into his god form, but he didn’t get up – his entire right side was, for the moment, paralyzed. Athena drove her spear through his left hand to preempt any further impertinence.
“Now,” she said, “Let’s talk.”
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