What Stirs Beneath

The moment the warmth faded from the shard, I understood why the gods protected Ambrosia the way they did. What moved through me wasn’t simple energy. It felt like something older than I was reaching through my bones and reminding them how they were meant to work. A quiet strength, steady and deliberate, rose through my limbs as if it had been waiting behind my ribs for years.

I steadied myself against a fallen column. The stone carried a faint warmth. Not enough to alarm someone unfamiliar with this place, but I knew these halls. I had swept their floors and trimmed the wicks of their torches. Olympus had never felt alive. Yet the ruins did now.

A low pull gathered in the center of my chest. It wasn’t hunger for food, not in any human sense. It was closer to memory. Sweet, soft, unmistakable. The same scent that drifted through these halls when the gods held their feasts. The same sweetness that clung to the golden bowls when Ambrosia was poured for them alone.

That scent was rising again, faint but certain, and it was coming from deeper in the ruins.

I turned toward the mural-lined wall. The carvings were familiar, but something about them unsettled me. The god at the center, the one who always raised his cup first, seemed to watch me with a sharper gaze than I remembered. It was a trick of the light, I told myself, yet the feeling lingered.

The air in the hall grew clearer. Every detail sharpened. The pattern of cracks across the marble floor. The darkened edges of the columns where torches once burned without smoke. The scatter of overturned bowls from the night Olympus fell. All of it returning to me with uncomfortable clarity.

That was when it struck me. Ambrosia had never been just a drink. It was a memory of strength, a piece of creation. It rebuilt what time had taken. It sharpened what life had dulled.

And now it was inside me.

A breeze moved through the broken roof. The chill of it settled on my skin, but beneath that cold was the sweetness again, stronger now. It drifted from the corridor where the stores had been kept. Only cupbearers walked that path. I had never been allowed beyond the first archway.

If Ambrosia survived anywhere in these ruins, it would be there.

My pulse quickened. Not with excitement. With recognition. This was how the gods had looked before each feast. Calm on the surface, restless beneath their skin. The shard in my hand had gone cold, but the warmth it left behind pulsed faintly through my palm like a quiet reminder.

I drew my cloak tighter and took a step toward the corridor. The hall behind me seemed to settle, as though watching what I would choose.

I didn’t know exactly what waited deeper in the mountain, but I could feel it waking. Whatever strength the gods once drew from Ambrosia hadn’t died with them. It was moving again, searching for someone who could carry it forward.