Starcrossed

time the separate Houses joined forces to make one giant army. It wiped out most of the Western world, nearly ending civilization as we know it, and it was just as destructive to the gods of Olympus as it was to the humans.
    Apollo fought riding in Hector’s chariot, Athena fought with Achilles, and Poseidon fought on both sides of the war, changing his mind as often as the tide. Even Aphrodite, the goddess of love, flew down to the battlefield on one occasion to protect Paris, and as she scooped him up to fly him away from certain death, her hand was cut by a Greek blade.
    “When her father, Zeus, saw Aphrodite’s injury, he forbade her to return to Troy. She disobeyed him, of course, and that enraged Zeus, but not enough to get involved. It wasn’t until his daughter Athena and his son Ares nearly sent each other to Tartarus, a hellish place of no return for immortals, that Zeus knew he had to act. The human war was tearing his family apart, and it was threatening his rule over the heavens.
    “Zeus’s involvement was nearly too late. Ten years had passed since the war began, and all the Olympians were so invested that the only way Zeus could get the gods to stop fighting among themselves was to get the Scions to stop fighting. After ten years of the gods meddling in their affairs, ten years of the gods dragging the war out and making it worse, the only thing that both the Greeks and the Trojans wanted was to be left alone. Zeus had to bargain with the mortals, offering them something they wanted. The humans and the Scions wanted the gods to go back to Olympus and stay there, and in exchange they agreed to end the war.
    “Zeus agreed as well. If the Scions ended the war, he didn’t care how, he swore on the River Styx that the gods would retreat to Olympus and leave the world alone. But before he sealed his vow he wanted some assurance that such a terrible war would never threaten Olympus again. As he saw it, the Greeks’ unification of the Scion Houses in order to fight the Trojans nearly tore Olympus apart. Zeus wanted to make sure that such total involvement never happened again. As he set his seal on the Truce and made his unbreakable vow that the Olympians would leave the earth, he also swore to return and wipe out the Scions if the Houses ever united again.”
    “It sounds like what happened at the end of World War Two when the Allies divided Germany,” Helen remarked. “They broke the country up, hoping to avoid World War Three.”
    “It’s very much like that,” Ariadne agreed. “The Fates are obsessed with cycles, and they repeat the same patterns over and over all around the world—especially when it comes to the Big Three—war, love, and family.” Ariadne trailed off for a moment, thinking some dark thought, before she finished the story. “Anyway, Troy was betrayed by one of their own and burned to the ground, and after a few months of confusion and tricks and payback—most of which is described in the Odyssey —the Olympians finally left the earth. Zeus swore that if the Houses ever united again, he would come back and the Trojan War would pretty much start all over again.”
    “And it left off somewhere just short of the total destruction of civilization,” Helen said, trying to imagine what “the end of civilization” would mean now. “If the Trojan War was so destructive with only swords and arrows, what would happen if it was fought with today’s weapons?”
    “Yeah. That crossed our minds,” Ariadne broke eye contact and looked at her lap. “That’s why my family—my father, uncle Castor, and aunt Pandora—separated themselves from the rest of the House of Thebes. Even if Tantalus is right, even if unification is the key to immortality, we didn’t think it was worth the total destruction of the earth.”
    “That’s a lot to give up. I mean, it’s the right thing to do, obviously, but immortality . . .” Helen shook her head at the thought. “And Tantalus and the Hundred Cousins just let you go?” she asked incredulously.
    “What choice did they have? They can’t kill us because we’re all family, but lately they were starting to threaten us, trying to bully us back to the fold, and some of us—okay, Hector—were starting to fight back. He was looking for fights, taking the bait when they called him a coward for not wanting to fight the gods. In our tradition, to kill your own kin is the worst sin imaginable, and he came so close, Helen. My family