The crackle of lightning in my fingers was the only thing that made me feel alive on that island. Every time I channeled my father's heritage, the air around me grew heavy, charged with the scent of ozone and the promise of a storm I still didn't know how to fully control.
I felt their eyes. Always.
The Amazons didn't look at me as a warrior equal to them. They looked at me as if I were a feast set upon a table, a chess piece too valuable to be discarded but too dangerous to be ignored. They wanted my blood, my lineage. I felt the lust disguised as sacred duty in every whisper throughout the palace corridors.
"One more time," I growled to myself, clenching my fist and feeling the electricity burn beneath my skin.
That was when she appeared. Diana.
Unlike the others, her gaze didn't devour me; it sought me out. When she suggested we head to the plains, I accepted instantly. I needed to escape that courtyard, the weight of the expectation of being the "last demigod."
We rode as if we were fleeing a war. The wind whipping against my face was the only thing that calmed the fire my father left in my veins. When we stopped, the silence of the plains felt louder than the thunder I had created earlier.
She began to speak about the council, about my mother, and about the fate they had drawn for me. I already knew all of it, but hearing it from her mouth hurt in a different way. I expected her to give me orders, to speak like the princess who would inherit the throne.
But then, she stepped closer.
The heat emanating from Diana wasn't like my destructive lightning; it was something that anchored me to the ground. When she confessed she loved me—not as a king, not as a demigod, but as a man—I felt a years-long weight fall from my shoulders.
I had been afraid that this feeling was mine alone. I spent sleepless nights staring at the ceiling, cursing myself for desiring my foster sister, for wanting to touch the future queen in a way the laws forbade.
"Did you really think you were the only one suffering from this, Diana?" The words slipped out before I could contain them.
I laughed, but it was a laugh of pure relief. I touched her face, feeling her soft skin beneath my fingers, calloused from training. For the first time in my life, the power inside me didn't feel like a curse or a weapon of war.
"I look at the others and feel nothing but duty," I confessed, looking deep into her eyes. "But when I look at you... I see the only reason I want to stay on this island. The feeling is mutual. It has always been."
I no longer cared about the throne, the Queen's plans, or the Amazon lineage. In that moment, under the sky of the plains, I wasn't the son of Zeus. I was just Eron, and I had finally found my queen.