The right moment arrived in December, which was earlier than he had expected.
Marcus had been working on a problem for three weeks — a specific computational challenge in a graduate-level course he had been allowed to audit, involving the optimization of a sequence of operations that was, by conventional approaches, not solvable within reasonable computational time. He had been at his desk every evening, working with the focused frustration of someone who knew the solution existed and could not find the path to it.
On a Wednesday evening in early December, while Kael was studying organic chemistry at the kitchen table and Marcus was at his desk, he watched Marcus stop typing. Put his hands flat on the desk. And then begin writing — not typing, writing, in a hand that moved with a fluency that was different from his ordinary handwriting. The words were not English. They were not a programming language. They were, Kael recognized after a moment, a script he had not seen used in a living context for several thousand years.
Hieratic — the cursive form of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The writing of Thoth's tradition.
Marcus wrote for three minutes without looking up. Then he stopped, looked at what he had written, and said: 'What the hell.'
Kael put down his chemistry textbook.
'Do you know what you just wrote?' he said.
Marcus stared at him. 'No. Do you?'
'It's a mathematical proof,' Kael said. 'In hieratic. It's solving the optimization problem you've been working on, in a notation system that predates modern computing by about four thousand years.' He paused. 'How long have you been doing things like this?'
A long pause. 'My whole life,' Marcus said slowly. 'But never that specific. Usually it's just — I know things. I pick up information faster than I should. I find patterns that other people don't see.' He looked at the page. 'I've never written in a language I don't know.'
'No,' Kael said. 'I think this is the first time the source has been clear enough to make it explicit.' He took a breath. He thought: this is the right moment. 'I need to tell you something that is going to require you to significantly reorganize your understanding of the world. It will make sense of a lot of things that have probably been unclear for most of your life. Is this — do you want to hear this now?'
Marcus looked at the hieratic proof, then at him. 'You're not going to tell me I'm secretly adopted,' he said.
'No,' Kael said. 'Something different. Richer, I think, though I acknowledge I might be biased.' He thought about the best way in. 'The mythology you've been studying — the Egyptian tradition specifically. You know about Thoth?'
'God of writing, knowledge, wisdom, the moon. Inventor of hieroglyphics. Kept the divine records.' Marcus's tone had the quality of someone reciting something they know very well. Then he stopped. 'Oh,' he said.
'Yes,' Kael said.
Marcus was very still for a moment. Then: 'You're serious.'
'Completely.'
Another pause. 'The mythology is real.'
'The mythology is real,' Kael confirmed. 'The Greek tradition, the Egyptian tradition, the Yoruba tradition — they're all real. They're all describing the same underlying divine reality from different cultural angles. The gods are real. Divine bloodlines are real. What you just wrote in hieratic is your bloodline expressing itself more directly than it usually has. Probably because you've been genuinely challenging yourself at the level of your gift for the first time.'
Marcus looked at the page. He looked at Kael. He was doing what Kael had watched other people do when they received this information: the rapid internal reorganization of everything they knew about themselves, the retrospective reading of a lifetime of anomalous experiences through a new framework.
'How do you know?' Marcus said. 'How do you — what are you?'
'Son of Hecate,' Kael said. 'Goddess of magic and crossroads. And a legacy of Apollo. I've been aware of my bloodline since birth and have been part of a community of people with divine blood for five years.' He paused. 'I recognized your bloodline in the first week. I was waiting for the right moment.'
'And this is the right moment.'
'Yes,' Kael said. 'Because you just wrote a four-thousand-year-old mathematical proof in a language you don't consciously know. It doesn't get much clearer than that.'
Marcus looked at the proof again. Slowly, the expression on his face shifted from shock toward something else — the expression he had when he encountered a very elegant solution to a difficult problem. 'So my optimization problem,' he said. 'Is solved.'
'It is,' Kael said.
'In hieratic.'
'Yes.'
Marcus picked up the page and turned it over in his hands. Then, with the specific practical intelligence of a computer scientist encountering an unfamiliar system: 'I'm going to need to understand how to read this. And presumably there's more to learn about — all of this.' He looked at Kael. 'You're going to teach me, I assume. That's why you waited for the right moment rather than just telling me immediately.'
'That's part of it,' Kael said. 'There's also a camp on Long Island that's going to want to know about you. Chiron — the director — has been cataloging divine bloodlines for three thousand years. He'll find you interesting.'
'I've been found interesting by professors before,' Marcus said. 'This seems different.'
'It is,' Kael agreed. 'But the principle is the same. Pay attention to what you have. Use it well. Don't let it be a burden when it can be a gift.' He looked at his roommate. 'You're going to be fine, Marcus. You've always been fine. Now you know why.'