[i]It is vital that each and every member of the Pantheon receives their due from the Empress-to-be; one careless slight might bring disaster down upon everyone’s heads. So Redana has a checklist. Every morning. Without fail.

Each shrine receives its own careful attention. Zeus, depicted in victory over the leviathans of the deep, gets fresh cubes of frankincense in her brazier. Before Apollo’s shrine she kneels in the lotus and recites the Thyssian Koans. She pours salt water from a horse-head jug over the icon of Poseidon and sings the tuneless Apophic Hymn, dreaming of seeing the crash and swell of nebulas as her tone rises and falls. She clears the rotting, spoiled fruit from Hera’s shrine and relentlessly replaces them with farm-fresh produce. The freshly-minted Binaric obol will be gone before she leaves the room, for Hermes comes and goes as he pleases, slipping freely between the seconds. Blindfolded, she sits in front of the jagged bismuth altar of Dionysus and listens to the holy madness of the Maenadarium record with her hands pressed firmly against her lap, refusing to give into panic.

But lastly there is the shrine to Athena. It is pure and mystically clean, flawless and cold. The bust of the goddess is in an old Atlas style, made of high sloping rectangles melded into her profile, sharp and ominous. And here she kneels and refers to Athena, and Athena only. Here she reads from the Principles of War and the blood chills in her hands as she feels the eyes of Olympus upon her.

And here, she never experiences the second face of the goddess.[/i]

***

There are things that Redana could (and wants to) say. She wants to ask about Ares, and if Iskarot knows a version of Athena Devouring Her Brother that she does not[1].

But this is important. This is [i]important.[/i] Iskarot wants her to remember this. But it’s not philosophy, or history, or strategy, or legal studies; it’s engineering. It’s reverence and a series of steps to placate something vast and dangerous that could destroy her without a thought. Redana has been dealing with [i]those[/i] her whole life.

So she stares, and doesn’t say a word, and makes a checklist in her head, step by step. And while she might not understand the [i]why,[/i] she can understand the [i]do[/i]...

***

[1]: Redana very much wants to know if there is a version of this story that doesn’t make her existentially terrified if she thinks about it too long[2].

[2]: Cannibalism is forbidden even the gods[3], but Athena swallowed her brother’s bones and flesh. She is a walking paradox, an inflection point in the way the world works[4]. Some of Redana’s first nightmares were about Athena swallowing her whole[5].

[3]: [i]”The virtue of Zeus is not that she is able to eat of the Shameful Feast and remain pure; the virtue of Zeus is that she possesses the insight to be in all things within the laws that bind even Olympus. The rebuke of King T——— is for his hubris; that he would dare attempt to trick Zeus Panopticus into consuming the flesh of the murdered dead is proof enough of his folly. Yet, surely also, his consignment to Tartarus reflects the severity of the crime he attempted to pander Zeus into committing, and the weight of judgment that would fall on her in turn...”[/i]
— Aspcleon of Tarrat, [i]The Joviad.[/i]

[4]: [i]”And for such crime was Cronos of the Bloodied Sickle overthrown. O Chiefest Calamity! O King of Utopia! The black seed of his act choked that mythic age, the days before the gods themselves. So was paradise darkened, and all manner of thing brought to ruin; and you think yourself his better? It would be better for a man to throw his aged parents out into the wilderness than to reenact the first and gravest sin...”[/i]
— Anonymous, A Condemnation of that Detestable Perversion, V-X-R-E

[5]: Alexa must never find out.