Hestia Prytaneia's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Hestia knelt before the great hearth of Olympus and watched its fire shrink. The eternal flame had burned for a thousand years without wavering. Every mortal hearth drew life from it. When a mother lit her stove, when a family gathered for supper, this fire fed the warmth. Now the flame guttered low in its bronze cauldron. Hestia did not know why. She only knew the cold in her chest, the same cold she felt in a house where people had stopped loving each other. She fed the fire the way she always had. She tipped oil from her bronze kettle into the cauldron. The flame should have leaped up gold and hungry. Instead it swallowed the oil and stayed dim. She tried again. Nothing changed. Her hands began to shake. "Burn," she whispered. "Please. For all of them." Her ember pig pressed against her side. The beast wore living fire along its back, and its trotters gleamed gold. It had never left her hearth. Now its flames burned low too, thin and blue, matching the dying blaze above. The pig whined. Hestia stroked its head and felt the heat fading under her palm. Whatever drained the great flame drained her creatures with it. She rose and searched the gazebo that housed the fire. She checked the painted columns and the marble floor. She checked the smaller braziers that ringed the sacred place. Their fires had dropped to embers. Then she saw a track in the polished stone. Something had scraped across the floor and passed behind her gazebo. She followed it. Behind the gazebo, half buried in the ground, sat a cracked stone vessel. Its wound faced the earth. Golden light poured from the great flame, ran down through the soil, and drained into the vessel like water into a broken jar. This was no accident. Someone had carved the crack by hand and hidden the vessel where no god would look. Someone wanted the eternal flame to die. Hestia poured the last of her kettle's oil over the crack. The oil filled the gap and slowed the leak. The flame above steadied, just barely. She knew the seal would not hold. One day, perhaps two. Then the crack would open again. Thunder cracked overhead in a clear sky. She looked up. A man descended through the air, wrapped in white and threaded with gold light. Lightning still danced along his gloved hands. He had not been born on Olympus, and the gods watched him with unease. His arrival had marked the flame's first dimming. He landed at the edge of the sacred place and studied the failing fire without a word of greeting. "You feel it too," he said. "The flame is going out." Hestia stood over the cracked vessel, her empty kettle in her hand. "Someone is killing it," she said. "And I have two days to find who."