Athena had studied gods for a thousand years, and none of them frightened her. Aether did. She stood at the top of the golden library steps and watched him cross the courtyard below, and the air changed around him. Static lifted the hair on her arms. A storm answered his footsteps though the sky was clear. This was the being she meant to unravel. She was the goddess of wisdom, born armored from Zeus's skull, and she had never met a power she could not name. She meant to name this one. To do that, she had to get close enough to touch it. That was the danger. Get too near, and he might feel her studying him. Gods who watched Aether too long tended to make him wary. So she chose the oldest trick of a wise host. She invited him inside for a drink. They sat beneath the great dome of the Minerva Library, walls of gold curving above them. Athena poured ambrosia into two cups. Aether took his without hesitation. "You want something," he said. He drank anyway. "I want to understand you," she said. "Most gods lie about that. I won't." He almost smiled. "Ask." She leaned closer than she should have. This was the moment. Up close his power pressed against her skin like heat off a forge. She traced it, listening for its source, and found no root she recognized. It did not come from Zeus's bolt. It came from him, whole and self-made, and that answered nothing. "Give me a drop of your blood," Athena said. "Then I'll tell you what I find." Aether studied her. Arrogance made him generous. He believed nothing she learned could threaten him. He drew a small knife and cut his own palm without flinching. "I don't bleed like the others," he said, as if it bored him. Athena caught the blood in an ornate vial. She held it to the light of the dome, and her breath stopped. The blood was gold. It shimmered and coiled in the glass, bright as poured sunlight. Not the red of a demigod. Not the blood of a mortal woman's son. This was ichor, the pure blood of a full god. But Aether had just drunk ambrosia. A demigod raised on ambrosia bleeds red still. Only a true god, born divine, bleeds gold. There was no explanation for this. A son of Zeus and a mortal could not carry it. Something in Aether's birth was a lie. "Well?" Aether pressed his cut palm shut. It was already healing. "You're rarer than they told you," she said, and gave him no more. He left satisfied. Athena did not move. She sealed the vial and held it against the gold light of the dome. Her golden owl swept down from the rafters, a scroll clutched in its talons, and landed beside her. Whatever made Aether was older and worse than a bastard prince. Now she had to learn who had hidden it.