“What if we are wrong?” my sister breathes, as the biting wind snaps at her words, throwing the tendrils around her jaw like Medusa’s snakes. I turn to her, my blue fire gaze meeting her forest green eyes. We are only half-sisters, a shared blood of our mother Athena the goddess of warfare, both our fathers are unknown, “But what if we are right?” We both swallow, our throats bobbing in unison as we look down into Styx River, we are the only remaining survivors of half-bloods, and if we survive this, we cross over to be welcomed into Olympus. We will finally meet our mother. Half-humans cannot be raised by the gods, and so we found ourselves jumping between foster homes until we came across one another in California in our teens. It was almost as though fate brought us together, she from New Mexico with her obsidian coils and sun-kissed complexion, me with my hair like fresh snow and skin like alabaster from Colorado, and we had been inseparable since. The majority of humans don’t believe in the gods anymore, but it was written in the stars above us that we would accept these challenges, and proceed through the Trials of Olympus before we rightfully excepted our power and immortality. Our power that would allow to continue the war against titans that had been raging for eons, the war that humans did not even know existed. I took her hand, our matching olive tree tattoos on our wrists connecting as a chill rattled up my spine. I chewed my lip, and she shivered in my peripheral vision. We had come across one other half-blood during our trials. A son of Poseidon with long golden hair and cerulean eyes. He would have made it too, had it not been for the titan we came across when we first arrived in Greece. The giant beast had plunged a blade into his chest before we’d even had a chance to help him, its monstrous mouth curling into a grin of sadistic satisfaction as he’d wailed, before taking his final breaths. If it hadn’t been for our speed and quick thinking, we never would have escaped ourselves. And now we stood before our final trial, to make a leap of faith that would kill any human on impact. But we were not human. The blood elixir of the gods ran strong through our veins. At least, that’s what the prophecy said, right? There was no guidance on this journey. No friend to confirm our beliefs to be true. This whole affair could have been fragments of our imagination, and now we were faced with the final blow. Jump, or return to a life of poverty. A life where no one knew our names, or remembered how we drank our coffee. Where we would need to work two, perhaps three jobs each just to pay the rent on a cockroach-infested apartment. The world needed the gods, but they had cast them aside all those centuries ago. With so few half-bloods to fight the war, the titans would soon find their way to the realm on earth that humans walked, and they would be completely defenceless. And yet here we stood, on a planet where nobody cared for orphaned girls, willing to jump to our deaths in order to save it. “I love you,” I choke out, and she squeezes my hand. I don’t say I love you to anyone, it was only ever reserved for her. I step closer to the edge, pulling her with me as all of a sudden the drop feels even higher than we thought, the wind pushing back against us like it’s begging, pleading us not to take the leap. She turns her head slowly, nodding as a single tear spills from her eye. Then we jump.