Chapter Text
The gods knew that they wouldn’t be making out of this second war without losses. That some of them would be forced to reform, being essentially dead until their domains could pull enough of their pieces together to form a consciousness again. The first to die was Athena, literally ripped apart from her Greek and Roman forms fighting each other. The second was Herems who spread himself so thin trying to spread much needed information on top of all his other work that he couldn’t put himself together. The next was Poseidon who suffered the worst damage from the last war and couldn't handle the grief of son falling into the pit.
With Python taking control of Delphi there was nothing to stop the weight of Prophecy from crushing Apollo. It was a struggle for him to stay around long enough to meet the demigods coming to Delos in hopes of finding the Death cure, but he did it. As soon as the demigods left with his message in hand Apollo stopped fighting and let death take him. He could rest assured that all his kids had something to remember him by and that they knew how much they were loved.
Artemis sent one last message to all hunters active and retired thanking them for the service, for being her second family, and saying goodbye. Without Apollo there to balance her out, Artemis fractured. The moon's coldness started to freeze her insides without the warmth of Apollo’s sun. The wildness of the hunt started to consume her without Apollo’s ties to civilization to keep it at bay. Instead of fighting a losing battle and suffering, Artemis followed the pull of her and Apollo’s intertwined strings, dying mere seconds after her brother.
The demigods watched as Delos sank below the waves, a grim understanding settling in their bones about what just happened. The twin Olympians were dead, faded just like Pan had a few years earlier. Unlike Athena, Hermes, and Poseidon the twins wouldn't reform after a certain amount of time. They were gone from this world, their strings no longer a part of the tapestry.
But their strings were not gone all together. Before they could be cut, sending the twins into the nothingness that awaited all immortals after they faded the strings were stolen. What the twins mistook for death was the hands of a different version of the fates stealing them away. Saving them from death by taking them away from the world they called home.
This new world suffered from a terrible curse. When the elder six overthrow their father, Kronos cursed them to suffer with every child born. At first they think much about the curse, they just got out of war. They had to explore the world and set up their own rule before they worried about having kids.
But once the world was explored, domains were claimed, and the council was stable they understood the misery their father cursed them with. Bringing a child into the world was a painful effort, the pain wouldn't stop until the child gained a domain and had enough power to sustain themselves or they died. So many children died, some just after their first breath, others not getting the luxury.
The gods had many kids through the years, the loss ate away at them but hope that this child might survive kept them having kids. Zeus made Athena from his thoughts and couldn’t think through the pain her birth caused until she found a domain of her own three months later. It took Zeus a few dozen years to recover, and even more before someone was brave enough to try for a child. Demeter was the next to make a child but wasn't as lucky. The flowers she made her child out rotted and Presepheny died just after talking her first breath.
In the end about one out of every thousand godlylings survived. Zeus and Hera were gifted five children through their combined efforts: Athena, Ares, Hephaestus, and Dionysus. Poseidon and his wife had two children, Triton and Kymopoleia. Hestia didn't want to go through the pain of creating a child or losing one; she swore an oath of maidenhood. Out of the elder six it was just Demeter and Hades who wanted children but were denied again and again.
They decided to try one last time before giving up entirely. The endless loss finally out weighs any hope for the future. For the best chance at success Demeter and Hades created their last would-be child together, hoping that having two sources of divinity would somehow help. They created their child with a mixture of plant, stone, light of the overworld, and the darkness of the underworld. Once they made sure their would-be child was perfect they braced themselves for the pain and poured their power into their creation and hoped for the best.
They watched their power seeped into their creation and it changed shape, growing from the size of a doll the size of a human child. When their creation split in half they thought their child died before they could even take their first breath. But they could still feel the pull on their power as their child tried to gain enough strength to survive. On a closer look they found that their child is not one child but two. It was twins. The first case of twin godlyings. It was more than either god could have hoped for. They just hoped that things went or else they would lose something they never dared to dream about.
The twins refused every domain Demter and Hades tried to feed them. Soon the power they offered wasn’t enough, the twins seemed to notice and tried to give the other as much energy as they could. They put more effort into making sure that their sibling survived than their own survival and by doing so, both twins gained the Protectors of Youth domain. They weren’t even officially born yet and they tried to protect the new life beside them, truly embodying the domain. With one domain gained the twins stabilized and it was easier for them to gain more. After the twins gained their fourth domains they were officially out of the danger zone and finished forming, giving Demeter and Hade their first good look at their kids.
Both twins were tiny, about the size of human five year olds, making the older gods shrink down to a more human size. The one on the right was a boy with golden hair, tan skin, wings that were just giant black fluff balls, and big mint green eyes. The twins on the left was a girl with black hair, pale skin, small antlers on her head, and big forest green eyes. She spoke first introducing herself as Artemis goddess of the hunt, the wildness, shadows, the protector of youth, and stated that she would gain more domains as she grew. The boy followed his sister's lead and introduced himself as Apollo, god of music, civilization, light, protector of youth, and claimed to have even more domains than Artemis someday.
It was clear to Demeter and Hades that their children would be slow to age and they couldn’t be happier. Not only did they finally have a child of their own but they had gotten two children who would stay kids longer than most godlying did.
When the fates stole the twins' live strings, they re-wound them, making the strings stronger but also changing them. In this world they weren’t the children of Zeus and Leto, oldest of the second generation of the gods, doomed to die from the strain of holding Prophecy, they were children of Hades and Demerter, youngest of the second generation of gods. The twins don't remember their past lives, they might have a flash of something here or a feeling of wrongness there, but for the most part it is like their first life never happened. Seeing the twins successfully be integrated into their world, the fates set their sights on the demigods of the other world.