"Why do you keep avoiding my gaze?" Sapphire's voice cut through the silence like a cold blade, too calm for someone who radiated such pent-up fury.
She sat cross-legged on a reddish rock, almost glowing in the flickering light of the Underworld. Her posture was relaxed, but her gaze… was not. Her eyes were fixed on the kneeling figure before her with an intensity that could have cut through iron.
Aphrodite, for her part, seemed anything but divine at that moment.
The goddess of love knelt on the dusty floor, her shoulders hunched and her hands resting on her thighs as if she were afraid to move. A swollen, purple welt throbbed in the center of her forehead, a lump so large it almost looked like divine punishment—which, technically, it was.
She had been gifted with such a well-aimed blow by Sapphire that even the echo still seemed to vibrate in the air. A goddess's head is hard to cause something like that, okay?
