It happened after a training session that ran late into the evening — sword work, Luke running drills against a training dummy with the focused intensity he brought to everything physical, and Kael nearby finishing his own shadow-precision exercises. The other campers had gone to dinner. They were alone at the arena.
Luke stopped mid-drill. He was breathing hard, sweat on his forearm catching the last of the evening light. He looked at the practice dummy for a long moment without speaking. The expression on his face was not anger — or not only anger. It was something older and more sustained, the expression of a person who has been carrying something heavy for so long that the carrying has changed the shape of them.
'He has never sent me a single dream,' Luke said.
He did not need to clarify who he meant. Kael had been waiting, with the patience of someone who knew this conversation would come and had decided the only right approach to it was to let it come when Luke chose to have it.
'I know,' Kael said.
'He sends other people dreams. He appears to other demigods. He has never once—' Luke stopped. He picked up his sword again, turned it in his hand, put it down. 'Three years I've been here. I did his quest. I nearly died on his quest. And he has never once acknowledged me directly.'
'He should have,' Kael said. He said it directly because Luke deserved directness. Not consolation — Luke was not asking for consolation and would recognize it for what it was. He was asking for someone to sit with the facts.
'The gods are not good parents,' Kael continued. 'That's not a controversial statement. It's a historical pattern. Zeus, Poseidon, Ares — the demigod tradition is full of parents who created children and then treated them as assets or obstacles rather than people they had obligations to. That is wrong. Your anger is not wrong. Hermes failing you is a genuine failure.'
Luke was watching him with an expression that was almost suspicious — the expression of someone who has heard too many partial concessions and is waiting for the 'but' that invalidates the concession.
'There's no but coming,' Kael said. 'The anger is justified. The cause is real. Those things are true and I mean them.'
A long pause. The arena was very quiet, the evening light almost gone now, the camp sounds distant.
'Then what's the difference,' Luke said, 'between justified anger and just—' He stopped.
'And doing something about it?' Kael said quietly.
'Yes.'
'The difference is what you do with it.' He was careful here, not because he was managing Luke but because the thought was careful. 'Anger at something real is information about what needs to change. The question is how you use it. You can use it to change the thing, from the inside, over time, by being the proof that things should be different. Or you can use it to burn things down.' He looked at Luke. 'Both are possible. Both have precedents. The first one is slower and harder and the gods will resist it. The second one feels more powerful right up until it isn't.'
Luke was quiet for a long time. 'You sound like you know which one I'm going to choose.'
'I don't,' Kael said, and meant it. He did not know — not with certainty. He had foreknowledge of a trajectory, not a certainty. People were not characters. 'I know which one I hope you choose.'
Luke picked up his sword again. His grip was steady. 'And if I told you someone had already offered a better option?'
Kael felt the shift in the air, the quality of what Luke had just almost said. He did not react visibly. He met Luke's eyes. 'I'd say that anything that asks you to use people's suffering as a weapon is not a better option. It's a different kind of being used.'
Luke looked at him for a moment — a long, assessing moment. Then he sheathed his sword. 'You're unusual, Alexander,' he said.
'I've been told,' Kael said.
'I'll think about what you said.'
'That's all I'm asking.'
Luke left. Kael stayed in the empty arena a while longer, sitting on the stone bench with the dark coming on around him, and thought: not lost yet. Still reachable. I have to keep showing up. I have to keep being someone worth talking to. That is all I can do and it has to be enough.