Lore

“Lore could have sold the house in a heartbeat and gone anywhere. Miles would have been fine, even if finding a new place in the city was a headache. But each time she thought seriously about it, the streets seemed to wrap around her. The familiar storefronts, the kids playing out on the stoop two doors down, Mrs. Marks hosing down the sidewalk every Monday morning at ten o’clock...it calmed her. It stopped the feeling that her chest might cave in on itself from the weight of the shock and grief. So Lore had stayed. For all its exhausting complications and crowding, the city had always been her home. She understood its difficult personality and was grateful it had given her one of her own, because in the darkest moments of her life, that resilience alone had saved her. In a way, she felt that her new neighborhood had chosen her and not the other way around, and she’d wanted to be claimed by something. And, really, that was New York for you. It always got a say, and, if you were patient enough, it led you where you needed to go.” (Part 1, 

These paragraphs of Lore’s thoughts set New York up both as the story’s setting and a character in its own right. The city is as much of a friend to Lore as Castor or Miles, and she relies on it with her problems and grief. Her observation that New York will take her where she needs to go foreshadows the Agon’s outcome, Lore saving the city, and how she finally finds her place with friends from the Agon in a world without the hunt.

“At the end of each Agon, the gods, new and old, regained their immortality, but they remained in the mortal world, unable to return to whatever home they’d once known. The new gods, brimming with power, manifested physical forms and lived lavishly, manipulating the workings of the world to fill the vaults of their mortal bloodlines. But the old gods, with their power ever-waning, usually chose to remain incorporeal. It made them untraceable as they set about the world, trying to plan for contingencies for the next hunt or seeking retribution against those who had tried to kill them. The threat of that vengeance was the reason hunters always wore masks.” 

These lines draw upon the differences between new and old gods. The original gods (Athena, Artemis, and others) have survived the hunt for centuries and are most focused on surviving future Agons. In contrast to the new gods, they have no mortals to support. The new gods also prepare for future Agons, but their preparation comes in the form of building up their mortal bloodline’s support. Longevity of godly power influences what is important.

“Her own many times great-grandfather had been a cautionary tale, having foolishly bound his fate to the original Dionysus. The old god had needed protection from the descendants of Kadmos. Though he himself had been born into that bloodline through his mortal mother, Dionysus had cursed his kin—and Kadmos himself—when they refused to believe he had been fathered by Zeus. The instant the old god died, cornered and slaughtered like a boar, Lore’s ancestor’s heart had stopped dead in his chest.

The strongest of his generation, gone in the time it took to blink, remembered forever by his kin as a blade traitor—and, as her own father believed, the true cause of the centuries-old animosity between the Houses of Perseus and Kadmos.” 

These lines come while Lore contemplates forming a bond with Athena. While the bond offers a level of protection in terms of each party ensuring the other survives, it also involves great risk.