Read Online Percy Jackson's Greek Gods by Rick Riordan, John Rocco - Free Book Online Page B

said earlier that nobody took her seriously, and it’s true the other gods weren’t good about taking her advice. Kronos had swallowed Hestia first, so she’d gotten barfed up last. Because of that, her siblings tended to think of her as the youngest rather than the oldest—the last one to emerge. She was quieter and more peaceful than her siblings, but that didn’t mean they didn’t love her. Like Rhea, Hestia was a hard person not to love.
    In one important way, though, Hestia was not like Rhea. Her mom was known for being…well, a mom. The Great Mother. The Ultimate Mama. La Madre Grande.
    Hestia wanted nothing to do with being a mom.
    She didn’t have a problem with other people’s families. She loved her siblings, and once they started having kids, she loved them, too. Her fondest wish was for the whole Olympian family to get along and spend quality time together around the hearth, chatting or having dinner or playing Twister—really any wholesome activity.
    Hestia just didn’t want to get married herself.
    If you think about it, you can see why. Hestia had spent years inside Kronos’s gut. She had a very good memory, and could even recall Kronos gulping her down when she was a newborn. She remembered the sound of her mother wailing in despair. Hestia had nightmares that the same thing might happen to her. She didn’t want to get married only to find out her husband was actually a baby-swallowing cannibal.
    She wasn’t being paranoid, either. She had proof that Zeus could be as bad as Kronos.
    See, after the war with Kronos, Zeus decided it would be a good idea for him to marry a Titan, sort of to show there were no hard feelings. He married one of Oceanus’s daughters, a girl named Metis, who was the Titan of good advice and planning—kind of like the Titans’ life coach.
    Metis was smart about advising others, but apparently she wasn’t so bright when it came to her own life. When she was pregnant with her first kid, she told Zeus, “My husband, I have good news! I foresee that this child will be a girl. But if we have another child together, it will be a boy. And—you’re going to love this—he will be destined to rule the universe some day! Isn’t that awesome?”
    Zeus panicked. He thought he was going to end up like Ouranos and Kronos—chopped into little pieces—so he took a page out of Kronos’s playbook. He opened his mouth super-wide and created a tornado that sucked Metis right down his throat, compressing her so small that he could swallow her whole.
    That kind of freaked out the other Olympians, especially Hestia.
    What happened to Metis and her unborn child down there in Zeus’s gut? We’ll get to that later. But Hestia saw the whole thing, and she said to herself: Getting married is DANGEROUS!
    Zeus apologized to the Titans and the gods for swallowing Metis. He promised never to do it again. He decided to marry another Titan, but as you can guess, there weren’t a lot of volunteers. Only one agreed: Themis, the Titan of divine law, who happened to be Hestia’s favorite aunt.
    Themis had sided with the gods in the war. She understood right and wrong, and she knew that the gods would be better rulers than Kronos. (Notice I said better ,not good .)
    Like Hestia, Themis was modest and veiled and wasn’t interested in marriage, especially after what happened to Metis; but in the name of peace, she agreed to marry Zeus.
    (And yeah, Themis was technically Zeus’s aunt, so feel free to get sick about them getting married. But let’s move past that.)
    The marriage didn’t last long. Themis had two sets of triplets. The first set wasn’t so bad—three sisters called the Horai, who ended up being in charge of the changing seasons.
    (You’re thinking, Wait, only three seasons? But remember, this was Greece. I guess they’ve never had much of a winter.)
    The second set of triplets, though—they gave everyone the creeps. They were called the Morai, the Three Fates, and they were