Zeus named the star on a clear January night. He felt the divine naming happen the way he felt most significant divine actions — as a shift in the shimmer of the sky, a single point of it deepening from background to specific, from impersonal to intentional.
He was outside the Apollo cabin when it happened, coming back from a late session in the medical room. He looked up at the new star and stood there for a long time.
He had known this was coming. He had known the naming. He had known that Zoe Nightshade — lieutenant of Artemis for centuries, poisoned by the Nemean Lion, the last act of her life holding Atlas so that Percy and Annabeth could free her mistress — would be placed in the sky by Zeus as acknowledgment of what she had done.
Knowing it was coming and standing under the new star were, again, entirely different experiences.
He thought about Zoe. About what she had been: precise, devoted, unsparing about what she knew to be true, deeply loving in the way of someone who had learned to love without expecting the love to be returned as performed warmth. She had carried a grudge against Luke Castellan for years — a justified one. She had carried a love for Artemis that was deeper than the word loyalty covered. She had carried the weight of several millennia of service with the grace of someone who had decided the service was its own reward and meant it.
He thought: she was not a character. She was a person. She was a specific, irreplaceable, enormous person, and she is gone, and the star is beautiful and she deserved to be a star and she also deserved to be alive and both things are true at the same time and neither cancels the other.
He sat down on the cold ground, back against the Apollo cabin's wall, and looked at the star for a long time. Not crying exactly. Something adjacent — the specific quality of being with a loss rather than running from it, the way Hecate had told him to be with difficult things.
He said, to the star, in the way he had gotten comfortable saying things to presences he was not sure could hear him: 'You were extraordinary. The kind of extraordinary that takes centuries to build and that most people don't recognize because it doesn't make noise. I recognize it. I see it. I'm glad you existed.'
The star burned. Stars always burned. But this one — this specific one, in the newly reorganized sky — seemed, in the subjective way that things seem when you are paying full attention and something is genuinely true, to burn a little more specifically than stars usually did. A little more present.
He went inside. He went to sleep. He carried the weight of Zoe's loss into the winter weeks that followed and did not put it down, because it was not the kind of weight that should be put down. Some things you carry not because you have to but because not carrying them would mean forgetting that they mattered.
Zoe Nightshade mattered. He was going to carry that.
✦ ✦ ✦
Thalia found him at the star the following night. He was there again, standing on the south hill with the sky clear above him. She came up the hill and stood next to him without speaking for a while.
'You knew her,' Thalia said finally. Not a question.
'I knew about her,' he said. 'There's a difference. I knew what she was and what she would do. I didn't know her the way you knew her.'
Thalia was quiet for a moment. 'She didn't like most people,' she said. 'She made an exception for people who didn't try to manage her. You probably would have been one of those.'
He looked at the star. He thought: yes. I think so. I think we would have been the particular kind of friends that people who take things seriously become when they meet each other. 'I hope so,' he said.
Thalia looked at the star for a long time. Then she said: 'Thank you for being here this winter. While we were gone.'
'The camp needed someone,' he said.
'Yes. But you were also here for Nico. And that was—' She stopped. 'He doesn't make friends easily. He's ten and he just lost his sister and he found a world he didn't know existed. And you played Mythomagic with him every Tuesday.'
'He's a good player,' Kael said. 'He takes the game as seriously as it deserves. That's not common.'
Thalia almost smiled. Then she turned from the star and looked at him directly. 'Whatever you are,' she said, 'you're good at it. I don't say that lightly.'
He thought of all the times she said things she meant and only the things she meant, and how rare that was. He said: 'Thank you, Thalia. That matters.'