Children of the Apothetae
The strain was too much for Javan and Serac to bear when the Twins were banished, and they parted ways to mourn differently. Serac pined for her children even as she felt immense guilt and sorrow for Azza, the member of the Eleven her children had killed. Javan’s rage, meanwhile, set him upon a lonelier path.
Javan’s sphere of influence continued to be greatest in the area around Greece, and he was familiar with the Spartan practice – still very much active in 290 B.C. – of discarding babies who appeared to be weak, deformed or out of the ordinary. Such infants were thrown into the Kaiada, known informally as the Apothetae, a chasm at Mount Taygetos. Once his own children had been discarded outside of time itself, Javan found he empathized with the lost children of the Apothetae. Their only sin was being abnormal, and their lives were taken for it.
After the calamity at the Twins’ sentencing, Javan knew better than to directly countermand the orders of his brethren. He wasn’t powerful enough on his own to fight a war against them, either. So he bit his tongue, bided his time and did the next best thing: Created an underground society dedicated to eventual freedom for his children. They are unique in all of creation, the only children of angel-born, and he believed deeply that they were innocents who had been unjustly tossed out of this world.
Like a sleeper cell, the group would remain dormant until the time was ripe to act. It would wait, watch and remain ever vigilant for ways to take action on behalf of the Twins. Javan knew that even after his passing, the organization would remain intact – ever watchful – to do whatever was necessary to see that the banishment was reversed.
Haunted by the image of lost children, Javan called his new society the Children of the Apothetae, or “Apoths” for short – determined that in this case, the chasm would give back what it had taken. The society’s band of assassins would be cast-off children he found and recruited from across the world, taken in and trained to work in pairs of two – twins – as lethal, interlocking killing machines. They would be on alert until they aged into adulthood, at which point they would be moved out of the killing corps and into other organizational, recruiting and training roles for the group.
Javan made certain, in other words, that child assassins remained forever ready to honor the world’s abused and discarded children by sacrificing themselves to right an ancient wrong and free the Twins when the time was right.
The Apoths are based to this day in the city of Sparti, near Mount Taygetos in Greece, about 450 miles southwest of Istanbul. Since it has done nothing but watch and wait for centuries, its presence remains all but unknown in the supernatural world. It remains a wild card, loyal to no one except the Twins and willing to go to extreme lengths to pursue a single-minded agenda.
The most likely opportunity for the group to take action was upon the death of the final member of the Eleven. At that point, the dictates of the Council – and the limits of the Covenant – were no longer binding. That would be true, The Kaiada believed, so long as nobody stepped in to replace the existing hierarchy with another that would uphold the status quo, banishment and all.
In the late days of the Eleven, with Armaros the final remaining member and aging herself, Javan’s secret warriors became more attuned than ever to the machinations of the world around them. They observed, always, for potential successors to Armaros who might be bent on upholding the Twins’ banishment. They watched the Council at all times, looking for any signs that Armaros might be appointing a successor or laying the foundation for what came after her death.
Something as innocuous as Armaros commuting a death sentence for a hapless Offspring girl might set off a frenzy of debate and activity among the Apoths. Maybe even prompt their first assassination attempt after more than two centuries of preparation.
