Styx set her back against the warm outside wall of Phobos' temple, then bent her knee and planted a stiletto heel against it as well. Her arms crossed over her chest.
"If you feel distance between us, Bia, it's because you've forgotten who we are. Do you believe I would withhold something from you without a good fucking reason? Think about it, Bia, just think about it. You saw Kratos, you couldn't have missed his intent. You remember what Akheron called you and your siblings - agents of Zeus. What do you think would have happened? Do you truly believe anything I said to Kratos would have stopped him? Do you think you could have kept him from doing what he so desperately wanted to do?
"And when he'd done it, what would my 'agents of Zeus' have begun? It would not have seemed only the retribution of children against the one who harmed their parent, but an attack of Zeus against the heart of the Underworld itself. What hope would there be in setting aside the war, then? And how much more of Akheron's plans would you have played into? What better rational would he have needed to continue?"
Styx sighed and rubbed her forehead. Perhaps she'd expected too much from Bia. Unlike Styx, Bia had not had to dance the line between the two worlds as often as she had; Bia had not been forced to analyze both sides of the situation politically and fashion some way of moving that kept the peace... that kept neutrality.
It wasn't untrue that Styx had kept Akheron's name from her children for political reasons. But her exhaustion had kept her from causing herself more conflict than she could have endured at that particular moment, with the faces of her children pinched in concern and her body unnaturally numb and the worlds falling around them and her true deception buried deep in her chest. No, she couldn't have made a reasonable defense of the truth when she'd been lying in that bed. She couldn't have kept the true secret from her children at that moment.