"So I poisoned Arion's mind—I showed him what evil power they could take from our world if they wished," Poseidon said. "I told him their ideals differed from ours; I told him they were destroyers. Our only choice was to kill them before they killed us all."
"Even I underestimated Arion's brilliance back then. He studied the life force and used his witchcraft and technology to transform a small fraction of it. He created a tiny drop of death—
"He took the conch that should have brought life and filled it with death. Its passionate call, once directed toward his ideals, became a terrible scream of destruction, ravaging his body with fear—we used that power to drive them into the Tomb of the Gods. That was how it was supposed to go—and then Atlantis's great mage died.
"Generation after generation passed—the mystery of that encounter drove Atlantis toward isolationism, the very opposite of what Arion truly stood for."
"—That's the truth behind the war all those years ago?" Aquaman felt somewhat disillusioned. "The story I heard was completely different—"
"According to legend, Arion won the favor of Poseidon, the sea god of Olympus, and learned a secret about life on Earth and other worlds. Arion hoped to summon them and build a great cosmic ocean alliance among the stars. But he could only summon monsters—they stole Poseidon's trident, and Arion sacrificed himself heroically to stop them from claiming our oceans." Aquaman recounted the story widely circulated in Atlantis, his expression growing stiff.
An epic about heroes and gods fighting foreign invaders had just turned into a story about a coward conning their ancestor into screwing over outsiders. What the hell was this? Aquaman felt a headache coming on.
"That's truly hard to believe," Mera said with a sigh.
"I don't