At mention of the others Zeus shifted, leaning away from her and gazing back outside. If she had aimed to cause chaos upon the Mount with her departure she had succeeded. He had been a proud king, and only her council had been enough to temper his less 'thoughtful' moments. The situation had fallen apart spectacularly quickly without her. "Poseidon left a week after you did," he said quietly and stiffly, as if the words burned his throat to speak them. "Demeter a day after. She never did sit right with my decision regarding Persephone, never understood that it was her choice and not mine."<br/><br/>He took another breath and his eyes flicked to her briefly. "Poseidon's last words to me were to compare me to Cronus... I'll spare you the specifics of the comparison, but it was not a kind parting. Artemis disappeared not long after, I know not where, Apollo, Hermes, Hestia, Aphrodite, all of them left one by one until just Dionysus and Athena remained." His hands clenched in his lap and a true roll of thunder, distant and small, struck the skies. "I found her speaking to him and Ariadne in the great courtyard before our palace. Athena bade them leave, to find their place in the mortal world.<br/><br/>"My fury was terrible. I demanded to know why she had done so, if she had driven them all away, one by one, to diminish me and Olympus. She looked at me with that way she has, and she told me no. She had only told Dionysus to go because he would have never known not to otherwise. Then she told me that I was the reason the others had left, and that she had only remained to see what it would be like for a once-noble king to devolve into a despot. She left me to my fury then, left me to my damning words and dire threats. And then I stood alone in Olympus."<br/><br/>Zeus didn't like that memory. The things he had said of his daughter, a woman he had nothing but pride for before then, haunted him. All of his mistakes had, in one way or another, but that final night upon the Mount had chased him in all the centuries since. "So, to answer your questions, that is why I don't ask Poseidon or Demeter or even Dionysus and his reasonable wife to return. And you are not the first, as much as I wish you were. Athena was. It is by her council that I come to you at all."