The Burning Maze… Or The Burning Earth?

[Photo collected from Rick Riordan's Instagram feed]

        I’m an avid Rick Riordan fan. With an exception of maybe one or two books (any of the companion books), I’ve read all of his books. Mythology has always been a matter of interest for me and his books allow one to know about them without getting bored.

        But I’m writing this for a different reason. From what I’ve understood, Riordan is trying to give a very important message through his books: 

We are killing the nature and one day the nature will kill us.

        So how did he do this? In the series titled Heroes of Olympus, the ultimate villainess is the Mother Earth, Gaia herself.

        Wait, the Earth and a villainess? Is that even possible? We have always known the Earth to be all-bearing. It does bear all of us. But Riordan tried to show that she isn’t so motherly as we all believe. Even the myth itself is that she helped her children cut her husband, Ouranos, into pieces so that Kronos could become the king of the Universe. Anyway, according to the books, Gaia is actually asleep, like all the time. If she wakes up, she can cause serious damage. In the book, The Blood of Olympus, she did wake up and tried to kill everyone in sight. Now it’s quite relatable for people who have mothers getting very angry if they forgot to run water over the dishes in the sink. So yeah, you don’t want to wake this mother up by burning holes in her body.

        Next comes the nature god, Pan. Nature is friendly. We, humans, however, are not. As a side-note, the word “panic” came from Pan when he screamed his Adam’s apple out during a war against the Titans.

        So, how would it be if the nature died? Well, even if you do have a potted plant on your window sill, the god of all kinds of nature spirits (in Greek Mythology, all kinds of plants and trees have spirits called Dryads) is dead. And it is so because even the god of nature couldn’t protect the nature from the humans. Well, being a god, Pan didn’t exactly die. He simply vanished, because he was forgotten. If this was real, it would have been something to panic about. Hell, we should panic nevertheless.

        The Burning Maze, the third book in the Trials of Apollo series, is Rick Riordan’s latest publication. The burning maze is actually a direct reference to the wildfires in California. Wildfires break out when dried leaves catch fire due to the scorching heat. And from one twig, forests upon forests turn to ash. But you see, it’s not just the trees, animals and humans fall to its grasp just as much. Whole cities are ruined. And it’s sort of a regular thing for California now. Almost every year, this hell breaks loose there. There’s little we can do once the fires start burning in full bloom. It’s like the fiend fire mentioned in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Once conjured, the fire can’t be extinguished. Everything and everyone is prone to it.

[I collected this photo from Facebook; I can't find the post now, so can't say who posted it. The photo was probably taken from a plane. There was a forest fire raging under the clouds.]

        Living in Bangladesh, we can never get a direct view of this Californian fire. But there’s something we all have seen, from time to time and have admired it. The Blood Moon. Yes, that red moon we see from time to time and fall in love with. In reality, the moon is stained with all the life burning in forest fires across the world. Also, air pollution due to other man-made reasons is a reason behind the bleeding moon.

[This photo was collected from Google. This is probably photoshoped, but you can get the idea.]

        The Blood Moon, or the moon that is not grayish white is still a sight to behold. Probably because the moon itself is still unadulterated. But with the rate at which we are yielding pollution, soon it would breach the atmospheric layers and start polluting the solar system. Well, if that were to happen, we’d be dead by then. That’s sort of a relief. XD