Kato Of Sinta
Months earlier on the banks of the River Styx.
Kato of Sinta, hero of Thalyria. Friend. Warrior. Deceased.
I can’t pretend to be surprised when the entrance to the Underworld comes up to greet me. A knife to the throat will do it. One moment alive, fighting, my heart pounding as victory sets in, and the next, a flash of danger, a split-second decision, and my blood gushing out so fast I’ll never get it back in.
Death came lightning-fast in the end. And I don’t regret a thing.
Shadowy fog covers my feet and curls around my legs like cool, sticky fingers urging me down the gentle slope in the direction of the river. I move toward the shore under a low, churning sky. I don’t hate the crimson-and-shadow roof sealing me into the Underworld. This false sky is beautiful in its own way. Impressive. I’m sure Cat would have plenty to say about it—probably something along the lines of, “Let’s throw a knife into it and see if it bleeds.”
My chest tightens, shortening the breath I still have, even in death. I glance over my shoulder at the dim tunnel I walked down to get here, but no one follows me out. I’m alone here, aren’t I? I left everyone else behind.
Cat’s face hovers in my mind, the rest of the team vague figures around her. I pull them into focus. My friends. My family . Sadness drags through me as my feet hit the rocky riverbank and the swirling fog lets me go. But it’s sadness without incapacitating grief, as if the Underworld allows a sense of melancholy without letting it grow too strong. The closer I get to the water and to irrevocably moving on, the more a feeling of peace settles over me. I died protecting Cat, a sister to me and a future queen. I can pass into my afterlife happy, because I’ve done exactly what I wanted to in life: helped make it a better one. I’ll never measure my success in years lived, but in how I lived them, and satisfaction grows stronger than sadness as I take my place in line for Charon’s ferry.
The skiff goes back and forth across the river, making endless trips. I brush my fingers over the hard, little obol in my pocket—one small but very important coin.
A thought plagues me as I wait. I died satisfied with life, but what am I supposed to do in death? Sitting on my laurels for all of eternity sounds damn boring, especially while I wait for anyone I care about to arrive. There isn’t a single dead soul I want to find in the Underworld and reconnect with. I have no intention of digging up my abusive parents, and everyone I love still lives.
Squawking explodes behind me, and I turn. Skeletal crows circle on my side of the Styx and caw from equally skeletal trees with dark, leafless branches and shadow-fog climbing up their trunks. Wailing souls materialize from the sparse, dim forest, disturbing more birds. The miserable, pale dead call out to the people lining up for Charon’s ferry, their outstretched hands begging for obols. I shudder, their desperate cries raising goose bumps all over my arms. Slight nausea fills me as I turn back around. No ferry awaits the dead who don’t have payment for Charon. This is their afterlife.
I’m unable to help a single one of them without damning myself to a fate worse than death. I was willing to die for a friend, but I’m not selfless enough to suffer through an eternal afterlife in the Shadowlands for a stranger’s benefit.
I shuffle closer to the dock, my turn for a ferry approaching. Charon takes most souls across the river. Some, he refuses, either because they don’t have payment or because he deems them unworthy of the far side of the Styx. The rejected have no choice but to return to the shadows, their gloom and hopelessness adding to the dimness on this bank.
Apprehension drips down my spine. Soon, the ferryman will decide my future in the Underworld. Did having killed in battle make a difference? I hope not. Murder should count against a person, but war shouldn’t. And I have Charon’s payment. The obol feels heavier than ever in my pocket.
I move forward in line, the ferry on its way across the river with another person now. None of my companions in life accompanying me into death feels lonely but right. It means they survived the combat I died in, and gratitude swells in my chest, the emotion striking just as keenly as any I felt while I lived. The only surprise is my lack of anguish over being separated from them. But I know they’ll arrive one day, when it’s their time, and I’ll be here to greet them.
Charon heads back for the soul just in front of me in line, and I can’t help thinking about all the differences between here and the mortal plane as the boat skims silently across the water. No sunshine or blue skies. No seasons. No fear of death, although I have no doubt the rulers of the Underworld can dole out punishments to make a person wish for their true end. No procreation.
A pang of regret startles me as I watch the ferry approach the landing. The dead can’t make life, so I’ll never get the chance to be a better parent than mine were.
Charon steers his skiff up to the dock. The person in front of me holds out an obol and tries to step into the boat, but Charon shakes his shroud-covered head and rejects him with a dark push of magic. My pulse kicks up a notch as the man flies backward straight past me and lands in the dense fog, disappearing into the drab, eddying landscape. My heart thudding, I turn back around. He’ll roam the Shadowlands until the ferryman deems his villainous deeds paid for and accepts his obol. It could take lifetimes, and he has an infinity of them now.
It’s my turn, and I move onto the wooden dock, my confidence shaken. I know I’m not wicked, but am I good enough? Worry thumps inside me as I take my obol from my pocket and step forward. It’s my moment of truth.
As still and somber as any of the shadow trees behind me, Charon takes my measure for so long I start to sweat. He didn’t take this long with anyone else, and my pulse beats a little more frantically with every passing second. He finally extends a bony gray hand to take my payment, and relief floods me. I tender the obol, but before I can place it in his hand, a sudden, powerful force yanks me back. I stagger and somehow right my balance, resisting the pull. Charon’s hand snaps out, and he grabs my wrist, anchoring me. The ice-cold burn of the ferryman’s fingers wrenches a pained gasp from my mouth.
The strange magic grips me just as hard as Charon. A fierce command from a voice I recognize rides the strong threads. Come back.
My eyes widen. Cat?
Charon’s hold on my wrist hurts straight down to the bone. His dark, sunken eyes hold me, too, his shroud billowing eerily as godlike power scrapes over us both.
“What’s happening?” The afterlife is all I have now. I don’t want to ruin it before it even starts.
Charon doesn’t speak, and the unabating force hits me with a clashing mix of love and doom that splits me right down the middle. The harder Cat’s magic pulls at me, the duller the Underworld seems, the grayer, the quieter, the lonelier.
Oh gods. I don’t want to be here.
My gaze snaps to the far side of the river. It’s nondescript—an ordinary road leading to an ordinary city that leads to an ordinary life for the rest of eternity. I turn my head, the dock creaking under my feet. It’s abominable on this side. Shadows, misery, and crows. Cat’s essence grows in the magic, and that painful grief that was missing before lances through me, a poisoned spear. My breath shudders. I don’t want to be alone. I have friends and family—not blood family, but better. And they haven’t let me go.
I twist my arm, trying to shake off Charon and run straight into the magic. It wants me, needs me, is meant for me. And it has to be better than this place. Here, there’s nothing .
Charon’s icy grip tightens on my wrist, and on the far bank, a bright light suddenly rolls toward the river. A golden pathway unfurls where there’d been nothing before. The new road leads away from the ordinary city and toward a high, marble gateway in the distance that appears out of thin air.
I stare in shock, Cat’s magical hold on me lessening a little. There’s only one place a golden pathway leads to in the Underworld: Elysium. The honored land reserved for heroes and gods.
Is the pathway…for me?
Charon hauls on my wrist, pulling me into the skiff with him. It rocks dangerously, forcing me to brace my legs for balance. The magic keeps dragging at me, entreating me , but death’s hold is powerful, and instinct warns me to follow that path. There’s something down it for me, something I need.
Charon makes a rumbling, animalistic sound and lets go of my wrist, turning his bony hand up for his payment. Cat pulls harder, with desperate heartbreak, and my eyes sting, my heart battering my chest. She’s calling me home, fragment by fragment. How can I say no to her?
Raw emotion overwhelms me. I look over my shoulder at the gateway half-cloaked in shadows. Swallowing, I turn back to the golden path. Life behind me. The afterlife ahead.
The golden pathway suddenly starts to fade, scaring me as much as the rest of this. I can’t shake the conviction that there’s something I want down it, something I want more than life itself.
But Cat’s pain is too piercing to ignore, the call to home real and there . The longer and stronger she holds on to me, the more I yearn for what I lost—for home, for friends, for life .
Indecision claws at me, my breath coming short and fast. What I know beckons to me from behind. Something indefinable summons me from ahead. Charon’s dark robes float on a shadow breeze, and small waves slap at the hull of the skiff. I grip my obol hard, the dulling path looking less and less like gold.
The paving starts to roll away from the riverbank, and my decision is just as quick as the one that ended my life and saved Cat’s. I lurch toward Charon, press the obol into his cold, gray hand, and sit. Charon closes his bony fingers around my payment, leans against his long pole, and pushes the skiff away from the dock.
The golden pathway to Elysium stops receding, and Cat’s magic rips over me, gouging out a part of me with it and leaving me a part of her. We’ll always be connected, but our story is over—until we meet again in the Underworld—and a new story awaits somewhere along that golden path and under a cloud-red sky. I keep my gaze ahead, my heart breaking along with Cat’s. Her magic abruptly disappears when I cross the midpoint of the Styx. The loss of her tears the air from my lungs, and my eyes sting again, but I made the only choice I could.
I need to follow the road to Elysium, or I’ll regret it forever—and in the afterlife, forever is a very long time.