Chapter 3 The Sphinx’s Command #2
I nodded, though my throat was now tight with a new kind of terror. The miraculous peace of Aion’s touch felt suddenly precarious. As much as I wanted to cling to my illusions, I understood the truth now. My fight for freedom had only just begun.
When I’d first arrived in Asphodelia, I hadn’t known what to expect of Charon’s domain. Jason had told me bits and pieces about the ancient ferryman, but nothing that actually made him real in my mind.
What I’d found underneath the Stygian Docks was…
industry. The same skill that had built Aion.
Heavy Stygian iron shelves sagged under thousands of meticulously kept ledgers—centuries of careful records.
In the shadowed corners, skeletal metal armatures of unfinished constructs hung from the vaulted ceiling.
In a way, I’d found the place warm. Reassuring. But the arrival of the sphinx changed that.
Phix was a magnificent, terrifying creature, looking exactly as one would expect of the auctioneer of the bride market.
She had the sleek, powerful body of a golden lioness, but the regal head and torso of a woman.
She kept her sharp, stony wings tucked tightly against her flanks.
Faintly glowing runes crawled across her skin.
When she entered the workshop, she stopped a few paces away from me. Her dark eyes fixed on me with an ancient, predatory intelligence.
“You have been a diligent warden, Aion,” she rumbled, her golden tail twitching in a slow, hypnotic arc.
“But her time hidden in your quarters has expired. An unbonded mortal cannot remain within the walls of Asphodelia. To stay, she must be woven into the city’s fabric. She must enter the Agora of Echoes.”
Aion shifted, his massive bronze frame angling slightly in front of me. “She is safe with me, Phix.”
“Her safety isn’t what is in question,” Phix countered. “This is about the law, Aion. If she remains an unclaimed mortal, she will be expelled from the city.”
“Phix… There are circumstances. She is being—”
“Chased by a necromancer,” Phix said, cutting Aion off. “Yes, we know that Jason and his Argonauts camp just outside the Blighted Lands. But it changes nothing.”
A cold, sharp panic seized my lungs. As I had expected, Jason was out there, lurking at the edge of the magical boundary. “Aion… I can’t go back. I can’t… I can’t let him have me again.”
“You won’t have to,” Aion promised. “Phix, there should be no issue at all. I will claim her.”
For all his words, there was a hesitation in his posture, something that hadn’t been there before. Did he not truly want me? No, this was something else.
“You cannot,” Charon said, leaning on his heavy pole. “You have no thread, my son. You already know what that means.”
Aion closed his eyes, hiding the blue glow of his core behind his metal skin. Yes, he had known. He understood what his father was saying. But I didn’t.
“What’s wrong?” I shook Aion’s arm, willing him to explain. “What does this mean?”
Aion didn’t answer. Charon released a deep sigh. “I forged Aion with my own two hands. Unlike almost everyone in Asphodelia, he is not one of the woven. He is absent from the Moirae’s Loom. According to our laws, he cannot go through the bride market, because he has no thread to bind.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. Even here, the man I had chosen for myself wasn’t a person? To his own people? To his own father, maybe?
“That being said, Phix,” Charon continued, “this entire conversation is beside the point. Medea cannot pay the toll to enter the bride market.”
This was just getting worse and worse by the second. Every bride market needed the bride to pay a fee, but what did I have that would be of value to these people? “Surely there must be a way to pay,” I pleaded. “To solve this.”
“Every bride must surrender a happy memory to the lake,” Charon explained. “I am the one who extracts that memory. But I am still flesh and blood. If I attempt the ritual, my hands will rot and wither before the memory ever transfers. You are locked out of the Agora, Medea.”
“Then we will bypass the Agora entirely,” Aion said, his voice dropping to a low, desperate rumble. “We will go to the shores of the Acheron. The lake recognized the bond between Phonos and Daphne when the Loom could not. It will recognize us.”
“No,” Charon said, striking the base of his pole against the stone floor. The sound echoed so loudly that even the sphinx flinched.
The entire workshop grew darker, the air heavier, more oppressive. Charon’s creations suddenly seemed to be staring at me. The ferryman was angry, desperately so.
But Aion still wasn’t willing to let it go. “Father, if there is a chance—”
“What you seek is destruction, Aion,” Charon interrupted, closing the distance between them.
“Daphne was mortal before she became a construct. She was born with a human soul. You were not. I built you to be a mindless conduit for volatile energy. The storm that woke your consciousness forty-seven years ago was an anomaly—a fragile, beautiful accident.”
Charon’s expression softened into heavy, ancient grief.
“The lake’s blessing requires raw, unfiltered power to forge a bond outside the Loom.
This is how your sister became the Keres’s mate.
If we subject you to that ceremony, the surge of the Acheron’s power will shatter your mind.
You will survive physically, but your consciousness will burn away.
You will return to being the mindless vessel I originally built. ”
A suffocating silence filled the cavernous workshop. I stared at the bronze giant standing beside me. He was the only creature in existence who could hold me. And the laws of this city demanded his destruction to keep me.
“Then I will kill them. Every last one. Whatever talents Jason has…”
“Aion, Jason is a chosen of Thanatos, and he has committed no crime against our city,” Charon shot back.
“By all means, leave Asphodelia. Take the girl with you. Crush the necromancer under your boot. And then what? How long will it take the lands of the living to kill you? You are a creature of death energy, my son. You cannot survive out there.”
“I will take my chances,” Aion said quietly. He kept his gaze locked entirely on me. The blue light of his eyes flared with a fierce, blinding certainty. “If it frees Medea, it will be worth it.”
I felt like I couldn’t breathe. “No.” I grabbed his thick bronze wrist, my fingers digging desperately into the metal. “I will not let you. I will not trade your soul for my safety. I would rather walk back to the Argo.”
“An unnecessary martyrdom,” Phix said, cutting through our despair with cold, feline pragmatism.
She began to pace, her lioness’s paws making no sound against the stone.
“The situation is clear. Medea’s touch unweaves flesh.
Charon cannot extract her toll. Aion is the only citizen who can survive her, but he lacks the legal thread to claim her. And Jason waits at the borders.”
She stopped, turning her dark, depthless gaze back to us. “The solution is a proxy.”
Aion went completely rigid. “You would give her to another?”
“I will arrange a binding to a legal citizen to satisfy the Moirae and grant her refuge in Asphodelia,” Phix corrected, her sharp wings giving an impatient flutter. “She need not pay the bride market fee. A monster will claim her in name only, leaving her safely in your shadow.”
I stared at the sphinx, my mind struggling to grasp the twisted logic. “Who would agree to that? Who would buy a bride they can never touch?”
Phix’s lips curved into a subtle, terrifying smile. She looked past me, her eyes fixed on a truth only she possessed.
“Someone whose own nature makes taking a traditional bride an impossibility,” Phix replied. “He requires the appearance of a bond just as much as you require the protection of one. The arrangement serves us all.”
I suppressed a shiver. She was arranging a hollow marriage, a political cage designed to trick the law of Asphodelia. And she had known from the very beginning that it would come to this. She’d come here not to make me an offer, but to notify me of the only possible solution.
“The bride market convenes tomorrow evening,” the sphinx commanded, flowing toward the heavy iron doors. “I have found your shield, Medea. Prepare yourself for the Agora.”
She vanished into the corridor. I stood in the heavy, dust-scented silence of the workshop, my fingers still gripping Aion’s unyielding bronze arm.
A plan had been forged to save me from Jason’s grasp.
But as I looked up at the quiet devastation in Aion’s glowing eyes, I understood the true cruelty of Asphodelia.
To stay with the man I loved, I had to let a stranger buy me.