Chapter 7 A Finished Tapestry
A Finished Tapestry
Medea
It was a strange thing, how something as familiar to me as death could still hurt. After all the lives I had taken, all the people I’d destroyed as Jason’s weapon, I’d almost thought the horrors could no longer touch me.
I’d never been more wrong. As my skin vibrated with echoes of countless deaths, I was trapped in a nightmare darker than Jason’s worst spells. “Aion!” I screamed, but it was too late.
The blinding wave of my climax had already swept over him, leaving nothing but wreckage in its wake. I’d seen the exact moment it had happened, the moment my damned body had overwhelmed his.
In a twisted way, Charon had warned us something like this could happen. Aion's vulnerability to death energy overload was the reason we couldn’t undergo a binding through the power of the lake. But apparently, not even the ferryman had been prepared for this.
My chest seized. I scrambled backward, tearing myself off Aion. My bare knees slipped over the thick pelts covering the stone dais, and I slammed my palms flat against his chest. I hunted for the deep, rhythmic vibration of his core, the steady hum that always told me he was close.
The bronze was just cold, heavy metal. The comforting, living resonance had vanished.
My breath caught in my throat, choking me.
I looked up at him, at that stern, inhuman face I’d come to love so much.
His eyes were open, but the gentle fire burning within them was gone.
The once-blazing blue had turned dull and flat.
I touched his cheek, my fingers trembling against his rigid jaw.
The magic humming beneath my skin met no resistance, no answering flare of life.
“No. No, please.” Tears spilled hot over my cheeks, dripping down onto his face. “Aion, wake up. Look at me.”
I grabbed his heavy shoulders and tried to shake him. It was like trying to move a mountain. He was stiff and motionless, a lifeless piece of metal.
The truth crushed the air straight out of my lungs.
Jason was right. My creator had spent my entire life forging me into a weapon, beating the reality into my bones: I was a walking plague.
My only purpose was to make things wither and rot.
I had dared to defy him. I had dared to believe I could be touched without leaving a corpse behind.
And I had only proven Jason right. I had reached for Aion, and the raw surge of my curse had shattered his soul. I had executed the only man I had ever loved.
No. There had to be some way, some way to fix this. This was Asphodelia, the city of the dead, and Aion had yet to rot. Surely, someone could fix this. Surely, it wasn’t too late.
I slid off the edge of the stone, the room spinning as I tried to focus.
My hands swept the floor until my fingers snagged the heavy silk of my discarded robes.
I dragged the fabric over my shivering shoulders, ignoring the ties at my waist. The simple action anchored me, and I finally made a mad dash for the heavy wooden door.
The damp, winding corridors of Phix’s den stretched out before me in the gloom. I ran blindly toward the distant entrance, my bare feet slapping hard against the cold floor.
“Help!” I pushed my burning lungs to their limit. “Someone, please help me!”
The solid rock beneath my feet shuddered.
A low frequency rattled my teeth and sent a fresh spike of terror through my veins.
A massive, bone-shaking boom echoed through the tunnels.
The air pressure plummeted. Above me, the deafening sound of crystals shattering echoed down from the city’s distant canals.
The devastating surge I had released had done more than hurt my colossus. It was tearing the city apart.
I breached the threshold of the den, bursting out into the sprawling asphodel garden. I barely dared to hope, but I had to do something to help my mate somehow. But even for that plan, it was too late.
Only an hour ago, the vast field of white asphodels had swayed peacefully in the wind.
Now, thousands of flowers shook on their stems, glowing with a panicked light.
The ground beneath my feet hummed, still screaming with the echoes of what I'd done.
And Skaros and Phix were standing there, motionless.
They were exactly where I’d left them, surrounded by the now-agitated flowers. Phix was waiting casually as if nothing at all was wrong. And Skaros… Was Skaros glowing too? Like the flowers?
I didn’t understand why they hadn’t done anything, why they were just pretending everything was fine. But they were my only chance.
“Phix!” I stumbled toward them through the flailing asphodel blooms. “Aion… something is wrong! He won’t move. Please, you have to help him!”
This time, the flowers didn’t wither away like they had in the Blighted Lands. But what happened was so much worse.
As I reached the edge of the path, a glowing, silver-blue thread drifted away from Skaros’s broad shoulder.
It looked like a single strand of luminous silk pulling free from his flesh and unspooling into the heavy air.
Then another thread detached from his chest. Another slipped from his furred legs.
There was no blood. There were no screams of agony. He was simply unraveling.
“Skaros?” The horror compounded, twisting my stomach into a tight, sick knot.
The manticore turned his head to look at me. His amber eyes were incredibly clear, stripped of any predatory edge. The triple row of razor-sharp teeth was visible as he offered a small, peaceful smile.
“Perhaps I was meant to have your unweaving touch after all,” he said.
“What is happening to him?” I screamed, spinning back toward Phix. But Skaros had already told me. The surge. I was killing him too. And his own mother was just… there. Watching. “Stop it! Do something!”
Phix ignored me. She did not reach out with her massive paws to catch the unspooling threads. She offered no command for a healer. She simply watched him dissolve, her dark eyes reflecting the silver light that was pulling away from the manticore’s body.
“Why would I stop it, child?” she asked. “Don’t you see how beautiful it is?”
“Beautiful?” I grabbed the sides of my head, feeling my mind begin to fracture. “He is dying! He is disappearing right in front of us!”
“He is being unwoven.” Phix stepped closer to Skaros, her golden tail twitching with slow, deliberate grace. “He has finished his pattern. He is being released from the burden of existence.”
More threads pulled away from Skaros. His broad, muscled torso was starting to turn translucent.
The silver-blue lines of his spirit became visible as they detached from his physical form.
The transparent fibers floated upward, dancing in the light of the asphodels like glowing seeds catching an updraft.
They hummed as they moved, a harmonious sound that clashed harshly with the crystal-shattering echoes ringing across the city.
This was wrong. All wrong. Skaros was disappearing, and Aion… Gods help me, Aion was still lying in the bedchamber, alone and abandoned.
“Phix, please.” I fell to my knees on the ground, every fiber of my being aching with grief. “This isn’t some kind of… natural gift. It’s all my fault. Please, punish me. Lock me away or kill me, but do not let this happen. Help Aion. Save Skaros.”
“I don’t know what happened,” Skaros offered in his mother’s stead. “But I know Aion would never want you punished. Even if you were to commit a crime. Which you didn’t do.”
By now his arms were gone, dissolved into a cloud of shimmering threads. I felt like I was going to throw up. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t apologize for your gift,” Skaros replied. “I have walked this city for a long time. I have carried a terrible, unnatural hunger that never slept. To feel the weight of the hunt finally falling away… it is the greatest kindness I have ever known.”
He shifted his gaze to Phix. For a fleeting moment, the sacred, ancient bond between the creator and her creation was laid bare in the garden. Phix bowed her massive golden head. She offered him the deep, silent reverence of a mother guiding her son home.
“Go well, my hunter,” Phix murmured, closing her dark eyes. “I will see you in the weave.”
With one final flash of silver light, the rest of his form gave way.
The manticore vanished. A swirling pillar of glowing threads lingered in his place for a single heartbeat before scattering into the freezing air.
They drifted gently over the trembling asphodels.
Wherever the glowing strands touched the soil, the white flowers flared with a soft, welcoming brilliance, drinking in the returned magic.
Skaros was gone. There was no broken body left behind. There was no spilled blood, no horrific scent of rot. There was only the heavy, ringing silence of Phix’s garden.
I sat back on my heels and pressed my raw palms over my mouth, sobbing into my hands.
In the rest of Alia Terra, death was a gruesome display of decay. I knew that better than anyone. It left behind hollow, blackened shells and a suffocating mountain of agonizing grief. But here, the end was a clean, luminous erasure. The beauty of it made no difference.
“How can you be so calm?” I screamed at Phix. “He was yours. You gathered the energy to weave him. You just watched him dissolve without doing a thing.”
Phix stepped closer, her massive paws silent on the stones. “In Asphodelia, Medea, we do not cling to the threads once the tapestry is finished. Skaros earned his rest. He returned his essence to the city so something new might be woven in his place. It is the natural order. It is sacred.”
She gestured toward the garden, where the countless asphodels had stopped shaking. They now stood tall and vibrant, their white light steady and bright in the gloom. New, delicate green buds were already pushing up through the earth, the last traces of Skaros's life already feeding the soil.
“Your surge hit the city like a gale,” Phix said, staring out into the distance. The sound of miniature explosions was still rumbling from the city proper. “But sometimes, the only thing that can lead to sunlight is a storm.”
“I do not care about your riddles!” I scrambled to my feet, alight with the fire of my own desperation.
“I do not care about the city! Phix, be reasonable. Whatever you might think about Asphodelia, about Skaros… Aion is a construct. A colossus. A being made of bronze. His energy will not return to your weave.”
My body was still vibrating with death energy.
I knew that if I reached out to the sphinx, I’d unweave her too.
That fear was the only thing that kept me from grabbing her fur, from shaking her.
“If his spark is gone, he doesn’t get to be reborn.
He is just dead! I will go back to the world above.
I will go back to Jason. I will do whatever it takes! But you have to help me save him!”
Phix looked at my white-knuckled grip on my robes, her ears flicking back against her majestic head. “You unleashed a power his fragile awareness could not withstand. I am the auctioneer of the market, child. I am not a mender of metal.”
“Then who is?” I demanded, my chest heaving, the edges of my vision tunneling in pure desperation. “Someone has to know how to fix him.” The obvious answer came to me even as I spoke. “Charon… Charon can save him. How… How do we get him to come?”
Phix opened her mouth to answer, but a raspy laugh drifted through the garden, cutting her off. “The ferryman is a little occupied.”
The sound made the blood freeze in my veins. The frantic energy keeping me upright turned to lead, locking my joints in place. I recognized that cruel amusement down to the marrow of my bones. It had been my constant companion for as long as I could remember.
“Thanks to you, Charon has his hands more than full,” the familiar voice said. “He won’t be saving anyone anytime soon.”
I turned slowly, already knowing what I’d find. There, stepping out from the dark shadows of the path, stood Jason.