Chapter 3 The Asphodel Crown
The Asphodel Crown
Daphne
The asphodel petals had stopped glowing.
They were still beautiful, ghostly things that felt like cool velvet against my thumb. But the pulsing light that had led me out of the Blighted Lands was gone. The flowers looked dormant now, like snow that had settled in a dark valley.
I ran my fingers over the woven stems, anchoring myself to the texture. They were the only physical proof that I hadn’t hallucinated my own salvation.
It had been a full day since Charon had pulled the coins from my eyes.
The throbbing ache behind my eyes was gone, replaced by a clarity that felt sharp and cold.
I’d scrubbed the mud and blood from my skin in a basin of dark water, eaten bread that tasted of nothing, and slept without a single dream.
The flowers were sleeping, and for the first time in years, I was simply. .. awake.
I looked up from the crown in my lap to the cavernous space around me.
The workshop felt less like a room and more like the inside of an intricate mind.
Shadows clung to the high, vaulted ceiling, hiding tools that looked large enough to dismantle a mountain.
Unfinished barges lay on massive tables, alongside small boxes very much like the one that had claimed my gift.
Aion stood near the center of the cavern, his fingers trailing over the hull of a vessel. It was crafted from something he called Stygian iron. A ship built to survive another Shift. A ship almost as strange as Aion himself.
He’d been keeping me company since the day before, and I found comfort in his presence. “Charon made all of this?” I asked him, leaning heavily against the wooden back of my bench. “The barges, the tools... everything in here?”
“He did,” Aion replied, and his voice washed over me in a soft, resonant hum.
It was deep, but without a single sharp edge, like a low note held on a massive instrument.
“My father remembers the Old World, where he lived before the Shift. He builds to keep his hands busy, I think. To preserve the shape of things that used to be.”
His massive bronze form didn’t move like one of Charon’s strange devices.
If I hadn’t known any better, I could have sworn he was as human as I was, another resident of the Korinos Wilds who just happened to paint his skin gold.
But every time he turned, a vein of blue death energy pulsed beneath the metal skin, and the bronze rippled.
He couldn’t hide from his own nature. The same way I hadn’t been able to. But unlike me, he didn’t seem to mind it.
“And you?” I asked, knowing I shouldn’t be prying, but unable to stay silent. “Did he build you to remember something, too?”
Aion paused. He turned his face toward me, the blue light in his eyes flickering as he studied my expression.
“He built me to be a vessel. Like the barges.” He tapped his own chest, over what should have been his heart. “I was meant to hold energy, not thoughts. But the energy changed me.”
“Changed you how?”
“It gave me a mind. But it did not give me a fate.” He took a step toward me, the heavy thud of his weight echoing in the quiet. “The Moirae did not weave me, Daphne. I have no thread for them to measure or cut.”
The admission made my breath hitch. In a world where I had been choked, dragged, and nearly drowned by the Weave, the idea of a creature existing outside of it felt impossible.
A strange sense of kinship took root in my chest, warm and solid.
We were both errors in the fabric of existence.
I was a seer who had bought blindness. He was a machine who had grown a soul.
A friend maybe. The one who’d given me the chance to stay in Asphodelia.
“No thread at all? You’re just... here?”
“I am just here,” he confirmed, his bronze features shifting into what might have been a smile. “Existing by the grace of my father’s hammer, not the Weavers’ loom.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “That sounds peaceful.”
“Peace is a luxury for the dead, Seer.”
The voice vibrated through the floorboards, a seismic rumble that traveled up through the floor. I turned and found Charon standing in the threshold, leaning on his ferry pole.
I’d been overwhelmed when I’d first met him, then thankful, but now… Now, I didn’t know what to think.
He’d received me in his home, not with grace, perhaps, and only because of Aion. But he hadn’t thrown me out. And yet, there was something in those icy eyes that made my skin crawl. “For the living,” he continued, “there is only movement.”
“I’ve been moving since I learned how to walk, Charon,” I answered. It was probably disrespectful, and I mentally chastised myself for my knee-jerk response.
Charon stepped fully into the amber light of the workshop.
The dry heat of the forge vanished, sucked away by a sudden, cloying humidity.
“Then you aren’t fast enough. The Keres stands upon the docks.
He has returned for what he claimed. Do not test the patience of a predator, even one who has learned to wait. ”
I stood and picked up my fading asphodel crown. As I wove the flowers back into my hair, I felt small, like a child caught playing in a graveyard. “I suppose it was foolish to think the world would stop just because I wanted it to.”
Charon jerked his pole toward the door, a command that brooked no argument. “The Acheron’s currents wait for no one. Go.”
Leaving the workshop felt easier than it should have been. I went, but not because of Charon’s order. It was my own heart urging me along. Because I knew the man waiting for me outside wasn’t a predator. He was my future.
I hadn’t been in Asphodelia long, but the dim corridors of Charon’s home were easy to navigate. And then, I was outside, stepping back onto the docks. The mist hit me first, a wall of damp vapor that tasted of ancient stone. The gray haze parted, and I saw him.
Phonos stood at the end of the pier, a silhouette cut from the darkest part of the night.
The black feathers of his wings rippled and shifted in a hypnotic rhythm.
Every fiber of his being radiated a coiled energy that made the fine hairs on my arms stand on end.
He stared past the city, his focus locked entirely on me.
He looked at the crown of dormant petals perched on my head. “The white of the asphodels suits you, Daphne.”
I reached up, my fingers brushing the flower petals. “They’ve lost their glow. It’s sentimental of me to keep them.”
“You can keep them as long as you wish.” He took a step closer, the movement fluid and silent. “They are beautiful because you wear them. But they would suit you better if they were fresh.”
He held out his hand. A clutch of new asphodels glowed in his palm, their light pulsing with a soft, steady rhythm. “May I?”
Phonos paused, waiting for permission I wasn’t sure I knew how to give. My hermit’s instinct screamed at me to run, to hide, to burrow back into the safety of isolation.
I’d spent three years ensuring nothing could reach me. I was still tired, still unsure of my place in this strange city. But the itch in my palms returned, silencing my wariness. He didn’t look at me like I was broken. He looked at me like I was the only solid thing in the mist.
If I had left Charon’s workshop, it wasn’t because of his disapproval. It was because of this man. Because of Phonos of House Keres.
I stepped into his space, tilting my head back to meet his gaze. “You may. Please.”
Moving with deliberate slowness, he reached out, his talons brushing against my temple. They were sharp enough to shred armor, but when they touched me, it was with agonizing gentleness.
First, Phonos removed my old flower crown. It was a little strange. I’d grown more accustomed to it than I’d realized. He discarded the old asphodels on the pier, then began to weave the fresh blooms into my hair.
The weight of his hand settled onto my scalp. I closed my eyes, leaning into the sensation. It anchored me. For so long, touch had been a threat, a prelude to violence or a demand for a prophecy. This was neither. It was just... presence. A warm, living tether in a world of mist and ghosts.
“There.” He murmured the word like a secret, his breath stirring the hair near my ear. “Perfect.”
The word twisted in my chest. Perfect. I was a woman who had traded her soul to escape a nightmare.
I was still putting the shattered pieces of my sanity back together.
There was nothing perfect about me. But looking at the quiet intensity in his eyes, I realized with a jolt that he wasn’t lying. He believed it.
He pulled away, and the loss of his touch left an aching chill behind.
His wings spread slightly, a sudden expanse of midnight feathers that swallowed the space between us.
“I would like to show you the city,” he said, turning his gaze toward the distant skyline.
“If we fly, you might get a better understanding of our home.”
Fly.
The word hit me almost as hard as the poison of the Blighted Lands.
The damp stone of the pier dissolved beneath my feet. In a single, violent heartbeat, I wasn’t in Asphodelia anymore.
I had flown in that blasted vision that had torn my mind apart. I’d been a helpless thing suspended in the roaring dark. The golden thread had hauled me backward through the sky like I was nothing but meat on a line. A puppet dancing for a mad god.
My stomach dropped, turning over with a sickening heave of pure vertigo. I stumbled back, my heel catching on the uneven stone of the pier. “No,” I choked out. “I… I can’t.”
Phonos was there instantly. The heat of his hand clamped onto my elbow, a searing anchor in the spinning world. “Daphne?”
I sagged against his grip, my legs refusing to hold my weight as the bile rose sharp and acidic in my throat. “Not the air. Please.”