Chapter 9 The Gift of Thanatos
The Gift of Thanatos
Phonos
There was something to be said about trying the same thing twice and expecting a different result. The definition of madness, people called it.
I knew more about madness than most. My screech had driven plenty of people insane with rage, and I’d felt the weight of my mate’s struggles during our claiming ceremony.
But the moment my eyes snapped open, my consciousness latched onto a single, impossible thought. He’d cut her away from me. And right then, I felt like I’d lost my mind.
“You’re awake,” Charon commented, and it didn’t help at all.
I was on my feet in an instant, snarling with bestial rage. My wings flared wide, a thousand hardened feathers ready to fly like daggers. I tried to lunge, just like I had on the pier.
My strength abandoned me all over again, and I collapsed, shaking with exhaustion. “What did you do? What’s happening?”
“You don’t need me to tell you that, Keres,” Charon replied.
I looked around and realized we were no longer on the pier. Instead, we were on one of Charon’s barges, and he was guiding us through the silent canals of Asphodelia.
Where were we going? For what purpose? My mind felt fuzzy, and there was only one answer and one reality I was interested in. “Restore my bond. Now.”
Charon continued to pole the barge, undeterred. “It cannot be restored.”
“Liar.” I never thought I’d say such a thing about Charon, but clearly, I’d misjudged him. “You used your magic. You severed the connection. Where is she?”
“She is where her thread guided her. I am taking you to her.”
It was almost too good to be true, yet I had no choice but to believe him.
I looked up at him, my fury and my weakness warring within me.
I saw no malice in his ageless features, no triumph.
Only a profound, weary resignation. “If you have harmed her...” I managed, the menace in my tone hollow and meaningless.
“I know,” he rumbled, and the simple answer silenced the vitriol still on my lips.
The barge glided through the canals, a silent ghost in the city of the dead.
Every splash of the pole in the black water, every scrape of the hull against stone, echoed in the hollow space inside me.
I focused on that emptiness, trying to find its edges, to understand the shape of the wound.
It was a clean cut, a perfect void. The work of a master.
I didn’t think I’d hated anyone more than I hated Charon now.
Finally, the barge bumped against a stone walkway. I easily recognized the massive building looming ahead. We were at the foot of the Weavers’ Hall.
A small crowd had gathered on the steps, indistinct silhouettes against the light of the death crystals.
My sisters stood to the side, their wings held tight to their backs.
Aion blocked the main thoroughfare, keeping others from approaching.
And Theron... the Cerberus was there, his massive form a bulwark of black fur.
He had a hand on the shoulder of a trembling, golden-haired figure.
Callista. Her shoulders shook with silent, ragged sobs.
And at their feet, lying on the cold obsidian, was a splash of color that did not belong. Fiery red hair, fanned out like a fallen sunset against the black stone.
Daphne.
I struggled to my feet and stepped off the barge, my legs unsteady but moving of their own accord.
Charon didn’t stop me. I walked through the silent crowd.
Their gazes were heavy on me, but I felt nothing.
My entire universe had narrowed to that red-haired figure on the ground.
The hollowness in my chest began to ache, a throbbing pain that grew with every step.
She was so still. Too still.
I made my way to her side and dropped to my knees. Surely, this wasn’t happening. Surely, she’d open her eyes and smile at me again. Any moment now.
I reached out with a trembling hand, my fingers hovering over her cheek. Her skin, a canvas of life and warmth only hours ago, was pale. Waxy.
This was not sleep. This was not a trick.
It was the stillness of a doll, a beautiful thing with the life gone out of it. An empty vessel.
I looked up, my gaze finding the Cerberus, my old rival, the only other being here who might understand the soul-crushing agony of a severed bond. The syllables that formed in my throat were a stranger’s, a hollow rasp. “What is this? How can this be? She was safe.”
Theron looked down at me, and for once, there was no animosity in his gaze. He glanced at the serpentine creature hiding behind Callista’s skirts. “Phonos... it seems... she looked into Zoe’s eyes.”
“Why does that matter?” I clutched Daphne’s hand, the cold of it seeping into my skin, a horrifying, invasive chill. A hysterical note began to fray the edges of my numbness. Nothing made sense. “A basilisk’s gaze is nothing to the death-touched.”
“She was never death-touched, Phonos.”
A collective sigh went through the small crowd as three figures emerged from the great bronze doors of the Hall. The Moirae. They moved as one, their presence silencing the very air around us.
But no one could silence me now, not when I had my mate’s body in my arms. “Of course she was. All brides of Asphodelia are death-touched.”
“But she wasn’t a regular bride, Phonos,” Clotho replied. “You saw that at your auction. Why do you think all those monsters went into a frenzy?”
“Because of her gift,” I answered. I already knew it wasn’t true. I already dreaded what the Moirae were actually going to say.
Lachesis shook her head. “No. Because even without knowing it, they sensed the incipient death on her.”
I felt sick. All those people at the auction had somehow realized what I’d completely missed. “I don’t understand. How is this possible? Without a death-touched blessing—“
“She should have never lived long enough to get to Asphodelia, anyway,” Atropos cut me off, her words carrying the same finality as her shears. “That’s true. No mortal can survive the death energy here intact.”
“Not without help, at least.” Clotho glanced from Daphne to Callista, an uncommonly sad look on her ageless face. “But you already knew that, Phonos. She said it, didn’t she?”
As I tried to process the meaning of Clotho’s words, a withered petal of asphodel detached from Daphne’s hair. It drifted down, a grey, lifeless husk, and settled on her pale cheek before turning to dust.
Just like that, I understood. It had been the flowers. The crowns I’d constantly woven for her. Because I’d thought their light suited her.
Clotho was right. Daphne had told us outright that Callista’s asphodels had guided her through the Blighted Lands. But they hadn’t just been a guide. They’d been a shield.
The asphodels had been keeping her alive in an environment that was slowly, inexorably poisoning her. They’d sustained her, protected her. And maybe some kind of instinct had told me they were needed. I’d never particularly enjoyed weaving flower crowns, not until I’d seen Daphne on the pier.
But nothing I’d done had been enough. In the end, the asphodels were just flowers. They couldn’t keep her safe from the absolute, unmaking power of a basilisk’s gaze.
My gaze snapped from the dust on her cheek to Charon. “You knew.”
“From the beginning,” he admitted. “I tried to send her away, back to the Korinos Wilds where she belonged. But, Phonos, I am only a servant of the lake. I can demand prices and make trades. I can’t force anyone to take paths they do not desire.”
If I hadn’t felt so numb, I might have burst into laughter. I’d been so stupid. I’d seen his caution as a threat, his wisdom as a trick. I’d thought his offer at the Bride Market was a sign of his malice, when in reality, he’d only been trying to help.
“Why did you never tell me? I’d have taken her away, if I’d known.”
“The lake had made its decision, Phonos,” he answered. “It was out of my hands.”
He’d told me that much earlier today, when I’d first arrived at the pier. I hadn’t understood it then, and in a way, I didn’t understand it now.
Nothing made sense anymore. When my mother had been unwoven, I’d felt nothing but happiness for her good fortune. But now… Now I couldn’t even remember what being happy meant.
I looked back at the Moirae, my last hope for some kind of solution to this insanity. “You promised me. You showed me the thread. You told me she was my match.”
All my life, I’d thought I could trust the Moirae. What reason would they have to harm me, a creature that had come from their own hands? But I’d been a blind fool.
“This was always her fate, Phonos. For her thread to be severed like this,” Atropos said, her tone devoid of any kind of pity. “No seer can escape fate, no matter where they hide.”
She spoke with such calm, as if I was just supposed to accept this unavoidable conclusion. But how could I?
“She wasn’t just a seer. She was my mate. And you let her die. You made sure of it.”
Atropos had been the one who’d stepped in at the Bride Market, when Charon had made his bid. They could have let us know something was wrong a thousand times. But they hadn’t. Why?
“Phonos, you aren’t wrong, and we did not lie,” Clotho said. “She was your mate. But you are a child of death, and she was not. Not every mating can have a perfect balance.”
I clutched Daphne closer, burying my face in the fiery red of her hair, trying to find a trace of her scent, a ghost of her warmth. But there was nothing. Only the terrifying stiffness of something that was no longer a person.
Then, it began, a subtle, sickening shift in her weight in my arms. The skin of her cheek felt suddenly... loose. A faint, cloying odor rose from her, like the smell of fruit left too long in the sun.
I pulled back, my breath catching in my throat.
Her skin, the skin I had kissed only that morning, was beginning to discolor, turning a bruised purple. It seemed to sink, to lose its firmness, pulling away from the delicate bones of her face. Her lips were darkening, peeling back from her teeth in a grotesque snarl.
“No,” I whispered, unable to believe my eyes. I ran my thumb over her cheek, and the skin shifted, threatening to tear.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen mortal death before.
I’d worked as a harvester for decades before my dispute with Theron had forced me to drop my position.
We’d gone through countless battlefields, places of death which, for us, had been a gift.
One that my own family had created. I’d never deemed any of it strange.
That reality suddenly became my worst nightmare. Daphne’s hands began to liquefy, to slough away. Her hair lost its luster, turning dull and brittle as it detached from a scalp that was no longer there.
I was holding a corpse. A decaying, putrefying thing that wore the face of my soul.
Daphne’s flesh melted like tallow, revealing the stark white of her skeleton. The last vestiges of her red hair withered away. For a horrifying moment, I was holding her bones, a fragile frame still wrapped in the remnants of her dress.
A scream built in my chest, a Keres screech born out of the sheer magnitude of my agony.
But before I could unleash it, the final horror occurred.
The bones themselves began to fail. A fine, spidery crack appeared on her skull.
It spread, branching out, and then the entire structure of her face collapsed inward.
The skeleton, no longer held by the grace of a soul, succumbed to the brutal reality of Asphodelia’s energy.
It cracked and fell apart, the bones snapping like dry twigs.
Even the fibers of her gown withered away.
Within seconds, the figure that had been my mate dissolved into a cascade of grey powder. It all sifted through my fingers and settled in a small, pathetic pile on the obsidian ground.
Dust.
She was dust.
The screech in my throat died. I stared at the pile of powder, a last remnant of the woman who had been my entire world. The hollowness in my chest was no longer a wound. It was my entire being.
I lifted my gaze from the ground, feeling utterly numb. Everything I’d ever believed was a cruel fiction. The gift of Thanatos had only ever been a curse, nothing more. And I’d lost my mate to it.
Death wasn’t a power worthy of worship. How could it be, when it had so easily erased the purest thing that had ever existed?
A gust of wind blew through the channel, and Daphne’s ashes began to scatter. I should have reached for them, protected this last part of her that I had left.
But at that moment, I truly understood. She wasn’t coming back. And there was only one way to reach her again.
Dazed but determined, I got up. With every passing moment, my decision was making more and more sense. “Phonos…” I heard someone say.
I didn’t know who had spoken, and I didn’t bother trying to figure it out.
Instead, I launched myself upward, a ragged arrow of pure agony.
It was almost ironic that my wings would work now, when there was no battle left to fight.
But I’d embrace this twisted stroke of good fortune, because I could do little else.
I only had a single hope left. If mortal death had claimed my mate so quickly, surely it wouldn’t refuse me. But to do that, I had to leave Asphodelia.