Epilogue
Daphne & Charon
The Following Year, Shift Day
“Sister, you have to trust him. Phonos knows what he’s doing.”
I leaned against Aion’s firm arm, digging my fingers into the metal. When I’d decided to come to Asphodelia, I’d never thought I would find family here. But since my forging, since my rebirth at Charon’s hands, Aion had become the closest thing I had to a brother.
“I realize that. It’s just… difficult. And they’re all so loud.”
The roar of the crowd in the Kratos Circle pressed in, threatening to suffocate me. It was Shift Day. Deemed a day of mourning in Korinos, it was a holiday of great importance for the people of Asphodelia. And today, that meant more.
Megaera leaned close, her wing brushing against my bare arm. “Aion is right,” she murmured. “Phonos has been… avoiding this for a long time. But he understands now. Like we do.”
I looked down at the sand, where Phonos and Alecto stood, a united front of black wings and grim determination. Across from them, Zoe waited, a shimmering coil of silver-green scales.
She had grown since that fateful day of my death. She was now a fully mature basilisk, her power a palpable, living thing. This was her first Shift Day spar, a right granted to adult Asphodelians.
She could have chosen any opponent. She’d picked Phonos. A challenge he could not refuse.
Alecto had invited herself for the challenge. I suspected that, in some ways, she saw herself in the basilisk. As if she and Megaera also shared blame for my death, or for Phonos’s loss of composure.
No matter how hard I tried, I could never convince them it just wasn’t true.
“If push comes to shove, Aion, I’ll send you down there to break it up.”
A low rumble escaped his metallic lips. I’d never do it, and he knew that, but simply having the option helped.
A horn blew, its sharp note cutting through the crowd’s roar. The space between the combatants erupted with activity. Zoe lunged, her tail whipping in a low, vicious arc aimed at Alecto’s legs.
Alecto launched herself into the air, a black shadow evading the sweep. Phonos moved in to cover her, his wing striking like a shield to deflect Zoe’s snapping jaws. The sharp metallic clang of the impact almost overshadowed the rising cries of the watching monsters.
“Zoe has grown strong,” Callista said from Aion’s other side, her hand resting on Theron’s massive arm. Her gaze remained fixed on the brutal dance below. “But she is still young. She doesn’t grasp… the meaning of grief. For her, this is a matter of honor.”
Was it? I wasn’t so sure. Up to a point, I felt we’d all made our peace with the pain of the past. But maybe Callista was right, and maybe this would be good for Zoe too.
Down on the floor, Alecto dove from above, a streak of Keres fury.
Her talons raked across Zoe’s flank, and blood welled from the long scratches.
The basilisk roared and spun, her tail a scythe that caught Alecto’s wing mid-flight.
My sister-in-law tumbled into the sand in a shower of dark feathers.
Before Zoe could press her advantage, Phonos was on her. He wrapped his arms around her thick neck and wrestled her head to the ground, his talons digging into her flesh. Zoe thrashed, her powerful body trying to throw him off. Their muscles strained in a primal, silent battle.
A basilisk’s strength would normally overpower a Keres. But Zoe was inexperienced, and Phonos had been battle-tested more times than I could count. In the end, she went limp in his hold. They slumped together on the ground in a strange parody of an embrace.
Then, Phonos’s hand curled around Zoe’s snout, almost brushing her eye with his talons. It was the only real threat that mattered in Asphodelia. The threat of crippling.
By my side, Callista and Theron both tensed. They cared deeply for the basilisk, almost as if she were their child.
They needn’t have worried. Phonos didn’t move. For a long moment, he stayed like that, frozen with his talons inches from Zoe’s eye. Then, with a shudder that ran through his entire body, he pulled back and climbed off Zoe. As I’d known he would.
I hadn’t for a second believed that he’d hurt her. I knew him too well.
Zoe remained perfectly still, her unblinking stare fixed on him. “You are strange, Keres. Why do you not take my sight? My eyes took your mate from you.”
Phonos looked up then, his gaze finding mine across the distance. There was steady strength in him now, a certainty that hadn’t been there when we’d first met. “Did they? I don’t think so.”
He knew exactly what had stolen me, and it hadn’t been Zoe. But we’d vowed to never speak of it again, to never bring up the chains that no longer bound me.
“I do not understand you,” Zoe insisted. “Death is a beautiful thing. And your mate was beautiful when she shed her mortal skin. But Callista said… Callista said you grieved her.”
“I did, yes,” Phonos confirmed. “But I won’t. Ever again.”
This was our simple, perfect truth. We’d be together forever now. I couldn’t even bring myself to be angry anymore for everything that had happened. Not when this was the result.
“For what it’s worth, I mean you no harm,” Zoe hissed. “I am no danger to you, or to the Ferryman’s daughter.”
The moment the words were spoken, I stood. The low murmur of conversation in the stands died as all eyes turned to me. I made my way down the stone steps and walked out onto the arena floor.
By now, Alecto had gotten up. She greeted me with a warrior’s smile, but gratitude glinted in her eyes. She knew that if I hadn’t come back, she’d have lost her brother, in a way even an Asphodelian couldn’t recover from.
I acknowledged her with a nod but stopped beside Phonos. I hooked my arm through his and leaned against his shoulder. Then, I looked at the basilisk, at the creature who had been used to end my mortal life. I felt nothing but a strange, quiet kinship, and perhaps, a form of growing affection.
“We know you’re not a threat, Zoe,” I told her, though a part of me still marveled at the strangeness of my own words. “It’ll take more than a basilisk’s eyes to even graze me right now.”
Zoe dipped her massive, serpentine head, a final gesture of respect to Phonos. Then, she turned toward me. “You shine brightly today, child of Charon. The Acheron’s blessing has settled well on your shoulders.”
“As has Thanatos’s gift settled on your skin.”
She preened, visibly pleased at the praise. Then, she leaned in closer, a strange, almost childlike curiosity flickering in her inhuman eyes. “I had hoped… Perhaps you could explain something to me.”
That I didn’t expect. What could Zoe want to ask me? “Of course,” I replied. “What is it?”
She perked up, her tail swaying slightly on the floor of Kratos Circle. She seemed to have completely forgotten this was supposed to be a spar, not a chat. “They say there are creatures like me that hatch from those eggs in the market.”
Her question was so innocent it caught me completely off guard. An image surfaced in my mind, unbidden and absurdly mundane. The simple, brown-shelled eggs piled in a basket at a stall in the Agora, nestled between pomegranates and a satyr’s horn.
The cyclops stall owner still brought produce in from the Korinos Wilds. Eggs, just like the ones Penelope used to lay, here in the middle of a city of death.
A chicken. A basilisk. A seer brought back from the dead, with a body of both flesh and metal. This was my life now.
I looked at Zoe, at her genuine, searching curiosity, and the last, tight knot of the past finally uncoiled in my chest. She was a mature Asphodelian today, but she was still trying to understand her own story. We were more alike than I’d thought.
I stepped forward, closing the small distance between us, my hand leaving the safety of Phonos’s arm. “Well, I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a basilisk hatching from a chicken egg. But when I was a child, there was this story about two cockatrices…”
The currents of the Acheron were calm.
From my post on the Stygian Docks, I could feel the deep thoughts of the lake, a placid hum that resonated with the distant energy of the Shift Day celebration.
It was hard to believe that, over the past few years, our balance had almost been torn asunder so many times. But new bonds had been born from those battles, steady and harmonious connections that the Acheron had embraced. One I’d personally helped forge. Daphne and Phonos.
“You’ve grown sentimental, Ferryman,” a familiar voice purred from my side.
I turned my head. Phix sat beside me on the cold stone of the pier, her gaze fixed on the mists of the lake. Some days, it felt as if she’d been here all along, a part of the stone and shadow. “You watch the Keres’s new mate not as a guardian, but as a craftsman admiring his own work.”
“I am a servant of the lake,” I grunted. “I monitor all its currents.”
“A servant guides the currents that exist,” she corrected, her unnerving eyes glinting with amusement. “A forger creates new ones. You did it before, you know. With your son.”
“Aion was a necessity. A vessel to contain a power that would have shattered the foundations of this city.”
He’d become more than that, and we both knew it. Phix was too intelligent to point that out.
“And the girl?” she shot back instead, as fearless as always. “Was she a necessity, too?”
“Perhaps she reminds me of another. Of the first spark ignited after the Old World was lost to us. The first soul the Moirae wove on the shores of the Acheron.”
I’d been there. I remembered the terror and chaos of the Shift, the raw, screaming wound in the universe that had birthed this place. We’d been torn from our own world, the three Fates and I, left purposeless in a reality not our own.
And then, the Moirae had taken their first desperate gamble, weaving a creature not just of thread, but of questions and riddles. It had been a test, to see if the new laws of this world would even hold a pattern. It had worked beautifully.
I looked at the sphinx beside me, and for a fleeting second, I saw not the ancient being, but the frightened, newly made thing she once was. “Daphne is necessary in her own way. As were you.”
She rumbled, her wings twitching in surprise. “Well played, Ferryman. You have always had a fondness for necessary things, haven’t you?”
“It is in my nature. I live for the trade.”
She finally turned her head and met my eyes. “You live for your craft, Charon. The Moirae are weavers. They follow the pattern. You… you see the tear in the fabric, and you forge a new creation to close it.”
Phix stood, her great, leonine form stretching in the gloom.
“The Moirae weave past, present, and future, Ferryman,” she mused.
“Their threads are a map of what has been and what will be, a story already written. But beings with no thread… They are creatures outside of time. Creatures only of choices. That isn’t a coincidence. ”
No, it was not. I wasn’t a woven being either, but unlike my children’s, my choices were rarely my own. Acheron willing, Aion and Daphne would never have to shoulder my burdens.
But Phix hadn’t come here to question me about my children, not really. “You’re sentimental, too, aren’t you, Phix? Shift Day always ruffles your fur.”
“Perhaps.” She sniffed the air and stared out into the distance. “I can’t help but feel, Ferryman… Something is changing. The lake is making its own choices, too.”
She was right. The Blighted Lands were expanding. The death-touched brides were becoming stranger. The death energy spoke differently to us now. And the Acheron had blessed Daphne and Phonos.
To what end, I didn’t know. But we were death-blessed on Alia Terra, and we could only do one thing. “We will follow the currents of the Acheron, Phix. Come what may.”
Phix said nothing. She lay down on her paws and closed her eyes, settling by my side in a restless slumber. As for me, I continued to keep watch.
Once, in the Old World, I’d ferried the souls of the dead. Now, I created life. I had no regrets.
Phonos and Daphne have found their sky. But down on the docks, the Ferryman’s son is still waiting. Coming soon: Bought by the Colossus.