CHAPTER FOURTEEN
"Choices and Fate"
Tao wouldn't describe herself as a coward. But even the strongest warriors needed to step back sometimes, and she had been in her room for what felt like three days, though time in the Netherworld was not a reliable measure of anything.
The four walls had become too familiar and it felt suffocating. She had been turning over what Hades had told, and she kept arriving at the same uncomfortable question, did it matter?
He hadn't lied. He withheld. Those were meaningfully different things, though the distinction did not make her feel better in any immediate practical sense.
What she kept returning to was not the covenant itself but the moments she had spent with him since arriving here, and whether any of those moments had been genuine or simply the very elegant execution of something that was always going to happen regardless.
She knew, if she was honest with herself, what she believed.
She had always been good at reading people.
A skill she was proud of, and what she had read in Hades, consistently and repeatedly, was not a man executing a plan in efforts to play her.
It was a being who was as surprised by her just as she was by him.
She just wasn't ready to act on that belief yet. She needed to sit with it first.
She left the room and walked.
The corridor was full of voices and the low, rolling energy of the ongoing unrest, and Tao walked through it with her shoulders back and her expression neutral, absorbing the looks that followed her with the practiced indifference she had developed over a lifetime of being watched.
A bitter laugh escaped her somewhere near the entrance to the Elysian fields, because there it was again, the place where she had been happiest, reminding her of exactly what she was trying to decide about.
She went instead to the River Pathana.
The clear water moved softly over its marbled sand and the sound of it was immediately calming.
She sat at the bank and turned the obsidian marble over in her fingers, the one she had found on one of her trips to the outer edges of the Netherworld with Sidius, she had kept it because it was exactly the colour of Hades's eyes, which was information she kept entirely to herself.
She felt his presence before she heard him. The air shifting, a warmth arriving that the river alone did not account for.
"Tao," he said from behind her. His voice was careful, as though he had rehearsed his approach.
"I know what you're going to say," she said, without turning.
"I don't think you do," he replied. He sat beside her at the bank, close enough that the warmth of him was present but not touching.
"I was going to tell you. I had been looking for the right moment for some time, which I understand is not an especially satisfying explanation.
But the truth is that every time I prepared to say it, I watched you look at this place with your own eyes, respond to it in your own way, come to your own conclusions about everything in it, and I didn't want to contaminate any of that with the weight of an obligation that predates you entirely.
" He paused. "I wanted you to choose this, or not, for your own reasons.
Not because you were told a covenant existed. "
Tao turned the marble over in her hand.
"I’ve been intrigued by you, from the moment you walked into my throne room," he said quietly.
"Demanding answers. No grief or shock or the emotions most souls arrive carrying.
Just being direct, something most do not have the grit to do.
" He paused again. "The covenant is a coincidence. What I feel is not."
A long silence passed between them.
"I believe you," Tao said finally.
"You do?"
"I said I believe you. I didn't say I was completely at peace with it yet.
Those are different things." She turned to look at him.
"But I need to go to the Styx. Not because of this, or not only because of this.
The realm is unravelling because my fate is unresolved and that is not only my problem anymore.
It's everyone's problem and I have never been the kind of person who lets someone else carry the cost of something I can fix. "
He looked at her for a long moment. "Do you want me to come with you?"
"No," she said. "This part is mine."
She stood and looked down at him, sitting at the river's edge. She could see that he was not at all pleased with her leaving but he knew that this was her path to walk alone.
"I'll find you after," she said as she left.
?
Sidius fell into step beside her before she had reached the end of the corridor.
"I was waiting," he said simply.
"Were you Charon all along?" she asked.
"Someone has to ferry the stubborn ones," he replied. "The regular process wasn't going to be sufficient for you. I think we both knew that from the beginning."
They walked together in a silence that was companionable.
Tao thought about what she was walking toward and found that she was not afraid.
She had been afraid of very few things in her life, and what she had been afraid of then had taught her that fear was usually pointing at something worth facing.
"How do I know it's the right choice?" she asked, not looking for an answer as much as thinking out loud.
"You don't," Sidius said. "That's what makes it a choice."
The River Styx came into view and its beauty hit her again the way it had the first time, that impossible shimmering light calling to something in her that had no name. The goddess of the river surfaced as she approached, a beautiful siren, her clothes liquid and in a constant flow with the river.
Tao stood at the bank and felt the weight of everything she was about to do settle over her.
"Are you sure?" the goddess Styx asked, the shine of her platinum hair almost blinding in the light. "To be reborn is to release the binds of what came before. There is no returning."
Tao thought about Monica walking free. She thought about Taron's dark circles.
She thought about Priya standing at the graveside in the white crowd.
She thought about her mother's hands in her hair and her father's voice reading to her when she was small, and she thought about Hades at the River Pathana a little while ago, choosing not to stop her.
"Yes," Tao said. "I want this."
The waters flowed gently, moving around her feet, warm and welcoming, and then the world that she had known as the Netherworld released her, and she went under, holding a breath as she went through, coming out on the other side.