Chapter Thirty-Nine #2
Zagreus’ mismatched eyes burnt. ‘Second cousin.’
Kage almost smiled. Almost asked whether that truly made it better. But Wren nudged his leg with her nose, a silent warning, and he swallowed the thought.
‘Fine,’ Kage said instead. ‘I’ll speak with Mal.’
The look on Zagreus’ face was pure disbelief. Raw, unguarded, and fleeting. Kage suspected he would never see it again.
‘Why are you so willing to help me?’ Zagreus asked.
Kage shrugged, the motion loose and careless. ‘Why not?’
Zagreus stared at him as if the answer itself were an impossibility, as though kindness without motive had no place in a realm built on bargains and blood.
And perhaps, in the Underworld, it truly did not.
‘When you speak to Mal…’ Zagreus hesitated, as though the words themselves scraped on something unfamiliar inside him. As though this, too, was a kindness he did not quite know how to offer. ‘Tell her Eris and my mother are working together. It is Eris who will try to take her child.’
Kage nodded, though uncertainty tugged at him. It felt like a warning wrapped in smoke. Important, but frustratingly vague.
‘Do you know how she plans to do it?’ he asked.
Zagreus’ mouth curved into a teasing smile. ‘Do you truly think they would share such plans with me?’ Yet beneath the humour, Kage caught the irritation, the old, quiet wound of a son forever kept at arm’s length from his mother’s secrets.
‘Could you… find out?’ Kage asked, carefully. Gently. As though pressing too hard might make Zagreus recoil.
Zagreus’ smile sharpened. ‘For you? Of course.’
Kage resisted the urge to react. It was clear enough: Zagreus understood bargains and favours, trades weighed and measured. What unsettled him was this. Help offered freely, without demand or debt.
In the Underworld, generosity was a language rarely spoken. And Zagreus was still learning its sound.
‘Why don’t you want to marry Eris?’ Kage asked as they set off once more, Wren padding between them, her bright eyes glinting with something suspiciously close to amusement, if such a thing were possible for a giant white wolf. Kage had long suspected it was.
‘Would you want to marry your second cousin?’ Zagreus replied, tilting his head as though the answer were self-evident.
‘I thought gods did not care about such things,’ Kage said mildly. ‘Do you not marry your own siblings?’
Zagreus waved the notion away with a sharp flick of his hand.
‘Believe it or not, we are not as vile as mortals like to claim. Marriage among the gods is about power. Strategy. If you wed your own sibling, you gain nothing. So no, we do not fuck our own families, Kage Blackburn. At least not most of the time.’
Kage ignored the irritation flashing behind those mismatched eyes and continued along the winding path. A river shimmered to their right, its dark surface catching the faint light of the Underworld, and an inexplicable pull urged him towards it.
‘We marry into other godly bloodlines,’ Zagreus went on, following him with visible reluctance, his annoyance growing the further they strayed from the road to Tartarus. ‘To claim a sliver of their power. To strengthen our own.’
Kage had already noticed the figure standing by the riverbank, motionless, watching the water as though it held answers. He could not have said why he felt drawn closer, only that with every step, a quiet certainty tightened in his chest.
By the time he reached them, his suspicions had solidified into something cold and unmistakable.
He reached out and touched the stranger’s shoulder.
The soul must have sensed him coming, for she turned at once.
Kage’s gaze lifted to the antlers first, then drifted down to the face before him—a face he had encountered once on the road, fleeting and unassuming. A face he knew, without doubt, was at this very moment escorting his body back towards his own lands.
Rio Hawthorne smiled.
‘Well, hello, Kage Blackburn,’ she said lightly.
He wanted to return the greeting, to offer some semblance of composure, but his attention snagged on her eyes. Green. Clear. Seeing.
Eyes that had once been blind, forever veiled in clouded stillness.
But here…
Kage knew that the Underworld was a place of strange mercies. Certain losses did not follow a soul beyond death. The deaf could hear. The mute could speak. It did not entirely surprise him, then, that Rio Hawthorne could see within this realm of death.
‘You can see,’ he said quietly.
‘Of course she can see,’ Zagreus cut in. ‘All souls—’
Kage cleared his throat, the sound sharp enough to halt Zagreus mid-thought.
‘I know that,’ Kage said, his voice tight. ‘But she isn’t dead.’
Zagreus frowned, confusion knitting his sharp features. ‘Of course she is. How could she not be? And how would you know?’
‘Because I check on my body every single night,’ Kage replied, exasperation bleeding through at last. ‘And she was very much alive only a few hours ago.’
Zagreus shrugged. ‘Then she must have just died.’
‘Perhaps.’ Kage’s attention returned to Rio, to the way she watched them now, her smile deepening with quiet amusement. ‘But I doubt it.’
‘How clever you are, Kage Blackburn,’ she said, a soft laugh threading through her words. ‘It truly is a shame you died.’
‘Then how are you here,’ he asked quietly, ‘if you are not dead?’
Rio shrugged, the motion loose and almost careless. ‘That is a rather long story.’
‘We have plenty of time,’ Zagreus drawled, leaning closer, curiosity sharpening his tone.
Rio studied them both for a long moment, her glare unflinching, before she sighed, as if conceding to an inevitability.
‘I was given the eyes of a goddess,’ she said at last. ‘They allow me to see the realms of the gods.’
Zagreus and Kage exchanged a glance, unease settling between them.
‘There is only one god capable of that,’ Zagreus said slowly, fear tightening his voice. ‘Only one who could move freely through every realm. One of the originals.’
‘I thought there were three originals,’ Kage said, rifling through memory. ‘Hades, Zeus, and the Sun God.’
Zagreus shook his head. ‘No. There were more. One even they feared.’
Kage turned back to Rio. Her smile widened, stretching into something sharp and knowing.
‘Who?’ Kage asked, watching the way her expression tipped into something dangerously pleased.
‘Nyx,’ Zagreus answered, the name heavy as a curse. ‘The goddess of night. Zeus’ first wife. The mother of Thanatos and Eris.’