Epilogue #2
Another wave. The mirror shows me her twin, Apollo.
Sat on the throne in the sun god’s golden palace, his defiant little nymph curled up on his lap as he plucks the strings of his lyre.
With this magic, sound doesn’t travel between realms, and though I can’t hear the song Alex is playing, the look on his Daphne’s face says she’s not impressed—and, yet, she snuggles closer to him regardless.
Another wave. White-winged Eros is soaring through the sky, carrying his pretty soulmate in his arms as though afraid someone will separate them should he loosen his hold.
No point in that fear. I made Psyche immortal at Eros’s request, and now that he has found his forever in a ceramicist named Jolie, they finally have their forever.
Deep down, I think, swinging my arm around Hera, tucking her under my arm, that’s all I’ve ever wanted…
Another wave. In the middle of the labyrinth, in the part of the Other that’s two days’ journey from her home in Delphi, I see the half-man, half-bull minotaur.
His big, monstrous body with his soft hands and kind eyes has the dainty brunette princess of Crete, Ariadne, resting with her head in his big lap.
With wonder on his face, and pure pleasure that he has the right by merit of being her true soulmate to touch her, he’s using his claws to gently comb her dark curls.
I’m glad. Part of Kronos’s power was the ability to shield himself from the one god fated to destroy him.
I didn’t know that he was Teddy Thanos, the “mortal” who hired Hades’s human soul to murder so many of us, or that he had taken over the reborn Theseus until it was too late both times.
Hades paid for my ignorance the first time; poor Aria nearly paid the second.
Convinced she was meant for Theseus until he betrayed her by leaving her to her fate at the hands of the minotaur, Kronos proved that sometimes the Fates trumped his chaos overall.
Because, in this lifetime, the princess was meant for the monster, and the hero is now a shade in the Underworld’s Asphodel Fields until the Fates take pity on him and he’s reborn again.
There was a concession for that. In order to give the befuddled hero a chance to be reborn rather than an unending fate as one of the Unmentionables, the Fates insisted that Ares be allowed the same.
The human soul was banished to whatever hell would take him, but the god of war would one day be allowed to return to Olympus.
Balance. It’s all about balance.
But, sometimes, it’s about true love, too.
One final wave.
The mirror returns to the scene that my wife was watching when I first entered the room. It shows a shy beauty with coils of pink hair, a terrible scar down one cheek, and love in her brilliant blue eyes as she swings a hammer alongside her big brute of a husband.
Hephaestus. Hera’s son she once threw off the side of Olympus—and the one that my Elisabeth has always had a soft spot for from the first moment he opened his mouth and she heard the former pirate’s thick Irish brogue.
She sighs. “He loves her.”
“He does.”
“And he’s happy.”
“He is. So is his Venus.”
Venus. Contrary as ever, Hephaestus refused to refer to the reborn Aphrodite by her Greek name.
He chose the Roman equivalent, and if you ask him, he’ll say it’s because that version sounds enough like her mortal name: Vanessa.
However, Hephaestus was the first of the Twelve I found and brought to this realm.
He’s had the longest to grow resentful of the promises that the magic made, never believing that his beauty would want a beast like him… until her.
And he is happy. What’s more astonishing, though, is that his mother is secretly pleased by that fact.
Hera would never feel that way toward her son. But Elisabeth… my wife is more than worthy of my love and devotion. She commands it, and I’m more than pleased with the prospect of returning to our palace mirrorside.
I’ve earned it. I want it.
And, shifting our positions so that I’m clutching Hera to me, I finally get to have it.
As though welcoming us home at last, the mirror leads us right to the palace that I brought Elisabeth to that fateful evening in 1892.
When I used her tie to me to convince a prim yet sharp-tongued beauty of a society girl to take a walk with her Mr. Dias before I brought her to our ancestral home for the first time.
The first, and over the years, not the last. But they were always mere stops to check in with the magic and the souls that live in this realm before we inevitably had to return mirrorside to continue the search for reincarnates and Kronos.
Now we’re home. We’re finally home. And while all I want to do is swoop my wife up into my arms and carry her off to our marital bed, I pause.
I pause and, reaching through the worlds, I make it so that the enchanted mirror—too close to the reborn Athena for my liking—is shattered to the point that no one will ever be able to cross over that particular portal.
The force of the magic ruffles Hera’s braid.
“What was that, husband?”
I smile down at my wife. “I cracked the mirror.”
She furrows her brow. “Why would you do that?”
I think of Athena looking out at me through the eyes of a five-year-old girl.
I think of a dark-eyed maid that I tricked through the mirror and had to watch as my son cursed her into being a prophetess before she became the witch in the woods.
I think of a World War II veteran who mistakenly killed so many of us reincarnates under Kronos’s command, and who has never been able to forgive himself for it until he threw the titan back into Tartarus without my interference.
My story might have begun and ended with chaos, but the way that I went about paying its price…
It’s time we all enjoy our immortal lives and the soulmates that come with it.
“Because the old ways endure, but they’re not the only ways. We don’t choose to be born the way we are, and with great power comes greater responsibility, but for now… I think it’s time I just spend it all with my wife.”
“No more hunting?”
I shake my head.
“No more affairs.”
I let out a soft chuckle. “Never, my goddess.”
For the first time in a long time, Hera cracks a smile that makes her impossibly more lovely.
She goes up on her tiptoes, pressing a kiss to my lips. “Thank Zeus.”
No, I think.
Thank Konstantinos.