Chapter 16 A Titan’s Choice
Danae paused, the knife raised above her head.
‘Do it,’ Heracles croaked.
During the long year she’d spent searching for the Underworld, she’d sometimes tortured herself by imagining how the hero would react if he ever saw her again.
She had expected hatred, fury, even violence.
Some proportionate response to her betrayal of all they’d shared.
She had killed his closest friend, stolen his lion hide and abandoned him outside the city of Colchis.
She’d never dreamed she would be met with acceptance. It was almost as though he was trying to make this easier for her.
Hades must have broken him too.
Time moved like a ponderous drip of honey, and as she gazed into Heracles’ gaunt face, the last words of Prometheus’ prophecy echoed in her mind.
Become the light that frees mankind.
If one brief walk upon the earth was all mortals had, she owed it to every living soul to fight for them. Every single one.
Hades smiled as Danae plunged the knife down.
At the last moment, she twisted, Hades’ mouth distorting as she sank the blade into his heart. The God of the Underworld staggered back, his pale face stretched in an agonizing grimace, the bone handle protruding from his chest.
She could never hope to become the light if she allied with the darkness. Hades might have promised to give her an Underworld army to defeat Zeus, but he was one of the Twelve, and under his reign mortals would never be free.
Heracles sagged onto all fours as Charon let go of him, sucking in desperate lungfuls of air, eyes stretched wide in disbelief. He stared up at Danae as though seeing her for the first time. The ferryman stood still as the rock around them, his crimson gaze locked upon his wounded master.
Danae ran to Heracles and tried to help him to his feet.
‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’
He flinched beneath her hands. He felt so frail, like he might shatter at any moment.
A world away from the last time they had touched.
A memory jolted through her: strong, calloused fingers, tugging the clothes from her body, warmth spreading through her.
Then a cold slab hard against her back. She shuddered.
Like the ferryman, most of the Missing looked on in paralysed disbelief as their master, their tormenter, bled onto the floor of their cell.
Danae had almost helped Heracles to his feet when there was a scream behind her.
Hades, his chest heaving with the last vestiges of life, had grabbed the nearest mortal by her ragged tunic and dragged her down to the floor with him. With a guttural moan, he ripped the knife from his chest, slashed it across the woman’s throat, then wrapped his fingers around her neck.
Time seemed to halt, then, like a river rushing towards a waterfall, suddenly regained speed.
‘No!’ Danae let go of Heracles and lunged towards Hades as he drained the woman’s life-force. She had aimed too high: the knife had pierced the flesh above his heart, and, aided by the mortal’s life-threads, the wound healed in the space of two breaths.
Danae made it halfway across the cave before Hades straightened up and conjured a gust of wind that hurled her back against the far wall. She cried out as her bones cracked against the rock, her limbs pinned under the pressure of his life-threads.
Heracles staggered and once again fell to his knees as the rest of the Missing cringed back, clustering into the depths of the cave. Charon stood between Hades and Danae, his crimson gaze flashing between them.
The Lord of the Underworld’s pale eyes burned with icy rage.
‘How disappointing,’ he spat through blood-flecked teeth.
Her heart thundered as he advanced, his arm outstretched as though he would drain her just like he had the mortal.
But before Hades reached her, Charon unleashed a guttural cry and charged his staff upwards, ramming its crystal end into the ceiling. There was a blinding flash of pure white light, then part of the cave collapsed.
Danae slid down the wall, no longer pinned by Hades’ life-threads.
Then a gloved pair of hands grabbed her.
She coughed, her lungs full of dust, unable to see as the ferryman dragged her out through the doorway, leaving Hades, Heracles and the Missing trapped in the cave on the other side of the fallen ceiling.
‘Wait,’ she spluttered, as Charon pulled her down the passage, ‘Heracles …’
But the ferryman only increased his speed.
Danae dug in her heels. ‘Stop!’ she coughed. ‘Why are you helping me?’
This could be a trick, another of Hades’ tortures designed to dangle hope in front of her only to snatch it away.
Charon grunted in frustration, turned towards her and held his staff aloft, then touched the glowing crystal to her chest.
Danae’s brow furrowed. ‘I don’t …’
Frantically, the ferryman nodded towards the crystal.
‘The light?’
He nodded again, then once more pressed the glowing rock to her sternum.
She drew a sharp breath. ‘I … I am the light.’
The ferryman continued to nod emphatically.
‘You know about Prometheus’ prophecy. You know who I am.’
He nodded once more, slower this time. A heartbeat passed between them, her oak-brown eyes staring into his crimson orbs, then he continued to tug her along the tunnel, away from the heart of Tartarus.
‘But Heracles … I can’t leave him.’ She tried again to pull back, but Charon tightened his grip on her arm and forced her onwards.
Try as she might, she did not have the strength to fight him.
His panic betrayed his thoughts without him having to voice them.
The rockslide would slow Hades down, but it would not keep him trapped for long.
They stumbled through passage after passage, the rough stone walls glowing with the same light-pulsing roots that laced the tunnels leading to the entrance of the Underworld.
After a while the ferryman eased his grip on Danae’s arm.
They had taken so many twists and turns, she would not have been able to find her way back to the Missing’s cave without him.
Then she heard it.
The roots were singing again. It was the same song Orpheus had serenaded the tendrils with at the bronze gates.
They reached another fork in the passage, and Danae stopped moving. Charon tugged her arm, gesturing towards the left tunnel, but her head twitched to the right, following the source of the vibrations. They were growing louder.
The clatter of a stone echoed in the passageway behind them. Charon let go of her, raising his staff aloft.
Something about the strange music called out to her. Compelled, she took off down the right-hand tunnel, following the song as the roots hummed louder and louder.
At the end of the passage she came to an oak door, half hidden in the shadow of an alcove. She tried the handle. It was open.
She stepped through it and found herself at the bottom of a staircase. The walls were cracked and the steps roughly hewn, wispy lengths of roots prising through the gaps like strands of hair, vibrating with the Thracian tune.
Another door waited at the crest of the stairs, twisted with more of the pulsing tendrils. Danae slowed as she approached, her heart hammering as the hum of the song grew louder. She went to turn the bronze handle, but the door opened of its own accord.
The room was devoid of furniture or belongings of any kind. Like an ancient structure left to the ravages of time, the dark stone was ruptured with roots, across the floor, walls and ceiling. And all of them, however large or small, led towards the same central point.
Danae’s mouth fell slack as she stared at the far wall.
It was difficult to determine where the roots ended and the woman began.
She hung above the ground, her limbs held flush to the wall by a web of tendrils.
They even wound around her tawny locks, splaying them against the stone like she was floating underwater.
Her skin was deathly white, and through a binding of roots, the iron ring of a collar like Danae’s was visible around her neck.
But the tendrils were not just holding her in place, they were part of her.
Like veins that had escaped her body, tiny roots pierced the skin of her wrists and ankles.
They burrowed their way into every crevice; her ears, her nostrils, her mouth.
And above her heart, twig-like branches sprouted from her chest, their bark decorated with pale leaves and delicate blossom.
This must be the Queen of the Underworld. Persephone.
Danae’s throat thickened as images whirled through her mind.
The young priestess who had dressed as Persephone for the Thesmophoria back on Naxos, her white dress fluttering, bright eyes gleaming as her feet pounded the earth, dancing with another priestess dressed as her mother, Demeter.
In the tale Danae had been told, Persephone was stolen away to the Underworld by a lustful Hades, allowed only to return to the world above for six months of the year.
But the woman before her looked as though she had not seen daylight in centuries.
Persephone’s lips were parted, moving as though singing the words to the song the roots hummed, her eyes rolled back in her head.
Hades must have done this to Persephone; mutilated her just like the shades. Danae could see it would be fruitless to try and extract the goddess from the roots. She and the tendrils were one.
Behind Danae, the door crashed open, and Charon ran into the room.
The last line of music settled in the air, and Persephone’s eyes spun back to reveal irises of milky white surrounding ink-black pupils.
‘You brought the lark to my gate.’ Her voice was thin and strangled as though there were roots wound around her vocal cords.
‘It was you singing.’ Danae stared at the web of roots splaying out from the goddess like lace-woven wings. She had suspected the tendrils had a higher intelligence; she never dreamed it was Persephone who was controlling them. That they were part of the goddess.
‘Your companion’s song reminded me of sunlight, and birdsong, and the grass beneath my feet. I had forgotten, but I was glad to remember.’
‘His name was Orpheus. He’s dead.’
‘Ah … they all perish in the end. All my little pets.’ Persephone blinked. ‘Will you sing for me, like the lark did?’
Charon grabbed Danae’s shoulder, pulling her back.
The goddess let out a strangled cry. ‘I did not bid you leave! I will have you caged, little bird.’
Little bird. Little Titan.
Danae looked at the ferryman, eyes sweeping over the ring of jangling keys hooked into his belt, and the knife sheathed beside them.
She reached for the blade. Charon did not stop her.
Danae gripped the knife, the whites of her knuckles pressing through her skin as she turned and walked towards Persephone.
She wanted to take something from Hades. Just like Alea, Arius, Manto and her horse’s namesake, Hylas, had been taken from her. In that moment, she did not see a woman, only a false god, kin to those who had destroyed her family.
Danae reached up and slashed Persephone’s thigh in a place she knew death would follow moments later.
Blood sluiced down the wall, and a great surge of light ran through the network of roots as the goddess’s threads returned to the tapestry of life. Persephone gasped, the roots across her lips trembling, then the tendrils went dark.
Danae was still as the blood pooled across the floor. Only when Charon once more grabbed hold of her arm and tugged her towards the door did she allow herself to be moved.
She had taken lives before in the heat of battle.
The heady rush of fighting for her own skin had never left much space to contemplate the consequences of her actions.
This should be different. She had extinguished a life knowing it would cease to exist. She had killed the Queen of the Underworld. But she felt nothing.
They continued on through the passage at the bottom of the stairs, Danae’s blood-stained feet slapping against the floor, their way lit only by Charon’s staff.
They hadn’t gone far when cries echoed from further down the tunnel, accompanied by the clang of metal.
‘Aim for the eyes!’
‘I’m trying! Where the fuck did the light go?’
Danae’s frown deepened. One voice was full of flint and honey, the other resonated with timber and bronze.
Breath hissed between her lips. Perhaps it was her torture-addled mind deceiving her, but she could have sworn she recognized those voices.