“To answer your questions, nothing is happening to you. Nothing that you haven’t brought upon yourself. You may not want to believe it—I have seen enough dead float through Styx to understand that being here can be a shock—but you are in the Underworld. The sooner you accept this, like all who’ve come before you, the better it will be for you.”
She sniffed but remained silent, and he took it as permission to continue.
“As to what I want.” He stood. “I want you to get off the floor and tell me why Hades has brought you here.”
He offered his hand, and as he took in Cyane’s wide, brown eyes, he watched as she surprisingly raised her hand to take his.
Cerberus pulled her to her feet as warmth flooded his limb. He released her and curled his hand into a fist.
He didn’t turn to see if she followed him as he continued down the hall. There was no need, the ever-watchful eyes of his dogs told him she was. Besides that, there was only silence between them.
Cyane’s gaze was on his back, his armor, his xiphos sword. He, like most of the undying ones, had a great sense of when they were being watched. Prayers, sacrifices, and celebrations honoring them often had so much pull to one of his kind, even if many of the mortals had forgotten that.
So he knew without looking that Cyane’s attention was on him. Like a soft touch or a tickle along the spine.
“Are you really Cerberus?” she asked suddenly, ending the silence he enjoyed. “The three-headed dog that guards the river Styx and is a companion to Hades?”
“I’m a three-headed dog now?” He hummed. “Yes.”
Her footsteps scurried up to his side. Cerberus slowed his gait to let her catch up.
The closer she was to him, the easier it would be to tear her secrets out.
“I hate to point this out,” she hesitated as if she was afraid of offending him, “but you don’t look like a three-headed dog.”
“No. My lord gifted me the form of a man. I’ve been told it would be rude to ignore his generosity.”
“The thing I saw earlier…”
He glanced down at her.
The female stood a foot shorter than him, with golden skin not unlike the gods that lived above. Now that he had the time to really look at her, he took in his fill.
She’s staring at the floor anyway.
Her hair was a light brown, much like the sacred dirt on Olympus that he would never get the chance to stand upon. It was tied up by a ribbon with curls bunched around her neck, falling down a little and more like the way of maidens who’d just lost their innocence styled their hair. A new emotion bloomed within him, compelling him to thread his fingers into her hair and undo it, let her hair fall free around her shoulders, to return her stolen maidenhood. A scowl threatened to return to his lips.
“...every time I picture it in my mind, there are more teeth, more fiery eyes, and tongues lashing out at me than I can count,” Cyane said, her words breaking through the fog in his mind. “I don’t even think there were tongues before…”
His eyes snapped away from her when she looked up at him.
They turned down a dark path that led to a stairway, leading her deeper into the castle.
“Perhaps your mind is playing tricks on you. I heard your kind imagine all sorts of things in the dark,” he said.
“It wasn’t a three-headed dog. It was something...something else. Where are you taking me?”
“You wanted to leave, correct?”
“You’re letting me leave?” she asked with a hopeful tone.
Cerberus came upon a large red door with his symbol carved into it—not the three-headed beast Cyane had questioned him about, but a hundred-headed one. He opened it to reveal a wide, open space with a large terrace that overlooked Hades’s Castle and the river Styx before it.
Cyane fell silent beside him, staring across the way at the castle. Cerberus ushered her into the room and stood quietly in front of the door as he watched her slowly make her way towards the terrace to look out at Tartarus.
She gasped. “I thought… I thought we were inside Hades’s castle.”
“We were. Until you crossed through the door.”
