I forced myself to open my eyes. Phonos hadn’t pulled away. Folding his wings tight against his back, he looked at my shaking, disgraceful form and accepted my panic without judgment. “Then the air is not for us.”
The vertigo receded, replaced by a shock so profound it left me breathless. He was a creature of the air. For him, flight would be a natural part of his being. But he wasn’t demanding I conquer my fear for his sake. In a world that had demanded everything from me, my sight, my sanity, my memories, he was the first person who simply asked what I needed.
“You...” The question fractured on the way out, brittle with disbelief. “You aren’t going to ask why?”
Phonos shook his head and smiled. “I said I would show you the city. I didn’t say we had to look down on it.” He offered me his arm, turning his back on the open sky. “Sometimes, even a Keres has to walk.”
“I still can’t believe this place exists.”
I crouched low, the unforgiving black marble a shock of cold that shot straight through my knees. The white asphodel growing from the silver-blue crystal cluster defied everything I knew about nature. It thrived in this vacuum, a fragile breath of life where none should have been. When I brushed my fingers against the petals, a living heat pulsed against my skin.
Phonos stopped beside me, his footsteps heavy with the absolute certainty of a creature standing in his own territory.
“Asphodelia exists because the Shift’s power must go somewhere. We simply gave it architecture.”
The thick atmosphere rushed into my lungs, filling the new emptiness in my head. For years, that space had been a chaotic storm of premonition. Now, this sweet, cloying pressure occupied it, holding me together when I felt like I might simply dissolve. “The air feels... dense.”
“That’s one way of putting it.” Phonos moved to the railing, his dark wings rustling with quiet grace. “What you feel, Daphne, is Thanatos’s gift. The death energy that sustains us all. It is a physical force here, as real as the stone beneath your boots.”
Thanatos’s gift.There it was again, that reference to the god of death. I’d heard it from Charon, and from countless others in my visions. Somehow, coming from Phonos, it sounded different.
The question formed before I could stop it. “Phonos... Do you ever hear anything? In the death energy of your people?”
He didn’t answer right away. The quiet stretched, filled only by the low hum of the city. A stillness came over his face, a flicker of something ancient and guarded in his eyes.
“It’s not one of my gifts,” he replied, the words carefully chosen. “But I did... Once.”
A sharp pang of envy shot through me, hot and unwelcome. He’d heard it, but only once. It had been a singular, profound moment for him. Perhaps he even treasured it. For me, it had been a plague.
“Before I came here, I had a hen,” I blurted out. “Penelope. I gave her to the miller’s boy when I chose the path toward the blight.”
“You miss her,” Phonos answered. He didn’t seem to find my comment strange. I hadn’t seen any domestic animals in Asphodelia, but no doubt, the people here had far more unusual habits.
“I miss her, yes. I miss her innocence. She didn’t know about threads. She didn’t know about the end of the world or the Loom. She just knew about barley and dirt. She never had to look up. She never had to see what was coming.”
I swallowed against the sudden tightness in my throat. “My sight helped me too, Phonos. At first. But then... It was a constant scream inside my skull.” Turning away from him, I looked out at the impossible city. “The noise drowned out all sense. It unmade me from the inside out. Erased thought, then memory, then self.”
The memory of it brought a phantom pressure behind my eyes. Simply speaking about it hurt. But now that I’d started speaking, I couldn’t make myself stop. “I woke up in agony. I went to sleep in agony. I was going mad. I came here because I wanted to be deaf to the future.”
Phonos stepped closer, his presence blocking the glare from the crystals. “I understand. You speak of the Weave. It was a burden to you. Too vast for a single mind.”
The steady certainty in his voice almost crippled me. “You don’t think it was wrong? To throw away that fate? To discard what the gods gave me?”
He shook his head slowly and offered me a quick smile. “I don’t trust the Ferryman. His prices are often cruel. But if he took that pain from you... then I am glad it’s gone.”
A slow heat unfurled beneath my ribs, a feeling so foreign it was like discovering a new limb. My fingers felt small as I slid them into the crook of his elbow. The dense muscle and radiating warmth of his arm anchored me, and I let myself be tethered. “I’m glad, too,” I replied. A paltry answer, considering what the Ferryman had done for me. But I had no words left.
It would have been easy to linger in this moment forever. I certainly wouldn’t have minded. I’d deemed these simple pleasures lost when I’d left Penelope behind, but maybe not. Maybe I could find something just as pure here.
A low, layered hum of activity reached us from farther down the walkway, snapping me out of my trance. “What’s that?” I asked.
“The Agora,” Phonos murmured, his gaze following mine. “Let’s see.”
As he led me toward the source of the clamor, I almost immediately regretted my curiosity. With every step, the gentle thrum resolved into a cacophony of distinct, overlapping arguments. A shrill, piercing haggle over prices. A deep, resonant query about a weapon’s origin. The discord grew louder, sharper, scraping over the barely settled quiet in my head.
I’d never much cared for marketplaces. When I’d been growing up in Dodona, they’d been a necessary evil, the only place I could find food.
But after… If there was anything I’d truly liked about my days living as a hermit, it must have been the utter lack of anything like commerce. How strange, that I’d find it again here, in a place that should have been devoid of any life.
