If I’d had a mouth to move, I might have gasped. This was water. I was in the lake. The Acheron.“What am I doing here?”
“You are waiting,”the lake answered. A simple response that told me much too little.
“Waiting for what? What happened?”
The moment I said the words, I remembered. Finding Callista. The flash of green from the dark canal. The surreal sight of those serpentine eyes. Then… Pure nothing.
Perhaps it should have shocked me, but a part of me had always wondered if one day, I’d black out and never wake up again. Now, I finally had my answer.“I’m dead.”
A deep, ancient amusement rippled through the water.“Are you?”
Before I could process the question, the space around me flickered. The darkness thinned, and an echo from the world above bled through, faint and distorted.
An arrow of familiar power shot forward and snapped against an unbreakable barrier. I mentally flinched at the distinctive sound of breaking bones.
Someone was hurting themselves. Someone I knew.
The person was coming closer and closer to the water, their presence so familiar I could almost feel it on my skin. I reached out, wanting nothing more than to heal their pain.
“You are still so kind, little seer,”the lake said, and moved with me.
The mysterious man’s injuries healed, and just like that, he disappeared from my reach. A part of me felt a keen sense of loss. Where had he gone?
Then, I heard them. The distant ripples of voices resonated in my mind, crisper than they should have been.
“...your sisters. Your House. Yourself. Is that the legacy you wish to leave for the one you grieve?”
I’d only heard that voice once, at the bride auction, but I could never have forgotten its distinctive, ancient tone. It belonged to the sphinx. Phix.
When Phix got her answer, so did I.
“Always one for riddles, Phix. But this time, you know nothing. You do not even understand the meaning of grief.”
It was him. Phonos. My mate. He was the one hurting, breaking, suffering, and still reaching for me. Of course. Who else could it have been?
“He doesn’t understand,”the lake told me,“not yet. He’s always sought easy answers for his problems. In a way, so have you. But nothing in Asphodelia has ever been easy.”
I bristled, outrage bubbling through my suspended consciousness. If I didn’t understand hardship, who did? I’d crawled bleeding and screaming through the ruins of my own sanity, and still had nothing to show for it.
But something silenced my tongue, and it wasn’t the fact that, technically, it didn’t exist. There was a layer of deep meaning in the lake’s words, something that kept me from dismissing its wisdom entirely.
Somewhere in the distance, the sharp edges of Phonos’s grief grated against the silence. I could feel every torn feather, every line of wrongness in the flow of his death energy. Why? The question tormented me, and there were no easy answers.
The lake water went blurry again, and new voices came through, clearer this time, closer.
“Are you sure about this, Father?”Aion asked, an edge of concern cracking his usually mellow voice.
“As sure as I can be. That girl… She deserved better.”
It was Charon, and for whatever reason, he wanted to help me. The unexpected sentiment flowed through my awareness, a strange, formless current of regret.
“The lake…”Aion insisted.“Won’t it be angry with you?”
“If the lake were angry, we’d know it,”Charon shot back with the certainty of a man who’d led countless souls to their damnation.“She is still there, waiting. The Acheron always knows best. It is always certain.”
Certain.
The word echoed into my mind, lifting the fog from my memories. The blackness around me dissolved, and the hard stone of the Stygian Dock materialized beneath my phantom form.
