A sudden pressure bloomed on my face. It was the weight of four ancient coins, two against my eyelids, one on my lips, one over my heart. I was back at the ritual where the Ferryman had freed me from my gift.
Charon leaned over me, and his question seemed to reach inside me and squeeze.“Are you certain?”
The realization hit me as hard as my visions once had. Back then, I’d feared he was testing my resolve. But he’d never been talking to me. He had been speaking to the Acheron.
“Very clever, Daphne,”the lake murmured.“You’ve always been both clever and brave. But we wonder… Are you brave enough for this?”
Before I could form an answer, a force of world-breaking power tore through the Acheron’s hold on me. It was a wave of pure, familiar music, the brutal but soft melody that had always brought me such comfort. Phonos’s screech. His soul song.
Phonos’s voice dissolved the endless space around me, and just like that, I could see. But the sight that greeted my eyes wasn’t one I’d expected.
Phonos I’d expected to find. His screech had told me so. Charon’s presence wasn’t that surprising, either. His earlier conversation with Aion had suggested he’d been trying to help me.
But there was something there, between them, a creature I could only stare at in disbelief. My own body, a beautiful shell.
Almost instantly, I knew what Charon had done. He’d crafted me a new physical form. Just like he’d built Aion, with his own two hands. Somehow, impossibly, he’d even managed to give me flesh. But still, his creation… That vessel. It wasn’t a human body.
Charon’s work had been masterful. He’d even done his best to recreate my imperfections, human pores, the occasional, invisible scar. But the vessel emanated a power that terrified me, and its flesh seemed to glow from within.
Phonos’s screech was more than a way out of the Acheron. He was calling me. But if I followed his call, I wouldn’t be the Daphne Phonos had met. I wouldn’t be human.
Could Phonos even love me like that? He hadn’t even loved me before, not really.
“Is that really what you think, little seer?”the lake asked.
I didn’t know anymore. After that final, devastating vision, all my answers had been right in front of me. But now… What was I supposed to do, to say?
I’d felt Phonos’s love for me in our bond. It had been real. But I was so afraid.
The screech intensified, now a melody of such profound loss it vibrated through my very essence. And within the sound, fractured pieces of his soul bled through, vivid and unfiltered.
Daphne…
My name, a desperate, broken prayer.
Mine…
A possessive, primal claim that was not a demand, but an unchangeable fact.
Please… Not an ending…
A plea so raw, so stripped of all his pride and power, that it shattered my doubts and my resolve. Of course he’d never wanted a replacement. He wanted me.
“If you didn’t belong together, it wasn’t because of Callista,”the lake told me.“It was because you weren’t death-touched. Because your own fate wouldn’t have let you go.”
Slowly, the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The difficult answers, the ones I’d missed.“Because I was marked for death from the beginning.”
In hindsight, it should have been so obvious to notice. I’d only ever been able to properly make my way to the lake once I’d found the flowers. Why had I ever believed I could stay in the city of the dead, unhindered and untouched by its power?
“You believed it, because you wanted to, and no one told you otherwise. But now, you don’t need to believe pretty lies. All you need to do…”
“Is to be brave.”
To venture into a new kind of existence. To reach back and embrace my bond with Phonos for a second time.
The threads of fate were never straightforward. I’d spent a lifetime trying to read them, to understand their tangled patterns, and I’d been a fool. I’d seen a single vision of Callista and let my own fear and jealousy twist the pattern into a knot of doubt.
I couldn’t let our story end this way.
