I nearly fell with relief when I reached the first flower. And beyond it, another, and another, forming a path leading out of the village. The sight of it brought a memory of the great vision rushing back to me. Not the screaming chaos, but a single, clear image that had been buried beneath it. A woman with hair like spun gold, kneeling beside a great, dark beast that was more shadow than wolf.
They had been right here, in this very spot, and this impossible life had bloomed from her touch. It had been a bizarre, incomprehensible fragment then. Now, seeing the flowers with my own eyes, I knew it had been real.
I dropped to my knees, the sweet scent of the asphodels cutting through the rot like salvation. The ghostly voices of Agrion faded. I took a breath that didn’t feel like poison. The nausea began to recede, the throbbing in my head easing.
My trembling fingers plucked the ethereal blooms. I wove them into a messy circlet, tucking more into my tunic before placing the fragile crown on my head. “Thank you,” I whispered to a single flower I held in my hand. “Thank you for being real.”
The flowers gave me a weak but steady purpose. I rose and began to walk, following their glowing trail. The path of asphodels created a bubble of life around me. The journey was still long, but it was no longer impossible.
As I pressed on, the landscape began to change. The ground became harder, more solid stone. The air grew still, and the suffocating mist I had seen in my vision began to creep in. The silence deepened, becoming thick and unnatural.
Finally, the path of flowers ended at the edge of a barren shore. The lake of the dead stretched before me, a perfect sheet of obsidian glass. I stood and waited, a lone, small figure against the silent emptiness.
After what seemed like forever, a dark shape detached from the fog. A black barge glided across the surface of the water without a single ripple.
Poled by a towering silhouette, the vessel came to a silent stop at the shoreline. The figure was tall, impossibly so, wrapped in shadows that seemed to cling to him like a cloak. I couldn’t see a face, but I could feel his presence, almost as ancient as the Shift itself. When he spoke, his words echoed in my bones, not my ears.
“You were looking for me.”
When I’d been a child, orphaned on the streets of Dodona, visions had come to me surrounded by a heavy fog. The gloom of the lake felt just like that. It seemed to have physical substance, a damp weight that pressed against my skin and muffled the world.
As the barge glided through the impenetrable gray, I could almost pretend this was a familiar dream.
“Is it... supposed to feel like that?” I murmured, the words a faint tremor in the oppressive quiet. “Like I could breathe it in?”
The shrouded figure at the fore of the barge didn’t turn. His pole dipped into the motionless surface of the lake. “It is the breath of the Acheron,” Charon rumbled. “It is not foryouto breathe.”
His words did little to comfort me. They only told me what I already knew, that I was a speck of dust in a land of ancient, unknowable forces. But if that was the case, if in this place, even lakes breathed, then maybe my chance of finding my freedom was greater than I’d hoped.
This lake, the Acheron, as Charon had called it, was the final barrier between me and my sanity.
The soundless journey felt like an eternity suspended in gray, a passage to the edge of the world. Then, through the darkness, faint lights began to appear. Bronze braziers marked the end of a long pier that stretched out from a dark island. Their flames burned without a flicker, an unnatural stillness that sent a chill down my spine.
As we approached, the architecture of Asphodelia began to take shape. The sight was so alien it stole the air from my lungs. Pristine white marble rose in elegant columns, so clean and flawless they seemed to reject the very idea of dirt. Structures ofdark basalt drank in the muted light, a perfect blackness that felt like a void.
“It doesn’t look real,” I whispered, overwhelmed. “What is this place?”
“It was not built by mortal hands,” Charon replied, his voice devoid of any emotion. “It is the gift of the Shift, granted by Thanatos’s blessing.”
A blessing. I looked down at my own filthy, broken body and the grime under my nails, choking on the stench of sweat and fear that clung to me. I didn’t feel blessed or protected by the gods any longer. But maybe I could fix that here.
The barge slid to a stop against the stone of the docks with an unnerving silence. Charon secured the vessel with practiced motions and gestured for me to disembark. I followed him onto the walkway. The heavy silence pressed in, broken only by the frantic, erratic thud of my own heart. My world narrowed to that single, dark path and the flawless circle waiting at its very end. The destination of my desperate pilgrimage. The altar.
“Most who make this journey show some hesitation,” he said. He wasn’t looking at me, but I felt his gaze on me all the same. “They carry the scent of the living world, a fear of what they are leaving behind.”
“Fear is a luxury.” I hugged my arms to my chest and was proud when my voice came out steady. “I’m running toward the only thing I have left to hope for.”
“Silence,” he said, his words as still as the lake that had welcomed us.
It wasn’t a question. I didn’t need my gift to know that. It was a statement of fact, of what I’d come here begging for.
“Yes.” I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, the words a raw, desperate prayer. “It’s the only thing I want.”
Charon came to a stop before the obsidian circle. “The trade is absolute,” he warned me. “The lake does not distinguish between the parts of a gift you cherish and the parts you despise. It only knows the source. Your gift is a thread woven into your very being. To remove the noise is tooffer the entire thread to the lake. It will take it all.”
I thought of the convulsions, the screaming chorus of a thousand thousand futures tearing my mind apart. I thought of the end that awaited me if I turned back. I looked at the altar, its promise of peace more comforting than any warm bed.
“I’m not reconsidering,” I replied, moving to the altar and lying down upon the obsidian.
