I acknowledged her with a nod but stopped beside Phonos. I hooked my arm through his and leaned against his shoulder. Then, I looked at the basilisk, at the creature who had been usedto end my mortal life. I felt nothing but a strange, quiet kinship, and perhaps, a form of growing affection.
“We know you’re not a threat, Zoe,” I told her, though a part of me still marveled at the strangeness of my own words. “It’ll take more than a basilisk’s eyes to even graze me right now.”
Zoe dipped her massive, serpentine head, a final gesture of respect to Phonos. Then, she turned toward me. “You shine brightly today, child of Charon. The Acheron’s blessing has settled well on your shoulders.”
“As has Thanatos’s gift settled on your skin.”
She preened, visibly pleased at the praise. Then, she leaned in closer, a strange, almost childlike curiosity flickering in her inhuman eyes. “I had hoped… Perhaps you could explain something to me.”
That I didn’t expect. What could Zoe want to ask me? “Of course,” I replied. “What is it?”
She perked up, her tail swaying slightly on the floor of Kratos Circle. She seemed to have completely forgotten this was supposed to be a spar, not a chat. “They say there are creatures like me that hatch from those eggs in the market.”
Her question was so innocent it caught me completely off guard. An image surfaced in my mind, unbidden and absurdly mundane. The simple, brown-shelled eggs piled in a basket at astall in the Agora, nestled between pomegranates and a satyr’s horn.
The cyclops stall owner still brought produce in from the Korinos Wilds. Eggs, just like the ones Penelope used to lay, here in the middle of a city of death.
A chicken. A basilisk. A seer brought back from the dead, with a body of both flesh and metal. This was my life now.
I looked at Zoe, at her genuine, searching curiosity, and the last, tight knot of the past finally uncoiled in my chest. She was a mature Asphodelian today, but she was still trying to understand her own story. We were more alike than I’d thought.
I stepped forward, closing the small distance between us, my hand leaving the safety of Phonos’s arm. “Well, I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a basilisk hatching from a chicken egg. But when I was a child, there was this story about two cockatrices…”
The currents of the Acheron were calm.
From my post on the Stygian Docks, I could feel the deep thoughts of the lake, a placid hum that resonated with the distant energy of the Shift Day celebration.
It was hard to believe that, over the past few years, our balance had almost been torn asunder so many times. But new bonds had been born from those battles, steady and harmonious connections that the Acheron had embraced. One I’d personally helped forge. Daphne and Phonos.
“You’ve grown sentimental, Ferryman,” a familiar voice purred from my side.
I turned my head. Phix sat beside me on the cold stone of the pier, her gaze fixed on the mists of the lake. Some days, it felt as if she’d been here all along, a part of the stone and shadow. “You watch the Keres’s new mate not as a guardian, but as a craftsman admiring his own work.”
“I am a servant of the lake,” I grunted. “I monitor all its currents.”
“A servant guides the currents that exist,” she corrected, her unnerving eyes glinting with amusement. “A forger creates new ones. You did it before, you know. With your son.”
“Aion was a necessity. A vessel to contain a power that would have shattered the foundations of this city.”
He’d become more than that, and we both knew it. Phix was too intelligent to point that out.
“And the girl?” she shot back instead, as fearless as always. “Was she a necessity, too?”
“Perhaps she reminds me of another. Of the first spark ignited after the Old World was lost to us. The first soul the Moirae wove on the shores of the Acheron.”
I’d been there. I remembered the terror and chaos of the Shift, the raw, screaming wound in the universe that had birthed this place. We’d been torn from our own world, the three Fates and I, left purposeless in a reality not our own.
And then, the Moirae had taken their first desperate gamble, weaving a creature not just of thread, but of questions and riddles. It had been a test, to see if the new laws of this world would even hold a pattern. It had worked beautifully.
I looked at the sphinx beside me, and for a fleeting second, I saw not the ancient being, but the frightened, newly made thing she once was. “Daphne is necessary in her own way. As were you.”
She rumbled, her wings twitching in surprise. “Well played, Ferryman. You have always had a fondness for necessary things, haven’t you?”
“It is in my nature. I live for the trade.”
She finally turned her head and met my eyes. “You live for your craft, Charon. The Moirae are weavers. They follow the pattern. You… you see the tear in the fabric, and you forge a new creation to close it.”
Phix stood, her great, leonine form stretching in the gloom. “The Moirae weave past, present, and future, Ferryman,” she mused.“Their threads are a map of what has been and what will be, a story already written. But beings with no thread… They are creatures outside of time. Creatures only of choices. That isn’t a coincidence.”
