But Daphne didn’t reject it, nor did she recoil from the colossus. She actually seemed to be considering it, but looked at me before answering.
Aion was metal, not flesh. And if Daphne wanted to stay at all, it was clearly because of me.
This was the only solution that kept her here, within my reach. Taking a deep breath, I gave a single, begrudging nod. “A perfect compromise.”
Now if I could only make myself believe it.
3
The Asphodel Crown
Daphne
The asphodel petals had stopped glowing.
They were still beautiful, ghostly things that felt like cool velvet against my thumb. But the pulsing light that had led me out of the Blighted Lands was gone. The flowers looked dormant now, like snow that had settled in a dark valley.
I ran my fingers over the woven stems, anchoring myself to the texture. They were the only physical proof that I hadn’t hallucinated my own salvation.
It had been a full day since Charon had pulled the coins from my eyes. The throbbing ache behind my eyes was gone, replaced by a clarity that felt sharp and cold. I’d scrubbed the mud and bloodfrom my skin in a basin of dark water, eaten bread that tasted of nothing, and slept without a single dream. The flowers were sleeping, and for the first time in years, I was simply... awake.
I looked up from the crown in my lap to the cavernous space around me. The workshop felt less like a room and more like the inside of an intricate mind. Shadows clung to the high, vaulted ceiling, hiding tools that looked large enough to dismantle a mountain. Unfinished barges lay on massive tables, alongside small boxes very much like the one that had claimed my gift.
Aion stood near the center of the cavern, his fingers trailing over the hull of a vessel. It was crafted from something he called Stygian iron. A ship built to survive another Shift. A ship almost as strange as Aion himself.
He’d been keeping me company since the day before, and I found comfort in his presence. “Charon made all of this?” I asked him, leaning heavily against the wooden back of my bench. “The barges, the tools... everything in here?”
“He did,” Aion replied, and his voice washed over me in a soft, resonant hum. It was deep, but without a single sharp edge, like a low note held on a massive instrument. “My father remembers the Old World, where he lived before the Shift. He builds to keep his hands busy, I think. To preserve the shape of things that used to be.”
His massive bronze form didn’t move like one of Charon’s strange devices. If I hadn’t known any better, I could have sworn he was as human as I was, another resident of the KorinosWilds who just happened to paint his skin gold. But every time he turned, a vein of blue death energy pulsed beneath the metal skin, and the bronze rippled.
He couldn’t hide from his own nature. The same way I hadn’t been able to. But unlike me, he didn’t seem to mind it.
“And you?” I asked, knowing I shouldn’t be prying, but unable to stay silent. “Did he build you to remember something, too?”
Aion paused. He turned his face toward me, the blue light in his eyes flickering as he studied my expression.
“He built me to be a vessel. Like the barges.” He tapped his own chest, over what should have been his heart. “I was meant to hold energy, not thoughts. But the energy changed me.”
“Changed you how?”
“It gave me a mind. But it did not give me a fate.” He took a step toward me, the heavy thud of his weight echoing in the quiet. “The Moirae did not weave me, Daphne. I have no thread for them to measure or cut.”
The admission made my breath hitch. In a world where I had been choked, dragged, and nearly drowned by the Weave, the idea of a creature existing outside of it felt impossible.
A strange sense of kinship took root in my chest, warm and solid. We were both errors in the fabric of existence. I was a seer whohad bought blindness. He was a machine who had grown a soul. A friend maybe. The one who’d given me the chance to stay in Asphodelia. “No thread at all? You’re just... here?”
“I am just here,” he confirmed, his bronze features shifting into what might have been a smile. “Existing by the grace of my father’s hammer, not the Weavers’ loom.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “That sounds peaceful.”
“Peace is a luxury for the dead, Seer.”
The voice vibrated through the floorboards, a seismic rumble that traveled up through the floor. I turned and found Charon standing in the threshold, leaning on his ferry pole.
I’d been overwhelmed when I’d first met him, then thankful, but now… Now, I didn’t know what to think.
He’d received me in his home, not with grace, perhaps, and only because of Aion. But he hadn’t thrown me out. And yet, there was something in those icy eyes that made my skin crawl. “For the living,” he continued, “there is only movement.”
