And she would.
Die.
There was no other way.
Humans were not built to last forever. They were creatures made for entropy. Made to burn up and fizzle out like a flame. Dust to dust. At least it could make hers a peaceful sleep. No suffering. Not the way the others suffered.
And, anyway, she’d asked for this.
She held, in her hands, a piece of the underworld. An obol for the gods. The rules were rules, older than time and unchangeable. It would grant her passage. It would permit her one last request.
In the open door, the demon crept closer. The dead followed him like nervous dogs. Hiding behind him. It wondered if the boy knew he was something imperial. A half man, with Hell in his veins, fit for lording over the dead. One day, perhaps, he too would keep dominion alongside them.
Strange.
But it had seen stranger, in its eons on this stone.
The door was weakening. Withering. It was time. Time to shut the way to men. Time to leave the space between worlds in the keeping of the dead.
It took a breath—a supremely human thing to do, but the girl had worn on it. The breathing had become something sweet, the way the rest of her was sweet.
It closed its eyes.
It ripped the girl apart.
It felt very sorry to do so. But there was no other way.
The dead screamed.
And so, too, did the demon.
All the world winnowed to a still.
And then, at long last, there was quiet.
Delaney Meyers-Petrov was not made of glass. She was made from carbon and atoms. From skin and from bones. From something much too deep and much too quiet to name. She was pressed and pressed and pressed. She shone like adamant.
She was sitting on the edge of a pond. The air was cold, but she didn’t feel it on her skin. She only glimmered, refracted like ice, like the polyhedral planes of a diamond cut to a sheen. Like something other. The water was flat and white, the surface frozen solid, save for a single dark pool atop a break in the ice. Fingers of blue bisected the rim in angry cracks, as if something had gone through and not resurfaced. A bubble rose. Another. The little muddy pool lapped at the ice.
Behind her, fat conifers rose up in sheaves of darkest green, branches bowed beneath thinning mantles of slow-melting snow. It drip-drop-dripped in crystalline flashes, like falling jewels in the ambiguous light. Overhead, the sky was the color of slate, the sun only a suggestion, an imprint, a memory, not quite correct.
It looked, some part of her realized, like the pond near her house, where her parents used to take her to skip stones. They’d spread out a blanket on the beach and her mother would set out an array of treats. Fat green grapes and baby carrots as long as her fingers, cucumber sandwiches cut into triangles, hefts of raisin-stuffed bread from the bakery, apple juice with a bendable straw. This memory, too, seemed like something faraway. Something she’d cobbled together.
And, anyway, this beach was not a beach at all, but a field. No sand, no mud, only flowers. White and brittle, the prettily spiked stalks bent under an unfelt wind. She knew their name, though she’d never seen them grown before. She could taste the word in her mouth.
Asphodels.
This was another memory, harder to reach. A mouth at her throat. A voice in her skin. A story—hers, or maybe someone else’s—about a queen of the dead and a garland of white. The trees rustled, bending, whispering. Slowly, adamant fingers stiff, she fashioned herself a crown, lacing together the plucked stems in banded knots until they rested neatly end to end, the way she and her mother used to do with dandelions in the field behind their house.
She placed it upon her head.
Her mouth tasted like copper. She wondered, faintly, if perhaps she was dead.
Time passed. Time stood still. The trees whispered on without end.
She didn’t know how long it was before she heard him.
“It was cold in the water.” The voice came from all around her. From directly behind her. It eddied through the quiet of the field. She turned without standing, her waist girdled in blossoms of white, half buried in a grave of petals.
