“Beautiful?” I grabbed the sides of my head, feeling my mind begin to fracture. “He is dying! He is disappearing right in front of us!”
“He is being unwoven.” Phix stepped closer to Skaros, her golden tail twitching with slow, deliberate grace. “He has finished his pattern. He is being released from the burden of existence.”
More threads pulled away from Skaros. His broad, muscled torso was starting to turn translucent. The silver-blue lines of his spirit became visible as they detached from his physical form. The transparent fibers floated upward, dancing in the light of the asphodels like glowing seeds catching an updraft. They hummed as they moved, a harmonious sound that clashed harshly with the crystal-shattering echoes ringing across the city.
This was wrong. All wrong. Skaros was disappearing, and Aion… Gods help me, Aion was still lying in the bedchamber, alone and abandoned.
“Phix, please.” I fell to my knees on the ground, every fiber of my being aching with grief. “This isn’t some kind of… natural gift. It’s all my fault. Please, punish me. Lock me away or kill me, but do not let this happen. Help Aion. Save Skaros.”
“I don’t know what happened,” Skaros offered in his mother’s stead. “But I know Aion would never want you punished. Even if you were to commit a crime. Which you didn’t do.”
By now his arms were gone, dissolved into a cloud of shimmering threads. I felt like I was going to throw up. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t apologize for your gift,” Skaros replied. “I have walked this city for a long time. I have carried a terrible, unnatural hunger that never slept. To feel the weight of the hunt finally falling away… it is the greatest kindness I have ever known.”
He shifted his gaze to Phix. For a fleeting moment, the sacred, ancient bond between the creator and her creation was laid bare in the garden. Phix bowed her massive golden head. She offered him the deep, silent reverence of a mother guiding her son home.
“Go well, my hunter,” Phix murmured, closing her dark eyes. “I will see you in the weave.”
With one final flash of silver light, the rest of his form gave way. The manticore vanished. A swirling pillar of glowing threads lingered in his place for a single heartbeat before scattering into the freezing air. They drifted gently over the trembling asphodels. Wherever the glowing strands touched the soil, the white flowers flared with a soft, welcoming brilliance, drinking in the returned magic.
Skaros was gone. There was no broken body left behind. There was no spilled blood, no horrific scent of rot. There was only the heavy, ringing silence of Phix’s garden.
I sat back on my heels and pressed my raw palms over my mouth, sobbing into my hands.
In the rest of Alia Terra, death was a gruesome display of decay. I knew that better than anyone. It left behind hollow, blackened shells and a suffocating mountain of agonizing grief. But here, the end was a clean, luminous erasure. The beauty of it made no difference.
“How can you be so calm?” I screamed at Phix. “He was yours. You gathered the energy to weave him. You just watched him dissolve without doing a thing.”
Phix stepped closer, her massive paws silent on the stones. “In Asphodelia, Medea, we do not cling to the threads once the tapestry is finished. Skaros earned his rest. He returned his essence to the city so something new might be woven in his place. It is the natural order. It is sacred.”
She gestured toward the garden, where the countless asphodels had stopped shaking. They now stood tall and vibrant, their white light steady and bright in the gloom. New, delicate green buds were already pushing up through the earth, the last traces of Skaros's life already feeding the soil.
“Your surge hit the city like a gale,” Phix said, staring out into the distance. The sound of miniature explosions was still rumblingfrom the city proper. “But sometimes, the only thing that can lead to sunlight is a storm.”
“I do not care about your riddles!” I scrambled to my feet, alight with the fire of my own desperation. “I do not care about the city! Phix, be reasonable. Whatever you might think about Asphodelia, about Skaros… Aion is a construct. A colossus. A being made of bronze. His energy will not return to your weave.”
My body was still vibrating with death energy. I knew that if I reached out to the sphinx, I’d unweave her too. That fear was the only thing that kept me from grabbing her fur, from shaking her. “If his spark is gone, he doesn’t get to be reborn. He is just dead! I will go back to the world above. I will go back to Jason. I will do whatever it takes! But you have to help me save him!”
Phix looked at my white-knuckled grip on my robes, her ears flicking back against her majestic head. “You unleashed a power his fragile awareness could not withstand. I am the auctioneer of the market, child. I am not a mender of metal.”
“Then who is?” I demanded, my chest heaving, the edges of my vision tunneling in pure desperation. “Someone has to know how to fix him.” The obvious answer came to me even as I spoke. “Charon… Charon can save him. How… How do we get him to come?”
Phix opened her mouth to answer, but a raspy laugh drifted through the garden, cutting her off. “The ferryman is a little occupied.”
The sound made the blood freeze in my veins. The frantic energy keeping me upright turned to lead, locking my joints in place. I recognized that cruel amusement down to the marrow of my bones. It had been my constant companion for as long as I could remember.
“Thanks to you, Charon has his hands more than full,” the familiar voice said. “He won’t be saving anyone anytime soon.”
I turned slowly, already knowing what I’d find. There, stepping out from the dark shadows of the path, stood Jason.
8
The Hero’s Quest
Jason
The air at the edge of Asphodelia’s mists tasted of iron and unearthed graves. A heavy, static hum thickened the atmosphere, making the hair on my arms rise. I stood on the deck of theArgo, pressing both hands flat against the wooden railing. The blighted oak groaned violently in protest.
