gold and stone are forever

-

Patroclus doesn’t move from his spot on the bench, letting Charon sit as close as they wanted. “I wouldn’t call myself god.” He knew what he was capable of, creating plants, islands and drugs, maybe in some way Patroclus was a god but he didn’t want to think of himself as one, he simply wanted to do his work and go home to do some of it. 

“I’m not used not being on that boat, you could say I miss my plants.” The trees, the seeds that are supposed to be growing and the different flowers, some are all for beauty, others for research, but he loved them all and cared for each. “They could’ve had a better garden here if they cared for it.” 

A blood caught his attention however. “Charon.” Patroclus spoke softly, looking at the bleeding cut. It was the medical doctor in him, even from a simple and non-life threatening cut such as that, he still didn’t want to see anybody bleed in front of him. Taking a napkin off his suit jacket, he wrapped it gently around Charon’s finger. Their skin still feel the same. 

“You speak as if we’re not the same age.” Patroclus chuckled, still holding the napkin around their finger, the bleeding will stop in a few moments, just a little more pressure and Charon will be good as new. “My greenhouse is filled with beautiful flowers that Olympe could only dream of, different colors and shapes, I’m sure you’d love it.”

.

This has always been the trouble with Patroclus Cirillo. There is a fecundity of goodness to the man, a goodness that long ago exhausted the bounds of body and began necessitating its proliferation on every starved mutt and wilted bundle of ornamental grass Patroclus touched. These are acts committed in inadvertence; ignorant of incompatibility, and through ignorance made half-immune to the phenomenon. It does not excuse Cirillo, this surrogate mens rea. But no court would find him culpable— what malfeasance has been committed? Charon himself cannot quantify the damages inflicted, only that there had been some kind of infliction, an affliction; an epigenetic scar; a disease that self-propagated in subsurface straits of blood.

Now this disease, this benthic crawler, stirs. Unfolds tendrils like long fingers and reaches up, up, out of the dusts and hadal zones of history.

“No seasickness? No— I suppose you wouldn’t have that. Not after a decade. What is it like, living in the middle of all that water? Like those—” Charon stops. He is startled to find the brown of Patroclus’ skin overlapping his. The heat of it, like five fingers of tallow wax, or metal spindles left in the sun, or a sudden onset of miasmic fever. He wets his lips. He thinks, in distraction, that there were such fevers in the 20th century: strains of virus that would infiltrate the body and carry out their gruesome work with undetectable and cutthroat efficiency. This propagation would last days, weeks. Tangible symptoms (the fever) would manifest only during the last hours, and by then it was too late: this foreign genetic code had ravaged the systems to a point beyond regeneration.

Is that what this is? Charon wets his lips, and finds them already damp. “Those creation myths. Primal seas. Earth-divers. Do you remember those?— Or was it after. The fable where there was sea before there was land, so in every direction it was water. Then from Their cupped hands emerged a swallow, or a black-footed albatross, or a Natantian ophidiiform, or a crab— and this thing, this eukaryotic creature, went to the bottom of the ocean trenches. The thick deposits of clay. The silt. The kerogens and the bitumens. And by the mouthful they brought it up, stacking mud on mud until we could taxonomize desert from grassland from tundra— theologians claim this was the first act of diagenesis—”

He is still looking at Patroclus’ hand.

“I suppose I read that afterwards.” Charon feels oddly stripped of learning, sitting on this bench. Susceptible to the hand of time which is mutable, and paces both forward and back. Regressions threaten at the demarcations of self. His throat closes around his own extremities, which is to say Charon swallows down a ghost. That intransigent fist refusing to be excised. Exorcised, in the words of a believer— but Charon has no interest in belief, nor theology, nor creation myth. Before Hades, he only read what was necessary: contractual agreements; transcripts; administrative files; transactions printed on antique triplicate and stacked in alphabetized crates. Afterwards, Charon read anything. Everything. Like he could scour out ignorance with a steel scrub, cut away the self that was helpless and replace it with the homo novus. Civis novus. The rat that left its rat world and tunnelled into human skin. There it sits: the inclement prickle of pelt under Charon’s fingernails. His carnassials are aching. He must unclench his jaw. “It doesn’t matter.”

Vacantly steady, Charon turns his palm over. His hand curves around Patroclus’ wrist. Semi-circular, thumb sliding across pulse. This touch is unerotic; no strata of intent, no laminated play at violence or seduction. It is hardly a grip at all. This is uncharacteristic, for a man who frames each interaction as a conflict game; zero-sum economics, loser or victor, victim or torturer, the fucked or the fucking— but Charon’s skin slips and skids, misshapes itself like a set of clothes that fit too big. He cannot sustain his own character, its artifice and unstable edifice.

“Are we the same age, Patroclus?” Or just close enough for the proposition not to misalign, and by process of alignment: to morph into axiom. Troublesome, though, for Patroclus to discover he was the arbitrary metric by which Charon had measured their own age, some twenty five odd years ago. “I would like to see your gardens, yes. You should send pictures, once you return to Pontius. Send a sample of the scent codes and let me recreate them, that perfume in the nethermost reaches of the House of Hades.”

Goodness, like light, may be an addition-subtraction. Charon does not think this aloud, of course. But his mind has strayed out of this hedged labyrinth— he is seeing oil wicks and tallow, the rapid oxidation of matter. The radiant heat of exothermic process. If dark is not only absence, light must be a demolition.

Objectively, Zagreus has approximate knowledge of many things. For example, he knows Charon has to sleep and they have to sleep somewhere, but when they’d first met, the exact details of such matters were lost on him. When he was younger, Zagreus pictured the strangest: perhaps Charon was the sort wrap themselves in a silk cocoon, hang themselves upside down, and sleep for entire winters. The truth, Zagreus learned not too long after their first meeting, was something more gentle, a little more relatable. Stark contrast to the alienating razor sharp edges of the rest of Charon’s life. 

It’s a few ticks of the hand past midnight and here they are, struck on their doorstep. They’re doing a brilliant impersonation of a succubus, asking to be invited in. “Do you have the password?” Zagreus asks, eyes bright. “I can’t let you in without the password.”

.

“The password,” Charon says, and his eyes stop on some point of mahogany at the side of Zagreus’ palm: yes, he thinks, oddly, there is a password. The thought is at a slant, removed from deictic centre and turned into riddle. Semiotic. Cryptographic. Charon is looking from the wrong end of the telescope. A strain of white noise is scouring his mind, as in the desert of lotus-eaters sand is eating canyons out of red lime.

There is a password, as there is a key and a lock. As there is a riddle and a resolution.

Wavelengths of moonlight slice red-green-blue across the plane of Zagreus’ face. And yet, by sight or by striving, these colours cannot be differentiated. The human eye disallows it. The shackle of biochemical code prevents it; an antediluvian, Mesozoic history of flat-nosed apes cracking open shelled fruit on rock— of sewer-bleached orphans on the streets of ancient Aeolia, cramming bitter pith, grinning with gormless mouths— of chains upon chains of nucleotides and wretched ancestry, printed into the base polymers of being. Charon’s being.

He cannot perceive this moonlight as it exists. He cannot perceive light as one perceives a musical chord: three notes, played at once. If you listen very hard, you can delineate all three.

Charon is in front of Zagreus’ door, and he wants to be let in. There is a question to be derived from this statement, and an answer. There is a riddle, and Charon does not have the answer because he does not know the question. And yet a question exists. An answer exists. Their existences are absolute.

And white light is a composite of many pigments.

A great distance away, a pomegranate splits from its branch and thuds on loamy ground. A frenetic god closes Their hand. A wave crashes against a cliff. A woman bleeds out on a bed of marigolds, under sweet-scented lemon trees. There is a connection to these things. There is a mechanism to understanding them.

“Is my gratitude not enough? Does it require proof?”

Charon’s gaze breaks from the doorframe. Moves to the mussed neckline of Zagreus’ shirt, then to Zagreus’ palm loose around the doorknob. He is smiling. He is not disembodied, but he understands that he aspires to be. He cannot cut out the helices, the history-in-genomics, the heredity, the—

He does not think that last word.

“Very well.” His fingertips brush Zagreus’ wrist. There is a material softness to this, and to how the dark blurs the line of Charon’s mouth. He leans close. He plays half-laughingly at seduction. “Please let me in, my dear.”

Sisyphus steps away from the touch. He knows he’s imagining it, but he could swear the chill is radiating off of Charon’s fingers like the steam around a block of ice. Charon, flickering in and out of the light like one of those old films, glitching where the shots have been lost to time, or excised out of existence on purpose.

“No thanks. Though it’s nice to see you’re feeling… friendly.” He pulls a face, not quite a smile. “Been a while. Don’t know if I ever expected to see you again, myself.”

He’s seen Charon again. In nightmares, usually. Placing coins over his empty eyes like a tithe to the dead, only they’re heavier than coins, heavier than anything he’s held before.

He brings his hands to his own changed face, a ghost of the touch he avoided from Charon. “What were you hoping for? Does it live up to your wildest dreams? Or maybe you were hoping you’d see me next in a coffin. Honestly, I’d been wondering how you took the news.”

.

“Dreams? Oh, sadly I haven’t dreamt this.” For a delay in the wavelength of visible light, for a static frame in a series of frames; Sisyphus remains a hairsbreadth from touch. It is this delay that daubs away on Charon’s fingertips. It is this trace they touch to their mouth, finger pad brushing against teeth. As though this trace can be sipped, sampled, judged on its tangibility and texture. “Have you, my dear? We only remember the dreams we wake from. Do you wake with the chill of the morgue in you?”

Charon’s eyes mimeograph their smile. “Well. My jokes are rather tasteless today. Forgive me. It would be a waste to see you in a coffin, Sisyphus. Especially— I suppose because I’ve already seen it once, and you know how it goes: repetition and the malaise of boredom. Come to think of it, did you see your own funeral? If not, you should remind me to send you a recording. It was such a graceless affair. Pity inducing. Zagreus—”

They blink. Their eyes flick away. An abrupt reshifting of priorities: Charon pauses their speech long enough to find the second closest bench (Parian marble, early 19th century Art Nouveau, engravings of peacocks in a line). It’s only after they’re seated, ankles crossed and palm curled over the edge of the bench, that they appear to recall Sisyphus.

“What was I saying?” Again, Charon blinks. Only this blink is held longer. Charon tilts their head with eyes still shut. “Ah. Zagreus. He was so willing to have death absolve you, though perhaps he would have preferred your life. Still, who could have guessed atonement could be so effortless? They interred you in a black bag. They had to, my dear, you see— your death was so wretched not even a face remained; not one acceptable to mourn. No doubt Zagreus thought your last hours brimmed over with all methods of suffering and anguish. Eyelids removed, skin flayed out of flesh, cuts incised and ribs extracted one by one. Conscious all the while, naturally! Nerves ingeniously razored by some chemical concoction— the full cornucopia of suffering, laid out in surfeit. The black body bag, a feast for imagination. Pity inducing, yes, quite… pity inducing.”

A pregnant silence. A stencilled recreation of bereavement.

Charon stirs.

“Regrettable for anyone to meet such an end. Quite regrettable. Inevitable though, mhm? You’d agree.” It’s a pleasant statement, ignoring the context. It’s a tone that says: isn’t this such a pleasant conversation between equals. “Well— do you agree, my dear? It was your death, after all. You should have the final say.”

                                                              ∙∙∙

So: he’s known tyrants.

Tyrants on paper and tyrants in marble; tyrants for purpose, for a price, for prized heads on the wall. For the fuck of it. Tyrants running like children to pluck the wings off flies, aimless and joyful. He’s even known his share of conviction. Tyrants sold on the taste of sainthood.

He’s never known anything like Charon. 

The man cuts through the hall. (A point, here. Is he? Can it apply to him, this word so fringed on human?). Ariadne watches him approach. Ariadne holds themself very still, waiting on things that lie beyond waiting. Their nails dance on the side of their plate. As he gets near, they upturn the cutlery. This rodent-scuttle should feel as embarrassing as it sounds. But Charon moves him to things that lie beyond pride. 

When he first contacted them, the trio had just started racking in money. Their heists got bolder, which means they had also gotten louder. As loud as to echo a world over. None of them imagined that could happen; it was almost like praise. He commissioned them to steal a private artifact: in, down, out. They executed. Flawless, poised—as only the first step to your death can be. It was Ari’s idea to use Charon’s connections for infiltrating Tartarus. No. Not Ari. They were called Arion, then. That half-fledged syllable converted somewhere in Elysium. The throat of the underworld spat out something different.

They’ve always wondered whether Charon had them where he wanted. Whether his interest in the trio had not been coincidence, but design. Neither Ariadne nor Arion were the sort of creatures that could speak their fear into being. They never communicated this doubt to Theseus, who would not have listened; or Mino, who would not have understood.

Mino had known tyrants, too. But not the same species as Charon, not even the same bone-taxed gens. Out of the two of them, Ariadne was much closer to it. This type of darkness, this type of knowing.

His face is perfectly amiable when he reaches them. Ariadne sees it ripple and whorl into something like speech. They’re too focused to listen. Their mind fixes on his hand, which hovers  close by. Entitled and proprietary. It’s all Ariadne can do not to pull their chair away. 

So: he’s known control. But this is different. This makes his skin crawl.

“Charon. How spot on. We do lack our bit of sun on Pontius, what with it being a literal island and all. I’ll make sure to run your suggestion by the board.” He draws back. Tucks his elbows in. As if stray glass might fly out and stab them. As if, and this seemed so much worse, Charon could make a grab for it. “Anything else to impart? I’ve heard your firecracker failed to deliver. Hypnos, or some such. My condolences. However will you get a foothold in the legal market?”

His way of encroaching space brings Theseus to mind. Ariadne supposes the throw is not that far-off; a Charon of an older cloth. Though perhaps it’s fairer to say: a Charon of any cloth at all. For while the golden emperor walked naked, Charon was clad in hides. He can almost hear them flap when he looms over. All these pieces of skin—animal, human, other. The green tint in his jewelry is the tint of rotten meat. Of every client king in this sad little graveyard, Charon, I dare say you sleep on the most bodies. You’re also having quite the fun, aren’t you?

Ariadne clenches his jaw. No other dignified way to get your teeth in line. He makes a mental note: to Poseidon, to Hermes, to whomever will still be alive for the clean-up. In whatever world they’re building, things like Charon must not exist. Not even as a necessary evil.

He digs in his heels. “We offer seminaries on Pontius, you know. Training classes. Maybe Hypnos should swing by. Maybe you could come along. Check what that sun is about.”

The average adult skeleton is in possession of two hundred bones, majority hydroxyapatite by composition and weight. Five times the strength of steel by density. But in Ariadne Asterion these bones may as well be bird bones, fish bones. Cartilage.

Charon is smiling. He cannot help it. It is a thing on the verge of teeth.

(—Not even hunger, by proxy or adjacency. Just teeth. It’s a deplorable habit, vivisection in the name of vivisection. Meritless. Precise. Beatific. Charon would crack open the rib cage like a pomegranate, and then he wouldn’t take the heart.)

“Condolences,” he murmurs. His lashes dip. “I do appreciate them, my dear, especially from you. But I don’t think it’s quite the time, you see— condolences should wait on the corpse. And we’re not attending a funeral, are we?” Charon splays his fingers outward, gesturing to their landscape of politicians, prevarications, effervescent champagnes. “Not yet. Besides. Science runs ahead of us. Lately, even the irreversibly dead have a habit of coming back to life.”

Lies, the good ones, aren’t printed and stamped in triplicate, distributed by indifferent hand to apathetic mass. Good lies are analogous to mimetic cuckoo eggs, blue on speckled blue and equally virtuous among the twigs. Gene-modified to host conformance. Cuckoo eggs want to be believed. They want to believe themselves. They must believe themselves, and so they do— what else do you call such bio-genetic alteration, if not truth, spoken from the helixed baseboards of existence? This is how the cuckoo’s egg survives.

Liars, the good ones, sell stories they have already sold to themselves. This is how men proliferate belief: they begin with its inception. They begin by believing. No con-man ought to mistrust their own fable, if only while they remain its narrator. But here Ariadne Asterion sits: limbs drawn in like the slightest curl of a fist. This fist is not in preparation for a fight. In some other place Ariadne Asterion must be folded over, curled foetal on the ground with all the pregnability foetal implies; resigned to violence, minimising surface-to-volume ratio. Protecting the internal organs. Protecting some soft, yet undamaged core.

It wouldn’t be surprising if some distant ancestor of theirs once fucked a deer or a hare in those grandiose, classical forests of myth. Bore a long line of deformity-ravaged children, and now it is that atavistic legacy lurching out of Ariadne’s DNA: prey instinct, lithographed fear, the spiking fur of the jerboa that goes motionless in the bush. Ariadne’s bravado, winking like a filament bulb. This feint exists uncertain of its own trajectory on the axes of space and linear time. It’s half a gamble on subsequence: to sputter out, to steady. And uncertainty invites interest. A fissure invites a knife, and Charon has pried patellas out of unwilling knees before. He resumes tapping the foot of the glass.

“Selling me on the prospect of Pontius, darling? An intriguing proposal, but one that requires further consideration before I give you an answer.” His eyes are half-closed. He is thinking in parallel, in parallax. He is thinking: when a hurt is carried long enough, overlooking its existence becomes reflexive. Thoughtless. “Perhaps Pontius might consider outreach instead, bringing these… ‘seminaries’ to other locations.” And reminders of this hurt may be equally thoughtless. “I confess— I take our conversations as earnest and authentic— if you are speaking with any measure of ire, I apologise for my comment. I misspoke. Certainly, I misjudged. Among other things, sunlight isn’t for everyone, yes? It’s perfectly understandable.” Just a nail, skimming the site of the wound. “I forget the number of dead things in you. After all, cadavers tend to putrefy if left out in the sun too long.”

Though: Ariadne’s dead are dead solely on technicalities, legalities. His own corpses, his own dead. His own names. Perhaps, more accurately, these dead are ghosts. Are wounds, as all ghosts are. Why wouldn’t they want to claw out? Coffined inside a breathing animal, albeit one that breathes as shallowly as Ariadne Asterion.

The glass topples. Red spills over the tablecloth.

(Civilised blood, thinned with water and the fragrance of plums.)

Charon’s fingertips curl over the hatched fabric. Perhaps Charon, too, is descended from beasts. Then he must be the stalking creature in the tall grass, the animal with long and recurved teeth. “Oh,” he says, as wine drips into Ariadne’s lap. “It seems I’ve made a mess.”

—

Nyx met Charon in the gardens of the Xenios Estate, sunglasses concealing her eyes from the setting sun, mouth in a firm, straight line. She feared that the conversation she wanted to have with him would not be an easy one. Really, she feared he would call her out on just how half-baked her idea was.

“Charon,” she greeted him with a stiff nod. “Thank you for taking the time. I’m sure you’ve been busy up here. I know you’ve been attending some meetings with Zagreus. How is he doing?”

But she wasn’t there to talk about Zagreus. For once, he wasn’t the House of Hades child causing her the most concern. She glanced around, double-checking that the spot that Charon had selected truly was isolated. Then, she added, “I was actually wanting to talk to you about Thanatos.”

Zagreus is expected. In the many and uneven marshes of conversation between Nyx and Charon, Zagreus is reliably tiled trajectory: bricked and cemented on dialogue over decades. Shared concern for Hades’ heir is broadly accommodating of any disagreements on handling.

On the other hand—

“Thanatos.”

The syllables stilt on his tongue, as though Charon is testing the word to consider whether he finds it palatable or foreign. Momentarily, he settles on politely interesting. “Of course, I’d be happy to discuss him with you. Although— I should preface. I should say that Thanatos’ work for me has always maintained consistent quality, he is quite the impeccable employee. My most efficient, no doubt, and his work ethic leaves little to be desired. If this talk concerns any failure on Thanatos’ part, I must confess— well, I’d be shorthanded to offer any response. I might require some time to investigate first.”

Or, and the thought oxidizes, rust dark under Charon’s tongue— then dissolving like a wafer, perhaps this concerns something more personal.

At the beginning, when Tartarus was still a dream snipped out of itself— a gamble on the ontogeny of a vision, crumbled out of vision, transplanted into basalt— Charon had not thought Nyx the type for sentiment. Her habit for picking up strays appeared innocuous: a vein that ran in the same rich lode as the Pithias and their foundlings. As Charon’s own early years, before he slipped the leash and turned it into a noose, and kicked out the chair from under his keepers.

When Charon saw how the child soldiers looked at their keeper, his surprise had been reflexive. Temporarily startling. Temporary. A particular line from one of Persephone’s books appeared to him: love is the leash you hold out your throat for. He had thought: how efficient. He decided he admired this streak of ruthlessness in Erebus, which diverged from his own.

(Parallel to this admiration, Charon discovered his capacity for scorn. Sincere, shrapnel-shredded scorn. If asked to comment on his early and pervading dislike for Thanatos, Charon would have replied: secondhand embarrassment.)

“If this is about any other issue,” he continues, mouth still unfurled in a smile, “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with Thanatos beyond a professional capacity. I know very little about his personal affairs but... Regardless, I will do my best to assist.”

The door clicks and his room is suddenly the slightest bit dimmer, just a little colder. It’s a comfort of the sort where childhood nostalgia exists more in day-mare dreamscapes than color film, distant memories fading into fantasy—five and balancing on the toes of polished black shoes to reach distant knees, six and scribbling wavy lines across expensive papers in waxy colors, nine and still small enough to hide behind long legs when avoiding mother’s wrath.

Perhaps that’s why he’s never found himself to be anything but at ease with this phantasma creature more omen than man.

“Hmm I suppose,” he leans around Charon, bending to peer down at the knob in question. A curious-looking creature, unnerving now that it’s been brought to attention in all its detailed finery. For cut gems polished, there is a strange emptiness echoing there, and he has the funny notion he’s liable to sink into those hollow sockets watching if he’s not careful. He blinks, rearing back and away a safe distance. “You’re the expert though, so I’ll take your word for it.”

He already knows what the purpose of this afterhours call is for—why does anyone visit him at night, unprompted? spare me a dream, a sinking, a sleep like forgetting—and there’s a bottle dangling loose from fingers just out of reach, skin-warmed glass warm in the light of a lonely desk lamp. Lethe swims within, pearlescent and shimmering and promising a morning dawning dreamless, if you don’t mind paying the toll. He crouches at Charon’s feet, eyes clear and tracing over those seconds lost in blinks for a telling.

“Where is your mind tonight?”

“My mind, Hypnos? Smothered in my skull.” Charon tips his head back. Follows a line of stars on the ceiling, constellations webbing the murals like the scaled backs of many snakes. “All the pilgrims to this city are like… rodents. Mice. Hordes of pedestrian little tourists fanning out on the streets, until you can’t see the pavement beneath your feet. Chittering some incomprehensible and still madly incessant concert. But then— Occasionally, scuttling underfoot— Like playing a particularly noxious round of find the chimaera— You catch a glimpse of a roach. A rat. The rat thinks it’s lost itself in the crowd. Then it sees you. Then it sees you’ve seen it, so it lurches away. Lurches back to its sewer, manhole, its…” he flicks a wrist, dismissive. Scornful. “Retinue of rats. All this, when the only expense to trampling vermin should be the cost of the shoe cleaning.”

His fingertips, half curled in the air, spasm. Charon lowers his gaze, looks at Hypnos, rendered wraith-white by a shear of moonlight that parts the carpet. “Don’t you find it vexing?”

The way Hypnos looks back at him, almost unblinking, sclera flecked with pink— “This too,” Charon says, but quietly. Half to himself. Even as the words crumple into air, he no longer understands what he meant. He touches the corner of Hypnos’ eye, the insect wing tremor of an eyelash. He slides his hand to their hair. Tugs, gently, until Hypnos’ head rests at his knee.

“Quite recently I came into possession of a pair of black diamond brooches. 2nd century Iolcian make; each individual brooch is set with sixteen hardstones, cut from a single black diamond.” Charon lays a lacquerware box on the desk between them. Unembellished save for the hinges, gold. The varnished wood glimmers under the light. “It took a period of intensive research, but eventually I was able to conclude the pieces constitute part of the Perdiccas black diamond parure.”

Fingers splayed flat, Charon skims the rim of the box. He turns his palm up, a brief gesture— go ahead, before withdrawing. Folding his hands back onto his lap, leaning back in his seat.

Carrion is causing a scene. The sort of scene that starts with ordering a beer at a fine dining establishment, and ends with an empty can crushed on a head.

“Alecto.” Charon says, quite coldly into the following hush. Alcohol sputters from a hole and drips down her hair. He turns his head to the businessman on the other end of the table. The man is reared back, pressed to the back of his chair— jaw agape, thick-fingered palm folded to chest. A bodily expression of scandal. “Pardon my partner. They can be… careless, with the drink.”

He stands. Without looking, he wrenches Carrion up by the wrist.

“Do accept my profuse apologies for ruining the evening. I have yet to teach them better manners.” His nails pierce the skin. His grip is white-knuckled. Silence. He presses harder, adamant until he hears the hiss. Something wet and warm stains his fingertips. On the businessman’s face: the delicate, fish-boned twist of revulsion into fear. “I assure you this will not recur.”

Platitudes, a near-stammer. An uncertain flickering of gaze— like a shoddy lightbulb— from Charon’s placid face to Carrion’s blood-flecked skin. Charon excuses them for the evening. He exits, hand never leaving Carrion’s wrist. Many pairs of eyes follow them out.

Reddish pink sweeps over the grounds of the house of Zeus Rhea. Evening, the prelude to the drawing up of night: all the marble is agleam, all the veins in the walls turn gold and blinding. And out of the way of the main estate, a shrine. Secluded in the gloaming, forgotten and almost lost amidst swathes and swathes of finely embellished garden. Here an idol of Lachesis rises from her stone dwelling, her figure tooled bronze, her robes inlaid with ivory. Charon bends to touch the end of this robe: a patch worn pale by time and other passersby. Moments later, footsteps.

They straighten. They tip their mouth into a smile.

“You had something you wished to speak about? This is as private a location as I think we will find.”

Zagreus takes after his father. There is no sophistry to this statement, it is merely an assertion on the particle arrangement of matter: mirrored molecules, spliced genetics. Under some lights, to look at Zagreus is to look into a slanted reflection of Hades Rhea. Albeit, a reflection with broadened shoulders and a crooked spine. But the last occasion Charon voiced this aloud was a decade ago, in a comment thoughtless of consequence: you do not look like her. Zagreus’ reaction— like shrapnel had sliced his mouth, gashed him into baring teeth. Gouged his cheeks red with denial. He effectively slammed the door of Charon’s office on his way out. Not long after that (or perhaps the next time Charon saw him), the boy was suddenly green-eyed. Verdantly. Defiantly. Still squinting from the surgery, sclera shot with pink and grimacing at every overhead light. They resumed without discussing the argument, and Charon did not mention likenesses again.

Perhaps, with the years that have followed, Charon’s permanent proximity to Zagreus has switched certain associations. Reshuffled causal and causality. That is to say, when Charon finds Hades in the shade of a lemon tree, he thinks of likeness. But he thinks: Zagreus, through a prism, and rather darkly.

“I’ve been conducting fruitful discussions with investors.” He bends, plucking a many-petaled flower from its hedge. Rose, camellia, viburnum?— Burdensome to differentiate. Differentiated only on a gardener’s technicality; they all have cells, and cellulose, and corolla. “Potential clients. Our business partners. The like.”

He brings the flower to his nose. The stem wets his fingertips. Questions prickle, loose as twine at the back of the throat. Bringing up fishhooks. Considered, dismissed. Charon does not claim Nyx’s closeness with Hades. He does not— has never— desired to be in his employer’s confidences, content with distance and the rigidity of structure. Hierarchical structure, lines drawn and extremities demarcated. He has spent twenty years avoiding knowledge he does not need to know, liabilities he does not need to be liable for.

Puzzling, to consider asking such questions at all.

🗡🗡🗡

these sort of conversations between him and charon are more common than achilles would like to admit. for as long as achilles has known him, too, which… implies a few things. he listens as charon describes the waterflow from the peaks of olympe down into the valleys. maybe that makes sense. it’s a little too idyllic in his mind, but olympe’s infrastructure is tacked out with enough fancy bullshit that it’s entirely possible. then again, that’s charon for you. make a joke, and he’ll take it a mile away and then some.

he doesn’t tense when charon presses in, but it’s a near thing. there’s a reason he tries to preserve their interactions for over the phone, when he gets the chance. he shifts the hold of the rifle in his free hand, finger off the trigger, and gently pulls the mug away for a long drink. when he finishes, he sets it down atop the table, next to the sachet of gunpowder.

“i’d ask you how you know these things, but i don’t know if i want to know.” as tartarus’ head of finances, charon inhabits a world that achilles doesn’t think he could comprehend if he tried. he steps back, eventually, from charon, and peers through the sight of the rifle at the target. if charon doesn’t want to have a practice round, that’s fine. he’s happy to work by himself. “when did you take a sudden interest in sediment, charon? another one of your hobbies?” the target sways in the dry breeze. achilles inhales, pulls the trigger, exhales. it’s bad praxis. it still hits.

🗡🗡🗡

“Sediment?” His lashes dip. He plucks the sachet of gunpowder and pries it open, sifts his fingers through the fine grains. “Oh, I know only a little. Dribs, drabs. A little scattered rainfall here and there.”

Something occurs to Charon, then. A peculiar expression comes upon him— though it gutters in an instant, a candle flame gone out. As the angle of the false sun shifts, and ticks towards noon, Charon folds his palm across the railing. “In the past,” he says. “They used river sediment to fertilise soil for agriculture. Then amelioration, turning over the earth to soften it for air and water.”

He tips his head.