Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Deep in the sprawling cave systems beneath the city of Hekateolis, a golden net lay in a messy bundle on the ground. A splatter-trail of bioluminescent blue ran from the fibres of the net through cracks in the stone floor, ending at the crease of a strange formation, its light slowly fading.

Beside this strange formation, a man of no real cosmic significance knelt before a sigil drawn with his own, unexceptional blood. Rod’s sigil—the primordial trunk, the source. A mere mortal invoking a God was unprecedented, and punishable by forces he did not fully understand but understood enough to fear. He knew this. His bloodied hands trembled with the knowing, but he’d drawn it anyway.

It worked. The man was very temporarily, and mercifully so, enlightened to things beyond any mortal’s comprehension. Over and over, he carved a language older than his species—older than the Gods his people prayed to—into the structure’s surface. He could barely hold the shapes in his mind long enough to etch them, barely hold his hands steady enough that the shapes formed right.

And so he wrote them again. And again and again, until he was certain they might hold, still bleeding but not caring. Again and again.

When he was finished—or when he could carve no more, which was not the same thing—he sat back and stared at what he’d built. His breath came in sharp, uneven pulls. Frantically scanning the runes he could no longer understand but had nevertheless written, he located one cross section of carvings that ran deeper than the others. The one he’d put there. He stood, took the stained blade from the floor, and scrambled up the structure until he could reach it.

There, at the top of the structure, he cut his palm once more, deeper this time, and pressed it against the cross section. It absorbed his blood easily, and he hummed, pressed his forehead against the structure until the runes faintly glowed and the structure hummed, too.

“No one will find you,” he said, voice cracked and worn. “I swear this on my life.”

He gathered the net and carried it away, down through the maze, and stashed it in a narrow room with scattered papers. On his way out, he ignited a wick near the alcove’s entrance. The subsequent explosion caused the wall to crumble, sealing away what was inside.

The man came back every single day, for twenty-three days. He bled into the channel and sometimes wept and spoke his promise and checked the runes for stability, for any sign of fading.

Maybe Rod’s punishment had come later. Or maybe the man passed away in one of the many, unremarkable ways that mortals do. Either way, on the twenty-fourth day, he did not return, and for nearly two centuries, the structure remained unattended and unknown.

Before Aithon had travelled to Hekateolis, he'd spent years studying the travel logs of other scholars who'd ventured here. Knew what to expect, to some degree. And, per his mentor’s somewhat-ominous parting advice, which the Apollonians applied to all deeply chthonic places, knew to expect the unexpected.

He was handling the unexpected with his ass in a pool, which was admittedly less graceful, but no less educational.

He broke the surface, sputtering. Water dripped down his braids; he brushed them back to clear his vision. The club’s ambient lights, a striking array of vivid purples and blues, reflected off the still, pitch-black surface, which seemed to go on forever. Or perhaps blended seamlessly into the stone floor. No warning signs, no markings on the ground—nothing.

A natchel stared at him about an arm’s length away, lounging at the edge of the pool, their iridescent tail-fin forming unamused ripple-waves.

"My apologies," Aithon managed.

The natchel considered him. Considered the talisman at his chest, Apollo’s golden lyre. Seemed to make a decision about both, and gracefully dove beneath the water’s surface.

Fair enough. He was out of his depth, which, come to think of—how deep did this pool go? Did it connect between rooms? How was the architecture of this club accounting for it?

A woman passed by the pool’s edge, set down the tray of drinks in her hand. Three water-dwelling natcheli swam to the edge and took them, downed them all in one go, and disappeared into the black water. The woman paid them no mind; she was too busy holding her arm out toward Aithon, trying to stop the laughter evident in her eyes.

He ignored her at first, but not for lack of manners. Something within him had quieted. As his fingers threaded through the water, he noted the temperature gradient—inverted, colder at the surface and warmer in its depths.

A purple fog, the same one he’d seen flitting in the edges of his vision since his arrival, swirled across the pool’s surface. It shimmered, passed around Aithon's head with a rush of what felt like wind, if he let himself imagine it was. That he was on top of the mountain temples once more, breathing in the endless night sky.

He shut his eyes and breathed deeper. The fog carried both the scent and taste of wine and smoke.

Something or someone scaled brushed past him below the surface, then pointedly shoved against his rear.

Aithon laughed, then swam to the stewardess, her arm still extended.

“Come, sky-walker,” she urged, openly giggling. Dionysus’ talisman, displayed on the ribbon tight around her neck, glinted against the fog’s faint light.

He accepted her hand, then stumbled when his feet found stone and the fog swirled past him once more, and up stopped being up and down stopped being down.

She steadied him and batted the fog away, unfazed.

As he cast her a grateful look, he caught a strange shadow in the periphery, within what he was beginning to suspect was a sentient fog: a massive black cat, and a flash of orange eyes with multi-slitted pupils. By the time he blinked it was gone, and he could not tell if he'd imagined it.

“Seems she’s in a mood tonight,” the stewardess said dismissively, then tapped the talisman Aithon wore. “An Apollonian, here of all places? What brings you? Surely not an evening swim.”

“Dionysus—” Aithon managed, before his tongue tangled. He touched his throat and froze.

He’d heard himself; his cadence, his voice. But not from himself—from across the room.

“Her influence is less when you lean into the dissolution. Here,” she said, sympathetic, and produced a vibrant blue flowerhead from the pouch at her hip. “Are you familiar with eyforiya?”

He’d seen it in pictures, and in the dried form traders sometimes brought into his homeland. But reading about it and partaking were two different things.

In the distance, the shadow of a moth-winged natchel moved independent of its owner. He opened his mouth to answer, thought better of it, then simply nodded.

The Dionysian smiled, pressed the fresh flowerhead into a glass bowl just wide enough to cradle it perfectly, and whistled. A natchel appeared, black-scaled and beautifully androgynous, and summoned a delicate flame above their palm. One of Hekate’s lineage, if he could make an educated guess, though likely many generations removed.

He breathed in the snow-white smoke, and his eyes glowed a sharp, striking blue. In that moment, the club around him became, all at once, more alien and more familiar. She took his hand, led him, and the next room found him in a sea of bodies where light refracted at impossible angles through nothing—sunlight through the surface of water.

An aura-spinner approached him, pressed a palm flat to his chest. Their fingers split into multiples or appeared to, then drew something out of him that rose like smoke and shone like metal.

Gold. His aura was gold. He’d always wondered but never had the chance to witness, and the sight of it unspooling from his sternum to drift upwards and mingle with the lights of others—he stood there, swayed there, starstruck. He could perceive these glowing ribbons as clear as an extra limb, but the boundary blurred where warmth met warmth. He could get lost—

“Ah, yes. You're the one my daughter dunked in the pool.”

In his lifetime, Aithon had seen only two olympians. Dionysus—officially the only one who had ever looked him in the eye, however disinterested that look was—did not behave like either. The God of ecstasy and dissolution lounged on a low loveseat: barefoot, broad-shouldered and dark-skinned, an empty silver cup held loosely between their fingers.

“Well?” Their slit pupils constricted—amethyst, amused, and distinctly waiting.

"I—" Aithon began, and the words came, but not in the right order. He heard himself say something—except not from himself but across the room again—about runes, or tried to, but the syntax arrived scrambled.

Dionysus tilted their head.

He stopped, swallowed. Tried again. “There’s a struct—”

That voice had not been his own.

“That’s enough, darling,” Dionysus said, not to Aithon.

A little purple wisp, which had apparently been following him around this whole time, scurried off his shoulder and escaped through the crack beneath the door.

Immediately, Aithon sharpened. Straightened his posture and faced the deity with the calm confidence of one who had crossed weeks of open roads to arrive here, and who’d spent weeks more with something he didn’t yet understand but knew was deeply special.

Dionysus’ brows lifted at that.

“There’s a structure beneath this city,” he continued, and his voice was where it belonged. “It’s old, older than this establishment, if my dating is accurate, and covered in a script I can’t identify. The writing likely predates any language I’ve come across—and I’ve studied many languages.”

Dionysus turned the empty cup in their hands, humming as it slowly refilled itself. “So you came to a club.”

“I came to you.” He smiled, prayed it was charming. “Not to trouble you with mysteries—I know this city holds more than I could ever comprehend. I’ve come for eyes old enough to know, if one of your descendants would be willing to look.”

Dionysus regarded him, then threw back their head and laughed. It rose from their throat as multiple voices—an entire chorus, theatrical and loud. “How intriguing. My daughter has been making a nuisance of herself, as you may have noticed. She actually has a talent for puzzles when she's not terrorizing my patrons.” They leaned forward and stared past Aithon, at the door. “I taught you better than to eavesdrop, Dyate. Come show yourself properly.”

The fog appeared again, seemingly out of nowhere, and materialized in the form of a striking, barely-dressed natchel—sylphlike and dark-skinned like her parent, arms draped casually over the back of Dionysus' seat. Black leopard ears protruded from amethyst hair that dissolved into smoke at the ends, shifting in a breeze that wasn't there. Three-slit eyes like the center of a torch-flame narrowed playfully, and her black tail swished once behind her.

Aithon could only stare.

Right. ‘Her.’

“Darling, this is Aithon. He’s one of Apollo’s, and he’s found something he can’t read,” Dionysus said. “I think you’ll find him amusing.”

✦

“This really is easier when Di decides to help,” Aithon said under his breath. He paused in the black tunnels, shutting his eyes to block every other sense, and focused. Lifting his nose, he inhaled deeply. Scrunched his brows, stepped forward. Inhaled again.

“Who is Di?” Dyate asked. Her eyes were more than capable of seeing clearly in total darkness, but she chose to follow from behind anyway. “Also…what are you doing?”

Of course she had keen ears. “My cat,” he said simply.

“Ah, so there’s competition?”

“Actually, you’ll probably get along,” he said lightly, then added apprehensively, “maybe too well.”

When he stopped to sniff again, she chuckled. “Truly darling, what are you doing?”

“The cavern I’m looking for is deeply hidden, and on the Gods, I swear the cave system moves. It's a maze. I keep incense burning so I can find my way back.” He tapped his nose and smiled at her, or at least in her general direction.

“Oh! You didn’t tell me this was a puzzle,” Dyate purred—actually purred, a little rumble in her chest wiggling through her words—and her eyes lit up. “Let me try.”

First, the swirling ends of her hair fanned out, then the rest of her dispersed as pale, purple fog. Aithon did not see the transition; he could only smell it, the swell of wine and smoke that expanded outward to fill every inch of the cave system, every tunnel and turn.

Shadows, somehow visible in the dark, shifted at the edge of his vision, dancing against the wall. He whipped around to face them, then laughed when Dyate’s disembodied chitter echoed through the caves.

“Please don’t do that,” Aithon said, though he reached out to try and touch one of the shadows, vaguely human. The figure bolted from him, darting across the floor to appear instead on the opposite wall.

“This way,” said a thousand of her voices at once, cascading. The fog began to glow, forming a path he intuited he was meant to follow; a twinkling spectacle less like stars and more like light reflecting off amethyst crystals.

Sure enough, she’d found the optimal route. When he turned the corner into the cavern, Dyate was already at the structure in her ascended form. A massive black leopard—her head might easily hit the ceiling of what was already an ample cave. Taller than the structure itself. Three torch-flames floated in the air around her, reflected by the shine of her fur, and each slit of her eyes was dilated, fixed on the runes. Unblinking.

Aithon leaned his hip against the wall, folding his arms and watching her from a respectful distance away. A direct descendant of two deities—of course her ascended form was powerful to witness. “Can you read it?”

Though her jaw opened slightly, her voice came from somewhere else. Which was logical enough: a cat’s tongue can form sounds, but not human words. “No…I’ve never seen anything like these markings.”

Aithon deflated, but on the outside, kept his composure. “Well. They do seem to be overlapping—”

“—They do.”

“So maybe—”

“I just need to untangle them,” Aithon said, at the same time Dyate said, “We just need to untangle them.”

He smiled.

Di padded out from behind the structure, moved flush against the cave’s edge until she was half-hidden behind Aithon’s leg, never taking her eyes off the massive cat looming before her. She froze there, all disgruntled clicks, flattened ears, and puffed fur.

“Oh.” Dyate’s eyes widened. In a cloud of fog, she shrank down to her part-shifted form, then continued to make herself smaller—first to her knees, then fully crouched. She stayed relaxed there, blinking slowly, eyes half-lidded.

“You’re being dramatic,” Aithon said to Di.

Di narrowed her eyes up at him, batted his leg hard enough to make him yelp, then pranced up to Dyate, stopping an arm’s length away.

Dyate’s chest shook as she tried to contain her laughter. When Di clicked in amusement, the natchel’s ears perked up and her tail lifted, slightly hooked at the top. Di approached and bumped her forehead against Dyate’s. To Aithon’s bafflement, she purred when the demigod straightened her spine and Di climbed into her lap.

“Once. Only once in my life have I seen her purr.”

“Once in this lifetime, maybe,” she mused, scratching behind Di’s ear. She tilted her head to the side, then fixed her intense gaze on Aithon, intrigued. “She’s not just a cat, you know.”

“I know.” Aithon pushed off the wall and approached his half-filled notebook, thumbing through it.

“Since I’m the betting type—you’ve never found yours, have you?”

He sat down at the desk, not facing her.

Dyate rolled her eyes and gently set Di down, stood, and brushed her knees. “Is he always like this?” she asked Di, who blinked once in response, then to Aithon: “Your symbolon?”

“No.” Before she could respond, he added, “And before you ask—no, I’ve never looked. I don’t intend to.”

She giggled and approached the desk, leaned on the structure beside it and put a hand on her hip. “Surely you’ve wondered?”

He didn’t have a response to that.

“What are your preferences?”

“In regard to?”

“Sexual partners.” She breezed past his startled cough and carried on. “Men?” Fog shifted past her, and she appeared as a man. “Women?” She shifted back. “Both? Neither? Other?”

The last illusion she cast over herself made her appear, for a brief moment, what Aithon could best classify as ‘purple.’

“I don’t have preferences,” he said flatly.

“Everyone has preferences. Come on—humor me.”

“Women, if pressed. But I’ve been with men, and I’ve been with genderless. I suspect the common factor is less about the body and more about…” He gestured vaguely.

“Let me guess—intellect?”

“Intensity.”

“Oh, I like that answer.” Her tail swished. “And you’ve really never wanted to find your other half?”

“I already told you, I have no intention.”

“Intention and want aren’t the same thing.”

He tapped the pen against his journal, raising a brow but still not looking at her. “Want to see what I’ve pieced together so far?”

One moment she was leaning against the structure, and the next she was crawling onto his desk. He lifted the journal lest she lie right across it, pointedly staring at the notes and not at her. Arching her back and stretching her arms out, she fixed him with a coy look.

“You're deflecting, darling. It’s actually kind of adorable.” She batted a hand toward him, and he batted it away.

"I'm being kind. A partner deserves someone who'll actually be present, and I—" He gestured at the cave, the structure, the notebooks filled with runes. All of it. "This is who I am. It wouldn't be fair.”

She considered this for a while, but continued to push. "The gods tend to know what they're doing, Aithon. Your other half could be just the collaborator you need. A catalyst for your work, or a muse.”

He made a noncommittal sound and kept writing.

"Give me your hand."

"No."

"It takes five seconds."

"The statistical likelihood—"

She tsked. “Like plucking the right grass blade in all of Elysium, yes. Spare me the numbers, I’m aware.”

Aithon paused, then set the book down and looked at her. Her tail still swished playfully, but her pupils were paper-thin slivers. It occurred to him then, what should have occurred when she’d first asked: this was someone born at the dawn of mankind and still, after millennia, hadn’t found her symbolon.

He sighed and held his hand out. Dyate grinned and took it.

There was warmth where their palms met, and he felt her trying to open a channel; a little pulse that faded as soon as it began, but nothing more.

"I'm sorry," he said, surprising himself. In truth, he was relieved.

"Don’t be, I have the rest of eternity to keep looking." The smile she wore never faltered, but now it felt like theater. She was already rolling off his desk, then began to pace around the structure. Di trotted after her. "Now. Shall we get back to this puzzle, or would you like to discuss my feelings further?"

"The puzzle," he said.

"Mm, clever man."

✦

They'd built something, in the years that followed—a partnership with its own rhythms and language. Part-chthonic, part-invented, part shorthand on scattered notes, spoken nowhere else on earth. She taught him the old tongue. He taught her patience, though he would have laughed at the suggestion. Di and Dyate disappeared for days at a time, and when they returned, Aithon had learned not to ask questions he wouldn't get honest answers to.

Every once in a while, Dyate even managed to convince Aithon to live a little; to join her at the clubs, and in turn, he convinced her to climb to the top of Hekateolis’ tallest building. They shared their respective heat and rut cycles, because they were always near one another and spending them alone was less comfortable for both. He was careful to never impregnate her, and though she wished he would, she never once asked.

One evening, Aithon was working, same as always. Di was asleep on his discarded pages, same as always. And he looked up at the ceiling, at the stone where stars should be, with the same expression he wore every time he looked there.

“Does it feel strange,” Dyate asked from where she sat cross-legged on the floor beside the structure, “having no sky there?”

“You’d think after all this time, I’d stop looking.” He chuckled, shook his head and turned back to his papers. “It’s like a phantom limb, almost. A part of me I’m convinced is there, just out of reach.”

He said it simply, and Dyate didn’t respond. So Aithon kept working, until the soft, amber light of Dyate’s torches was joined by something brighter.

He looked skyward.

“Oh.” He stood up from his desk. For a long time he was speechless, then he stepped back and settled on the ground beside her, never once taking his eyes off the boundless stars. “I can almost imagine the breeze.”

“Try to. My magic works wonders when you allow it, darling.”

Aithon shut his eyes and imagined the highlands, temples so close to the heavens that the winds were ever-present, light and wild and—

His braids, silvered at the temple these days, brushed past his forehead, except they didn’t. Not really. But when he opened his eyes he still felt them, still saw them moving. Still felt the breeze, steady against his skin, and it was real.

Di woke, stretched and then froze. Her pupils grew wide, fixed on the fireflies drifting through the stars, and she sat down on her haunches to watch them dance. The fireflies were an illusion Dyate had first conjured months ago as an experiment, to keep both Di and herself entertained. Since that day, she’d never once broken the illusion. Di would not have tolerated the loss.

“Thank you, Dyate.” Aithon’s voice was rough.

She opened her mouth, considered, then in a near-whisper, offered him her chosen name. “You can call me Ira."

He looked at her—Dyate, the daughter of Dionysus and Hekate whose magic could form this—and shook his head.

"Gods, no," he said, not unkindly. "You're too important to be spoken to so casually."

Her ears dropped, just slightly. She smiled, and it was genuine, and she went back to looking at the stars.

✦

“I’m starting to think these aren't even chthonic.” Dyate tapped the structure, trailing a little thread of fog along one of the inscribed channels. She’d been tracing every possible combination of cross sections for years, and still stumbled upon new ones.

“One would think an artifact below a chthonic city would have chthonic runes,” he said.

“Best not to assume anything in this city, darling.”

He moved to stand next to her and tilted his head to the side. “What do you think they are, then?”

She thought for a long time, then offered, “This might sound mad, but what we're looking at could be older. Primordial.”

He lifted one brow at her.

“Think about it, Aithon. The first chthonic language borrowed from Rod’s, which is why I can kind of decipher some of it. But the primordial tongue—”

“Right. There were never any written runes, the language lived and died before the concept existed.”

“Never any that were found.” Her voice pitched in excitement, and she shifted so her tail could twitch and dispel some of the growing energy.

“Do you know any of it?”

“One nursery song, everyone in Rodina knows it by heart.”

“Well, sing it.” He gestured, urging her.

“Not purely necessary, is it? Unless you just like hearing me sing,” she teased. The demigod knew she had a beautiful voice.

Aithon merely shrugged, then smiled as she sang the melody—minor, almost haunting. When she’d finished and her echoes finished too, he shook his head to clear the spell. “What's it mean?”

“Oh we come, we come from one seed, and once returned the soul is freed. Blessed is thee born from She, the vessel, the womb, eternity.”

Di chirped and batted at her leg, and Dyate cast a new firefly for her. Then turned back to wonder at the structure.

“Actually, this—” She drew a rune then used her fog to display it on the structure. “It looks just like the sound of ‘freed’.”

Aithon stepped back from the structure, thoughts racing. One matched rune—one he couldn't even confirm was a match—wasn't a translation.

“We need help,” he said.

Dyate hummed, then her attention was stolen by Di, who’d trotted up to her and made her boredom apparent. She paced away from the structure, Di expertly weaving between her ankles.

“Where’s your sense of urgency? This is important.”

“I’m immortal, darling,” she said, sending a false firefly zipping between the legs of the desk. Di bounded after it. “Nothing is more urgent than this.”

“Okay—what about Priarod? He’s not far from here, easy to visit.”

“Unless you plan to carry this—” she gestured at the structure, still looking at Di, “—all the way to him, no. He hasn't left the garden in centuries, and refuses anyone who asks.”

He frowned. “Why not?”

“Because he doesn't want to, darling. Not everything requires a reason.”

Filing that away on the ever-growing list of things he would return to later, he continued to think. Then, he clasped his palms together. “Themis’ daughter!”

Her tail stilled. “You know Remis?”

“Textbook knowledge. But not how to find her.”

“I know her. She’s a judge…what if she thinks what we’re doing is wrong?”

“But we're not doing anything wrong. Delphi revered all scholars, especially linguists.”

Dyate approached the structure, deep in thought.

“If there's a chance this is her father's language written, she’d want to know,” he said earnestly.

She eventually clicked her tongue, conceding. “Ever the logical one.”

Then, she slipped into an interim space, somewhere Aithon couldn't follow and couldn't attempt to comprehend.

✦

The following day, they awaited Remis’ arrival. Di was out—likely trotting through Hekateolis’ streets and making at least one person’s day mildly inconvenient—and Aithon was on the floor with his back against the structure, balancing an open journal on one knee. Dyate was beside him, threading fog through the inscribed channels to illuminate the deeper grooves.

“You haven’t eaten.” Dyate nudged his knee with hers, but kept her eyes on the carvings.

“I ate.”

“Coffee isn’t food, darling.”

“It has substance. I would argue—”

“You would argue with a stone wall if it had runes on it. I’ve seen you argue with this one.”

He grinned without looking up.

“Finish your line, then let’s—”

The structure, which had always emitted the faintest, pulsatile hum, grew quiet. Dyate didn’t finish her thought.

Remis stood at the center of the cave, facing the structure. Her hair was perfectly straight and perfectly white, bleeding to bright red tips. Patches of pale skin displayed delicate lines of woodgrain, the crimson-brown of heartwood faintly glowing. On the skin of her hands and wrists were stars, moving independently of her, or she moved independently of them; the demigod a window to a different plane entirely. Her eyes, scleras and all, were darkness, and within that darkness, stars turned.

Aithon, who had been lost in his notes, finally noticed the stillness. He looked up from his journal, smiled at Remis, and catalogued all of her features the same way he had every impossible thing he’d encountered in this city—curious, precise, and unafraid.

Dyate snapped him out of it by tapping his shoulder and gesturing with her chin for them to move, and he understood without her saying: they were blocking Remis’ view. So Aithon stood, and they both moved—Aithon behind Remis to lean against his desk, Dyate to the side of the structure with her ears down in deference—and Aithon watched Themis’ daughter with bated breath and lifted cheeks.

Remis regarded the carvings, perfectly vertical and perfectly still. Then, somehow, grew stiller.

“You asked if I could read these markings,” Remis said to Dyate. Her voice was crystalline. “Not in their entirety, but I have understood enough. What you have found was never meant to be found.”

Dyate’s tail wrapped around her ankles. “What is it?” she asked, a slim note above a whisper, but Remis did not answer.

“Leave this place, tell no one it exists. I will not give this warning twice.”

“Why?” Aithon asked.

Remis turned to face him. It wasn’t that she didn’t blink—she couldn’t. She had no eyelids. A demigod designed to enforce cosmic law could miss nothing. “Who else knows of this?”

“Just us. But knowledge doesn’t belong to any one people—”

A blade found his chest, then his knees found the floor. The pain never registered.

The last thing Aithon saw was red flames rising, and the pages of his journals ember-edged and curling.

“This is completely ridiculous—I can’t see a thing,” Phaeton muttered, one hand braced against the subterranean wall, guided in complete darkness by the cat insistently pressing him onward.

He’d made the journey to Hekateolis to study, not get lost in the caves. Having tried to turn around more than once and receiving a disproportionately-angry bite from Di each time, he’d since given up and begrudgingly allowed the herding.

He was ready to truly snap at her when they rounded a corner, and he found himself before a pale, wisp-like barrier. He halted immediately, but Di confidently slipped right through it with a series of excited vocalizations that ceased the second she crossed the threshold.

“What…” he whispered, brushing his fingers across the shimmering surface. It rippled around his touch like water, and then it clicked: he’d read about these. A veil.

A wiser pródniy would have turned around. But his companion was on the other side—not to mention that he’d need her nocturnal eyes to get back out of here—and it felt like something was tugging at his chest, attempting to pull him through.

So, he stepped through.

In the center of the cave was a woman sitting on her knees, lit by a set of three torch-flames floating in the air beside her. Di was in her lap, purring—Phaeton had never once heard her purr. It was distinctly reptilian. The woman’s chest rumbled, too. She shifted when Phaeton passed through the veil but remained on her knees, and Di hopped down to sit on her haunches and stare at Phaeton.

Beside the woman sat a stack of notebooks, burned at their edges, that she gathered against her chest with both arms as she turned to face him. The rounded, furry ears on her head perked up, while her black, leopard-spotted tail wrapped around her lap.

“You do not know me,” she said, “but I know you.” Her ears dropped, just slightly. “My name is Ira.”

“Ira,” he repeated, and swore her breath hitched, though no sound escaped. “I’m Phaeton, and that’s Di. She basically bullied me to come here.”

She chuckled once, her expression distant. “I’m not surprised. Welcome back, Phaeton.” She held the notebooks out. There were small, permanent indents in the leather where her claws had gripped them. “These are yours.”

He moved forward to take them, or maybe get a better look at her eyes, those triple-slits unlike anything he’d ever seen before, but his attention was stolen by the runes carved into the massive structure behind her. He stepped past her instead, awestruck at the sight. At the sheer height of it, the complexity.

The pull.

Dyate said nothing, only righted herself, set the notes down where his desk once stood, and cast Di’s fireflies once more.

Phaeton reached out, set his palm against the side of the structure. With a smile and warmth blooming in his chest, he began again.

Months passed, and the two fell into a rhythm rote in Phaeton’s soul—the shared shorthand, little phrases he didn’t remember learning but Dyate responded to easily, for she had never forgotten. Where Aithon had been reverent and methodical, Phaeton burned through journal after journal, relearning the language of a lifetime he didn’t remember.

“You’re different this time,” she said to him once, watching him hurriedly sketch by the torch-light. Di bounded through the cavern, chasing the blinking, green pinpoints that drifted around the structure—an illusion Dyate maintained without thinking, now.

“Different how?”

“Faster. Louder. Less likely to stop and wonder what something means before trying to take it apart.”

“Oh.” He paused, looked up from the journal. “Is that a problem?”

She giggled at Di’s antics, then her smile drifted into something sadder. “I’m immortal, darling. Nothing is a problem.”

They spoke no further of lives already lived, and the pródniy continued to burn. Dyate continued to maintain the veil around the structure, strengthening it every day so Remis couldn’t interrupt them. So that no one could.

Phaeton began writing his own journals: sets of rules he'd reverse-engineered from the syntax. Which symbols modified which. Which sequences repeated, and why. He kept these notes at his lodging; the theoretical work happened late at night, by lamplight, when his mind was too alive to sleep and he couldn’t waste time navigating the caves. Two different authors across two sets of notebooks in two locations.

It took him eleven months to get close to something.

He didn’t know what, exactly. That was the problem—he didn’t know what he’d found, but he pressed forward to uncover it. He’d been circling the same set of runes he’d identified as recursive, looping back on itself like something about this structure was programmed, not just inscribed upon. On the night it happened, he was tracing that sequence, actively recarving it, and he adjusted a single variable with the tip of his chisel.

The structure pulsed.

A wave of sheer pressure and force sent his journals scattering, extinguished Dyate’s floating torch-lights and had Di scrambling into Dyate’s arms. The runes along the structure’s surface blazed, so white-hot and brilliant they fragmented the cavern into sharp shadows.

“What did you do?” Dyate called out.

“I don’t—”

A resonant sound leaked out from inside. Then, a crack appeared. A hairline split, almost indistinguishable—but Phaeton saw it, and he panicked.

He didn’t know what he’d broken, but his wide eyes traced the glowing runes and understood this much: that the structure was destabilizing.

He worked faster than he’d ever worked, carved over the error he’d made until the fracture fused itself shut. Then, emboldened, he continued to carve in the bastard language he’d been building—born of intuitive leaps that had no right to function over primordial runes but did, because it shared the same DNA.

Protect this, he inscribed. Keep this intact.

The light dimmed, the sound ceased, and he was about to set down the chisel when the cave went still.

Di was at his side, pressed against his leg. Though a guttural noise vibrated her chest, the rest of her was shaking, too. He looked over his shoulder to find Dyate standing unnaturally-still, watching not the structure, but the cavern around them.

“Ira? What’s—”

“Take Di and leave. Now.”

He didn’t get a chance to question or argue before roots split the cave floor and Dyate was already shifting. First she was fog, then she was massive, her leopard-paw tugging both Phaeton and Di away from the fracturing floor and beneath her. She bared her teeth and arched her spine, and for a moment, the cavern was hers—fog rolling off her fur, the air weighted with wine and smoke. Her growl was so low Phaeton felt it in his ribcage, rattling the cavern walls.

A cluster of roots surfaced, smoldering like crimson coals, and formed a trunk which Remis emerged from. Phaeton recognized her from the highlands, recognized the constellations he could navigate by, there in her eyes—and those stars in her dark scleras extinguished.

This time, for Phaeton, it wasn’t a quick death.

Di burned quickly—she was smaller, the mercy of it smaller, still. And as Phaeton’s cries became warped by smoke and Dyate’s desperate claws raked the stone beneath her, trying to tear the roots from the ground though she knew it was futile, Remis spoke.

“I did warn you, Dyate.”

Phaeton’s soul slipped back into the cyclical cosmos, and Dyate screamed; a piercing caterwaul that shook the floor like a stampede—the maenads, the satyrs—then cut off entirely when a snap of crimson lightning cut through her ribcage.

A clean cut, perfectly sharp and perfectly vertical and precise in its aim. Silver dripped out the exit wound. It wasn’t much ichor; it didn’t have to be.

The black leopard fell, the flames in her eyes fading.

Then she was fog, slowly dissipating. Then, she was nothing.

✦

After decades of unrest in Hekateolis—years of Hekate demanding retribution for her daughter’s death under threat of war—Remis was ultimately removed from the mortal plane. It was not an execution, nor did she die in any typical sense. She simply returned to primordial dust, ceased to be a body and existed only to those who dreamt of her vision.

Far away from this public display, a curious scholar had just purchased an unassuming, leather-bound journal from a market stall. The symbols inside were unlike anything he’d ever seen, and he thumbed through the pages with an excited glimmer in his eyes, already suspecting he’d stumbled upon something extraordinary.

Behind him, a commotion. He turned to find his companion with a stolen fish clamped in her jaws, and an irate merchant reaching for a broom.

He sighed, but didn’t stop smiling. “Dimitra, please. I will have to pay for that fish.”

The merchant grumbled his agreement, and Di ignored them both, as was her nature.

Eventually, Dyate’s veil failed, as a demigod’s influence can only exist for so long after her death. It held on for just shy of a century, and by the time the structure was discovered, generations of scholars had, on the surface, cracked the syntax of Phaeton’s journal. They took one look at the structure and saw what a mortal—some unknown but brilliant pródniy—had built, then spent decades more decoding what was written on the structure. And what they read carved upon its surface was this: ‘What’s inside here is valuable.’

A lab formed around this structure. Some in Hekateolis took interest in the scholars' work, but it was mostly unknown and, amongst those who knew about it, near-unanimously disregarded as madness. Nevertheless, on this particular afternoon, dozens in clinical work-clothes were gathered around the structure now surrounded by scaffolding and monitors.

Near the top of the structure, balanced on a sliding ladder, a pródniy was making final adjustments to the lever mechanism he'd spent the better part of two years designing. He rarely consulted any manuals at this stage, preferring to work by feel, the same way a musician tunes by ear rather than by instrument. Amongst his peers, this pródniy was regarded as a prodigy. He understood the syntax better than anyone else—the one whose hand, on occasion, would write something just slightly different than what the manuals said, and it worked better. The one who’d built a device of floating runes that responded to input, who watched those runes light up and listened to the twinkling sounds they emitted, adjusting his formulas to follow.

Across the lab was a hole in the wall: ‘The hearth,’ as the scholars called it. It was a versatile invention, something the natcheli could use to create arcane tools for mortal use. The insides were carved with the same syntax as the journal, and when the natchel standing in front of it casually pricked the side of her wrist, the drop of silver ichor she dripped into the hearth caused it to glow brighter. The hearth hissed, and a fresh spiral of filament wire formed, a conduit for arcane energy used to connect monitoring equipment to the structure. The man waiting beside her pulled it out, and they both parted ways to their respective stations.

Di watched over this, and all the other happenings within the lab, perched on the rafter closest to the pródniy, her tail hanging over the edge like a pendulum.

He checked the alignment of the last rune once more, then looked over his shoulder at his companion. "Think this will work?"

Di’s ear rotated toward him, then away.

"Noted," he said, and pulled the lever.

The hydraulics below engaged, steam hissing upward, and the runes carved into the structure’s surface began to glow. The monitoring equipment spiked; one beeped in alarm, but the pródniy paid it no mind. Neither did the scholars. Where the pródniy’s hand lingered on the lever, a thin vibration hummed against his palm.

The glow was near-blinding. He hopped down to the floor, shielded his eyes, and stepped back to join his colleagues. When the glow receded and the structure shuddered, many gasped, including himself. Silver, iridescent fluid began to trickle out of the structure from precisely the points he’d anticipated; flowed down the channels he’d carved for it; gathered in the reservoir he’d built.

The room erupted. Champagne was opened. Colleagues who had spent years on this project embraced, laughed. The pródniy was at the center of it all, and he was radiant.

A glass of champagne was pressed into his hand, but he politely batted it away, still grinning. Breathless and dazed, he stepped forward to observe the reservoir. To finally see what was so precious to the mortal who’d created it.

And in his eyes, it was beautiful.

Behind him, the rest of the scholars grew quiet. Or perhaps he’d stopped hearing them. Curious, he reached one finger into the reservoir. The fluid rippled around his touch—warm, but not in the way of temperature. Like something charged.

The pródniy grew still—eerily still. Unnerved, the others stepped back, watching him anxiously. He tugged his hand away, pupils dilating—

Then gripped his skull with both hands and screamed.