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The first time Nemesis swoops in with unwanted aid, Melinoë is three quarters through a brute-force exorcism along the nor-norwest leyline. She sweeps it hastily aside, missing both the goddess and the half-mad shade she has targeted for lustration. A dram of her precious power drains away.
“Nem,” she says, too furious to moderate her tone, “what do you think you’re doing?”
The goddess of vengeance sidesteps a spectral lash. Stygius arcs; the shade explodes into lambent green dust. “Saving your hide, looks like.”
Melinoë would like to be the sort who can bandy words with gods and kings of men. She would like to return a winged retort that will cut now and sting forever. She does not. Her mind is trembling and blank. But there are souls coalescing, hungry for gods’ blood, so she sets aside the matter for later and flings her feelings into combat.
When later arrives, Melinoë has not yet assembled words of chastisement. She stalks the empty clearing for time. Here a clot of ashes melts into the soil; here, moly unfurls beaten-gold petals. The bloom marks a gout of blood spilled long ago in the world-shaking battle between Giants and Olympians.
She kneels and takes out her spade. At the corner of her eye, Nemesis flicks ectoplasm from her sword. The blade is a scarlet flash in the gloom.
“You’re supposed to be in camp,” she says when the heavy tread approaches. It’s a miracle that Nemesis hasn’t drawn more shades to them. Her gait might wake the dead, or Lord Hypnos, for that matter.
“Says who? Your surrogate mother?”
Melinoë bristles. She does not know why Nem resents Headmistress Hecate, and does not consider it her business to pry. “If you dislike your instructions, take it up with Headmistress.”
“Like she’d listen.” Nemesis inspects her nails. “Tell me. Are your odds of taking vengeance against Chronos without Vengeance on your side…good?”
Melinoë bundles the moly into her reticule with more force than is healthy for it. “I trained to carry out this task alone. Mistakes are impossible. When you turned up earlier, I was forced to waste a spell.”
“You were wide open in that position. And you’re already regaining your strength. I can see it.”
Nemesis cannot know how the battle might have turned without interference, but she is correct in the other point. The danger over, the stunted, sun-shunning flora of Erebus are siphoning droplets of magic to Melinoë. They gather at the wellspring of her power as iron grains to a magnet.
Nemesis cocks her head. “Anything else, princess?”
Melinoë feels a frown drawing down the corners of her mouth. Her reasons to spurn this alliance are being whittled to nothing by a willful fool. And perhaps it is foolish of her to refuse. Vengeance’s intervention may be fated. Headmistress has long instructed her to use what reagents present themselves.
Nemesis squats down. Melinoë busies herself with closing her reticule. They are at eye level, and Vengeance smells, as always, of blood. “I see the huntmaiden’s hand on you.” She sniffs. “And Paean Apollo’s, and your revered grandmother’s. Why not mine? Here, my boon. Take it.”
Her chiton scrunches in her hands. Nem is intent upon this, and Melinoë knows she must yield or waste precious minutes convincing or escaping her. Alter your thoughts, Headmistress has often admonished. The words sit poorly as ever. But in the war for her family and against Father Time himself, she cannot allow personal reservations to hinder the cause.
“Very well,” she says. “I accept your aid.”
"Right call." Nemesis stands and thrusts down a hand to her.
Melinoë does not take it. "You will follow my instructions," she says, "and my lead." She clambers to her feet. "I was chosen for a reason."
"Yes." Nemesis's eyes glitter. "You were."
They proceed only a little way before shades descend. Battling them, Melinoë finds her spell patterns foiled by Vengeance's close-quarters attacks. Frustration makes her sloppy. She takes wounds when a foe slips her defenses, and is compelled to return to the Crossroads while Nemesis's back is turned.
The grove's power blooms around her. Her injuries heal as she heads for her tent. The night is young. Her family waits. She must decant more concoctions and set forth immediately.
Phials tinkle against her fingers. The sound, so like the wind chime that once hung above her cradle, is nearly sufficient to soothe the bone-gnawing fear that she will never reach Hades, or reach it too late.
She must not doubt. She cannot.
She manages two more forays into Erebus (abortive—but she will overcome those damnable Root-Stalkers) before a familiar blade carves a rune through her opponent, and a familiar figure steps from the shadows.
“You left me,” Nemesis says, by way of greeting.
“I had not reserved mana for two,” Melinoë says, stung, “I left the Crossroads alone and expected to return that way.”
They follow a grass-scruffed defile, changing course when Melinoë’s instinct tugs. She can sense the banked power of an Olympian ahead. It glows like a beacon to her occult senses.
Abruptly, she realizes that Vengeance has no such gift. “How did you find me?” she asks. “Erebus is pathless, trackless…”
And while Nemesis is powerful, she is not attuned to magic. Much like Melinoë herself, before she traded her left arm for the aptitude. The ghost of her true limb flickers like a firefly in the dark. How Headmistress had approved of her bravery under the knife. There had been kopte for dessert that night in camp.
Owls croon. Some hidden thing roots in the brush—but only a rodent rummaging for forage. Melinoë turns her attention back to Nemesis.
“Blood calls to blood,” Nemesis says.
“We're not kin.”
Vengeance’s red-nailed hand grips her pommel. “Your brother wielded Stygius for a time. And bled on it. A lot.”
Melinoë wonders why she was never told. How long has she watched Nemesis moving through the steps of her drills in silver-scarlet blur, cutting and lunging, hewing the night to pieces? And all this time…
But she knows sword lore. She knows what will happen, if she fails. And she knows the compulsion that lies in blood.
“Then by rights, Stygius is mine,” she declares.
Nemesis snorts. “Stygius is no one’s, and goes where my know-it-all, sorry, all-knowing sisters will. Why do you think your brother got to have it, trying to bust out of Hades?”
“All-knowing…” Melinoë turns the epithet on her tongue. “Your sisters the Fates? Is that why you hate them?”
“I don’t."
“You speak poorly of them often or always.”
“They’re my sisters.” Nemesis ducks under a trailing branch.
“And?”
“And they’re a collective pain.” She rubs her knifeblade jaw. “You’ll get it after you meet your brother.”
“Not all siblings are alike,” Melinoë says swiftly.
Nemesis is silent. Her opinion is clear.
Embarrassment warms Melinoë’s neck. What does she, reared in a bog with a frog for company, know of family? How foolish Nemesis, with brothers and sisters innumerable, must think her. How trite Odysseus must find her, a man so storied and wide-wandering, even while he indulges her 'expert' assertions.
Unexpectedly, resentment blooms. All her life she has striven to be enough. To save her parents and elder brother. To meet them—king, queen, and prince of the underworld—as their equal. The natural order itself teeters upon her mission’s success. Death to Chronos, or death and tortured undeath to all. Yet in the hour of need—!
It isn’t fair. Her lip trembles. “Why do the Three Fates help my brother when they ignore my summons?”
She doesn’t ask the true question. Am I less worthy?
Vengeance shrugs. “They’re like that.”
The third time Nemesis encroaches, Melinoë does not immediately note her presence. She is in shameful need of assistance. Her left knee shies from receiving her full weight, and Arachne’s well-spun chlamys is tattered to shreds. Blood and spidersilk limn her footprints.
“Looks like your battle’s gone poorly.”
Melinoë flinches. Nemesis has materialized beside her, a griffin on two legs.
She does not wish to autopsy her failures with Nem of all people. Her fingers sting from plucking the cords that crisscross the magical world. She rubs them. “I let a troupe of Wailers get the better of me.”
“You should avoid that." Nemesis looks her over. "And bind your wounds.”
“I don’t have the reagents.” Rage simmers in her spine. You should avoid that? Nemesis should avoid angering her, unless she wishes a draught of aconite forced down her throat. Her judging eye plucked and fed to the ravens. To be dragged back by her ridiculous hair to kneel before Headmistress for a whipping.
Vengeance reaches under her kilt—Melinoë startles—and draws forth a phial. It glitters, diamondlike, when Melinoë holds it to Selene’s skybound face.
“Healing waters.” She wonders how she missed it herself. Then again, she plots her course by such omens as the flight of birds; the vanishing thread of her celestial kin's power. Nem's compass points straight to her. “You found a source?”
Nemesis adjusts her drape. “Thought I saw that headpiece of yours through the trees. Turned out it was just a dryad spring.”
A shame that Erebus resists mapping. Melinoë sips. She can feel her tendons knitting together, her knee shifting to its proper seat. The wounds on her feet sting horribly and then cease to hurt at all. “Thank you,” she says, and tries not to begrudge the words. She hands back the empty phial. It is beautifully cut and looks dear. “I have a question, Nem. Why are you helping me?”
The goddess’s fingers close over the crystal and crush it to powder. Luminous dust sifts down. “Why do I get a nick?"
"I've known you since I was a child."
“Nicknames are for friends, and you think I'm a nuisance. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t try Erebus alone. We’d leave the Crossroads together.”
The matter clarified, Melinoë files it as unimportant. Nemesis is merely irked that the daughter of Persephone and Hades, not the daughter of Nyx, has been given this charge. “Headmistress would forbid it. And you have your own duty—to guard the encampment.”
Guilt pricks her at the thought. Does she have a responsibility to send Nemesis home? If she had not come this time at least, Melinoë might well have been forced to turn back.
“Please.” Nemesis loosens Stygius. The hilt scrapes against her gauntlet. “Your precious Threefold Goddess wards every inch of that camp. Nothing is getting in unless she wants it to.”
As one who has helped set and renew those wards, Melinoë admits that this is likely to be true. Still, there are rules. She lets her disapproval be known in silence.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Vengeance says. The trees have fallen away.
Melinoë looks around. The air has turned blobby and glasslike, strangely distorted. Points of phantasmal materialization—imminent. The mad shades have found them.
“Nor did you,” she says, and draws the Sister Blades.
When Nemesis appears a fourth time, Melinoë is in no mood for companionship. She has already sustained wounds—unwelcome reminders of imperfect technique. So when she dispels a lost soul and turns to find inescapable Vengeance hulking like a Titan behind her, she speaks the first words on her mind, which are:
“Go away, Nem.”
Nemesis lifts a penumbral strand of hair away from her circlet. “You lead with your right foot. You’re indicating your next move to your opponents.”
“I welcome the critique,” she says, in tones she hopes are glacial. “I shall make adjustments once I am not grievously injured.”
“You’d last longer if you took the advice now.”
Melinoë considers flinging a bolt of mana at her. It would hurt, she thinks; her Lord-Uncle Zeus has cast lightning into her power’s centre, and she crackles with potential. She turns from the urge under the pretense of adjusting her belt. “Were you trained in the art of dual blades then? As well as that tree trunk you swing around?”
Nemesis does not respond.
Melinoë knows she has been petulant. She hates herself virulently for it. She is only a little goddess, as Odysseus is so fond of declaring: a child in years, experience, and patience. No ancient being like Nyx or her children. Now, she thinks bitterly, she has shown it.
They push forward to the next night-strewn glade, the next test of mettle. When the shades converge on them, Melinoë is mindful of her right foot.
She essays several attempts by herself after that. Nemesis is present in camp, visible in the performance of her duties. They do not speak. Melinoë tells herself this is the preferable arrangement.
The fifth time Vengeance joins her, Melinoë is scarce out of the Crossroads. She is trudging along, brooding upon the mistakes that forced her last premature retreat, when a startled hare bisects her path. She looks up, equally startled, into void eyes.
“Princess,” Nemesis says.
“Headmistress will suspect,” Melinoë says, suddenly anxious. She feels a night-delving gaze upon them—or is it paranoia? It is never clear to her what her teacher knows, or what is permitted, for that matter.
“She won’t.” Silver-shod steps align with hers. “Too deep in her incantations.”
“She has spells of scrying. Auguries…”
“She’ll have to find a way out from under that hat to use them.”
Melinoë wonders if Nemesis likes any of her myriad siblings or allies.
They are several leagues and as many skirmishes into the woods when Melinoë asks the question that has gnawed at her.
“Where have you been?”
The cumbrous steps slow. “The last time?”
“The last three times,” she corrects.
“Patrolling. Swaddling Hypnos. Brewing moonshine, I think.” She clanks on. “Wasn’t aware I was supposed to sneak out for every go.” Her gesture encompasses the path. “You want me to tag along?”
A simple question. Melinoë is surprised not to know the answer. “You’re an unknown variable. I find it difficult to keep adjusting my tactics.”
The ground billows like a sail under full wind. Hastily, Melinoë sketches a rune. Descura blazes as a massive, tortuous root erupts in their path.
“I’ll try to be around,” Nemesis says, and leaps to meet it.
The sixth time, Nemesis says:
“I was bored.”
Melinoë looks up. She is weaving a charm of her own hair—something to mark Vengeance as an extension of herself, to protect her from her own spellcraft. The logical route. If she is to have a companion, she should see to it that her presence is minimally complicating.
Nemesis rests Melinoë’s pickaxe on her boot. She has been cleaving silver from a block of stone: components for yet more invocations. A fine sheen of sweat gilds her throat. “I was bored,” she repeats. “When I first went searching for you.”
Melinoë snips a hair, thinking. “And now?”
Nemesis lifts a shoulder, and the pickaxe. “This is the most exercise I’ve gotten in years.”
Melinoë coaxes her shuttle along the weft: a bone splinter peeled from her own spectral arm, for a hand loom the half-breadth of her palm. “You were Nem because I was too little and clumsy to pronounce your name,” she says. “The letter sigma was very challenging.”
Tonk. Another chunk of silver hits the ground. “You could be Meli.”
“What?” she says, startled, and, “No.”
Nemesis ducks to the tumbled ore and tosses it into Melinoë’s reticule. “Why not?”
She doesn’t know. “Titles are supposed to be organic. Granted for words, or deeds.”
Nemesis raises the pickaxe again. Selene flashes off the tip, and describes a silvery arc in descent. “Suit yourself.”
Meli means ‘honey.’ Melinoë applies herself to her charmwork, and does not ask herself why her cheeks are warm.
The seventh time Nemesis walks with Melinoë, she stops mid-stride, head up.
Humiliating to have overlooked a potential threat. Melinoë raises her staff. “Is there danger?”
“Someone’s waiting for you,” Nemesis says, “and I can’t be there.”
And before Melinoë can respond, let alone unravel the enigma, Vengeance has turned on her heel and left.
“Nem,” Melinoë says in alarm. “Lady Nemesis!”
Stygius fades into the mist.
Descura bites her palms. She will not admit how unsettling Erebus seems now, without Nemesis’s jangle and clank. But her unexpected solitude demonstrates more than ever why she must rely on no one.
And she is not alone, she reminds herself. The moon incarnate, her uncle Wavebreaker, and Grandmother Demeter stand with her. They will and must suffice.
Melinoë squares her shoulders and marches forward.
When Nemesis intrudes upon her an eighth time, Melinoë has been soundly thrashed and is contemplating murder. No god stays dead, but it might relieve her own tangled feelings.
“You could have told me,” she says without turning.
The steps stop. “You’re a good girl. You’d have called it cheating.”
“It was an advantage,” Melinoë snaps, “advantages are always to be taken.” She rounds on Nemesis. Stalks forward, and seizes Vengeance’s wrist, the one with the charm upon it. “Why else would I have gifted you this?”
She lets go, snaps her fingers. The charm unravels. Nemesis’s bare arm drops to her side.
“You were a nuisance before, until I was tricked into calling you an ally. But I was right all along.” She holds out a hand. “Let me use Stygius. After, we shall part ways for good.”
Vengeance unsheathes the blade and plants it point down between her feet. Her hands settle on the pommel: left over gloved right.
“No.”
Melinoë wants to scream. She will not indulge anger. She forces herself to speak evenly. “A single casting only. With a focus that has drunk kinblood, I can find my brother with an accuracy exceeding any divination ritual once I reach the House.”
“Which you won’t. You can’t even best the Handmaiden.” Vengeance’s eyes are empty. “You want to get that far? You need me.”
“I need an instrument I can trust.” Melinoë thinks of Headmistress; of her waiting, predatory patience. She wills herself still and beckons, just with the tips of her fingers. “If you please, Lady Nemesis.”
Nemesis does not move.
Melinoë exhales and gathers a handful of threads, each a conduit, each saturated with power. “Then I shall take it from you by force.”
She unstoppers her smith-forged mana, and it ravens down the path she’s made. It bombs out the place where Nemesis stands—or—
Melinoë turns. Vengeance waits for her on the clearing’s far side.
“Face me, Nem. Your honor demands it.” She unsheathes the Sister Blades.
Nemesis does not draw.
Melinoë lashes out with her power till the twisted trees burn, till Nemesis’s armor is hatched over with marks. Her foe does nothing except what needs must to evade her spellcraft and turn aside her blades.
You came only to leave. The injustice sets spurs in her heart. Oros flays open Vengeance’s cheek. “Betrayer,” she flings, “you were untrue. Better you had stayed away. This quest is my burden, as ever it has been.”
Lim flickers forward, and Nemesis, at last, moves. Her bare hand rises to meet the blade. It bites. Her blood smokes, gushing down, and Melinoë leaps to press her advantage.
They hit the soil. Stygian eyes meet hers. Nemesis does not fight as Melinoë straddles her, makes no move to defend herself when Melinoë sheathes, rears back, and slaps her. She weathers her curses, her execrations, her every blow, and only when Melinoë has crumpled, exhausted and weeping, does she say:
“My primordial mother’s besieged. Thanatos is enslaved for all I know. But your teacher picked you for a scion and chained me to the Crossroads. She’s a bitch and a fool, and I’m done obeying her.”
“Don’t,” Melinoë says immediately. She drags her chiton over her eyes. “Headmistress marshals our forces. She keeps us safe.”
“Her hubris put us in this mess. And if she’d let us go together instead of grooming you like a sacrificial goat, my shitty, time-eating uncle would already be defeated. Look at me, princess.”
Melinoë sits back. Nemesis’s hair has torn loose from its knot. There is blood on her lips—or is it paint? Her wounds are healed. The font of her power blazes when Melinoë places a hand on her breastplate.
“I attacked you,” Melinoë says, numb.
Nemesis smiles a savage smile. “You invoked me. Every step on your journey, you invoke me.”
Melinoë hugs herself. Her spectral hand is cold, but no colder than the despair that chills her heart. Here is a true goddess: unbowed and unbreakable. Chthonic and ancient. Inexorable as her mother Night, unrelenting as her brother Death.
And she—unfit to surpass her teacher. Unfit to master her revenge. Unfit, it may be, to defeat the Lord of Time.
She burns with shame. She is a weapon ill-forged, pulled too soon from the flame. Doomed to shatter on her enemy’s shield; doomed to attain the cusp of victory and be cast back to shrouded Erebus. Again, again, again.
Such a burden. She wants nothing more than to sink down and let it crush her. “Help me, Nem,” Melinoë whispers.
Her answer is low. “Your cause has always been mine, princess. And mine has always been yours.”
Nemesis’s face blurs. “Death to Chronos,” Melinoë chokes.
A searing hand cups her cheek. Melinoë turns her face into it. Her tears are steaming, boiling away.
"Vengeance.”
Nemesis’s lips are scalding on hers. Melinoë drinks in her white-hot heat. She shivers with gratitude and exhaustion, with fear and want, and clings on with both hands.
The ninth time that Nemesis walks with her, shades fall in droves before them. Melinoë lays her teacher low, and Nemesis awaits after with her jagged red smile.
The tenth time follows. The eleventh, and the twelfth. On their thirteenth attempt, Melinoë and Nemesis arrive at a blighted place.
They tread cautiously, but nothing stirs on the grounds. Once-proud vines hang strangled on their trellises. Brittle leaf-fall, Daphne’s corpse hair, snaps underfoot.
A house stands at the dead gardens’ heart. Silence answers their hail. Melinoë hesitates, and then pushes in. Guest-right shall protect her if she intrudes. If not that, spell and sword.
Whoever lived here is gone or dead. Door after door opens on vacant rooms. Skeletal branches stick finger bones through the broken shutters, and there is a derelict air to the sleeping chamber with its leaf-strewn and bird-picked bed.
“Princess…”
Melinoë turns. Her companion stands before a hollowed-out sconce in the corner: a domestic shrine.
There are no icons. Not to the king of gods and men; not even to verdant Demeter, in this place once lush with produce, grain, and blooms. Melinoë runs a forefinger along the recess. There is a word carved deeply into the plaster—no, two words. She picks gravel from the incisions.
ΖΑΓΡΕΥΣ
ΝΥΞ
“Zagreus,” Melinoë reads. “Nyx. No others, Olympic or Chthonic.” She swallows. “Nem…I think this was Mother’s home.”
They tack scrounged linens over the windows. Barricade the door (Nem) and ward it (herself) and huddle down in bed to await the night.
Nemesis sleeps like a banked fire. Her arm lies heavily across her. Melinoë stares at their threadbare curtain; at the sunshine that stipples its shifting weave. Somewhere beyond this false twilight, birds speak of mundanities.
She has seen Helios before. In paintings, in sendings. Shrouded in bog-born haze. It differs from the reality that pricks her eyes now. Clearly her mother loved the sun and all things that grew under it. Melinoë has prised the lids off countless jars, snooping through the pantry. Here, dried seeds and herbs; there a mortar and pestle, rusted shears. The trappings are not so different from her witchkit.
She wonders if her mother will approve of her craft. She wonders if her brother prefers the darkness or light, and if her father can gaze upon Helios at all. She cannot imagine a life lived wholly in the shadows. The sun must have been blinding on Zagreus’s first escape. And to be torn from it, cast down repeatedly…her fate is hard, but surely the more favorable.
Tomorrow, on my word, she thinks. Tomorrow you, brother, and Mother and Father, will walk free.
She turns into Nem’s broad chest and closes her eyes.
She hears the gates before she sees them: a vast nothingness. The sounds of flora and fauna have ceased. No birds in the branches, no underbrush scurry or insect chitter and whir. The grass bends, arrested in a wind that does not blow, and the ever-flowing Styx flows no more. Never has there been a silence so profound.
Hades waits.
It is a black wound in a scree of broken stone. No three-headed hellhound bars the way. No bright-shining scion of the House, nor mad souls chained to Chronos’s whim. There is the absence of light, a steep slope down, and the will to advance.
“I’ve done it.” Melinoë’s words fall strangely in the dead air.
She looks for her companion. Nemesis stands a half-pace back. Her smile is sharp, unnerving.
“You did it,” she agrees. Her nostrils flare. She breathes in, open-mouthed. “They’re here, princess. Can you taste them?”
“I can sense them,” Melinoë corrects, “I am not a snake.” She squares her shoulders. “Lord Chronos knows we approach. The battle will be bloody.”
Nemesis’s smile grows more feral still. Stygius sings free of its sheath. Melinoë readies Descura.
“Vengeance for our family,” Melinoë says.
“Vengeance,” Nem echoes. And holds out a hand.
They descend.