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When Melinoë materialized back at the Crossroads only to feel the sudden weight of her brother’s body collapsing over her shoulders, she realized she had shamed her family mere minutes after meeting them.
She collapsed with a grunt, panting; the thud of the Sister Blades followed her. Her brother—Zagreus—met the soft grass facedown and did not move.
Distantly, she heard Dora exclaim and whirl out of the glade, calling for help.
Melinoë heaved him onto his back. In the depths of Chronos’s underbelly, she hadn’t seen their relation; here now in the moonlight, it was clear to see the shape of his nose was the same as hers. He was not bleeding or injured; looked asleep, almost. But she knew the appearance of a warm corpse, knew the consequences of a spell gone wrong.
She had made it to her family, and yet even in success, she’d found a way to fail. The fight had been long and draining. She’d had enough energy for one spell, one return. Chronos, of all the Titans, would not stay down for long. So her parents had commanded Zagreus to go, and the siblings would descend and face Time together on her next attempt; two could undergo the journey down, and four could come back up. All of her slow progress alone, expedited when shared. Next time, they would get them all out.
And he hadn’t survived her spell back home. She had known she was low on mana, but to overestimate so much that it cost her brother’s life in the abyss between realms was a shame and horror she couldn't put to words.
Gods did not stay dead. Zagreus would revive eventually in the Underworld; the headmistress would surely help. But she did not know how long it would take, and to come so far, and to return to her parents alone again…
The blur of a purple cloak. Hecate had arrived, sweeping into the clearing with her cape fluttering like raven’s wing. Melinoë avoided her gaze, mortified at her tears and ashamed to have been wrong in so many ways. Hecate crouched next to them both, and her dark hands reached out to her brother’s chest—
Zagreus awoke with a jerk, eyes wide open to the heavens. He gasped for air like a man who had never lived before. One hand clutched for a missing weapon; the other shot up to his throat. He turned his head, coughing, and spit up onto the grass.
“Oh,” he croaked, “I’m dry.”
Melinoë stared at him. His eyes… it was like seeing herself in someone else’s face. Hesitating, she put a hand on his shoulder, steadying him as he shuddered in the grass. “I’m sorry?” she managed.
He ran a hand through his hair, shaking it quickly, as if on instinct. “This isn’t the Pool of Styx.”
“No, young lord,” Hecate replied from somewhere outside her vision; Melinoë only had eyes for her brother. “I am the Witch of the Crossroads. Be welcome in my domain.”
“Pleasure, Lady Hecate,” her brother groaned. He closed his eyes again and leaned into the ground, wincing. One green eye cracked open at them. “Sorry. I would bow, but I’m not quite sure why I’m horizontal. I normally bounce back from death faster than this.”
What followed was a blur. Hecate checked the remains of Melinoë’s spells to ensure no unwanted guests had followed her home, and then went to reinforce the wards. Distantly, Melinoë heard Odysseus’s voice clarifying plans for new accommodations and Moros’s gently suggesting not to move him too far.
Nemesis had arrived as well.
“You can just carry me under the arm,” Zagreus told Nemesis as she reached for him. “Meg says it’s fun.”
“I’m not Megaera,” Nemesis replied, and hefted him so that he lay over both of her broad shoulders. He winced again but did not protest.
When Melinoë’s hands stopped shaking, she picked up Lim and Oros and wiped away some ichor from their blades. Her tears had dried quickly. She was still kneeling in the summoning circle. She wanted to curl up here and sleep until dusk.
As Nemesis carried him out of the glade, Zagreus looked back and caught Melinoë’s eye. “Sorry,” he wheezed; his pale, exhausted face was sincere. “I guess no one warned you about my entrances back home.”
Nemesis deposited Zagreus into Melinoë’s bed, as her tent had a small modicum of privacy. Hecate had spoken to him, answered his many questions, administered what care she could. Melinoë was informed that while Zagreus’s prolonged incapacitation within Chronos had damaged his relation to the realm of the dead, Fates willing, he would recover soon. But nobody knew what “soon” was anymore, least of all the man who had just been a prisoner to Time itself.
Melinoë drew the canvas closed and stood in the entrance of her dark tent, watching her brother’s chest rise and fall in the shaft of light that remained.
Now one third of her family was safe from the war. Now she had a real, flesh-and-blood brother, not an imaginary friend to give advice and respond to her when she spoke aloud; now there was someone who would reply back, and he was lying in her bed, and she had no idea what to say to a stranger who’d last known her as an infant. Not for the first time, she worried if her brother might like her for who she was, not what she had done. Would he think her a mad, reckless witch? Brave, she hoped, but mad all the same, surely. Her kind did not inspire trust.
Nemesis told her elder brothers among mortals were either bossy and overprotective, or uncaring and aloof, or mocking and cruel. And she indeed had borne witness to many bitter sibling feuds, including her own. Melinoë always told her not to believe that of every family, but it came from a selfish place. She needed them to be different. Needed them all to see the baby they knew was gone, that the unfinished family portrait on her wall was all that remained of that brief, happy time, and accept her regardless. Accept her for who she had become: an assassin-witch of the night raised by a Titanness. A Silver Sister.
Would they even like someone who dabbled in forbidden magicks to rescue them?
She bent her head and crept in silently. Every part of her was sore. All she wanted to do was collapse into her sleeping mat and sleep till this war was over, or have a long, private cry, because for a few moments she had believed she would have a partner tomorrow, but she should have known better than to hope she wouldn’t have to bear her burdens alone.
Her brother needed the comfort of an enchanted sleep more than she did. The glade would do for privacy. She gathered up her spare bedroll from the corner.
“I don’t bite.” Zagreus’s voice was weak. “Are you all right? That was a nasty escape.”
She looked up. His eyes were still closed. “Me? I’m fine. You should be resting.”
“I can sleep later. I’ve got time now, thanks to you. It’s not every 7:48 you meet your little sister. Who’s no longer so little.”
She didn’t know what to say, so she latched onto what she could. “It’s not 7:48.”
“It’s not?” He started to rise, eyes open now; she dropped her bedroll and moved to push him back down.
“The healing spell only works if you’re stationary.”
“What time is it?”
“I’m not sure, a few hours till dawn? Time works a little differently—”
“In the Underworld, yes, but I need to know the time. I need to see it move. Do you have a sundial?”
Startled, she obliged and collected a sundial from the window of her tent. It looked out onto one of the many shaded pathways that wound their way into moonlit Erebus, knowing no sunlight in this place, but one of Hecate’s many enchantments at the Crossroads was a geas of truth upon all of their timekeeping devices. Aside from its necessity in their spellwork, which often required precise timing, the enchantment was a critical boon here in their war against Chronos.
She sat it between them on the ground. Zagreus’s eyes tracked it with rapt attention in the dark. They waited as a minute ticked by. Two. The enchanted shadow barely moved, but move it did.
After three minutes, Zagreus sighed.
“Sorry,” he said, looking out the window instead of at her. “That was nutty of me, wasn’t it?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Your tent is very organized.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t worry, I haven’t touched your things.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m told I’m a bit of a slob.” He gave her a crooked grin. “I figure word would’ve gotten round… Hecate mentioned many of these shades in the Crossroads were in the House at some point, and my room didn’t have a door.”
She blinked. “I know very little of the House. The shades don’t gossip. With us, at least.” They certainly gossiped to each other; she was forever walking up to them to salute or say hello, only to watch them fall silent on her arrival and greet her reverently with “Princess.”
“Oh.” Zagreus paused, staring at her for a moment. Off-kilter. It was the first time she’d seen him pause before speaking; thus far, he had exhibited a casual, almost flippant assurance in nearly every word, her brother. His confidence felt prince-like, if not his speech. “…What does that mean, you ‘know little’—you don’t know anything about home?”
“I know of it, and you, of course.”
“But you don’t remember us, you were too young. Surely someone told you about us?”
“I know of your deeds, and Father’s,” she reassured him. “How you united the family and found Mother and brought her home, how Father helped slay the Titans—”
“Not that,” he said impatiently. “About us. About—who we were, not what we did.”
She didn’t know how to reply to satisfy him. The answer, and he knew it, was no.
“Nevermind,” he said quickly. “Forgive me… I must be tired.”
But she had been prepared for this, after her talk with Hecate. “You’ve had a long imprisonment. You won’t be well enough to join me when I descend tonight, but you may rest here as long as you need.”
Zagreus slowly sank back onto her pillows, staring off somewhere around her elbow. She put the sundial away; she had the feeling he was not really listening to her.
“Am I keeping you?” he asked. “Were you going to bed?”
“Nearly, but I can keep talking.”
He perked up a bit, but granted, “I don’t want to take your space.” His hand clutched the thin blanket. She only now realized that he was shivering slightly.
Melinoë gathered a woolen blanket from her chest. “We expected you would all need to recuperate. I won’t be here at night anyway and my tent has the most privacy, aside from the headmistress’s.” Even she didn’t know where Hecate slept, or if she rested at all.
“You’ve had a long night too.”
“You need the mat more.”
“It’s not a contest. Look, I’ll make room, just lie down on the other side. Not to be rude, but you look exhausted. And you’re wobbling. It’s worrying.” He paused. “Unless you're not all right with it.”
She hesitated for only a moment, but had the sense he would not relent. If it were anyone else, even her parents, she would have insisted and retreated to her glade; but in difficult times, had she not wanted to know what it would be like to have a brother nearby, to know his presence at all, to speak to as an equal…?
She relented and crawled in next to him. He extracted a pillow out from under his head and laid it out. It was odd to have someone sleeping in her space next to her, but he was just a single body breathing in the dark, after all that trouble to get him here. As she settled, her eyelids began to grow heavy; a sign of the mat’s enchantment for restful sleep.
“This is so weird,” came Zagreus’s voice.
“Yes.” She almost laughed, but nothing here was funny. He would stay here to recuperate and in the morning, she would rise to prepare her spells, gather her mana and herbs, then delve back into the depths again when night fell. “Go to sleep, brother.”
“My friends call me Zag.”
“Zag?”
“That’s me. Can I call you Mel?”
She almost said, I prefer Melinoë. It was the name her parents gave her, and not much of them remained for her to claim. But it was true she had grown used to close friends calling her thus over the years. She didn’t want to deny him anything that he might want, that might bring them closer, and she found herself saying, “That’s fine.”
“Mel,” he said, “you were just a baby about twenty minutes ago.”
“Twenty minutes ago, we arrived back in the glade.” And I thought I’d lost you a second time.
He nodded against the pillow. “I loved you the moment I saw you,” he said suddenly. “I didn’t know that was possible. I thought that was just something mortals say when they meet new family. But it actually happens.”
Melinoë was quiet.
“I mean, I’d felt the same when I met Mother for the first time, but she’s our mother.” He gathered steam now. “You were this… new thing, and Father and I were so worried the Fates would intervene again, but then you came, and I’d never seen him so…”
He exhaled. “Hera sent me a boon that day, the first time she’d done that. She said older siblings have a responsibility, and we don’t choose it, unlike our parents, but we must bear it anyway. To protect and guide and all that.” It was quiet enough to hear Zagreus breathing. “You grew up alone, didn’t you? I failed you.”
She turned to interrupt him in the dark, but he went on: “I’m failing you now. We should go down together, and yet you’re inheriting all the family’s burdens alone. I couldn’t even raise a hand to defend myself, much less you.”
“You have failed no one,” she said. “And I didn’t grow up alone. I always knew I had a brother, a family. I know you would have come for me, protected me if you could.”
“Your arm,” he started, but didn’t continue.
She was glad he didn’t, because her mouth had gone dry. She didn’t know how to broach it. Had hoped in the dark of Chronos’s lair, in the chaos of their return, neither Zagreus nor their parents had noticed her magicked limb. “You should sleep, Zagre—Zag.” Both of them felt odd words in address, after so long hearing of the man in abstract.
“Has it really been decades?” he asked hoarsely.
“Yes.”
“Okay,” he said. “Mel? Can I call you Mel?”
“You—already asked me that.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“You can call me Mel.”
“I might ask you again. I might get confused in the morning, after some real time has passed. You have mornings here, right?”
“It’s fine. And yes, we do.”
“Do you have afternoons too?”
She couldn’t tell if he was joking. “Yes. You can watch the sunrise through the window if you want. It’s charmed to show the eastern view on the surface but I can change it to the west, if you want to see the sunset.”
Zagreus didn’t reply to that. He was quiet for a long time and she realized when he raised a hand to his face that he was wiping away a few tears. “I nearly forgot what the sun was like.”
“It’s still there.”
“I haven’t seen it since…” He swallowed. “There are still… birds, I think they’re called, right? They would chatter like mad on the surface but they’re nice.”
“I can charm the window to hear birdsong. It may not be perfectly accurate to what you’d hear up above, but they’ll definitely be, um… birds. Do you want me to wake you to see the sunrise before I leave?”
He turned his head to face her on the pillow. “You’re bloody amazing. I’m really not winning any big brother awards, though, am I.”
“Sorry?” She had begun to wonder if these frequent subject changes were the result of lingering confusion from his imprisonment within Time, or if it was just her brother.
“I’m supposed to do stuff for you. Here you are saving my rear end and showing me up with magic. You need to look properly impressed and awed when I’m well enough to do something flashy, would you?”
“I don’t think there’s any ‘supposed to’ in our family, extended or otherwise. We’re not very normal.”
“No,” he said slowly, “but we really did try.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. She sank slowly into her pillow, bringing the wool up to her nose. When she was a child, she used to wonder what a brother would be like. Sometimes she pretended it was Zagreus looking for her just around the corner instead of the headmistress when they would play hide-and-seek. Zagreus, who would miraculously arrive one day to help; not her mother or father, who in her mind would end the war on arrival and put everything back to rights, but her brother, who would share her troubles and fight at her side. A much more realistic desire than a parent who would swoop in and fix everything; and thus a desire she often craved more.
He didn’t need to know that. But maybe that was the sort of thing he’d want to know.
“Well done, by the way,” he murmured. “On reaching the end.”
Melinoë swallowed. She was still reeling from it, the victory that wasn’t a victory, because Chronos was eternal, and would outlast all their efforts to stop him. Throughout the night she had been avoiding the knowledge that the job she was raised for, the reason for all her years of training and the hope of ending the war, might not be done soon, or ever, if Chronos’s power was this strong. “Now I just have to make it down there again. And again.”
“You can do it,” her brother said, already half asleep. “I think it runs in the blood.”