11-02-2026, 12:04 AM
Two alignments had been tried in the night, the Ker had said, at a gate no one had woken in two hundred years. The first had held for a breath. The second had held for a count of ten.
The gate stood on a ledge above the gulf, its pylons pale against the rock behind them.
He had set it there himself. It had once opened from a shrine whose last priest he had outlived by four hundred years, and when no one came through it anymore he had not broken it. He had turned its pairing down into the labyrinth instead, so that anyone who woke it from above would arrive on this ledge with the gulf in front of him and no way onward. He had done the same with every gate he retired, thirteen in all. Acharaca was rubble now. That left twelve, and until Acharaca, a dead end had seemed answer enough.
The man the Keres still held had told them his orders: enter the Pyle, study the destination, and continue until further movement became impossible. A dead end stopped a man who wanted to come home. It did not stop a man who had been sent not to.
He was still standing before the pylons when the light came.
It spread between them pale and slow, the way it did when a Pyle was woken by someone who did not quite know how. Hades laid his hand on the nearer pylon and read what was pushing into it from the far end: baetylus that was not his, prepared by no one who understood the stone, driving a stored charge into the pairing a little at a time and feeling for the place where it would hold. They were better at it than they had been at Acharaca. The light steadied. Beyond it, the dark began very slightly to look like a passage.
He put Dynamis into the baetylus in the capital.
It went dark first. Then the capital split, and the crack ran down through the fluting to the base, and the second pylon followed it. The light went out between them. Pieces of the capital went over the edge, and he did not hear them land. Somewhere under a sky across the world, a handful of mortals were looking at two columns that had just become ornaments.
They had found one of the twelve. They would find the rest. And if they ever found their way past all of it, past the gates and the warders and the rows Nyx kept, there were prisoners at the bottom of Tartarus who had known him before the war, and who could give them what the curse tablet in his coat was missing.
He felt the corner of the lead against his ribs when he turned.
He would break the other eleven today. Then he would go down to the cells.
His way to the next gate passed the pylons the two men had come through from Caria, below the shrine mortals had raised the year he married. Nothing was bound in them now. Dust had begun to settle on the baetylus in the capitals, a fine grey film over the violet, the way it settled on any stone that held nothing. The rock around them had always been dirty.
He went past without slowing.
None of the other eleven had been tried. He broke them anyway. When it was done, the only Pyles left in the labyrinth that opened onto anything but the labyrinth itself stood behind the palace, and they woke for only two: himself, and Nyx.
The labyrinth ended where the Hundred Hands began.
The Keres stopped at the mouth of the warders' hall and set down the cases of new baetylus they had carried from the Deep Works. They went no farther. They never did.
The three who kept Tartarus had been made while the Titans still ruled, in the years before such making was forbidden, and they had been made for war. Zeus had bound them to this prison when the Titans went into it. Hades kept them there. Below them, at every cell door in the prison, lay one of the hundred warders made from their flesh, and what the three wanted, the hundred knew.
Furrows crossed the floor of the hall, each deep enough to lose a man in, running from the far wall almost to the place where he stood. They dated from the first time he had told them no. He had not had them filled.
Kottos and Gyges were at the far end of the hall, where the air never settled. Aegaeon was nearer. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall and his forearms across his knees, the way soldiers sit between watches, and sitting, his eyes were level with Hades's own. His hide had grown in plates, dark and ridged, the way armor might be made by someone who meant it never to come off, and his horns swept back from his brow past the line of his shoulders. Where the plates met, the hide had split, and a red light showed in the splits, low and steady, like a forge banked for the night. Bronze chains crossed his chest and shoulders. Zeus had put them there. They had been on him so long that the hide had grown over them in places.
Hades had always thought the three the best-made things in Tartarus.
Hades drew in as much Dynamis as he could, and spent none of it. Anywhere else, he drew that much only to use it.
"Give him to us."
Beneath his feet, through the firmament, he felt the demand go down into the prison: a hundred great weights shifting on the rock at once, each warder at its own door lifting its head. Then all of them turning the same way, toward one door.
It was what Aegaeon said first, always, before any other greeting. He had said it at the end of the war, when the brothers divided the world and Tartarus came to Hades with the rest of it. He had said it every time since.
Those who knew you before the war, Hecate had said. There were few of them left. The oldest sat at the bottom of this prison, behind a door Hades had closed himself.
He let the request stand a moment longer than he ever had.
"No."
The light in the splits of Aegaeon's hide came up, the way a banked forge comes up when its door is opened, and held there. Then, slowly, it went down again.
His father had been sentenced to Tartarus. He had not been sentenced to them.
Below, the warders turned back to their own doors.
"You took longer to answer this time."
"I was thinking of the mortals."
Aegaeon already knew about them. Nothing came into the labyrinth that the three did not hear of.
"The next ones are ours, son of Kronos."
"None will get this far."
Aegaeon did not trouble to argue. The mortals had never been what he really wanted.
His eyes, with the same light at the back of them, went to the key at Hades's breast and stayed there, as though that were the part of Hades he had always been speaking to. Then they went past him and down, to the floor of the hall, toward the one door at the bottom of the prison.
"We can wait."
Aegaeon had never said that before.
Hades looked where Aegaeon had looked, toward the far distant door he had closed on his father. Hades looked down a moment longer than Aegaeon had.
"Then you will wait a long time."
He crossed the hall to the far arch. Beyond it, Dynamis eased away, and he laid his hand on the wall of the stair. The rock showed him the way down, every turn of it, as it always did.
The Keres were waiting beyond it with the cases. They had their own way down, and did not use his. From there the way narrowed and went down, and at the bottom of it Nyx had laid three rows around the neck of the prison.
In the first, all light went out. It did not dim. It was simply not there, and neither was the glow that had followed the Keres down the stair. He walked it as he always had, by count, forty-one paces with his left hand on the rock and the brush of the Keres' hems ahead of him. The two men from Caria had carried lamps and an instrument. Here they would have walked blind, and their needle would have wandered the dial with nothing to find. From outside this row, nothing beyond it could be seen, or heard, or found by any instrument yet made. He had never asked Nyx how she crafted it.
The second row had no edge he could feel. He crossed it in the returning light and felt nothing at all, and somewhere out there, Nyx knew that he had entered. She would have known as much of them: how many, and where, and what they carried.
The third came on behind the eyes, a weight like the last hour of a long night's work, and lifted before he had gone three steps. He had held leave for seven hundred years, but it still took the sleep a moment to recognize its king. It would not have recognized the men from Caria. They would have lain down where they stood and slept until the Keres came for them, and the Keres did not hurry.
In seven hundred years, nothing had crossed all three rows without her leave.
She was beside him when the weight lifted. He had not heard her come. He never did; he had never seen her arrive anywhere.
She looked younger than he did now. She had looked younger than him when he was a boy. Her dark hair was drawn back from a face that every sculptor in Greece had tried to carve at one time or another, and none had got right. She wore black, cut in no fashion he had seen at any court, with a single crescent of silver at her waist. There were rings on every one of her fingers. He knew every metal and every stone that came out of the earth, but he could not have named what any of them were made of.
"How is the child?"
Nyx had more grandchildren than Hades had ever troubled to count. She had raised only one of them herself, down here, and only Lethe did she call that.
"She found the craftsman. By what he remembered."
Nyx did not ask about the craftsman.
"Does she eat?"
"When Hypnos reminds her."
"Then someone should remind Hypnos."
He took the lead tablet from his coat and gave it to her.
She held it to what light there was and read the name. Her face did not change. She laid her thumb on the fleck of baetylus hammered beneath it, and it lay under her thumb as it had lain under his: a pebble in a riverbed, pulling at nothing.
"Can it be made to take?"
"Not with that name."
She did not look at the tablet when she said it. She looked at him, the way she had read the name: as though he were something she had read a long time ago and was checking against what she remembered.
He let her look.
She was one of the few still living who could cut a tablet that would take. He had always known that. It had never seemed worth considering, and it did not now.
She gave the tablet back, and he put it away.
The cells stood in a ring at the bottom of the prison, each behind a door carved from the rock, and before each door waited its warder.
He began with Iapetus, because Iapetus was pushing. He was always pushing. His warder lay across the threshold, a smaller thing than its master but made from the same flesh, bound to this door and no other and made to know the Titan behind it by their soul. It lifted its head as Hades came, knew him, and lowered it again.
Hades laid his palm on the door and felt it through the rock: the whole weight of a Titan leaning on his confinement, and the confinement leaning back exactly as hard, and a little harder each time he pressed. The restraint held his power; the warder held the door. Neither needed anything from Hades. Hades had brought down the walls Iapetus once boasted no army could breach, and he had done it from underneath. Iapetus had been trying to come through this door ever since.
The restraint was bound into a piece of baetylus set in the doorframe, the finest his mines could give him seven hundred years ago. He could feel where the binding had thinned along a flaw no one could have seen when it was laid. It would hold another two hundred years. Until mortals learned to open his doors, that had seemed time enough.
The baetylus in the Keres' cases was purer: the new core from the Deep Works, which Kleitos had meant for the regulators of his garden. There was enough for every door in the ring, and one case more. He had kept that one back.
A worn restraint could not be mended, only copied fresh from the pattern. He turned from Iapetus's door. Every door in the ring faced the chamber at its center, and the chamber's one door faced his father's.
He crossed to it and laid his hand on the rock, and the firmament gave him what lay within: the first restraint, the one all the others had been copied from, bound into a mass of baetylus finer than anything his mines had ever yielded. Nyx had brought that stone from wherever such stone was found before there were mines, and where that was, he had left to her. One did not cut a master to make its copies. Nothing had settled on it in seven hundred years. It held far more power than a pattern needed, as it always had; Nyx built with more margin than he did. And it had been made for no one. Narrowing it to fit each prisoner had been her part of the work, and the part he had never needed to understand.
The Keres opened the cases and held the new pieces up for him, and into each he copied the pattern, a thread at a time. He worked small. Near the cells, every working was answered the way a prisoner's effort was answered, his own included; he had insisted on that when the place was made, so that no king who came after him could open a cell by wanting to. A working the size of a lamp flame went into the new stone and came back up his arm heavier than it had gone in. It was tiring work.
Then he went round the ring. At each door he cut a socket in the rock beside the worn piece, set the new one, and drew the restraint across. It passed without a gap; whoever was behind the door would not have felt it change. The old piece went dull in its socket, the violet gone out of it. At Iapetus's door the new stone took hold, and the cell closed on its prisoner as it always had, harder as he pushed.
Nyx followed him from door to door. At each one, the rock opened under his palm to take the socket and closed again around the new stone, and she watched his hands while it did.
His father's cell was last.
He laid his hand on the door.
Nothing was pushing against it. His warder lay across the threshold with its eyes open, and there was dust on its back. It had not needed to move in a very long time. The restraint lay quiet in the baetylus, holding nothing, because nothing asked to be held. Of all of them, his father was the only one who had understood how the cell caged him.
The door was his work, like all the others in the ring, and like the others it was sealed true, except along one edge, where the rock had been driven home harder than it needed and had cracked a finger's length along the seam. He had closed it himself.
He ran his thumb along the crack. He left it as he always had.
When he looked up, Nyx was not watching his hands. She was looking at the door. She had known his father before he was king.
He cut the socket, and set the new stone, and drew the restraint across. The old piece went dull, as all the others had, and a Ker took it from his hand.
He had kept back the last case. On its lid, Kleitos had asked whether any part of it might come back to him afterward. Hades had read the note before coming down, and had not answered it.
He did not go into the chamber. He walked the ring again, as he had walked it for the doors, but this time he faced inward, and laid the last of the baetylus over the chamber's outer walls piece by piece, joining each to the one before, until the chamber stood from floor to crown under a shell no thicker than a fingernail. Here, beside the pattern, every working came back to him heavier than anywhere else in the ring. Twice he stopped with a piece half set and waited for what had come back up his arm to ease. His hands were steady. He waited anyway.
When the shell was whole, he bound a working into it. The Atharim's instruments found a Pyle by the unsteadiness of its mageia, and found a god by the power he used. Through this they would find nothing at all to read. Last, he laid his hand on the chamber's door and closed it into the rock around it, so that there was no longer a door, only wall.
When he took his hand away, he could not close it. The arm was cold and stiff from the fingers to the shoulder and heavy, as though it belonged to someone else and he had been given it to carry. He stepped back until there was rock behind him, and stood with his shoulders against it. It was his father's door.
”That took more from you than the doors did."
"It is the first."
"Yes."
He worked his fingers closed and open again, and closed, until they answered him. Nyx watched him do it.
Nyx came with him as far as the Pyle that would take him home to Erebos. She did not usually see him out. He put it down to the day.
He woke the Pyle, and had his foot over the threshold when she spoke.
"Hades."
He stopped, but did not turn.
"Is there anything else you would ask me?"
"No."
He had what he had come for. She said nothing more. He went through, and let the conjunction close behind him.
The gate stood on a ledge above the gulf, its pylons pale against the rock behind them.
He had set it there himself. It had once opened from a shrine whose last priest he had outlived by four hundred years, and when no one came through it anymore he had not broken it. He had turned its pairing down into the labyrinth instead, so that anyone who woke it from above would arrive on this ledge with the gulf in front of him and no way onward. He had done the same with every gate he retired, thirteen in all. Acharaca was rubble now. That left twelve, and until Acharaca, a dead end had seemed answer enough.
The man the Keres still held had told them his orders: enter the Pyle, study the destination, and continue until further movement became impossible. A dead end stopped a man who wanted to come home. It did not stop a man who had been sent not to.
He was still standing before the pylons when the light came.
It spread between them pale and slow, the way it did when a Pyle was woken by someone who did not quite know how. Hades laid his hand on the nearer pylon and read what was pushing into it from the far end: baetylus that was not his, prepared by no one who understood the stone, driving a stored charge into the pairing a little at a time and feeling for the place where it would hold. They were better at it than they had been at Acharaca. The light steadied. Beyond it, the dark began very slightly to look like a passage.
He put Dynamis into the baetylus in the capital.
It went dark first. Then the capital split, and the crack ran down through the fluting to the base, and the second pylon followed it. The light went out between them. Pieces of the capital went over the edge, and he did not hear them land. Somewhere under a sky across the world, a handful of mortals were looking at two columns that had just become ornaments.
They had found one of the twelve. They would find the rest. And if they ever found their way past all of it, past the gates and the warders and the rows Nyx kept, there were prisoners at the bottom of Tartarus who had known him before the war, and who could give them what the curse tablet in his coat was missing.
He felt the corner of the lead against his ribs when he turned.
He would break the other eleven today. Then he would go down to the cells.
His way to the next gate passed the pylons the two men had come through from Caria, below the shrine mortals had raised the year he married. Nothing was bound in them now. Dust had begun to settle on the baetylus in the capitals, a fine grey film over the violet, the way it settled on any stone that held nothing. The rock around them had always been dirty.
He went past without slowing.
None of the other eleven had been tried. He broke them anyway. When it was done, the only Pyles left in the labyrinth that opened onto anything but the labyrinth itself stood behind the palace, and they woke for only two: himself, and Nyx.
* * *
The labyrinth ended where the Hundred Hands began.
The Keres stopped at the mouth of the warders' hall and set down the cases of new baetylus they had carried from the Deep Works. They went no farther. They never did.
The three who kept Tartarus had been made while the Titans still ruled, in the years before such making was forbidden, and they had been made for war. Zeus had bound them to this prison when the Titans went into it. Hades kept them there. Below them, at every cell door in the prison, lay one of the hundred warders made from their flesh, and what the three wanted, the hundred knew.
Furrows crossed the floor of the hall, each deep enough to lose a man in, running from the far wall almost to the place where he stood. They dated from the first time he had told them no. He had not had them filled.
Kottos and Gyges were at the far end of the hall, where the air never settled. Aegaeon was nearer. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall and his forearms across his knees, the way soldiers sit between watches, and sitting, his eyes were level with Hades's own. His hide had grown in plates, dark and ridged, the way armor might be made by someone who meant it never to come off, and his horns swept back from his brow past the line of his shoulders. Where the plates met, the hide had split, and a red light showed in the splits, low and steady, like a forge banked for the night. Bronze chains crossed his chest and shoulders. Zeus had put them there. They had been on him so long that the hide had grown over them in places.
Hades had always thought the three the best-made things in Tartarus.
Hades drew in as much Dynamis as he could, and spent none of it. Anywhere else, he drew that much only to use it.
"Give him to us."
Beneath his feet, through the firmament, he felt the demand go down into the prison: a hundred great weights shifting on the rock at once, each warder at its own door lifting its head. Then all of them turning the same way, toward one door.
It was what Aegaeon said first, always, before any other greeting. He had said it at the end of the war, when the brothers divided the world and Tartarus came to Hades with the rest of it. He had said it every time since.
Those who knew you before the war, Hecate had said. There were few of them left. The oldest sat at the bottom of this prison, behind a door Hades had closed himself.
He let the request stand a moment longer than he ever had.
"No."
The light in the splits of Aegaeon's hide came up, the way a banked forge comes up when its door is opened, and held there. Then, slowly, it went down again.
His father had been sentenced to Tartarus. He had not been sentenced to them.
Below, the warders turned back to their own doors.
"You took longer to answer this time."
"I was thinking of the mortals."
Aegaeon already knew about them. Nothing came into the labyrinth that the three did not hear of.
"The next ones are ours, son of Kronos."
"None will get this far."
Aegaeon did not trouble to argue. The mortals had never been what he really wanted.
His eyes, with the same light at the back of them, went to the key at Hades's breast and stayed there, as though that were the part of Hades he had always been speaking to. Then they went past him and down, to the floor of the hall, toward the one door at the bottom of the prison.
"We can wait."
Aegaeon had never said that before.
Hades looked where Aegaeon had looked, toward the far distant door he had closed on his father. Hades looked down a moment longer than Aegaeon had.
"Then you will wait a long time."
He crossed the hall to the far arch. Beyond it, Dynamis eased away, and he laid his hand on the wall of the stair. The rock showed him the way down, every turn of it, as it always did.
* * *
The Keres were waiting beyond it with the cases. They had their own way down, and did not use his. From there the way narrowed and went down, and at the bottom of it Nyx had laid three rows around the neck of the prison.
In the first, all light went out. It did not dim. It was simply not there, and neither was the glow that had followed the Keres down the stair. He walked it as he always had, by count, forty-one paces with his left hand on the rock and the brush of the Keres' hems ahead of him. The two men from Caria had carried lamps and an instrument. Here they would have walked blind, and their needle would have wandered the dial with nothing to find. From outside this row, nothing beyond it could be seen, or heard, or found by any instrument yet made. He had never asked Nyx how she crafted it.
The second row had no edge he could feel. He crossed it in the returning light and felt nothing at all, and somewhere out there, Nyx knew that he had entered. She would have known as much of them: how many, and where, and what they carried.
The third came on behind the eyes, a weight like the last hour of a long night's work, and lifted before he had gone three steps. He had held leave for seven hundred years, but it still took the sleep a moment to recognize its king. It would not have recognized the men from Caria. They would have lain down where they stood and slept until the Keres came for them, and the Keres did not hurry.
In seven hundred years, nothing had crossed all three rows without her leave.
She was beside him when the weight lifted. He had not heard her come. He never did; he had never seen her arrive anywhere.
She looked younger than he did now. She had looked younger than him when he was a boy. Her dark hair was drawn back from a face that every sculptor in Greece had tried to carve at one time or another, and none had got right. She wore black, cut in no fashion he had seen at any court, with a single crescent of silver at her waist. There were rings on every one of her fingers. He knew every metal and every stone that came out of the earth, but he could not have named what any of them were made of.
"How is the child?"
Nyx had more grandchildren than Hades had ever troubled to count. She had raised only one of them herself, down here, and only Lethe did she call that.
"She found the craftsman. By what he remembered."
Nyx did not ask about the craftsman.
"Does she eat?"
"When Hypnos reminds her."
"Then someone should remind Hypnos."
He took the lead tablet from his coat and gave it to her.
She held it to what light there was and read the name. Her face did not change. She laid her thumb on the fleck of baetylus hammered beneath it, and it lay under her thumb as it had lain under his: a pebble in a riverbed, pulling at nothing.
"Can it be made to take?"
"Not with that name."
She did not look at the tablet when she said it. She looked at him, the way she had read the name: as though he were something she had read a long time ago and was checking against what she remembered.
He let her look.
She was one of the few still living who could cut a tablet that would take. He had always known that. It had never seemed worth considering, and it did not now.
She gave the tablet back, and he put it away.
* * *
The cells stood in a ring at the bottom of the prison, each behind a door carved from the rock, and before each door waited its warder.
He began with Iapetus, because Iapetus was pushing. He was always pushing. His warder lay across the threshold, a smaller thing than its master but made from the same flesh, bound to this door and no other and made to know the Titan behind it by their soul. It lifted its head as Hades came, knew him, and lowered it again.
Hades laid his palm on the door and felt it through the rock: the whole weight of a Titan leaning on his confinement, and the confinement leaning back exactly as hard, and a little harder each time he pressed. The restraint held his power; the warder held the door. Neither needed anything from Hades. Hades had brought down the walls Iapetus once boasted no army could breach, and he had done it from underneath. Iapetus had been trying to come through this door ever since.
The restraint was bound into a piece of baetylus set in the doorframe, the finest his mines could give him seven hundred years ago. He could feel where the binding had thinned along a flaw no one could have seen when it was laid. It would hold another two hundred years. Until mortals learned to open his doors, that had seemed time enough.
The baetylus in the Keres' cases was purer: the new core from the Deep Works, which Kleitos had meant for the regulators of his garden. There was enough for every door in the ring, and one case more. He had kept that one back.
A worn restraint could not be mended, only copied fresh from the pattern. He turned from Iapetus's door. Every door in the ring faced the chamber at its center, and the chamber's one door faced his father's.
He crossed to it and laid his hand on the rock, and the firmament gave him what lay within: the first restraint, the one all the others had been copied from, bound into a mass of baetylus finer than anything his mines had ever yielded. Nyx had brought that stone from wherever such stone was found before there were mines, and where that was, he had left to her. One did not cut a master to make its copies. Nothing had settled on it in seven hundred years. It held far more power than a pattern needed, as it always had; Nyx built with more margin than he did. And it had been made for no one. Narrowing it to fit each prisoner had been her part of the work, and the part he had never needed to understand.
The Keres opened the cases and held the new pieces up for him, and into each he copied the pattern, a thread at a time. He worked small. Near the cells, every working was answered the way a prisoner's effort was answered, his own included; he had insisted on that when the place was made, so that no king who came after him could open a cell by wanting to. A working the size of a lamp flame went into the new stone and came back up his arm heavier than it had gone in. It was tiring work.
Then he went round the ring. At each door he cut a socket in the rock beside the worn piece, set the new one, and drew the restraint across. It passed without a gap; whoever was behind the door would not have felt it change. The old piece went dull in its socket, the violet gone out of it. At Iapetus's door the new stone took hold, and the cell closed on its prisoner as it always had, harder as he pushed.
Nyx followed him from door to door. At each one, the rock opened under his palm to take the socket and closed again around the new stone, and she watched his hands while it did.
His father's cell was last.
He laid his hand on the door.
Nothing was pushing against it. His warder lay across the threshold with its eyes open, and there was dust on its back. It had not needed to move in a very long time. The restraint lay quiet in the baetylus, holding nothing, because nothing asked to be held. Of all of them, his father was the only one who had understood how the cell caged him.
The door was his work, like all the others in the ring, and like the others it was sealed true, except along one edge, where the rock had been driven home harder than it needed and had cracked a finger's length along the seam. He had closed it himself.
He ran his thumb along the crack. He left it as he always had.
When he looked up, Nyx was not watching his hands. She was looking at the door. She had known his father before he was king.
He cut the socket, and set the new stone, and drew the restraint across. The old piece went dull, as all the others had, and a Ker took it from his hand.
* * *
He had kept back the last case. On its lid, Kleitos had asked whether any part of it might come back to him afterward. Hades had read the note before coming down, and had not answered it.
He did not go into the chamber. He walked the ring again, as he had walked it for the doors, but this time he faced inward, and laid the last of the baetylus over the chamber's outer walls piece by piece, joining each to the one before, until the chamber stood from floor to crown under a shell no thicker than a fingernail. Here, beside the pattern, every working came back to him heavier than anywhere else in the ring. Twice he stopped with a piece half set and waited for what had come back up his arm to ease. His hands were steady. He waited anyway.
When the shell was whole, he bound a working into it. The Atharim's instruments found a Pyle by the unsteadiness of its mageia, and found a god by the power he used. Through this they would find nothing at all to read. Last, he laid his hand on the chamber's door and closed it into the rock around it, so that there was no longer a door, only wall.
When he took his hand away, he could not close it. The arm was cold and stiff from the fingers to the shoulder and heavy, as though it belonged to someone else and he had been given it to carry. He stepped back until there was rock behind him, and stood with his shoulders against it. It was his father's door.
”That took more from you than the doors did."
"It is the first."
"Yes."
He worked his fingers closed and open again, and closed, until they answered him. Nyx watched him do it.
* * *
Nyx came with him as far as the Pyle that would take him home to Erebos. She did not usually see him out. He put it down to the day.
He woke the Pyle, and had his foot over the threshold when she spoke.
"Hades."
He stopped, but did not turn.
"Is there anything else you would ask me?"
"No."
He had what he had come for. She said nothing more. He went through, and let the conjunction close behind him.