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Nyx was the one who told him about stars when he was very small. He had heard that she was the night and he asked what it meant and so she had told him about the difference between night and day and the rhythms of life among the mortals on the surface. She had talked about light and dark and blown out a candle at his bedside to illustrate the point.
Then she had told him of stars and the moon.
He had listened intently and asked for details and reached up to touch the spots in her hair where the stars lingered as flecks of silver with none of their true fire. He touched them like they held answers he had been seeking for centuries though he was barely big enough to walk. She told him tha t the Gods upon Olympus would write the stories of the heroes in the skies by mapping out constellations so the mortals would see and remember.
He was a quiet child and she had not seen the impact the story had made.
She had raised other children who had been loud and tumultuous and carried far more of her father in them than these two did. These two were peaceful. It was what she had wanted. She had created them in hopes of a child that would bring a little peace to the mortal world and she had gotten two. This one was serious and affectionate and perhaps a little too orderly for a bloodline that had originated in primordial Chaos and his brother. The brother was a little sillier, a little more at ease, slower to anger and quicker to laugh.
She wasn’t ready to admit yet who they would be or what roles they would have to play.
They were still too small. They hadn’t even grown into names yet. She would have to choose soon but choosing a name for a god was a fraught decision as it would pass them into the hands of the Fates. Nyx had named the Fates and with that naming, she had set each of them a role. Names mattered in a family such as theirs.
She told the quiet serious little boy about stars while he sat with his little cloth mouse held in both hands and his hair falling around his face. She wasn’t ready to name him yet. He’d been born into this House and so his would be a Chthonic role and some piece of her already knew. She knew which road he would walk but she wasn’t ready to set him on it yet.
He curled up to sleep and dream of stars while his mother considered his future.
Naming gods was not a simple task.
When Persephone had arrived with half the blood in her veins running mortal red, the boys had both been fascinated by her. Shades came and went and it was rare for either of them to pay them much heed but she was a goddess. Persephone had walked in the light and carried it with her through the halls of a House that was defined by duty and darkness. She tended what flowers would grow in a place like this and carefully experimented until she found the right conditions to keep them blooming in her garden.
The little boys were still so small but Nyx had relented and given them their names.
Thanatos would have the harder road to walk. She had known that before she gave him his name and put his future in the hands of his older sisters. It was there in the name itself. In his serious expressions and his ability to flicker through reality like time and space were a trifle. Others would weave his thread, pulling it eternally from an immortal spool, but she had set him on this road.
Thanatos would have work to do.
Eventually.
He was still too small to begin it when he slipped away into the garden where the strange new Queen sat with her dirt-streaked fingers and her hair twisted up on top of her head so it didn’t fall into her work. He had been watching her. She had lived on the surface. She had been beyond the walls of this House and he had been building his courage to ask this single question.
He practiced it before he crept close enough to say it, “Did you ever see stars?”
She looked up startled and confused at the interruption. He had crept along through the bushes because he wasn’t supposed to bother her. She was the wife of the Lord of the House and neither he nor his brother was to bother the Lord of the House and they certainly weren’t to ask questions when they weren’t spoken to first. Some child logic told him that it would be less of a problem if he was hiding when he said it.
She had to coax him out of the flowers and she was all smiles and warmth as she asked him to repeat himself. He stared at her green eyes and her yellow hair and then slowly nodded. He tucked his feet up under him and floated above the ground so he couldn’t accidentally step on her flowers or some other important green thing that he didn’t understand. He floated there and he asked again.
“Did you ever see stars?”
The stranger, the Lord of the House’s wife who had a smudge of rich brown dirt on her jaw, told him everything she could remember. She was a Queen but she didn’t shoo him away or scold him for talking to her at all. She spoke of stars and constellations and the moon and the depth of the blue-black that his mother laid over the heavens each evening.
“Your mother is night herself and yet, you’ve never seen the night sky,” she said. “Isn’t that unusual?”
He hadn’t had an answer for that. He’d planned out how to ask his single question but he wasn’t prepared for a conversation with a stranger. She sat on her heels and watched him float there in his garden with his hair in his face and his eyes too wide and waited. Waited for him to answer. There was no answer. He stared at her for a long moment and then willed himself away.
The fabric of the world wavered and he vanished only to appear somewhere else.
He sat wherever he had landed and waited.
This happened to Thanatos.
It had happened since he was a baby but he’d never done it before. He would be playing and then he would be somewhere else, surrounded by shades or surrounded by voices. He would be walking down a corridor and then the world would shift just for a moment before coming back into focus. He would appear in a room without walking there only to appear again in the spot he had left. He would see things that he couldn’t explain. He would see only blackness. He would see only light. A moment at a time.
It happened but that wasn’t the same as doing it.
He had willed himself elsewhere and had appeared elsewhere. Reality had bent for his whim instead of its own. He waited for reality to snap back into place around him like it always did. He waited for the walls of the house to reappear. He waited to be back in the garden but it didn’t happen.
Thanatos stood after a long moment of waiting.
Grasses spread out around him. Gray-green flowers bobbed on long stalks in a breeze he couldn’t feel and, in the distance, he could hear voices. He stood and walked in that direction. He was small enough that the grasses blocked his view until he could find a rock or a little rise to scramble up onto. There was nothing around. Just more of the same.
He was a practical little thing. Even then. This was a problem that needed solving. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a problem like his brother stealing his favourite toy or getting lost down an unfamiliar corridor. He closed his eyes and willed himself home again. He had gotten himself here. He could get himself home. It didn’t work immediately but he felt the little shiver of reality around him as though it were trying to do as he wanted. He sat down and floated just like he had in the garden. He crossed his feet and took a deep breath.
He looked up once, to check, but high above him, behind a spray of misty clouds, was more stone. He was still in the Underworld; he just wasn’t in the house anymore. There were no stars here. The grasses waved around him, the white flowers bobbed and he could see nothing else. He closed his eyes and pictured home and willed himself back there.
Reality shivered and then shivered harder until it finally snapped back into place with a clang that left his ears ringing. He was back in the garden again but it was empty now. The Queen was gone, not for good, not yet but she had packed up her tools and gone inside, leaving the flower to unfurl its leaves and stretch out its roots.
Thanatos had gone somewhere and he had come back.
Discovering the powers of godhood was not a simple task but thrill of power and curiosity ran through him as he smiled and headed back inside.
Thanatos sat above the baby and stared at him. He was used to being the smallest one in the House. There were other children in the underworld but he didn’t get to see most of them. He certainly didn’t get to sit and watch them be tiny and defenseless and half-formed like this one. The Fury Sisters had been presented to the court and one of them had thrown such a screaming fit that they’d all been tossed out before Thanatos had gotten a good look at them. His brother was always there but he was as familiar as the stone of the walls.
This baby was new and it seemed to be staying.
The baby stole his mother’s attention but it also stole Thanatos’s attention so he didn’t complain. The baby was a bright spot amid the shades and the Chthonic gods and all the long empty spaces of the House. The baby felt different. Reality itself felt different around him and so Thanatos would sit and stare at him sometimes as though he was a puzzle.
“Why is he different?” he asked his mother once.
She hadn’t understood the question and had explained to him that the baby was still very young and weak but he would grow stronger as he got older. Thanatos had understood that part well enough. He understood that he and Hypnos had been babies once. He was still too young to have the vocabulary to ask about the shape of reality. He didn’t know how to describe the bright spot.
Much of the House was so steeped in old magics and powers that it was hard to find an exact point. Thanatos practiced his ability to appear and disappear but it often led him to places he didn’t want to be. He’d find himself on an island in the Styx surrounded by blood and the hands of souls reaching out for him. He’d find himself in administrative chambers that he knew he wasn’t supposed to open. He’d find himself in that gray grass field and spend hours trying to get home again.
The baby changed that.
The baby was easy to locate. He was a tiny bright spot in the fabric of time and space, a little star in dark tapestry, and like a mortal sailing by ship, Thanatos learned to use him to navigate by.
He started by appearing in the room beside the cradle. Once he’d mastered that, he moved on to using the little star as a navigation point so he could appear nearby. He’d pace out the steps from the cradle and then appear there. Nyx watched him do it sometimes with curiosity but no commentary.
Gods each had their own powers and this was one of his.
With his tiny north star to navigate by, Thanatos got bolder. He moved beyond the house again and again. He willed himself out into the dark corners of Tartarus. He went looking for that green grass meadow and found it again and again. He could use the little bright spot wrapped up in his mother’s magic to find his way home.
Then one day, he grew too confident. He threw out his power as far as he could and he found himself in Elysium.
He was noticed.
He didn’t know by who. Someone other than his mother and his brother. Perhaps it was the Master of the House himself. Perhaps it was Charon. Someone noticed and Thanatos was sat down in front of the big desk to be studied by the Lord of the House himself.
“How did he do it? Nyx, answer me.”
“All gods have their powers,” she said in her softest most even voice.
Thanatos resented being talked over but he had never been this close to Lord Hades in his life and fear kept him quiet. He didn’t fully understand what he had done wrong. One green field wasn’t so different from another, was it? He sat and he stayed silent and he let his mother speak for him. She spoke of abilities and of children exploring and of proper training.
The Lord of the Dead interrupted her, “Could he make it to the surface?”
“Yes.”
That caught Thanatos’s attention. He looked at his mother who was looking at Lord Hades and he waited but no one explained. Could he make it to the surface? Had he done it before? Back before he could control it, he had gone to places too bright or too hot or too loud. He’d never stayed for longer than a few moments before reality had righted itself and brought him back home. He had gone and he had come back and he had been too little to remember.
He wanted to try.
He was being studied and he was old enough now not to will himself away from every uncomfortable situation but he wanted to. He wanted to be the green grass meadow. He would rather be in the Styx itself than be here like this. He twisted his fingers into his sleeves and set his jaw and did not look directly at Lord Hades as they talked over him.
“There is no escape. No one gets out.”
It took Thanatos a moment to realize that that was directed at him. “I wasn’t trying to escape.” A pause before he remembered, “My Lord.”
“You do not come and go as you please.”
“No, my Lord.”
“What are your loyalties, boy?” Lord Hades asked.
Thanatos looked up. Lord Hades stared down at him with his bright red eyes, huge and imposing and angry. The anger was always there in his tone but Thanatos had never had the full force of it directed at him before and he went very still. He had never been asked such a question before but his mother had once said that the house came before all else and so that was his answer.
“I am loyal to the House.”
It must have been an acceptable answer because the Lord of the Dead nodded once and said, “See that you are. Send him with Charon, it’s time he learns to be useful. If you are not, you can be kept in your place by other means.”
It was a threat but Thanatos didn’t understand it. There was so much he didn’t understand yet.
Thanatos felt the air shift as his mother’s opinion on the matter crystalized in the air around them but she did not say a word. Either the Lord of the Dead could not feel the way the magics of reality fit together or he did not care. Nyx was an old god and her powers shivered through reality itself. Her mood was enough to keep Thanatos silent even after they were alone and walking down the halls. He had to hurry to keep up so he stopped walking and just floated in her wake as she moved silently through the corridors.
“Will Hypnos learn to be useful as well?” Thanatos asked when there was finally a closed door between them and the rest of the house. Hypnos slept peacefully and the baby was fussing and so Nyx picked him up and stood there, rocking the tiny little star boy while Thanatos stared at her. He was searching for a meaning to the phrase useful. He had learned how to read and how to hold a sword and how to do his sums and a variety of other things but he wasn’t sure what learning to be useful would entail.
“Eventually,” Nyx said without looking directly at him. “We all have our roles to play.”
Finding your role wasn’t as simple as declaring a child be useful but Thanatos liked the idea of having a role to play.
First, he’d been sent along with Charon for a long silent boat ride up the River Styx. He watched Tartarus slide by. The dark stone and the screaming wretches and the shades twisted into grotesque monsters were familiar to him. He’d been to Tartarus more than he’d been to gray-green meadows of Asphodel. He was small and he tucked himself in at the bow of the ship while Charon piloted it.
They did not speak on that first trip.
They did not break out onto the surface though the river continued on past what he could see. They stopped at the edge and Thanatos craned his head but he stayed in the boat because he had been told to stay in the boat and he did not want Lord Hades to think him disloyal. It was daylight. Bright as fire and as cold and sharp as ice. Thanatos almost disappeared in shock. He flung his attention out into the shape of reality and found his mother’s magic and the little bright spot in the middle of it. They were still there. This was just something new. He could manage it.
He squared up his tiny shoulders and tried to play his role even though he didn’t know what it was.
He rode among the shades back down the river, watching each one be let off in the places they had earned during their short mortal life. Charon did not speak to them either. He pointed and they left. Some of them were left in the arms of cheering crowds welcoming home a new hero. Most were left on near-empty docks at the edge of the green meadow and Thanatos stood up on the bow to look back when he heard voices calling out welcomes but he couldn’t see the shades anymore as they rounded a bend in the river. The final few were handed off to be punished for their transgressions. Thanatos caught sight of the Fury sisters on one of those docks. The screaming one he remembered from their presentation at the house pointed at him and the other two turned to look.
That had been his first day of training and there would be many more to follow.
He was sent along to meet his older sisters. The Fates sat in a large room dominated by a loom and a wall of threads. The room was comfortable, the cushions were gold and blue and the three of them sat at the loom with their spools and their scissors and they all turned to look at him at once. Clotho Lachesis, and Atropos all considered him and he felt smaller than he had since the Queen had asked him that impossible question about the night sky.
They taught him how to read the warp and the weft, how to see the threads that were coming to their end. He had long been able to feel how reality shifted around him but now he started to understand it. He started to understand how he could duck in between the warp and weft when he appeared and disappeared. They wove the fabric here and he could walk through it out there, hopping from one line of the warp to another while others were trapped in their places.
He hadn’t liked the sisters. He hadn’t liked the way they talked of mortals and gods. He hadn’t liked the way they studied him but wouldn’t tell him which of the strings was his though they had an entire section for the strings of gods and immortals. One of them was his but they weren’t labeled. Clotho knew. She had spun his thread just like she’d spun the threads of everyone else but she wouldn’t tell him.
“The Fate’s design is not for the likes of you,” Atropos had told him.
He trained and he learned.
Charon taught him the levels of the underworld and what led to shades being sent to different places. He saw the furies training to punish those who deserved it. He saw the towns and villages that souls had carved out throughout the Asphodel Meadows where they would spend their eternity. He saw souls drink from Lethe to enter their afterlife with no memories of their lives before and he saw those who held fiercely to their memories. He saw the river Phlegethon swelling its banks. He saw the fields of Elysium and the great battle arenas of long-dead heroes who refused to stop their constant search for glory.
He studied the rules, the laws, the weights the judges used against the souls that entered the underworld. Who suffered and who was rewarded and who spent their eternity in the meadows was laid out in detail. He saw the judges but he did not speak with them.
He studied with the doctor they’d found in fields of Asphodel who could teach him about the ailments of humans. He learned about death. Violent deaths and peaceful deaths. Deaths where people suffered and deaths where people faded quietly and peacefully out of the world.
“Those will be yours,” he was told.
It would be his job to bring those who died quietly and peacefully to their eternity. His brother was the god of sleep but his charges always awoke. Thanatos’s charges never would. He would carry them away in the night to whatever reward or punishment they had earned during their lives. His work would be gentle but not always simple. A quiet death was a comfort and it would be his job to provide it.
He would be useful.
Each night, after he finished the day’s training, he’d go home to his family.
At first, he rode with Charon because he had been told to but soon, he started appearing at home of his own accord. He’d find the bright star in the night sky and he’d appear at home to tell his mother of his day and to quietly resent that his brother wasn’t asked to studying cancers and the chambers of the human heart to understand how they might fail at the end of a human life.
The baby was walking now on his way to being a child in his own right and he clamoured all over Thanatos with his feet on fire and a laugh that echoed off the walls of the old house like it was trying to escape. He was bright and loud and he made Thanatos smile even when he’d spent his day wrapped up in the minutiae of reading the Fates' design so he could pluck the strings they’d cut at exactly the right time. It helped to know he had someone to laugh with when he got home.
“He’s too young for it,” he overheard his mother say once and he’d immediately gotten defensive. He wasn’t too young.
He was learning.
It wasn’t simple but he knew now that he was going to be the God of Death.
Later, he would be able to admit that perhaps he had been too young when they decided he had learned enough to be useful.
He was sent out to the surface which was too bright and too cold and too loud to go get his first soul. An elderly man with grandchildren no bigger than Thanatos was, one of whom was sleeping at the foot of his grandfather’s bed while his mother tended to the old man. Thanatos moved among the mortals and they didn’t notice him. It took a little longer than it would later to tease the soul loose from the flesh and coax the old man out of his body.
The man had stared in shock at the child who wielded the scythe a little clumsily but had such a serious and earnest face. The soul was a shade now. Separated from the old body and ready to make the journey to the underworld. Thanatos had practiced this with souls in Asphodel and Tartarus but he’d never made the journey from the surface. He knew how to do it.
He held out his hand to the mortal man. The new shade.
“It’s time to go,” he said.
The one did not argue or fight or attempt to run. There would be others who would. There would be others who would scream for their families who could no longer hear them though they stood in the same room. This one though, he took the child’s hand and let the little boy and his too-large blade lead him out of the house. Thanatos walked. His feet on the ground.
Outside, the sun had set and Thanatos tipped his head back to look up and saw them for the first time.
The night sky was as deep and dark as he’d always imagined. The black and purple faded to a brighter blue at the horizon where Helios’s chariot was disappearing from view. His shade stopped as well and they both looked up at the sky for a moment. The moon was a crescent sliver and the stars dotted the dark.
Thanatos had been waiting for this moment since he was barely big enough to walk. He had dreamed of stars. He had asked goddesses and damned shades alike about what they were like. The points of light above shone down on him and they were as cold and distant as Olympus itself. He stared a little longer, hoping for magic but they were just light. Just tiny pinpricks with the personality of candle flames but none of a candle’s warmth.
“It’s time to go,” he repeated to his shade.
He cast his attention out into the threads of fate and found his mother’s magic and the bright true star that had been guiding him home for years. That point of light was warm and sharp and bright and alive in a way that the points of light above him were not. He didn’t need to dream of stars or the night. They were already waiting for him.
It was time to go home.
That much, at least, was simple when he had his star to follow.