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It all goes wrong in an instant.
One moment, you’re in your room, gazing into the Mirror of Night, idly wondering if you should change anything for your next escape attempt. And then you notice that the sounds of the House—quiet as they are—have vanished, and in their place is a soft whooshing sound you can’t place.
You turn towards the door. There’s a stranger there.
He’s tall, and something in the bones of his face reminds you of your father. But the resemblance ends there. The stranger is rail-thin and white-haired, and his eyes—pale from edge to edge—are colder and crueler than your father’s ever were, even when your relationship was at its worst.
At the stranger’s feet, golden sand trickles into your room. As it begins to cover the floor, a golden haze creeps in with it. Motes of dust in the air hang in place where the haze touches them, as though frozen in time.
Time.
You lunge for the door to the balcony, where you keep your Infernal Arms, but you’re not fast enough. You hear the stranger’s laughter echo behind you, and then—
—and then there’s a girl.
You nearly bowl her over in your haste, and she squeaks and stumbles out of your path. You spin, looking for the stranger, but he’s nowhere to be found. Your room is exactly as you left it, except for the sand, which coats the floor in a thin layer. (Ugh, the House Contractor is going to charge an arm and a leg to clean all of this up.)
“Zagreus?” says the girl.
You turn, again, and get a good look at her for the first time, and a shiver runs down your back. Her short hair is the same wheat-blonde as your mother and your grandmother, and flames lick at the soles of her bare feet. Her left arm is a shade’s arm from bicep to fingertip, bones and green-glowing ectoplasm with no skin. She carries—no, she leans heavily on—a staff, and blood is dripping from a dozen cuts and scrapes on her face and arms. But the most unnerving part is her face. If not for the finer cheekbones and the narrower chin, you could be looking into a mirror, right down to the eyes—your father’s red eye on the left, your mother’s green on the right, the opposite of yours.
It’s impossible. Only a moment ago, she was a babe in arms. But the only person she can be is—
“Melinoë,” you reply.
Her eyes widen, and she blinks several times in a row. When she speaks, her voice is thick, choked with tears. “I don’t have much time,” she says, which is exactly what you didn’t want to hear. “But I’ll be back for you, I swear.”
You frown. “Wait! What do you mean—”
“—you’ll be back for me?”
In the middle of your sentence, Melinoë suddenly vanishes and reappears. There is no movement, no sense of an in-between; one moment she’s standing across the room, leaning on that staff, and the next, she’s right in front of you, ghostly hand outstretched. You take a step backwards in alarm, and she grimaces apologetically and pulls her hand back. The staff is gone; instead she carries a needle-straight dagger and a wickedly curved crescent sickle.
“Sorry,” she says. “Chronos has a very strong hold on this place. My incantations can only ward off his influence for so long.”
You don’t even know where to start with that. Chronos—well, that’s confirmation of your worst suspicions. Gods all damn your grandfather to the deepest pit of Tartarus. But what does she mean by incantations? Does she mean that she’s somehow contravened his power, even if only for a short while—just one young godling against the erstwhile King of the Titans?
“Where is he?” you ask. You can’t hope to win, but you can at least give him a piece of your mind.
“Dead,” she says. You stare. “Though not for long,” she continues, and idly wipes the edge of her dagger on the hem of her dress. It’s stained with golden ichor, you suddenly notice. “I haven’t figured out how to kill him permanently. But I will.”
Ha. Apparently it runs in the family. “I know you will,” you say, completely sincerely. “You’ve already bested him—once? Twice?”
“Four times,” she says. “I couldn’t break your bindings at all, the first two times I found you.” Then she looks around the room and swears. “We’re out of time again. If I can find a way—” She looks at you beseechingly. “Would you come with me? To the Crossroads?”
“Is that where you’re hiding from Chronos?” you ask.
She nods. “It’s my home, with Headmistress Hecate,” she says, and your heart aches at the thought that home, for her, has probably never meant the House of Hades. “You’d be welcome there, and safe,” she continues. “The other Children of Night are there too—some of them, at least—and Odysseus, and my friend Dora, and Commander Schelemeus—”
You nearly burst out laughing. That lying skeleton! You’re going to give him a good friendly thrashing when next you see him.
“—and the Wretched Broker is there, and lots of other shades besides,” she finishes.
She looks at you expectantly, and you have to think about the conversation for a minute before you remember what she was asking. “Yes,” you reply. “Of course I—”
“Ready to go?” she interrupts.
Well, you suppose from her perspective it’s not really an interruption. “Let’s go,” you say. “Erm—how are we doing this?”
“Hear me, shadows, blood and bane,” she intones, her voice echoing strangely off the walls. She holds out that ghostly arm towards you, and you take her hand. It’s cold and strange to the touch, but you’re comforted, in some obscure way, by the fact that she has calluses on it, much like your own hands. “Bring us to the Crossroads from whence I came!”
Blue-green light spills out around you, and then suddenly you’re engulfed in howling shadows, colder than the icy touch of Grandmother Demeter’s magic, faster and more urgent than the current of the Styx when it comes to claim your life. You clutch onto your sister’s hand for dear life, and she hangs onto you right back.
It’s hard to say how long you’re buffeted through that inhospitable void. Time has ceased to have any meaning—though, to be fair, that’s not exactly a recent development. Eventually, though, you burst through the other side, and wind up in a clearing in some shadowy woods. There’s an entrance to a tent to one side, and on your other side is a large green frog.
Melinoë drops your hand and stumbles over to the frog. “I did it, Frinos,” she says, and wraps her arms around it. “Look, this is my brother Zagreus!”
The frog ribbits at you. You bow politely.
“O gods,” groans Melinoë. “Sorry, I’m doing this out of order. Welcome to the Crossroads—you’re welcome here, and safe—come, I’ll introduce you to Headmistress Hecate—”
She hauls herself to her feet, leaning on—oh. Oh dear. That’s Than’s scythe. But you don’t have the time or presence of mind to dwell on it now; you put it out of your mind for the moment as best you can while she waves her hand at the scythe and it disappears into smoke. She beckons you into the tent. You follow her, but she’s swaying visibly, and those cuts on her upper body (a different pattern than the ones she had the last couple of times you saw her, but no less or more numerous) are still bleeding.
“Are you all right?” you ask, alarmed.
“I’m fine,” she says, and wavers so badly she nearly falls down. Alarmed, you reach out and catch her. The non-ghostly parts of her are reassuringly solid, but her skin is chilled, and covered with a fine layer of sweat. “All right, maybe I overdid it a little with that incantation…”
You help her over to the low cot, and she flops over and falls asleep almost immediately. You glance around, at a loss of what to do with yourself, and spot a pitcher of water and a jar labeled salve and some clean rags, and, well, it couldn’t hurt, right? So you start cleaning her wounds.
It’s sort of funny, really. You’ve never been hurt long enough to really heal—you’ve only ever died, and then been spat back out by the Styx, hale and whole. You take an odd sort of pride in watching Melinoë’s wounds stop bleeding and begin to close.
Eventually, though, you’re done, and she’s still asleep. You tidy up the medicines as best you can, but it still looks messier than when you started. Oh well. Maybe you could go and introduce yourself to the rest of the camp…?
You turn towards the other entrance to the tent, opposite the one you came in through. Between you and the door is a green-and-black specter, with a maw full of teeth and eyes full of malice.
You yell and fling yourself backwards.
“WHO DARES INTERRUPT MY ETERNAL SLUMB— oh, sorry, I thought you were Mel,” says the specter, transforming mid-sentence into an ordinary-looking shade. Her features are a bit more defined than most of the ones you’ve seen, but honestly, that’s not saying much. “Wait, who are you, actually?”
“Erm,” you say. “I’m—Zagreus? Pleased to meet you, good shade.”
“Oh please, call me Dora,” says the shade. (How is she talking? Can all shades talk?) “Zagreus, huh? Does that mean you’re Mel’s long-lost big brother? She’s been talking about you absolutely non-stop for weeks. Maybe now there’ll finally be some peace and quiet around here.”
“...Sorry?” you reply, a bit at a loss for words.
The shade—Dora—flaps one arm-like tendril at you. “Nah, it’s okay. It’s kinda nice, actually? Normally she’s all vengeance for my family, blood and darkness, death to Chronos, blah blah blah. But once she decided she was going to rescue you it was all I wonder if Zagreus will like the Crossroads, do you think he’s going to want his own tent, will he and Nemesis get along or should I try to keep them apart? It was, like, a change of pace.”
“Ah,” you say.
“Anyway, I’m gonna get back to my haunting,” says Dora, and stretches her arm-tendrils over her head. “You can stay, I guess. I think she wanted to introduce you to everyone, so I’ll make an exception to my one-to-one ratio of haunter to hauntee rule.”
“Thank you?”
“Anytime,” says Dora, and transforms once more into the maw of teeth. She doesn’t make any move to menace you, though, just starts wandering around the tent, moving stuff around as she goes, apparently at random.
This is, quite possibly, the strangest day of your life.
But it’s better than being frozen in time while Chronos—Chronos!—sits on your father’s throne. Belatedly, you wonder what became of your parents. Hopefully Chronos just froze them in time, like he did to you. You and your father don’t always get along, but that doesn’t mean you want him to suffer the same fate he visited upon his own father. And your mother…
Well. You wouldn’t even know how to start looking for her. Maybe Melinoë can help.
Your gaze falls upon a painting in the corner, and you stand up to go examine it. It’s—it’s you. And your parents, and tiny Melinoë in your mother’s arms. It’s not finished, but it sits in pride of place anyway, atop a table in a beam of moonlight. You wonder if she looks at it often—realizing, as you do, that it’s likely the only image she has of her family, that until she found you in captivity she probably had never seen your face anywhere except here.
All of a sudden, you’re furious. How dare Chronos. How dare he. You should have been there while Mel was little. You should have gotten to see her grow up. You should have taught her how to hold a sword, should have gotten her into trouble and then back out again, should have shown her how to sneak out the window of the House. Should have started bringing her with you on your escape attempts, once she was old enough. But your grandfather stole that from you, stole away years of your life and hers, and now your baby sister is an adult you don’t know at all.
“Zagreus?” says a voice from behind you.
You turn. Mel is sitting up in her bed, rubbing her eye with a knuckle of her flesh-and-blood hand.
“I really did it,” she breathes, staring at you. “It’s really you.”
You can’t get those years back. But maybe it’s not too late to start.
You walk over to Mel, and sweep her into a hug. “Thank you,” you say.
She freezes, then tentatively wraps her skinny arms around your back and rests her cheek on your shoulder. “Thank you for coming with me.”
“Anytime,” you reply. Then you pull back and give her a serious look. “Now. Please tell me exactly how you vanquished the Titan, so I know exactly how proud to be.”