Page 85 of Invoking Ruin

As though there’s an easy answer to his question. Of course I want out of here, but to what end? There’s no place to run, no escape from what’s coming, and Dionysus coming to free me reeks of some sort of trap.

Surely, he doesn’t care enough to come down here, in the middle of the end, just for me.

Unless he wants to punish me one last time.

“Did one of them send you down here?” I ask him.

“What?” His eyes widen before he shakes his head. “No. Apollo is trying to lead, and Eris is hindering as much as helping. It’s madness in there. I grabbed the keys and left.”

He shakes the ring, letting them rattle. “Do you want to stay here?”

No, I don’t. “One second.” I get my other leg through the circle of my arms and hold them up for Dionysus. He unlocks the cuffs, and they tumble to the floor.

“It’s a neat trick,” he says.

Stalling now. The hair on the back of my neck stands up.

“Awkwardness isn’t your style,” I tell him as I get to my feet, rubbing my wrists. “Why are you here?”

“I didn’t like the idea of you being in here, alone. Not at the end.”

So, he’s not here to punish me, but that’s a small comfort while staring my demise in the face. We gods have been facing our potential mortality for centuries, watching family members decay and lose their memories. It’s different when it’s everyone. Everything. Any moment, now. The closeness of the Void must be unspooling them all, Dionysus included. Why else would he come down here?

My stomach clenches around a stone, and I force myself to stay calm. “Do they know what happened?”

He shakes his head. “They can’t get close to the break in the sky, but there’s something at the center holding it open.”

Something? Or someone. “Do you think she sacrificed another god?”

Dionysus’ lips thin. “It’s possible. I don’t know. I… you know, this isn’t what I came down here to talk to you about.”

No, I suppose not. I’m not the goddess one seeks out to strategize. My mother has proven capable of crafting plans, and perhaps Lethe helps her now. Finally the favorite child she always secretly wished to be.

I’m just a scavenger, waiting for an opportunity to pick their corpses.

Nyx’s words still sting, even now, when they could not matter less.

“Then why are you here?” I ask as the silence stretches on between us. We don’t have time for silence. “I’m free now. You did what you came here to do.”

“You were right.”

The words float past me, missing my ears, my brain. He might as well have spoken pure gibberish. “I—what?”

“You were right. Olympus is the absolute last place I want to be.” He comes closer, and his shoulders lift as though weight has slid off them with his confession. “Your dream of travel, of adventure, it was a good one. I would have liked being out in the world with you.”

It shouldn’t hurt to hear kind words from him. All I’ve ever wanted, for centuries, for millennia, is to hear something like that from his lips, to hear praise.

But it’s such a waste. Why must I hear how he’d have liked to be with me now, when the end hovers over us like the Sword of Damocles?

The mortals always talk of regrets and things left unsaid, how it’s better to be honest with loved ones when facing death. But I can’t see how it matters.

We could be halfway around the world, our pursuers left far, far behind, but we’re not, we’re here.

Noble bullshit.

I shake my head. “In the great hall, when Nemesis allowed you to decide my fate, what were you about to choose?”

This hardly matters, either, but I can’t let it go. The indecision had been written so plain on his face. He’d kept Deimos and Aphrodite from me, but while we were in Hera’s garden he’d made no secret of what he thought I deserved: Loneliness. He’d never love me.

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