Page 58 of Patron of Mercy

So what now?

“Shall we go to the museum?” Lach asked, seeming to sense Thanatos’s shifting mood. “I mean, this place is amazing, but I guess they removed some really interesting frescoes to the museum. Took out a whole wall to get one of them.”

“They’re really impressive,” Martina agreed, motioning for them to follow her back the way they had come.

The museum was fascinating in the way all history museums fascinated Thanatos. Mortals were more passionate about the things that had happened before their births than most Olympians were about their actual lives. The way they dug, discovered, and extrapolated—sometimes in bizarrely incorrect ways—was amazing. It made Thanatos feel small, maybe in the same way it did to them. He liked it.

Like the dig site, however, the museum felt quiet and peaceful, not like there was an object of power lurking in the shadows.

Martina led them through, explaining the frescoes, what they depicted, and what the humans who had discovered and studied them thought they meant. Some were simple, like a beautiful depiction of spring. A few were harder to understand.

When they came to the last in a long line, her face changed. A dozen emotions flitted through her eyes faster than Thanatos could track before she straightened her back and turned to them. “This is the most recent one found.”

The painting was stark and less detailed than most of the others. It simply depicted two men in combat, hunched toward each other as though they were wrestling. Above them, there was a lightning bolt in the clear sky. Below them, stuck in the ground, a scythe. They were surrounded by fire on both sides, and the ground beneath their feet was cracked, flames flickering through.

In the context of history, it made no sense. There had been no humans to witness the Titanomachy, let alone to know where its battles had occurred or what they had looked like. In the context of reality, and their presence on the island, it was everything.

“Is that...” Lach breathed, reaching for the flaking paint before remembering himself and pulling his hand back. “It is, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Thanatos agreed. It was the first sign that they were in the right place.

I Could Tell You

Lach caught Thanatos’s gaze, a slow smile spreading across his face. There always came a point in every adventure where things got real—intangible ideas hardened into something he could grasp, find, take. Gaia might’ve sent Lach after the scythe, but it’d felt like a story until that moment. And damn if he hadn’t needed the win.

“It is what?” Martina demanded, staring between the pair of them. She crossed her arms, cocked her pursed lips, and raised her eyebrows, unwilling to let them sideline her.

Lach chewed his tongue and considered her narrowed eyes. So far, they’d been playing things close to the chest, but Lach had called on her because she was the best archaeologist he knew. He trusted her, and nothing about giving her the information she needed to be effective required him to disclose that he was standing beside a god he’d personally known for millennia. And she couldn’t help if she didn’t have all the facts.

“Cronus’s scythe,” he said.

With wide golden eyes, Thanatos stared at him. Lach hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and gave a little shrug. Shoulder still hurt, but the thrill of a lead was enough to distract him.

Martina stared too. For a few seconds, she was frozen. Then, she let out a bark of a laugh. “Cronus as in the titan god of time? That Cronus?”

“You don’t believe in gods?” Lach asked.

“Do you?” she shot back at him. “Which gods? There are thousands all over the world from hundreds of unique cultures. Who’s to say if any of them are real?”

Don’t look at Thanatos. Don’t look at Thanatos.

Lach bit the sides of his tongue and shrugged. “Okay, not literal gods. Metaphorical. We live in a world of magic. There are powerful artifacts everywhere. Why not an ancient one?”

“A scythe wielded by a god that can control time?”

“And harvests.”

“And harvests,” Martina echoed hollowly. She breathed in slow through her nose and let it out in a sigh. “Okay, say this scythe does exist. You’re talking about a weapon that would’ve been in play in the Golden Age before Cronus fell—which we have norealconception of, if it happened at all. You’re looking for an artifact that’s conservatively ten thousand years old, and you think you’re just going to find it lying around Akrotiri?”

“We got a tip,” Lach said.

“Oh yeah? Got an eye-witness account, did you? There’s no way it’s here. The earliest evidence of habitation here is from the fifth millennium BCE, and it’s decidedly human,” Martina said.

“But what’s under that?” Lach asked.

“Who the hell knows? Ash. Volcanic deposits. I study people, Lach. Geology is an entirely different field.”

Lach chewed his lip. Old as he was, he didn’t predate people. Thanatos did, but his lips were firmly shut, and he looked less than thrilled at Lach having spilled all that to Martina.

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