Page 65 of Aïdes the Unseen
Her scream didn’t sound human.
The memory ended before her death.
Present
I stood motionless as the last flicker of rain faded from the projection.
Mara watched me carefully, arms folded.
“That record was corrupted for a reason,” I said slowly. “This was the only death we never confirmed.”
“No soul tether,” she agreed. “No return. No crossing.”
“She should have come to me.” Every single time she should have come to me, and she didn’t.
“Maybe she has tried,” Mara said. “But someone else reaches her first.”
The thought settled like a cold weight in my spine. It was a thought I had had, over and over. One I desperately clung to but had never been able to prove.
“Do you think it was him?” I asked.
Mara hesitated. “You mean Ares?”
“No.” I looked at her. “The one we don’t name.” The one most likely to interfere because he thought it his divine right.
She didn’t speak for a long time. Then: “I don’t think he’shere… yet.”
“But you think he will come.”
“It’s power,” she said with a shrug. “Yes, he will come.” It was afait accompli.
I turned back to the now-empty display. There were rules, once. Laws carved into the oldest stones, long before fire had a name. Gods who died were meant to fade. Mortals who bloomed again carried only fragments.
Butshewas different. Her soul retained shape. Music. Memory. Thepattern.
I had tracked her across centuries, followed that glimmer through empires and ruins, through ice ages of loneliness. I was the Lord of the Dead, but I was not immune to yearning. “I won’t lose her again.”
“Then you’ll have to change the ending,” Mara murmured. She turned to go, her shadow slipping back into the corridor.
I remained, alone with the echo of a memory that should never have existed.
She had screamed, but not in pain—inrecognition.
Something had found her that night. Whatever it was… it had stolen herawayfrom death itself.
The first time I knew something was wrong was not Paris.
It was long before, when she was called Selene, a healer in Delphi, gentle and clever, dead at twenty-six from a fever that came too fast. I waited three days in the Lower Gates for her soul to cross. It never did.
It happened again in Tangier, and Siena, and once outside Kyoto. Each time her life ended, Iwaited. I felt her pass from her body, but not into mine. Not into the realm that should’ve welcomed her.
At first, I blamed myself. Maybe the curse—orher choice to be mortal—cut the thread too deeply. Maybe she wasn’t meant to return. Maybe I wasn’t meant to hold her anymore.
But Élise?—
Élise was different.
Paris, 1795.
