Like a man in a dream, the tall figure with sandy hair had no knowledge of how he came to be in the vast meadow of waving grass. He knew neither his own name nor that he should remember it.
Naked, he walked forward through the waist-high grass with only one goal in mind—to see what lay beyond it.
Figures passed on all sides of him, their features unclear, their bodies blurred. When he looked down, he saw that he, too, was a bleeding watercolor, a brushstroke away from eternal formlessness.
This did not seem strange.
He walked until a tall cypress tree broke through the featureless plain. White and glowing rather than dark green. At its base, blurred figures bent to drink from a spring gurgling into a small pool.
Throat raw with thirst, he knelt at the pool’s edge. He reached his hand into the cool water. Only then did he notice the glint of gold reflected in the pool’s surface.
Curious, he lifted one blurred hand to his throat. A pendant in the shape of an ivy leaf. The inscription glowed sharp and clear, brighter than the leaf itself, as if penned by a hand of fire. The words scrolled across the small leaf like a Times Square news ticker.
You will find in the halls of Hades a spring on the left,
and standing by it, a glowing white cypress tree;
Do not approach this spring at all.
Find the Lake of Mnemosyne, refreshing water flowing forth.
He looked at the figures around him with new eyes. As soon as they drank, all color drained from their bodies; they became no more than pockets of vaguely man-shaped darkness in the world. Shades.
They moved away from the spring in a great herd, passing farther into the meadow, where one great hole opened in the heavens and another in the earth. Most of the shades walked forward into the earthly portal. Very few ascended through the celestial gate instead. He watched them impassively. Some small part of his brain recognized the portals as exits from this netherworld.
That’s the goal, isn’t it? he wondered. To get out of here?
An indistinct figure, vaguely woman shaped, knelt eagerly beside him and plunged her face into the pool to suck the water. Despite the leaf’s instructions, he wanted to join her. If I drink, he suddenly understood, I can leave through one of the portals.
He cupped his hand in the water and lifted it to his lips. The woman beside him straightened up, now no more than a shadow.
Lethe, he realized. This spring is Lethe, the River of Forgetting. The moment he drank of its waters, he would lose whatever it was that made him … Theodore Schultz.
Yes, that was his name.
If he walked through the lower portal, he would return to life, but as someone—some thing—else. But what is Theodore Schultz, anyway? he wondered, searching his own fading memories. I read old books, he remembered dimly. I have friends who love me. Students who depend on me. I have a home and a dog. A great lumbering, brindled dog with eyes full of grief.
The image sparked something in him, and he fought through the cobwebs in his brain to latch onto the memory, but all in vain. He tried to reach further back. To remember his childhood, his parents, but it was all too hazy. It’s as if I’m a different person, trying to remember a different life.
A woman’s voice echoed in his mind, bright and ringing while all other sounds were muted. My memories of godhood are like images seen through a forest pool.
Who’d said that?
With that single question, Theo remembered his purpose.
“Selene.” He spoke her name aloud; like a spell, the fog lifted from his mind.
His memories rushed back, as sharp and clear as the leaf’s gold words: Selene alive in his arms, Selene falling through the night like an arrow piercing the clouds. Selene kneeling on a bloody floor, the answer to his prayers. Her stunned face, as the dream faded to nightmare. Her charred husk smoldering before him. The mithraeum. The syringe.
His anger returned—anger at Saturn. Anger at her.
He stood up abruptly and shook Lethe’s water from his fingers as if it burned. While the shades flocked toward the portals, their memories forgotten, Theo headed back the way he’d come at a run, shouting Selene’s name, half pleading, half enraged.
He walked against the tide of the faded dead. Back into the waist-high grass. He felt like a sailor in an unending sea, searching the waves for sign of his drowned love.
He had no idea how long he wandered the plain. Hours, days. Years, perhaps. No sun crossed the blank gray sky, no moon either. Time had no meaning.
He thought of Scooter and Flint in the mithraeum. Had the syndexioi found them and confiscated the second syringe? Or maybe, Theo thought, they’ve already injected me with the antidote—and it didn’t work. He made a conscious decision not to panic. I’ll be stuck here for eternity with Selene. That’s not such a bad idea—it will take that long for me to find a way to forgive her.
Thirst tore at him like a lion. He could barely move his cracked lips. Yet drinking from the River of Forgetting would mean giving up on Selene. And somehow, despite everything she’d done to him, he couldn’t do that. Not yet.
Finally, he returned to where he’d first emerged. There, the grass dissolved into a great wall of darkness, infinitely tall and infinitely wide. The surface eddied, black upon black, like a whirlpool of ink.
The River Styx, Theo realized. The border of the Underworld upon whose waters the gods swore their most solemn oaths. Vast and impenetrable, rushing in every direction at once—across the ground, toward the sky, beyond the horizon.
A hand emerged from the swirling black, then a foot. A figure stepped through, quickly resolving itself into the hazy outline of a man. He didn’t look confused or lost. He simply strode slowly forward without noticing Theo standing nearby and joined the herd of other ghosts headed in the same direction.
They’re all drawn straight to Lethe, he realized. Just as I was. Selene will go there, too. Panic quickened his pulse. She won’t know not to drink. She’ll return to the world another woman. Forgetting she was ever Artemis. Forgetting that I ever loved her.
He raced back toward the spring, fear driving him faster, faster. I can’t be too late, he begged silently. Not again. He’d never believed in destiny—but if Artemis was real, perhaps the Fates were, too. There has to be a reason I went into the necropolis just before Selene was killed. It can’t have been for nothing. The universe would not be so cruel.
He reached the white cypress and ran from one blurred ghost to the next, grabbing them by formless shoulders, looking for the woman he’d loved. She can’t have drunk from the spring, he decided. She’d know, somehow, that I was coming for her. She would wait. But his faith in Selene had already crumbled in the Phrygianum.
He searched a hundred bland faces—but none were the one he sought.
He felt like a man pushed from a cliff, clutching at air he knew to be empty.
Finally, for the first time since he’d come to this place, Theo sank to the ground in despair. The grass closed above his head, transforming his world into a colorless prison, just as it had been for the last six lonely months. Had his sacrifice been the gesture of a man desperate for meaning in a world that had none?
His adrenaline finally drained away. The obsessive need to find Selene settled into weary recognition that his epic quest had been no more than a fool’s errand. Because even now, when he’d come so far, she didn’t want to be saved. She’d drunk from Lethe’s waters and moved on, happy to forget.
For a long time, he sat with his head in his hands and simply mourned.
Finally the spring’s gurgle penetrated his fog of despair. It seemed to be whispering to him.
You can forget, too.
He stared at the water, obeying the desperate thirst urging him to rise. To kneel before the pool. To reach a hand into the shining deep. To finally forget his sorrow.