Selene walked along the water’s edge for what felt like hours but might have been seconds. To her right, the parched ground stretched into hazy distance. To her left, the vast Lake of Mnemosyne lay calm and still, reflecting the featureless sky. In either direction, nothing held the eye.
This is what it means to be dead, she thought. To exist within nothingness. Apollo had wandered this netherworld for six months—half a year that might have felt like centuries or minutes. Only his music—and her memory—had kept him sane.
Selene fixed her gaze on her twin and Theo, latching on to them as the only anchors in an empty sea.
Finally, they came to a narrow stream that swirled with color like oil in sunlight. Where it joined the lake, two men stood guard. Selene recognized them from the carvings in so many mithraea: Cautes and Cautopates, the Torchbearers. They were twins, their expressionless faces like bronzes cast from the same mold. Only the direction of their torches differed—upward for Cautes, guardian of Birth; downward for Cautopates, guardian of Death.
Between them stood a lion-headed man, the same figure she’d seen on the ceiling of the Mithraic schoolroom, the one Saturn had called Aion, Unbounded Time. He stood ramrod straight, clasping two foot-long keys against his chest. A snake writhed around his nude body and up his torso, its head resting above his lion’s mane for a moment before it slithered back down to retrace its twining path. An undulating double helix, twisting into the shape of life itself.
None of the three guards paid any heed to the blurred ghosts standing a few yards away.
“Dennis said we need to be Releasers,” Theo murmured. “That must mean getting our furry friend to use the keys to unlock the way forward.”
“The Torchbearers will not let you pass,” Apollo said in a hushed voice.
Theo tapped the gold pendant around his neck. “We’ll see.”
Neither Cautes nor Cautopates looked at him as he approached, but when he tried to pass between them, their meter-long torches slammed together like a gate.
Theo looked down at his pendant and read aloud carefully, as if reciting a passphrase:
“I am the child of Earth and starry Heaven, but my race is heavenly. I am parched with thirst and I perish, but give me quickly refreshing water flowing forth from the Lake of Mnemosyne.”
To Selene’s amazement, the guardians uncrossed their torches in response. Lion-headed Aion took a step back and raised his two keys overhead, as if to unlock the sky itself.
Theo motioned for Selene to follow. “Do what I do,” he urged. “We’re almost there.”
He passed beyond the guardians and quickly bent to sip from the rushing rainbow stream. Selene grasped her twin’s ghostly hand in her own and strode quickly between the guards. Cautes and Cautopates let her through—but their torches clashed together behind her with a shower of sparks, blocking Apollo’s way.
“He may not pass,” they said in unison.
Aion merely growled, his long teeth bared.
“Why not?” Selene demanded. Her hand still clutched her brother’s, their outstretched arms reaching between the crossed torches.
“Only souls newly arrived can depart,” the Torchbearers intoned. “You may go. He may not.”
“Where I go, he goes.” She squeezed her twin’s hand, trusting her own nebulous flesh to convey her message. As one, they swept their clasped hands upward to knock aside the torches, moving so fast the flames barely licked their skin.
Selene yanked on Apollo’s arm to drag him through, but Aion stood before them, barring their path to the stream. He lowered his keys with a roar.
Theo stepped forward to help, then jerked to a halt as if he’d run into an invisible wall. His shell of calm determination cracked open. “Aion locked the way!” He pounded his fist against thin air, desperate, panicked. “I can’t get back to—”
Apollo’s warning shout drowned out Theo’s words. Selene wheeled toward her twin just in time to see him dodge the torches swinging toward him from either side. Cautes and Cautopates moved in perfect symmetry, their flaming brands streaking the dim gray sky with light.
“They move as one,” she cried, “but we don’t have to!”
Releasing Apollo’s hand, she hurtled toward Cautes just as his torch swung toward her. She ducked the fluttering flame and seized the bundled reed handle instead.
“They call me Torch-Bearing Goddess,” she snarled, ripping the reeds from his hands. “But I prefer She Who Helps One Climb Out.”
She jabbed the torch into the ground, dousing the flames against the rocky earth.
Cautes stared down at the blackened reeds, his hands limp at his sides, a robot with his batteries removed.
Selene risked a glance back to her twin. Apollo had trapped Cautopates’s torch in the strings of his golden lyre. He wrenched the instrument to the side, shearing the torch in half. The flame tumbled to the ground. Selene stamped it out with her bare feet, the pain nothing compared to her time upon Saturn’s pyre.
The torchbearers both stood slumped and unmoving, their strength doused along with their fire. The shape began to leech from their outlines, the color from their skin and clothes.
But the fight was not yet done.
Aion roared his anger, dragon flames spouting from his fanged jaws. Selene ducked beneath the plume of fire and slammed a roundhouse kick into the creature’s stomach. His flesh was solid and unyielding beneath the sole of her foot; her kick seemed to have as little impact as a butterfly’s wing. She reached for his keys instead, but he bolted into the air. His four feathered wings flapped noisily, taking him—and his keys—out of reach.
Saturn’s story came back to her. Primordial Aion, limitless and infinite, finally pinned in place by Saturn, God of Bounded Time, who bent the universe into a straight line.
If I want to reverse my own death, she realized, I have to make Time limitless once more. I have to unbind him from his serpent coils.
The snake hissed down at her, its tongue a mocking flicker. Selene snatched a rock from the ground and hurled it like a shot put. It crunched against the snake’s skull.
The serpent unfurled, slipping off Aion’s naked body and spinning to the ground. Selene snatched it up, the coils heavy and rough. It blinked slowly, barely alive. She grabbed its neck, ready to finish the job.
“Wait!” cried Theo. “Dennis said release Time from the snake. Don’t kill it! We don’t want to resurrect all the dead!”
Selene held the snake up to Aion like an offering. He swooped down to retrieve the prize.
She yanked it back at the last moment. “Drop the keys, and I’ll give you the snake.”
Aion growled, smoke billowing from his jaws.
She held the beast across her body like a shield. “Burn me, burn your pet.”
The lion blew sparks from his nostrils and bared his fangs—but he held out the keys.
The voice of the Torchbearers surprised her. She’d thought them too stunned to speak.
“If you take them,” Cautopates began.
“No one will ever pass through Mnemosyne again,” finished Cautes.
“So be it.” She grabbed both keys from Aion. Then she hurled the snake away from the stream with all her strength. The lion-headed man flapped after it, bellowing his distress. She tossed one key to Apollo.
Theo stood at the lake’s edge. He still hadn’t entered the water. Perhaps he couldn’t.
“Here, Theo, you take it,” she said, preparing to toss him the other key.
“I didn’t come all this way to leave you behind,” he said tightly. “Besides, I have another way out. Flint’s going to—” His hands shot to his throat. His eyes bulged as he drew a wheezing, terrified breath.
“Theo!”
For an instant, his amorphous form turned solid, color flooded his cheeks—and then he disappeared.