Charon's quarters were dim, lit only by the muted glow of light emanating from magical crystals that clung to the walls in soft pulses. Shadows stretched long across the floorboards as Darren helped Marianne settle back into her bed. The mattress dipped beneath her slight weight, the blankets rustling as she adjusted herself against the pillows. She looked fragile in a way that felt almost unnatural for someone who commanded such formidable power.

  Darren had not said a word.

  Silently, he turned away from the bedside and crossed the room. The faint creak of wood beneath his boots was the only sound that accompanied him as he retrieved a glass from the small basin near the wall, filling it with water. When he returned, he held the filled glass out to her without a word.

  Marianne accepted it with a faint smile.

  “Thank you,” she murmured.

  But that smile never reached her eyes.

  She sipped carefully, her fingers steady around the glass as the tension that hung thick between them. Her gaze flickered toward him again and again as though bracing for something—an accusation, a reprimand, an outburst, anything else other than silence.

  Darren remained standing at first, watching her without a word.

  The quiet dragged on.

  He had been silent for a long while now, ever since helping her to bed from where she had sat upon the ground. The absence of his voice filled the room more loudly than any argument could have.

  Finally, he spoke.

  “How far along are you?”

  Marianne’s lips pressed together. For a fleeting moment, hesitation flickered across her face. The Witch lowered the glass slightly, her gaze dropping to the water as though it might offer her an escape. Then she exhaled.

  “Four weeks.”

  Still in the fragile beginnings of life.

  Darren absorbed the information without outward reaction. He did not know whether it was a good or bad thing that this pregnancy was still in its early stages. What he did know was that this meant that in the midst of gods, bargains, and an apocalypse, there was another aspect now entangled in all of it. He dragged a chair closer to the bed, the legs scraping softly across the floor, and sat down heavily. His elbows came to rest against his knees, and he buried his head in his hands, fingers threading through his hair. This posture was of a man trying to hold himself together.

  “The child’s father,” he said at last, lifting his head slightly. “Where is he?”

  Marianne finished her sip before answering. She placed the glass carefully on the bedside table, as if the extra seconds were necessary.

  “He’s dead.”

  Her voice was flat.

  Darren’s head lifted fully then.

  Their eyes met.

  The anger he had been holding back faltered. His expression changed, sharp edges softening as something else replaced the irritation.

  Understanding.

  Loss was not foreign to him. The feeling carried a familiarity where he wished it did not. There was a certain emptiness in the way she had said it, a finality that did not invite questions.

  Darren straightened in the chair, drawing in a slow breath as he composed himself. His shoulders squared, and when he spoke again, his tone was more measured.

  “Listen Marianne,” he began. “I made a deal with Hades to deliver you to the God of War. That means that I'm going to protect you and your child, no matter what."

  The promise was a simple thing, anchored in obligation and something deeper that he had not yet chosen to name.

  “But if we are to make it through this alive,” he continued, his eyes holding hers firmly now, “then we need to be able to trust each other.”

  Marianne did not hesitate. “And I do trust you, Darren.”

  There was no flicker of deception in her expression. No evasiveness. Her gaze remained clear and honest. She believed what she was saying.

  And that was the problem.

  Because as Darren searched her face, he realized he could not offer the same certainty in return.

  “If you really do trust me,” he asked quietly, the question weighted with more than frustration now, “then why can’t you be honest with me?"

  The Witch laughed. But this laugh, there was no excitement in it, no spark of amusement like before. This laugh was thin at the edges, strained by something far closer to exhaustion than humor.

  “By all the gods, old and new, I wish I could be honest with you,” she told him, shaking her head faintly. “But if I were to give you the answers you seek, then you would also have to protect me from the wrath of Styx.”

  Darren exhaled slowly and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  Of course.

  He had suspected as much.

  If only they had not been sworn upon that name.

  Marianne had never outright said it, but she had hinted that there were vows binding her to secrecy and he was sure that those oaths had been not been sworn lightly. Even in his time, there were lines no one dared cross. The Goddess of Unbreakable Oaths was not a figure invoked carelessly. Promises sworn upon her essence were absolute. To break them was not merely to invite punishment, it was to invite a fate worse than death itself.

  No cleverness could trick the Goddess of the River Styx, no strength could shield against her punishment.

  Darren lowered his hand, the tightness in his jaw easing into reluctant acceptance.

  He could not ask her to condemn herself. Not even for the truth.

  “But I do promise you this,” Marianne continued, her voice softening. “You will see your family again, Darren Ittriki. I am certain of it.”

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  Those words struck him with an eerie familiarity.

  In his dream, Lukas had said the same thing.

  It was familiar not only because they had made the same claim. It was because they had been so sure of it, possessed the same unwavering assurance as they said them.

  This only strengthened his conviction.

  A faint smile touched Darren’s lips.

  “I hope so too, Marianne.”

  For a moment, the tension in the room finally began to fade.

  They held each other’s gaze—not as protector and charge, not as bargainers bound by divine contracts—but as two people who understood loss.

  A quiet understanding settled between them.

  Marianne adjusted herself, sitting up a little straighter and resting her back against the frame of the bed. Though she still looked pale from earlier strain, she seemed stronger now.

  “If you have any questions,” the woman offered carefully, “you may ask them freely. And I will be as honest as I possibly can. Without breaking any of the vows that have bound me to secrecy, of course.”

  Darren considered her offer only briefly.

  “Why did you swear those oaths in the first place?”

  The question left him before he properly think about it.

  Marianne blinked, clearly not expecting that direction. For a heartbeat, she simply stared at him. Then her eyes narrowed slightly in concentration. She was considering how she could go about answering his question without breaking her oaths. The room felt smaller as she searched for a response that would not trigger unseen consequences.

  Finally, she gave him an acceptable answer.

  “I did it for the people I love.”

  He understood that better than anyone.

  In this way, they were the same.

  Just as the closest thing to comfort began to form and just as they began to relax just slightly, that was exactly when it happened.

  They should have known better.

  Peace, in their circumstances, was never meant to last.

  The impact came without warning. A violent force slammed into the barrier surrounding the Ferry of the Dead. A bone-rattling collision that tore through the vessel’s protective field. The entire ship lurched as if struck by a celestial hammer.

  Darren’s chair tipped backward before he could react. Marianne was thrown from the bed. The world inverted in an instant.

  The barrier outside groaned under the strain, shimmering violently as the Ferry was launched off course. The floor seemed to vanish from his feet, the vessel flipped, spinning end over end into open space.

  Weightlessness swallowed them.

  Charon's quarters spun in dizzying arcs, the walls becoming ceiling, and the ceilings becoming walls.

  Across from him, Marianne drifted helplessly, her hand instinctively reaching for something that was no longer stable enough to grasp.

  There had been no time to brace themselves for the impact.

  Now, there was only chaos and the realization that whatever had struck them was powerful enough to shake even the protections surrounding the Ferry of the Dead.

  But the violent tumbling only last seconds.

  Merlyn’s Autopilot engaged with mechanical precision, the Ferry of the Dead shuddering as the System used Darren's Pathway of Authority to correct its trajectory. The spinning slowed, then halted. Gravity reasserted itself abruptly, dragging both Darren and Marianne back to the floor. They landed hard but upright.

  Darren did not wait.

  He was moving before the last tremor left the hull, already through the door and into the corridor. Marianne followed without protest, gathering her balance as she rushed after him. The narrow passageways seemed tighter than before, the light flickering with residual instability. They ascended the steps two at a time, the air growing colder with every level.

  By the time they reached the deck, the Ferry had stabilized completely.

  Beyond the golden lattice of hexagons that formed the protective vesicle, something waited.

  It was not like the drifting clouds of darkness they had encountered before nor the scattered hordes of floating corpses that wandered aimlessly through the cosmos.

  Those had been manageable.

  Along with the piece of the Gates that Marianne had commanded to surround the Ferry of the Dead, the System had handled those minor threats while Darren slept.

  This was no minor threat.

  What Darren had never realized before was that this consuming void spared nothing. It devoured indiscriminately—mortal, divine and everything between. Much like his own Divinity of Dissection, it recognized no hierarchy.

  Even the gods were not exempt.

  Because there, emerging in fragments from that suffocating black, was proof of that.

  The figure was colossal beyond comprehension.

  Darren’s mind tried to measure it, failed, and abandoned the attempt entirely. Scale lost its meaning. The outline of the undead immortal stretched farther than sight could properly process, its mass distorting the very perception of space around it.

  Its flesh appeared in glimpses where the darkness thinned—rotted, sloughing, torn in ways that suggested decay without end. It was not the clean death of stillness but the obscene persistence of something that should have long since ceased.

  Two heads loomed from its upper mass, fused at the base of a gargantuan neck. They were not symmetrical. One sagged lower than the other, jaw hanging slightly ajar as though mid-rot. The other craned unnaturally, its features elongated, eye sockets cavernous and lightless. When they shifted, moved independently. This was something that had once held form and authority, now hollowed out and infested by the same devouring darkness that cloaked it.

  Then Darren saw its hand, if such a thing could still be called a hand.

  It emerged from the void slowly. Each finger was longer than any planet they had passed on their journey. The flesh was split and decayed, yet it moved with terrifying purpose.

  It was reaching for them.

  The golden hexagonal lattice surrounding the Ferry shimmered as the being’s proximity strained it. Each hexagon was a fragment of collective strength, an echo of the Gates of the Underworld themselves. Those Gates had endured for ages because of the unified power embedded within every piece. This vesicle was simply a small part of that barrier that had guarded Hades' domain after the darkness began to corrupt the realms.

  Against something like this, it would hold for seconds. Perhaps minutes, if fortune dared to intervene and luck chose to be on their side.

  Marianne shouted something behind him. Merlyn’s voice overlapped hers, sharp and urgent. Screens of red warning flashes reflected faintly in his eyes, it was the System alerts screaming of catastrophic threat levels.

  Darren closed his eyes.

  The noise dulled and the shouting faded into distant echoes. Even the looming monstrosity seemed to recede as he turned inward instead of outward.

  He let the memories come.

  He saw the faces of Aurelia and Andrea vividly in his mind. He heard their laughter, felt their warmth, remembered the quiet moments that had once felt ordinary and now felt unreachable.

  Darren had told himself that he would see them again.

  He had promised that it would happen.

  When he opened his eyes, the undead god had drawn closer. Its twin heads angled toward the Ferry and its massive fingers beginning to curve inward, preparing to enclose the vessel completely.

  The logical choice was obvious, they should escape so that they could live to see another day. But Darren Ittriki did not have the luxury for logic. Not when every second counted against the fragile lattice protecting them and especially not when escape might only delay the inevitable.

  In his own hand, the Compass of Life trembled faintly. The needle pointed directly at the monstrosity.

  Not away.

  Toward it.

  The only way was through.

  This man had promised to do everything in his power to see his family again, even made it known to Merlyn the lengths he would go to.

  Now it was time for Darren Ittriki to prove it.