Marg's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Marg flew north again the next morning. The pomegranate sat warm in her belt pouch, and the death-winds no longer clung to her chest. But warmth was not a map. Somewhere in this gray waste hid a gate to the underworld, and she could not see even a mile ahead. She and her dragon circled a plain of black rock. Every ridge looked the same. "Where is it?" she asked. The wind gave no answer. She landed and dug the fire pit into the rock with her twin daggers. She had done this before, and it had shown her the sky-god. Maybe it would show her the gate. She stacked what dry moss she could find and struck a spark. The flame caught small and blue. Marg knelt over it. "Show me the door," she prayed. "Show me the way down." The flame did not build a vision. It bent sideways, then flattened toward the north, as if something pulled it. Marg followed its point with her eyes. Twenty steps off, the black rock split open in a seam she had flown over a dozen times. She had not seen it. Now the fire pointed straight at it. She walked to the seam. Cold breath rose from the crack. She pushed her fingers in and pulled. The rock ground back, and a stone frame lifted out of the ground. Two curved horns crowned it. Chains crossed its face. Runes she could not read glowed along the pillars, and behind them a low orange fire churned like a living thing. She had found it. The hidden gate stood open in front of her. A man stepped out of the fire. He wore dark robes stitched with silver. His hair was black, streaked with gray, and his eyes were flat and old. He looked at Marg the way a person looks at someone they already know. "You lit a fire at my door," he said. His voice was quiet and did not need to be loud. "Few do that and stay standing." Marg's hand went to her dagger. "Who are you?" "Hades." He studied her face, the same way Persephone had. "She sent you the fruit. Of course she did." His jaw tightened. "You have her chin. And my temper, I think." Marg's breath caught. "She said she was my mother." "Then she told you half." He looked past her, north, toward the sky-god she had crossed three countries to reach. "The one you chase up there gave you storms. He did not give you life." His eyes returned to her. "I did." The fire behind him pulled at her like a tide. Marg understood now why she could not release the death-winds. They were not a stranger's. They were her father's, and part of her own blood. The gate stood open. Her question about the sky-god had not changed. But a heavier one now waited below, and the way to it was in front of her.