Charon dragged the skiff onto the black sand and knelt beside its split hull. For centuries he had ferried the dead across the Acheron in this same boat. Now the planks crumbled under his thumb like wet bread. He needed timber, real timber, or the next crossing would drown a hundred souls. The wreck lay tilted on the shore beside his mooring stones. Its dragon-headed prow still curved proud, but the belly was rotted through. Bronze nails dangled from soft wood. The dark sail hung in strips. He set his gilded oar across two stones and stared at the ruin. Footsteps clicked on the rocks behind him. Hermes landed light, his winged sandals folding still. "You can't patch that," he said. "That's a corpse pretending to be a boat." Charon grunted. "Driftwood won't hold. I need harder wood." He looked up the slope, past the distant baying of the three-headed hound, toward the pale grove that grew near the lord's hall. The white poplars there burned with orange leaves and charcoal bark. Their wood was sacred. Their wood did not rot. "Hades's own trees," Hermes said. He tilted his head. "Ask, and he may grant one. Cut without asking, and you'll be the next thing splintered." He tapped the broken hull. "But every hour you wait, this gets worse. And the dead are piling up at the gate like grain at a clogged mill." Charon stood. He lifted his oar and pointed it inland, toward the grove. The choice was made. He would climb to the poplars and beg the lord of the dead for a single tree. The ruined skiff stayed behind him on the sand, useless now, waiting to be reborn or abandoned.