Hecate knelt at the edge of her shrine and counted the dead. Hundreds of pale shapes drifted in slow circles around her, waiting. She had sworn to send each one home — to place every restless ghost back in the arms of someone living who still loved them. But she could not tell which souls had kin left above, and which did not. A glowing ring of red runes hovered over the stones, sorting the crowd into rough groups. Beside it stood a tall rack of golden torches, one lit for every soul she could not yet match. The rack was full. More torches waited on the ground. She tried a guess. She pressed her palm to a thin, weeping ghost and whispered a mother's name. The soul shuddered, then wailed. Wrong. The wail spread. Other ghosts began to keen, and the rune-ring flickered red with warning. A child-ghost clung to her sleeve and asked for a father who had died long before him. Hecate pulled back, shaking. Each wrong match cut the soul deeper. She could not keep guessing. Hermes landed on the shrine stones without a sound. He looked at the rack of torches, then at her. "You're sorting letters with no addresses," he said. "Every wrong one is a knife." He tapped his staff. "The ferryman owes me a crossing. His boat carries messages up. Send the names. Let the living answer which ghosts are theirs." She gathered the names onto strips of bark and pressed them into his hand. Hermes carried them down to the dark water, where the skiff waited in its red fog. The boat slid out, and an owl rose from its prow toward the world above. Hecate watched the torches on her rack. She would no longer guess. She would wait for the living to call their dead by name — and pray they still remembered how.

Hecate stood beside the great ring of red runes, watching the torches on her rack burn low. The names had gone up the river. No answer had come back. The ghosts drifted in slow circles, each one clutching a small bark strip — a copy of the name she had sent above. They held the strips like coins, like proof that someone, somewhere, might still remember them. Then one ghost let her bark slip. It fluttered to the stones. She turned toward the dull glow at the edge of the shrine, where the Lethe ran in cracks of fire and black rock. Others turned with her. The forgetting river was calling them home. Hecate ran to block the path, but her hands passed through them. She could not speak the truth — that help was coming — because she did not know if it was. Her greyhound pressed against her leg and whined. Her polecat darted to the falling bark strip and caught it in her teeth, keys jangling at her collar. The polecat carried the strip back to the drifting ghost and dropped it in her open palm. The greyhound stepped between the crowd and the burning river. He lowered his head and growled at the heat. One by one, the ghosts stopped. They looked at the small dark dog standing guard, and at the polecat darting from soul to soul, pressing each loose bark strip back into waiting hands. Hecate understood. She could not give them words. But she could give them her own. She lifted two golden torches from the rack and pushed them into the stones at the river's edge. "Stay inside the light," she told the ghosts. "My hound watches the water. My polecat keeps your names. Wait with them." The ghosts gathered close around the two animals. The pull of the Lethe dimmed. No soul stepped into the fire that night. The torches still showed no answer from above — but the waiting had a shape now, and a guard, and it would hold.

The torches still burned. The ghosts still waited. But Hecate knew the silence was the real enemy now — somewhere above, the living were calling names into empty air, and no sound of them reached the river. She left her hound and polecat at the water's edge and climbed the black path toward her cave. She pressed her hand to the carved door. Inside, the rock was cold. She had built this place to hear, but it had never been finished. She lit a ring of red runes in the air above the floor. The marks turned slowly, casting orange light on the walls. The runes hummed but caught nothing. The cave was sealed. Voices could not pass through stone. Hecate stood under the spinning circle and understood. A listening place needed an opening — a root, a branch, something that touched both worlds. She thought of the pomegranate tree in Hades's orchard. Its roots ran deep into the underworld. Its branches reached the light above. She went to the tree and cut one long branch. The wood bled red sap onto her hands. She carried the branch back and set it upright in the center of the rune ring. The runes locked around it. The branch shivered. Then, faint as wind through grass, a sound came out of the wood. A woman's voice, far away, crying a name. Then a man's voice. Then a child's. Dozens of voices, calling down. Hecate fell to her knees and listened. She could hear them now. She could match each call to a waiting ghost. But the voices came faster than she could hold them, layering and tangling in the air — and she was only one witch, with only two hands, and the river was still full of the dead.