“You’re mine,” he said, letting the flame of his gaze fall on Persephone so that she flinched. A sob escaped her lips.

The heat touched me next as hot agony burned along the line that connected our eyes. I saw hate there, and fury, and a terrible, devouring sort of lust.

“She’s mine. And you will be. Forever. Death I will bring you, and as Death I will collect you, and though heat will bake you and flames burn you, never will Lethe’s sweet waters pass your parched lips. You will envy Prometheus.”

As he spoke I could feel the fire of his will eating away at my soul, pushing me already toward death, and fear filled me. Persephone stood then and stepped between us, breaking the link, and I sagged against the desk, my chin coming to rest inches from Shara’s laptop shape. I noticed words on the screen.

There was a cursor prompt right after a big chunk of the programming language that Cerice had written for her dissertation.

Why? I typed. Neither Cerice nor I ever used the “Execute” command anymore, preferring “Please,” which allowed the webgoblin freedom of choice in the question of a program run.

I did. Escapee. Execute. Then I hit return.

Data flashed across Shara’s screen too fast for me to follow. It looked like a complete read-off of her memory, but I couldn’t tell for sure. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flickering and realized that whatever was happening within Shara was being mirrored on Hades’ monitor. But I didn’t have time to think about that, not with Hades himself on the spot.

Catching the edge of the desk, I pulled myself to my feet. Hades had crossed deeper into the room, coming to stand only a few feet from Persephone. The weight of his gaze had bowed her down, pushing her own eyes floor-ward. It was the first chance I had to really look at him.

He was dark, with black flame in his eyes, and thick black hair like billowing smoke. His frame was long and lean, and he looked hungry, with his bones too visible under his skin, a skeleton playing at being a man. If Zeus is thunder and lightning, bluster and brawn, Hades, his older brother, is smoke and shadow, a fire burning underground. He smiled as he took another step, then backhanded Persephone with a crack that suggested a broken cheekbone.

Without so much as a whimper, she crumpled to the ground. Now only a desk stood between me and the Lord of the Dead. Hades raised his hand. Dark flames streamed from his fingertips, reaching for that last shield. Where they touched, decay ate into the rich mahogany, points of dry rot racing outward like ants escaping a shattered hill. It was mesmerizing, and I watched as one long line of rot slid under the now blank monitor, making it sink and tilt. Only then did I think of Shara, reaching to catch her up. Halfway there, my hand stopped as suddenly as if I’d run it into a wall.

Her screen was black and empty, off and more than off. Her case had lost its shine, fading from true purple to mauve as it had when she’d been killed. I didn’t know what “Escapee” was supposed to do, but it was clear that Shara was no longer at home. Whether that meant I’d finally finished the task I’d set out to perform on my first trip here was something only time would tell. While I was still trying to decide what to do next, her mortal shell fell into the collapsing desk and vanished from sight. Dust puffed outward as the last bits of wood lost their structural integrity. Hades stepped forward, smiling still, his eyes level with my own.

The darkness within leaped between us, driving me to my knees. I might be a power now, but the Raven was no match for Death. I could feel my inner strength fading. I wouldn’t last long, and I knew it. But I refused to look away from his gaze. I would meet my own personal death eye to eye despite the terror in my heart, even if it hastened the outcome. Shadows closed in around the edge of my vision again, narrowing my view till all I could see was the dark fire. Soon, even that began to fade. I was dying. Blackness and . . .

Discontinuity.

The world rolled under me like the deck of a ship in strong winds. I realized I was lying facedown. Something had changed, though I had only the haziest idea of what. There had been a sound, a wild, wonderful, totally unexpected sound, and Hades had released me. What had it been?

Laughter?

That was it. The light ringing tones of pure living joy, a sound utterly alien to this land of dust and ashes. I didn’t understand. But I was alive still, and that meant I had to go on trying. My arms felt as heavy and dead as old logs, but I forced them to move, dragging my hands up beside my chest and pushing myself onto my knees again. What had become of Hades?

There he was, standing over Persephone, and the fires engulfed him now, a continuous sheet of black flame that wrapped around him like a shroud. But Persephone didn’t seem afraid. Didn’t even seem to notice him, looking through Hades rather than at him, and her eyes held . . . joy? That couldn’t be right, but it was. The pain was still there, would always be there, but it had been pushed down into the depths and Persephone was laughing. Laughing in a bright clear voice like a stream foaming over polished rocks on a sunny morning high in the mountains.

Hades tried to strike her again. But his hand passed through her face without touching it, and I realized that she was fading. Or perhaps clarifying would be a better word. I could see through her, but she didn’t look one iota less bright. Rather it was as though she were being transformed from flesh into light in a process that was accelerating steadily.

She turned to look at me then and paused in her laughter. “Thank you,” she said. And, “freedom,” though I could not hear that last word, only see the movement of her lips.

Then the light filled her, and she was the most beautiful thing in the world, perhaps in all the worlds. This is how she must have looked in the beginning, before her long imprisonment, and I cried for the joy of seeing her so. But the vision lasted only for an instant. Then she was gone, leaving me alone with Hades, who now turned his wrathful gaze full upon me.

But I was no longer afraid. Somehow, with Shara’s help and against the longest of odds, I had righted one of the oldest and harshest of wrongs in a universe full of them. Persephone was free. What better epitaph could anyone ask for? Now I could, and would, face Death with a smile. After all, I had triumphed over him once, and in a way that would echo down the long years into eternity. Even if I was doomed to fail, Hades would know he’d been in a fight.

The black fires shot from his fingertips. My clothes rotted around me, my blades rusted, and I actually felt my hair going gray. But this time I did more than stand and take it. I reached deep into the chaos at my core and reshaped myself, changing my hair back and clothing myself once again. Not with the court garb my grandmother demanded, but in the leathers of my own choosing. I had broken the chains that bound Persephone. I was the Raven and master of my own House, a child of Fate no longer.

But the fires fell on me again. This time the gray hair burned completely away and took some of my suddenly wrinkled skin with it. Arthritis blossomed in my joints, and my bones creaked as microscopic fractures raced through them like threads of lightning. I reached inward to tap chaos again, but the response was weaker now in my premature dotage. I knew, even as I started to renew myself, that the next round would kill me. This was not a battle I could win. Not this way, and probably not at all.

Then, as the old do more often than the young, I thought of those who had passed into Hades before me, and especially of those I had sent here. Laric, the cousin that I had loved as a brother. Moric, the cousin I had hated but would not have killed had I any choice at all. I wondered if Moric were here still, and whether I might meet him again and apologize. His death in the fires of chaos haunted me yet. Suddenly, on the edge of death, it also gave me an idea. It was a bad idea, and one that probably wouldn’t work, but as Melchior would have pointed out were he there to remind me, that wasn’t a big surprise.

The Primal Chaos, Xαos, is the source of all things and the matrix in which reality is embedded. The Titans formed themselves from the stuff using nothing more than an act of will, and it flows in the blood of their children and their children’s children unto the last generation. For any child of the Titans the Primal Chaos is no farther away than a moment’s thought, or a heartbeat, or a razor’s edge. For the Raven it lay even closer. With a flick of thought I opened a door in my soul and let the stuff of creation roar through it.

I felt it fill me to the brim and beyond. It was hotter than the plasma that fuels the sun and colder than the liquid helium that rains out of an outer planet’s skies. It was pain and pleasure and sheer condensed sensation. I was baked and boiled and frozen and fractured, all from within. Then it overflowed. Mad, swirling, impossible colors shot from my eyes and mouth, from the pores in my hands and follicles on my scalp. A great tumbling ball of the stuff built around me and rolled outward, an ever-expanding sphere of destruction. It burst over Hades like a wave, knocking him down and tumbling him as easily as a twig in a tidal bore.

He tried to get to his feet, but the flow never stopped or slowed, just kept building and building. Where it touched, things melted, the walls, the floor, the very substance of reality. I was no exception. This was not a process I could control or—realistically—survive. The chaos that ate away the building housing Hades’ office and even the bedrock on which it stood would also devour me. I had become the Raven, a creature of chaos, and more resistant to its extremes because of that. But resistant is not immune. Even as I watched the stuff of creation destroy the heart of Hades’ domain and burn and bite the god himself, I could feel the thread of my own existence unraveling away into nothingness.

I was hurting Hades terribly, but I would not, could not win. Just as I was thinking that thought, the chaos ate through a final wall, the one between the universe and the sea that surrounds it. In the blink of an eye, here became there, the stuff of Hades poured into the Primal Chaos and vice versa. There, in the heart of creation and destruction, I felt my flesh fail and my soul fray, then nothing at all.

Nevermore.