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It’s no surprise, there is no response.

But I know they speak to Hades.

From the flat of the stone, a ridge swells. I reach for it with a hand that is drenched in the sweat of fear and exhaustion. Turmoil rises inside me as anger I’ve not let myself feel before this moment needles the knowing I hate that I’ve mostly accepted. The knowing that I will give my daughters to save the world, even as I still try, desperately, to think of a way out.

“It’s not right.” Tears burn my eyes. “You can’t expect me to carry them and not love them. You can’t expect me to just let them go.”

“We have not asked you to let them go.”

I stiffen, never having heard anything so clear and yet disembodied. It consumes my mind, a physical thing that moves beyond the boundaries of sound.It invades.

And yet I recognize it. The Moirai. The voices that predate even the ancient Gods.

Voices that are not of this world, even as they have guided its creation.

Voices that are of the Universes.

A ledge grows beneath my feet, holding me on steady ground as a vision floods my mind, stealing my sight. A memory, I realize. They had once been my guides. Their voices a tender tether tugging me away from the pain of a living end, and into the care of Hydra. My soul fell through earth, grieving—mourning—and all the while they spoke to me softly. Their voices a cocoon that held me together through the fall, and straight into the care of a beast who would become my bonded protector.

I see that, too. The handing of my spirit from the arms of the three—the keepers of universal law—to the one they entrusted to devote herself to me. To healing.To life.

It has always been intended, me and Hydra. I was always meant to be born a giftless goddess. I was always fated to crave a love Demeter could not give. I was always intended to die in the Lethe, where my soul was fated from the spark of its conception to take refuge with the protector who had always been called monster. It was always intended that I be born to my human parents, that I know their unending love. That I bask in their human protections, so fragile and yet so strong. And they were always intended to grieve me.

A flash of sunlight blinds me before the vision settles into one of Mom. My heart contracts. She’s standing at the kitchen sink window that overlooks a barren farm field touched with the first signs of cold weather. Her hand is clutching the cross she wears around her neck for comfort, her eyes misted with a grief I know will cling. Then I see Daddy. His sun-weathered hands pulling her into his plaid covered chest. He drops a shaky kiss to her hair and squeezes her just a little tighter. The scene is sad, but it swiftly changes to one in the future. Mom is happy. She is laughing, sipping wine on a ship deck and Daddy is sitting close,watching the fall of the sun into an endless stretch of water. They’re holding hands, at peace.

“Even as there is healing after loss, you live forever in their hearts.”It’s those voices again. The Moirai.

Mom and Dad drift away to another vision. A lifetime of pain cuts through me, slicing into limb and organ andhope. Thousands of years of agony stretch inside only a few minutes, and I scream.

I realize, through the terrible pain, that I am being fed Hydra’s suffering. Sweat beads my brow and my knees threaten to buckle. My forehead finds reprieve in the cool chill that pours from the black stone as I catch breath in lungs that shudder.

“You were always meant to heal her suffering. And she was always meant foryou.”

Hades’ roar in my mind is deafening. It echoes the one the Moirai pull from memory—the one which finally led me to him. But this time, there is a subtle tugging I can’t ignore. A ribbon of something darker, something which led me to obsess with ancient Gods and the smear of paint—a remembering of a life lived that was not yet finished.

I was always intended for him. Bound to him.

“His war is your war, for you are one split in two.”

I am internally brutalized when my mind finally quiets. But there is only time for a gasped breath before another swell stretches from the stone. It comes just in time for the one beneath my feet to fall away. I cling, my feet dangling with nothing to catch me. I’mthousandsof feet in the air. The fall would be disastrous. Deadly.

Hydra roars.

Her fear and rage sets fire to the blood in my veins, and my fingertips curl into stone, clinging. My muscles burn, and I swear they tear as I hold my weight, my feet scraping the mountainside for anything I might catch.

Sweat trickles toward my eye, and fearing the sting of it, I wipe it on the arm of my shirt. The streak of red I leave behind on the white is alarming. I’ve cut my forehead on the stone. Or the stone has cut me. I’m not sure which.

This realm is built on the sacrifice of my innocence.

It is fed by the power of my soul.

It will continue to feast on my blood, sweat, and tears. Continue to thrive with every thunderous beat of my heart.

Three voices speak as one. “The Underworld will survive, becoming the Kingdom of Gods and Kings, in the sacrifice of its dearest twin goddesses.”

I whimper. Just as I think I am going to fall, that it’s the end for me, my foot catches on a ledge that wasn’t there before. The mountain shifts beneath my body, the perpendicular slope tilting to a slanted incline in which my body falls heavily into.

My overheated body sinks into cool stone.