Thanatos had long ago stopped counting the dead.

In the beginning, he had tried. There had been something orderly about numbers, something that suggested a beginning and an end to the work. A thousand souls, ten thousand, a hundred thousand. Surely, he had thought, there must be a point at which the number became too great to comprehend, and surely reaching that point would change him in some way. He had imagined that death, witnessed often enough, might eventually become familiar.

He had been wrong about that.

The work itself had become familiar. He knew the roads that led from the world of the living, the places where the last breath came easily and the places where it had to be coaxed from a body that had fought desperately to keep it. He knew the quiet that followed a long illness, the sudden stillness after an accident, and the terrible confusion of those who died before they had understood what was coming. He knew the anger of those who believed they had been cheated, the bargaining of those who offered anything for one more hour, and the bewilderment of those who looked around for someone who could explain why their lives had ended. He had no choice but to know it, for more often than not, he was the one they blamed.

What he had never learned was how to make all of it weigh less.

Most of the dead arrived carrying something they could not bear to leave behind. A name, a promise, a regret, or the face of someone who had been waiting for them to come home. Thanatos did not ask them to surrender these things. He had discovered long ago that the dead would put them down when they were ready, and not a moment before. On the night he brought the little girl to the Underworld, she was holding a stuffed rabbit with one worn ear.

She had been seven years old. Her death had come in a hospital room filled with the soft machinery of medicine and the exhausted voices of people who had tried everything they knew to keep her alive. Her mother had held her hand until there was nothing left to hold on to, and the little girl had gone from a world where birthday candles were still being planned to one where the candles would never be lit.

Thanatos had stood beside her bed when her breathing stopped. He had waited while the living spoke her name, while one of them covered her face with trembling hands, and another turned away because looking at her had become unbearable. He had seen this grief in countless forms. He knew the shape of it before the first cry escaped the mother’s throat.

He had not been prepared for the rabbit.

The little girl had held it against her chest when he approached. She was standing in the corner of the room looking at the occupants with wide eyes. The rabbit was the only indication of movement on her part. Its fur had worn thin beneath her fingers as she rubbed it, and one black button eye was hanging by a thread. She looked at Thanatos without fear, though she seemed uncertain whether she ought to know him.

“Who are you?” she asked in a sweet voice.

“I am Thanatos.”

“Than-a-who?”

“Tha-na-tos. I am the god of death.”

“Are you here to take me somewhere?”

“Yes,” he told her softly.

“Is it far away?”

“Far enough.”

She considered this with the solemn seriousness of a child who had already learned that grown-ups rarely answered questions properly. Then she looked back toward the bed.

“Will my mum be all right?”

Thanatos could have offered the familiar comforts. He could have told her that her mother would survive the night, that the living were stubborn creatures, or that grief changed its shape with time. All of these things might have been true. None of them answered what the child had asked.

“She will miss you,” he said. “More than I can tell you.”

The little girl lowered her eyes to the rabbit.

“I don’t want her to be sad.”

“I know.”

“Can you make her not sad?”

For one brief, impossible moment, Thanatos wished he could lie. He had carried kings and beggars, warriors and cowards, those who had lived long enough to grow tired of the world and those who had barely begun to discover it. He had heard every plea imaginable, and he had learned that a false promise could wound the living almost as deeply as the truth. Still, there were questions he hated answering no matter what century, and this was one of them.

“No, little one,” he said gently. “I cannot do that.”

The girl was quiet for a while. Then she slowly reached for his hand. He took it carefully, not wanting to frighten her, and together they left the hospital room. Thanatos did not look back. He had learned that looking back did not change the scene behind him, though the knowledge had never made the leaving easy.

The road opened before them, as it always did. It lengthened as it needed to, or shortened in rare instances, to meet the time a newly deceased required to accept the path. The little girl walked beside him with her rabbit tucked beneath one arm, asking whether the Underworld had beds, whether the dead were allowed to keep their toys, whether she would have to take more medicine, and whether she would be able to find her grandmother. Thanatos answered each question as honestly as he could. When he did not know the answer, he told her so. It was the least he could give her.

By the time they reached the House of Hades, he had spoken more than was usual for him. It had left his voice feeling rusty, as though he had not used it properly in centuries. The child had grown quiet, tired from a journey she did not understand, and when her little legs began to falter, Thanatos lifted her gently into his arms.

Children were a special case. Most of the dead followed the established roads into the Underworld, but the youngest were often brought directly to the great hall, where Hades and those entrusted with the care of his kingdom could see to their needs personally. Thanatos had never questioned the arrangement. He had been grateful for it more times than he cared to admit. Children should never be afraid in the Underworld and Hades made sure his realm held to that belief.

The Underworld was not silent. It had never been silent, despite what the living imagined about a kingdom of the dead. There were footsteps in its corridors, voices in its courtyards, the low murmur of souls discovering one another again, and the occasional argument that could have come from any marketplace in the world above. The dead brought their habits with them. They brought their tempers, their stories, their stubbornness, and their capacity for laughter. Hades had learned long ago that a realm could not be governed by solemnity alone. Especially with the changing of times.

Thanatos found him in a chamber adjoining the great hall, listening to an elderly shade explain why a vineyard that had been dead for three centuries still belonged to him. A second shade stood opposite the first, insisting that the vineyard had been stolen by the first man’s grandfather, who had apparently been a thief in life and remained a thief in death. Hades listened with the grave attention of a king considering a matter of state.

“So,” he said when both men had finished, “the vineyard has no grapes, no living vines, and no value beyond the principle of the matter.”

“Precisely,” said the first shade.

“It is a question of honor,” said the second.

“Of course it is.” Hades sighed as he leaned back in his chair. “Honor seems to thrive best where there is nothing left to harvest.”

A quiet laugh came from the doorway. Zagreus stood there, arms folded, looking as though he had been enjoying the dispute for some time. There was something untamed about him even when he was still, a restless vitality that did not diminish simply because he lived among the dead. Wildness moved through him like a current beneath dark water, and the Underworld had never managed to make him entirely predictable.

“Perhaps we should give them each half the vineyard,” Zagreus suggested. “They could spend eternity arguing over which half was more dishonorable.”

Hades regarded his son with a degree of affectionate disgust. “I am beginning to understand why you enjoy offering solutions.”

“Because they are good?”

“Because you enjoy baiting me.”

Zagreus grinned. The two shades began arguing again, this time over which of them deserved the more dishonorable half, and Hades dismissed them with instructions to return when they had decided whether they wanted justice or simply wanted to keep fighting. Only then did he notice what Thanatos carried.

The disgruntled look left his face, replaced by a softer warmth. No one with ties to Hades’ household ever greeted a child with anything but compassion. It was an unspoken rule, one they all understood without needing to define it.

“Who have you brought me?” Hades asked, not unkindly.

“A child,” Thanatos replied. “Her name is Alicia.”

Hades rose from his chair. He approached slowly, making certain that his presence would not frighten the little girl, and looked first at her face, then at the rabbit tucked beneath her arm. Finally, he glanced at Thanatos. His old acquaintance’s expression had grown so still that anyone unfamiliar with him might have mistaken it for indifference. Hades knew better.

“Come along,” he said.

He led them away from the hall, into a quieter part of the palace where the noise of the shades softened and the lamplight fell gently across the stone. There were places in his kingdom for judgment, places for dispute, and places for the necessary ordering of an endless population. There were also places where the newly dead could sit without being asked to understand their new existence before they were ready.

Hades had insisted on those places himself in the last millenia or so. The harsher judgments of his earlier reign were now reserved for those who truly deserved them. He had learned that justice did not require cruelty, nor did compassion mean allowing every soul to escape the consequences of its own choices. The dead arrived with lives behind them, and those lives could not all be weighed by the same measure. He brought the girl to a room prepared especially for children, with low seats and soft blankets, toys left by those who had once arrived carrying their own, and a window overlooking a garden where the flowers did not wither. The little girl studied the room with cautious interest.

“Can I stay here?” she asked.

“For as long as you need, Alicia.” Hades replied.

“Will someone tell my mum where I am?”

Hades glanced at Thanatos. For a moment, neither god spoke. “No,” Hades said at last. “Not exactly. The living cannot simply be told what happens in our realms.”

The girl’s face fell. “But you will be safe here,” he continued. “You will be cared for. You will not be forgotten or left alone.”

She seemed to consider whether this was a fair exchange. At seven years old, she had not yet learned how often the world offered people something different from what they had asked for. Eventually, she nodded. Hades summoned one of the attendants who cared for the younger souls and entrusted the girl to their keeping. Before she left, she looked back at Thanatos.

“Will you come again?”

He felt the question settle somewhere beneath his ribs, in a place he had long ago stopped trying to protect.

“Yes,” he said, a little more slowly than he intended. “I will come again.”

When she was gone, Hades remained beside the doorway, looking at the god he had come to consider something like family. He did not hurry Thanatos back to his duties. He had known him too long to mistake silence for a desire to be left alone.

“She was seven,” Thanatos finally said.

“I know.”

“She had a rabbit.”

“I saw that. You don’t often bring toys here with the children. Most of those we have are left behind at graves or markers. I cannot recall the last time you mentioned one.”

Thanatos looked toward the passage where the girl had disappeared. “She asked whether her mother would be all right.”

Hades sighed softly. “And what did you tell her?”

“The truth. As much as her age would understand, at least.”

“Good.”

Thanatos turned toward him, anger stirring beneath his exhaustion. “Good? Is that what you call it? She is dead from a dreadful illness that ravaged her for months before knowing anything about life. Her mother is left behind to mourn a child who might have been so much more had she lived, and I am supposed to be satisfied because I did not lie to a child who had already lost everything?”

“No,” Hades said. His voice was quiet, but it carried the authority of a king who had held his ground through ages of complaint, fear, and accusation. “I call it good because she deserved the truth from you, and you gave it to her. I would not have you offer a false hope merely to make the moment easier for yourself.”

Thanatos looked away. “I know what I am supposed to do.”

“I have never doubted that.”

As though he had not heard, Thanatos continued. “I take them where they must go. I do not choose their hour. I do not decide who lives long enough to become old, or who dies before they have learned how to live. I do not decide whether a death comes after a long illness or in the middle of an ordinary day. I do the work regardless of how many hate me for it. I have always done the work.”

“And yet?”

Thanatos’s hands tightened at his sides. “And yet I remember her. It isn’t fair.”

Hades said nothing.

“I remember all of them,” Thanatos continued. “The ones who begged. The ones who were ready. The ones who died peacefully in their sleep and the ones who fought until there was nothing left in them to fight with. I remember the children. Gods of Olympus, I remember the children. I remember the parents who could not bear to release their hands. I remember every person who looked at me as though I had chosen this for them, when just once I wish I could grant them a reprieve, even for a moment.”

His voice did not break. Thanatos was too old, too practiced, and too accustomed to carrying himself through the moment when others fell apart. Yet there was a weariness in him that no rest could touch.

“They look at me and see the end of everything they know and love. I cannot blame them for it. I would hate me too, if I believed I had come to take someone that meant the world to me.”

Hades studied him for a long moment. “You are not wrong to feel the weight of it. What would be wrong is pretending there was no weight at all. All of us feel it, in one way or another.”

“What use is that to the dead?”

“Perhaps none. But you are speaking to me, not to the dead.”

Thanatos looked up at the god he sometimes thought of as an uncle, a title that had little to do with blood and everything to do with the long familiarity between them. Hades was one of the few who might understand the depths of what Thanatos could not easily say.

“I cannot give that child back to her mother,” Hades said. “I cannot make every death fair, or make every life long enough, or persuade the living that there is a reason for every loss. I would be a fool to promise you or them otherwise. My kingdom receives what the world above sends me, and much of what arrives here should never have been taken so soon. Every god or guardian who keeps an underworld will recognize that.”

For a moment, the king’s composure gave way to the man beneath it, the one who had watched his realm fill across the ages and understood that the dead were not an abstract multitude. Each soul had once been someone. Each had left something unfinished.

“But I can decide what happens when they arrive,” Hades continued. “I can make certain this kingdom does not add cruelty to the suffering they have already endured. I can listen when they have been wronged. I can offer rest to those who have had none. I can see that a child is cared for, that a frightened soul is not mocked, and that the dead are not made to suffer simply because the living imagined my realm as a place of punishment. There are those who must pay a price to rebalance the scales of their lives, but I need not make it more than it should be.”

“You cannot repair what was done to those who were wronged.”

“No,” Hades said. “But I can refuse to make it worse.”

Thanatos let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh, though there was little humor in it. “I sometimes wonder whether the work has made me cruel or heartless.”

Hades’s expression sharpened. “Has it?”

“I do not think so. I still grieve. I wish some of them had been spared. Yet I have carried so many that I sometimes fear I have become accustomed to the suffering. That I will cease remembering and grow cold.” He hesitated, then admitted, “There are times when I hope for that.”

Hades did not immediately answer. He knew Thanatos well enough to understand that the confession had cost him more than the words suggested. “You have become accustomed to the work,” he said at last. “You know how to enter a room where everyone is weeping. You know when to speak and when silence is kinder. You know how to guide someone who is afraid. If you had done this for ages and learned nothing, I would be far more concerned.”

“And the grief?”

Hades looked at him. “You are still here talking to me about a little girl and her rabbit. I doubt you have grown as cold as you fear.”

Before Thanatos could answer, a familiar voice came from the corridor.

“If you have begun discussing the nature of existence without inviting us, I shall take it as a personal insult.”

Hypnos entered without waiting for permission, as he had done for longer than most kingdoms had existed. He was followed by Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, his son, who carried the thoughtful, slightly distant air of someone who had spent so long among dreams that waking conversations sometimes seemed unnecessarily difficult.

“We were not discussing the nature of existence,” Hades said, sighing even as he smiled. “We were discussing the possibility that you have never learned to knock.”

“I have learned,” Hypnos replied. “I have simply decided that it is not always necessary. Besides, you said we had an open-door policy.”

Morpheus glanced between them. “He knocked on my bedroom door once, several centuries ago, then walked right in without waiting for a response. The experience was so unpleasant, for the both of us, that he has avoided repeating it.”

Hades gave him a look. “I distinctly remember a story of him rapidly falling asleep before he would have to acknowledge what you were doing in there. Then I heard you fell asleep immediately afterward.”

“That was an unfortunate coincidence,” Hypnos said.

“It was deliberate. The dreams that came from that required quite a bit of explaining,” Morpheus corrected.

“I was asleep,” Hypnos said. “I cannot be held responsible for what happens while I am asleep.”

“You were standing in the doorway when you fell asleep.”

“I was very tired.”

“You were trying to avoid seeing what I was doing. Something that would not have been needed if you had waited for me to let you in.”

“And look how well it worked. I saw nothing.”

“You heard everything.”

Hades rubbed a hand over his face. “I had forgotten how much I enjoy these family gatherings.”

“You were not invited to that one,” Morpheus reminded him.

“Thank Olympus. I am beginning to remember why.”

For a moment, the old familiarity eased the room. Then Hypnos looked more closely at Thanatos, and the humor softened in his face. “What happened, brother?”

“A child,” Hades answered for him.

Hypnos did not ask for more details. He knew that Thanatos would give them if he wished to, and that asking too quickly could turn a grief into a report, thus denying him the opportunity to set it down when needed. His brother’s duties had begun to weigh more heavily upon his shoulders over the past few centuries. Hypnos had noticed, though he had not yet found a way to ease the burden.

He moved to stand beside Thanatos, close enough to offer company without demanding conversation. Morpheus, meanwhile, had grown quiet. Dreams, both past and future, clung to him in ways that were difficult to explain to those who did not walk among them. He could sense the fragments that followed the living into sleep, the memories they revisited, the wishes they could not abandon, and the fears that took familiar faces and made them strange. He could even sense the left-over dreams of those who had recently passed.

“There is a mother above,” he said softly, tuning in to some current the others could not hear. “She will dream of the birthday she had planned for her daughter. She will see a cake and try to light the candles, but the flame will not catch.”

Thanatos closed his eyes, sorrow breaking through his composure. “Can you change it?”

“Yes, I can change a dream. I can offer her a night in which the memory is gentler, or one in which she sees her daughter laughing as she remembers her. But I cannot promise that she will receive such a dream tonight, nor make the morning painless.”

“Then do what you can, please,” Thanatos said.

After a moment looking carefully at his uncle he saw his father nod slightly. Then said, “I will.”

Hypnos rested a hand briefly against Thanatos’s shoulder. “You know, you could occasionally allow someone else to sit with you before you decide you must carry the entire weight alone.”

“I have not asked you to carry it.”

“No. You have merely been carrying it loudly enough for the whole Underworld to notice.”

“I was not aware grief made a sound.”

“Yours does. It has a very particular sound, too. Rather like a door being slammed by someone who insists he isn’t upset.”

Thanatos gave him a flat look. “Would you like me to demonstrate? I hear Hades has quite a few doors that need proper using.”

“There he is,” Hypnos said, giving his shoulder a squeeze. “I was beginning to worry you had become entirely unreasonable.”

“I am always reasonable.” At everyone’s shocked expressions, Thanatos frowned.

“So you say.” said Hypnos. “But we will allow it as we have grown accustomed to the lack.”

Before Thanatos could reply, voices rose in the corridor, followed by the unmistakable sound of someone laughing at their own joke. Zagreus appeared in the doorway with Lakkos at his side. The two had evidently been enjoying themselves before they arrived, and neither seemed ready to stop just because the rest of the household were having a serious conversation. Zagreus had something in his hand that looked suspiciously like a small stone. Lakkos glanced at it, then at him.

“You said it would skip.”

“It did skip.”

“Once. That is not skipping. Once is a stone hitting the water and sinking. You lied to me, cousin. And you took my coins.”

“It made contact with the surface. You cannot argue with the evidence.” Zagreus winked at the other men.

“I can, and I just did.”

Hades looked between them. “Should I ask?”

“No,” Lakkos said.

“Yes,” Zagreus said at exactly the same time.

Hades closed his eyes. “Of course. Do share the nonsense the two of you have been up to now.”

Zagreus tossed the stone from one hand to the other. “Lakkos insists that a stone should skip at least three times before it can be considered a proper throw.”

“It is a perfectly reasonable standard,” Lakkos replied. “You have been throwing stones into my water portals for the better part of an hour, and most of them have gone straight to the bottom. I’m getting complaints from the local Limnas.”

“You say that as if the water is offended.”

“The water is not offended. I am offended. The Limnas are offended. There is a difference.”

Morpheus leaned toward Hypnos. “I see they have found something productive to do.”

“They are both very good at finding things to do,” Hypnos murmured. “Whether those things are productive is another matter.”

Lakkos gave the room a leisurely look, his attention settling briefly on Thanatos. He was a god of still waters and portals, a keeper of places where one realm might touch another through meres and stagnant swamps. His presence had always seemed to belong to the quiet moment before a reflection changed, when water lay so still that it might be mistaken for a window. Yet there was nothing distant about him now. He and Zagreus had the comfortable familiarity of kin who had spent ages wandering into one another’s company and leaving a trail of minor disasters behind them. Even though they could bring a bit of chaos into any situation, Lakkos was very capable of reading a room. And this room held more than a casual family gathering. “Have we interrupted something?” Lakkos asked.

“Only a family argument,” Hades replied.

“Ah. Then we are right on time.”

Zagreus dropped into a chair. “Has anyone settled the vineyard dispute yet?”

“No,” Hades said. “Your solution has made it worse.”

“I told you it would.”

“You proposed it.”

“Precisely. I know my work.”

Lakkos settled beside him, looking altogether too pleased with the lightening of moods playing out before him. “He also tried to convince me that a stone which sinks is simply exploring a deeper portal.”

Zagreus pointed at him. “And you cannot prove it isn’t.”

“I can see the bottom. They are getting thrown back at me.”

“Maybe it is a very short portal. They have simply returned after passing through.”

“Perhaps, instead, you should stop throwing stones at my lakes.”

“Perhaps you should stop putting lakes where I want to throw stones.”

Hades looked toward Thanatos. “Do you see what I endure?”

“I have seen worse,” Thanatos replied, one side of his mouth hitching slightly upwards.

“Yes, but you have the good fortune to be able to leave.”

The remark drew a quiet laugh from Thanatos, and Hades’s expression softened at the sound. Zagreus noticed it too, though he was sensible enough not to draw attention to it. Instead, he looked toward the passage where the little girl had gone, and the playfulness in his face settled into something more thoughtful.

“What happened?” he asked simply.

“A child,” Hypnos answered.

Zagreus looked down at the stone in his hand. “How young?”

“Seven. Her name was/is Alicia.” Thanatos said.

The room grew quieter. Zagreus had always been a god of wild energies, of the forces that refused to remain neatly contained. He understood the restless, the unruly, the furious, and the frightened. The dead who arrived ready to challenge the world could meet him on familiar ground. He could give them something to push against, something to remind them that whatever else had happened, they had not lost every spark of themselves. A child was different.

“I have seen the dead arrive furious,” he said after a moment. “I have seen them frightened, and I have seen them ready to challenge the first god who looks their way. I can meet them there. But a child who has barely begun to know the world…” He looked toward Hades. “In what way can I meet them?”

No one rushed to answer. Zagreus was not asking for a clever solution, and the others knew him too well to offer one merely to fill the silence. Lakkos turned the little stone over between his fingers. “Perhaps you do not have to meet her where she is frightened. Perhaps you meet her where she is curious.”

Zagreus looked at him. “You have spent half the evening trying to make a stone skip,” Lakkos continued. “You have failed repeatedly, and yet you have not given up. I suspect you can find something to do with a child who asks too many questions.”

“Are you suggesting I teach her to throw stones? Wait. Are you saying I have the intellect of a child?”

“I am suggesting you stop looking so pleased with yourself whenever one of them sinks. And yes.”

Zagreus grinned despite himself. “You are a terrible influence.”

“You have been saying that for several thousand years now.”

“And I have been right for several thousand years.” Lakkos laughed and nudged his shoulder. The easy affection between them did not erase the seriousness of what they had heard. It simply made room for it, as though grief did not have to silence every other part of life to be taken seriously.

“If she needs anything,” Zagreus said, looking back toward Hades, “tell me.”

“I will,” Hades replied.

Lakkos’s gaze followed his toward the quiet corridor. “I may look in later. The surface of the water is unusually clear tonight.”

Thanatos turned toward him. “Can you see the world above?”

“Sometimes. A still pool may hold a reflection of a place far from its own shores. Some waters are thresholds; others are simply water. It is not always easy to know which until you stand before them.”

Thanatos understood that distinction. Lakkos did not guide the dead along their journey, nor did he decide where they would settle. His concern lay with the places where worlds touched, with portals that opened upon realms beyond the familiar and waters whose stillness could conceal a passage. A threshold was not the same thing as a road, and a road between worlds did not necessarily lead back to the life one had left.

“Does the water show what remains behind?” Thanatos asked.

“If it chooses to show anything at all.”

“And if someone wished to return?”

Lakkos studied him for a moment. These were not questions he had expected from this god. He did not mistake the question for a request, and he didn’t pretend that the longing he had heard could be answered by opening the right door.

“Then they would have to understand what they were asking of the threshold,” he said. “A reflection may show you a place you remember. A passage may take you somewhere you have never been. Neither promises that the past will open its doors.”

Thanatos nodded. He had no need to test the water to understand what it could not give him. For a little while, the conversation moved elsewhere. Zagreus resumed his argument about the stones, Lakkos countered with increasingly elaborate descriptions of what constituted a proper throw, and Hades threatened to ban both of them from the gardens if they turned the palace fountains into a competition. Hypnos offered to settle the matter by putting everyone to sleep until the argument had passed. Morpheus suggested that he could arrange a dream in which every stone skipped perfectly, though he declined to guarantee that Zagreus would be satisfied with the result.

The laughter returned in fits and starts. Thanatos did not suddenly feel lighter, nor did the memory of the little girl fade. He still saw the rabbit’s worn ear when he closed his eyes. He still heard the question she had asked about her mother. Yet for the first time that evening, he was not alone with the memory.

Eventually, Hypnos and Morpheus departed to attend to their own work. Lakkos and Zagreus left together, still arguing about whether a portal could reasonably be described as a very deep puddle. Hades watched them go with the expression of a king who had long ago accepted that a certain amount of chaos was simply part of governing his household whether he wanted it to or not.

When the room had quieted, he found Thanatos standing beside a window that overlooked the gardens.

“You should rest,” Hades said.

Thanatos almost smiled. “Is that a royal command?”

“It can be, if that is the only way you will listen.”

“I have never been particularly obedient.”

“No, you haven’t. Contrary to what many think, I have noticed.”

They stood together in silence. Beyond the window, the garden’s pale flowers stirred though there was no wind.

“Do you ever wonder whether the living understand what we do?” Thanatos asked.

“Rarely,” Hades replied. “The living have enough to contend with without understanding every corner of the worlds and realms. Some will always fear us. Some will curse us. Others will invent stories in which we are the monsters because it is easier than accepting that death is not a punishment handed down by a god who dislikes them. At least, not as much anymore.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think most people understand very little about a place they have never visited. I have long since stopped expecting them to understand me. With the increase of souls and movement between the worlds there simply isn’t time to devote to such thoughts.”

Thanatos turned from the window. “You make it sound simple.”

“I don’t mean to make it simple. Just perhaps a little clearer.” Hades paused, then added, “There is a difference, though people have spent entire lifetimes confusing the two.”

A quiet laugh escaped Thanatos before he could stop it. It surprised him. He could not remember the last time he had laughed without first deciding that the moment permitted it. Hades smiled and showed enough sense not to comment.

The next time Thanatos returned to the room prepared for children, Alicia was sitting on the floor with her rabbit beside her. Someone had given her a small wooden horse, and she was explaining to another young shade why the horse would need a stable if it was expected to live indoors.

She looked up when Thanatos entered and smiled brightly. “You came back.”

“I said I would.”

She seemed satisfied with this. After a moment, she held out the rabbit so he could see the worn ear. “His name is Button.”

Thanatos knelt beside her. “That is a good name.”

“He’s a little broken,” she said. “But he still works.”

Thanatos looked at the rabbit, then at the child. He could have told her that the dead were not required to arrive whole, or that even in the Underworld, small and ordinary things could matter more than the grandest treasures. He could have offered some carefully considered words about the things people carried with them and the things they learned to live without.

Instead, he nodded. “He does,” he agreed.

When he left her, the weight eased just a little. It had not vanished while speaking with Hades, nor had any of the others dissolved it with their companionship. The grief remained, as it always would, because the child had mattered and her death had mattered. No truth about the order of the worlds could make either thing less real.

Thanatos returned to the road that waited for him. There would be more souls before the next turning of the age, more hands reaching for his, more questions he could answer and others he could not. There would be those who came willingly and those who fought the last moment with everything they possessed. He would meet them all, as he always had. He would tell them the truth when he could, offer gentleness where gentleness was possible, and guide them onward when the time came. He would do the work as he had always done.

Yet he would still mourn the deaths that should not have come so soon. He knew better than to expect those memories to leave him. There were some souls a god carried long after the journey itself was finished. Thanatos walked on. He could not give the living back what they had lost. He could not make every ending fair. He could, however, keep meeting each soul with care. He could do what must be done and still mourn what should never have been lost.

For now, that would have to be enough.