Tyrants on paper and tyrants in marble; tyrants for purpose, for a price, for prized heads on the wall. For the fuck of it. Tyrants running like children to pluck the wings off flies, aimless and joyful. He’s even known his share of conviction. Tyrants sold on the taste of sainthood.
He’s never known anything like Charon.
The man cuts through the hall. (A point, here. Is he? Can it apply to him, this word so fringed on human?). Ariadne watches him approach. Ariadne holds themself very still, waiting on things that lie beyond waiting. Their nails dance on the side of their plate. As he gets near, they upturn the cutlery. This rodent-scuttle should feel as embarrassing as it sounds. But Charon moves him to things that lie beyond pride.
When he first contacted them, the trio had just started racking in money. Their heists got bolder, which means they had also gotten louder. As loud as to echo a world over. None of them imagined that could happen; it was almost like praise. He commissioned them to steal a private artifact: in, down, out. They executed. Flawless, poised—as only the first step to your death can be. It was Ari’s idea to use Charon’s connections for infiltrating Tartarus. No. Not Ari. They were called Arion, then. That half-fledged syllable converted somewhere in Elysium. The throat of the underworld spat out something different.
They’ve always wondered whether Charon had them where he wanted. Whether his interest in the trio had not been coincidence, but design. Neither Ariadne nor Arion were the sort of creatures that could speak their fear into being. They never communicated this doubt to Theseus, who would not have listened; or Mino, who would not have understood.
Mino had known tyrants, too. But not the same species as Charon, not even the same bone-taxed gens. Out of the two of them, Ariadne was much closer to it. This type of darkness, this type of knowing.
His face is perfectly amiable when he reaches them. Ariadne sees it ripple and whorl into something like speech. They’re too focused to listen. Their mind fixes on his hand, which hovers close by. Entitled and proprietary. It’s all Ariadne can do not to pull their chair away.
So: he’s known control. But this is different. This makes his skin crawl.
“Charon. How spot on. We do lack our bit of sun on Pontius, what with it being a literal island and all. I’ll make sure to run your suggestion by the board.” He draws back. Tucks his elbows in. As if stray glass might fly out and stab them. As if, and this seemed so much worse, Charon could make a grab for it. “Anything else to impart? I’ve heard your firecracker failed to deliver. Hypnos, or some such. My condolences. However will you get a foothold in the legal market?”
His way of encroaching space brings Theseus to mind. Ariadne supposes the throw is not that far-off; a Charon of an older cloth. Though perhaps it’s fairer to say: a Charon of any cloth at all. For while the golden emperor walked naked, Charon was clad in hides. He can almost hear them flap when he looms over. All these pieces of skin—animal, human, other. The green tint in his jewelry is the tint of rotten meat. Of every client king in this sad little graveyard, Charon, I dare say you sleep on the most bodies. You’re also having quite the fun, aren’t you?
Ariadne clenches his jaw. No other dignified way to get your teeth in line. He makes a mental note: to Poseidon, to Hermes, to whomever will still be alive for the clean-up. In whatever world they’re building, things like Charon must not exist. Not even as a necessary evil.
He digs in his heels. “We offer seminaries on Pontius, you know. Training classes. Maybe Hypnos should swing by. Maybe you could come along. Check what that sun is about.”
The average adult skeleton is in possession of two hundred bones, majority hydroxyapatite by composition and weight. Five times the strength of steel by density. But in Ariadne Asterion these bones may as well be bird bones, fish bones. Cartilage.
Charon is smiling. He cannot help it. It is a thing on the verge of teeth.
(—Not even hunger, by proxy or adjacency. Just teeth. It’s a deplorable habit, vivisection in the name of vivisection. Meritless. Precise. Beatific. Charon would crack open the rib cage like a pomegranate, and then he wouldn’t take the heart.)
“Condolences,” he murmurs. His lashes dip. “I do appreciate them, my dear, especially from you. But I don’t think it’s quite the time, you see— condolences should wait on the corpse. And we’re not attending a funeral, are we?” Charon splays his fingers outward, gesturing to their landscape of politicians, prevarications, effervescent champagnes. “Not yet. Besides. Science runs ahead of us. Lately, even the irreversibly dead have a habit of coming back to life.”
Lies, the good ones, aren’t printed and stamped in triplicate, distributed by indifferent hand to apathetic mass. Good lies are analogous to mimetic cuckoo eggs, blue on speckled blue and equally virtuous among the twigs. Gene-modified to host conformance. Cuckoo eggs want to be believed. They want to believe themselves. They must believe themselves, and so they do— what else do you call such bio-genetic alteration, if not truth, spoken from the helixed baseboards of existence? This is how the cuckoo’s egg survives.
Liars, the good ones, sell stories they have already sold to themselves. This is how men proliferate belief: they begin with its inception. They begin by believing. No con-man ought to mistrust their own fable, if only while they remain its narrator. But here Ariadne Asterion sits: limbs drawn in like the slightest curl of a fist. This fist is not in preparation for a fight. In some other place Ariadne Asterion must be folded over, curled foetal on the ground with all the pregnability foetal implies; resigned to violence, minimising surface-to-volume ratio. Protecting the internal organs. Protecting some soft, yet undamaged core.
It wouldn’t be surprising if some distant ancestor of theirs once fucked a deer or a hare in those grandiose, classical forests of myth. Bore a long line of deformity-ravaged children, and now it is that atavistic legacy lurching out of Ariadne’s DNA: prey instinct, lithographed fear, the spiking fur of the jerboa that goes motionless in the bush. Ariadne’s bravado, winking like a filament bulb. This feint exists uncertain of its own trajectory on the axes of space and linear time. It’s half a gamble on subsequence: to sputter out, to steady. And uncertainty invites interest. A fissure invites a knife, and Charon has pried patellas out of unwilling knees before. He resumes tapping the foot of the glass.
“Selling me on the prospect of Pontius, darling? An intriguing proposal, but one that requires further consideration before I give you an answer.” His eyes are half-closed. He is thinking in parallel, in parallax. He is thinking: when a hurt is carried long enough, overlooking its existence becomes reflexive. Thoughtless. “Perhaps Pontius might consider outreach instead, bringing these… ‘seminaries’ to other locations.” And reminders of this hurt may be equally thoughtless. “I confess— I take our conversations as earnest and authentic— if you are speaking with any measure of ire, I apologise for my comment. I misspoke. Certainly, I misjudged. Among other things, sunlight isn’t for everyone, yes? It’s perfectly understandable.” Just a nail, skimming the site of the wound. “I forget the number of dead things in you. After all, cadavers tend to putrefy if left out in the sun too long.”
Though: Ariadne’s dead are dead solely on technicalities, legalities. His own corpses, his own dead. His own names. Perhaps, more accurately, these dead are ghosts. Are wounds, as all ghosts are. Why wouldn’t they want to claw out? Coffined inside a breathing animal, albeit one that breathes as shallowly as Ariadne Asterion.
The glass topples. Red spills over the tablecloth.
(Civilised blood, thinned with water and the fragrance of plums.)
Charon’s fingertips curl over the hatched fabric. Perhaps Charon, too, is descended from beasts. Then he must be the stalking creature in the tall grass, the animal with long and recurved teeth. “Oh,” he says, as wine drips into Ariadne’s lap. “It seems I’ve made a mess.”
Charon is smiling. The chair legs are scraping back on marble. He is standing, then he is standing over Ariadne: one hand resting on their shoulder. One hand skimming down their arm. “Forgive me.” His thumb digs into the flesh of Ariadne’s right shoulder. “I can be careless. Let me clean you up.”
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