She could not be worthy unless she was willing to risk everything to save him.
Though it might stretch through eternity and shape days four millennia from now, this moment still could not last forever.
20
Pyrrha
219 Golden Age
For more than half a year, Pyrrha had wandered the poleis of Elládos. She had stayed in Korinth for a time and found welcome in the courts of Kreios and Eurybia. The Titan lady had retained her as a mathematics tutor for her son Pallas, though Pyrrha had soon found Pallas’s arrogance grating. The man thought he had little to learn from ‘a haughty Nymph,’ and Pyrrha had barely restrained herself from laying a curse upon the pompous arse.
It had been Enodia, who had taken up residence by the harbor of Lecheae, who had dissuaded her. “Vengeance, if it must be taken, should be reserved for reasons far less petty than idle words of young men without hair upon their stones.” The mental image had done more to soothe her nerves than the words themselves, and Pyrrha had left Korinth and wandered the lesser poleis and the small towns dotting the peninsula.
Sometimes, Enodia met her in the wilds. The sorceress had the Sight herself, and thus, like Papa, always seemed to know just where to find Pyrrha when she wished. Whether Pyrrha sheltered with kindly farmers or slept in lean-tos in the forest, Enodia would show up some nights, offering some morsel of arcane training.
“Necromancy is a subdiscipline of sorcery,” Enodia told, when they sat in a forest glade beneath a waxing moon. “We evoke ghosts, most oft to interrogate them and thus divine secrets about the forgotten past. Sometimes the dead even know about the future.”
“How?” Pyrrha demanded.
To that, Enodia shrugged. “The dead pass into spaces the living cannot understand. They perceive that which is beyond us, and sometimes, in hateful necropoleis out in the nebulous Roil, they gather and speak. You would shudder to learn the depths of what is whispered in courts beyond this world.”
Still, the nights when Pyrrha found herself alone far outnumbered those when her mentor appeared. Sometimes a fortnight or longer she would spend with no one to talk to save villagers who could not have begun to understand her. She saw things they did not. Almost unbidden, the Sight would come upon her, and she would find the fallen stalking her. Here, a woman murdered by her husband after he learned of her affair. There, an eight-year-old boy who drowned in the river and forever followed his oblivious parents around, desperate for answers they could not give. The villagers would sometimes fall into despair when ghosts lurked nigh, but they would call it malaise and think they needed more wine to cure it.
The dead wanted her to save them, but Pyrrha had no such power. Was she to confront the bereaved parents and tell them their dead son wandered the Earth in torment, desperate to touch them when they could not even see him? If she had thought it would somehow help the child, she would have done so in an instant, but Pyrrha no longer believed the dead could be released.
Thus, in the end, she learned the boy’s name, Agapetos. Using necromancy, she summoned him into a circle deep in the woods and looked hard into his face. Her skin tingled with his presence, crawling with his regard.
“Why am I here?” the child demanded.
Pyrrha wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or sob. “Because your presence in this village torments both you and your loved ones. Because … all I can do for you is to help you move on.”
Thus, she incanted in Supernal, calling up the forces of the Roil. The child fell into a crouch, whimpering and wrapping his arms around his knees. The sight of it almost had her stopping. Before she could decide, the umbral ground beneath Agapetos turned aqueous. The boy shrieked as he sank. Tenebrous hands lurched from the new-formed mire, seizing the soul. With gut-churning slowness, as Pyrrha stood there watching in mute horror, they dragged the child into the depths. The last to vanish were his tiny, twitching fingers.
Pyrrha fell to her knees and retched. Finally, after catching her breath, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Nyx! Had she made aught better? She had envisioned those necropoleis Enodia had mentioned. Had dared to believe the boy might find some final rest … But that had looked more like the Roil had devoured him. And the parents? Could they live now?
Pyrrha had no answers.
And Enodia did not come.
When she came to Delphi, staring up at the tiny fort upon the lower slopes of the Olympian Mountains, it felt she dragged the weight of a bireme behind her. So much wandering, and still she had no true answer as to who she was or her place in the World. Her Sight felt more curse than blessing, and despite the power, she had never found her mother. Even necromancy had failed to summon the woman’s soul, who, like the boy, must have moved on, beyond the Penumbra.
Pyrrha had seen this place in dreams. A dozen times in the past months, her dreams had shown her the fort upon the mountain and, more disturbingly, the tunnels beneath them. Atramentous depths that called to her, and she began to dread she knew what lurked down there.
In the time following the end of the Ambrosial War, while Pyrrha was yet a young child, the Titan Themis had founded the polis of Delphi here. According to legend, she was among the greatest Oracles of the World, and she called others of her kind to her for training. Was Pyrrha an Oracle as well as a Medium?
Was that her answer? Certainly, she had experienced strange dreams, and Enodia had implied that both gifts were aspects of the same Sight. Considering Papa was an Oracle, perhaps Pyrrha was
