by James Welsh
Athena was walking along the passage towards the River Styx. She was walking slowly, but her mind was racing. She held up the folds in her robes between her fingers – every time she took a step, her clothes jingled like a merchant’s palm in the market.
It had been a few hours since she had collapsed – that was how long it took her to collect herself and the thief’s dream of gold coins and jewels. Her face, her arms, her legs, they all were as gray as they were before, and becoming grayer. Soon, she would no longer be able to tell herself apart from the shades she supposedly ruled in that land.
The ferry wasn’t at the shore when she arrived. Athena felt so weak by that point that she sat down on a flat rock nearby and waited for Charon. As she waited, she thought of what she was trying to do with all of the coins and jewels in her possession. She had vague ideas when she left the palace sometime before, but all of those plans were ridiculous and barely wishes. She was in a world where the dead only decomposed more, where she herself lost all of the colors that made her Athena before. But she was not going to let those things happen like they always had. She didn’t think of how the decay of life worked so well for so long – for countless years, since the first creature breathed – but she thought of how little time the world was given to improvise.
After a few minutes, Athena could make out the dim silhouette of the ferry through the world of fog. With ragged breathes, Athena clambered her way onto the ferry and fell into a heap on the nearest wooden row. It took a few more minutes for the shades to disembark the ship, but when they did, it was as if they were never there. There were no footprints, no litter on the harsh soil, no distant voices, none of what mortals left behind as a trail in the world above. And this saddened Athena – it depressed her more than her changing colors.
The boat ride back to the other shore felt longer than it did before. But finally, Athena felt the now-familiar thump as the boat bumped against the rocks. As Charon mutely lowered the ramp for the souls to clamber aboard, the ferryman held out his long, spindly fingers. It was the same routine that he had perfected over a course of hundreds of times a day, thousands of times a year, billions of times over the course of his career. It was a routine that never changed: if the souls of the departed presented him with money, he would let them through. But if they were missing money – if they were even a single coin short – than Charon would point the poor soul away, to join the countless souls that gathered along the shore of the Styx like a fog, waiting forever for charity that never came.
Athena sat to the side, watching as each of the shades dutifully paid for the ferry and stepped aboard. After a few minutes, it happened: one of the shades did not have enough money to pay its way aboard. The shade’s voice was too whispery to protest – it had lost one of its coins in the journey to the river, and it could not find the money through the foggy march of souls. But even if it could speak, Charon wouldn’t have listened – Charon never listened to any of the shades because they were not the kings and queens over him.
Just as Charon was about to push the shade away, though, Athena stepped forward. She took some gold coins from the folds of her robes and pushed them into Charon’s bony hand. The ferryman froze for a moment before turning to look back at Athena. The Queen of the Underworld wasn’t sure if Charon was surprised by the sudden act of charity, or if Charon’s face had just wrinkled like that over the centuries. Still, Athena said in her demanding voice, “Let this soul pass. It has paid.”
The look of bewilderment dissolved from Charon’s face and he stepped aside to let the shade board the boat. The same thing happened a few more times, and each time Athena personally paid for the soul’s passage. Of course, Charon never said anything during these unusual exchanges, but Athena knew that the ferryman wanted to. Charon probably wanted to know why his new monarch was so generous with her stores of money. Charon probably wanted to know why the Queen loved her subjects so, in spite of the fact that all of them looked so wispy and indistinct, it was practically impossible to tell them apart.
And just like the shades couldn’t speak their thanks, and Charon couldn’t speak his confusion, Athena too couldn’t speak her reasons. She knew that Charon wouldn’t believe her, but she was so generous with those shades because she knew many of them when they were human and real. She had walked amongst the mortals long enough that she could still remember many of their laughs, their tears, and their voices both shouting and whispering. She had seen as many of their kings as she had seen their beggars. She knew the secret that so many of the mortals themselves did not admit, even though they were themselves the secret-keepers: they were as fragile because they were beautiful, they were beautiful because they were fragile.
Athena gave away money to the poor souls, mostly because she wanted one last good deed before she slipped entirely into the gray, when she would become just as cold-hearted as her uncle. But, as the ferry filled and left, with Athena still on shore, she decided to trudge along the footpath, against the headwinds of the march of souls. She wanted to strew her pile of jewels across the surface of the path, she wanted to break the gems down until they looked like beautiful crush on the unforgiven trail. She did it so that the spirits could find their way through the darkness by the trail of glistening light, and so the souls would have a warm welcome to the rest of their lives.
She busied herself with her good works, so much so that she didn’t notice that the gray was loosening from her skin, that her old painter’s colors were creeping back into her arms, her legs.
Book 22