The Mate They Threw Away
he said, “to Tartarus.”
The word landed in my chest with the weight of every story I’d ever heard that contained it. Every myth. Every ancient text Marcus had ever referenced with his careful, scholarly gravity. Tartarus, not a metaphor, not a name repurposed, but the actual place itself, existing with the absolute confidence of something that had been here long before anyone thought to name it.
I looked back at the statue. At the crimson stone face of the creature who ruled it.
I had walked through a portal into Tartarus behind a being of incomprehensible power because my sister needed her voice back.