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One of his assistants is missing. She’s been gone for three days now, and the keyward of Asphodelos is worried sick.
Her name is Cybele, and it’s not uncommon to lose her for weeks, but she always talks often of her destinations if she travels away. Most find her vexing, but Hesperos always enjoyed the talkative ones, for his domain is quiet by nature. When one walks through Asphodelos's halls, oft the only things one hears are creaking chains, doors slamming shut or a roar from the creations. Despite the ruthless nature of the residents, Asphodelos is often described as eerie and lonely by the few visitors they have.
And without Cybele, it is all the more plain. His belone rests in a corner as he peers over his schedules, carefully crafted rosters with lists of rotations for his warders, roles, instructions and assigned tasks. He has a headache, but he can’t let that deter him from his work. His pen crosses out her name rapidly as he reassigns Erichthonios to the second circle for the week. He should be fine.
“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to be alone this week. We simply cannot afford to let the lower circles be understaffed, and I know you’re more familiar with the Hippokampos.”
His pupil nods, sitting on the other end of his table, relaxing his posture.
“It’s ok, I can take it. We went through the full procedure last month.”
Hesperos nods, writing down some additional info on a separate note, which he hands to Erichthonios.
“The feeding schedule on the left, sleeping on the right, but you can adjust as necessary. I trust in your judgement.”
He hands it to him with a smile. He believes that Erichthonios is doing better every day. As lackluster as his magic is, it makes him a resourceful warder. He paired him with Cybele for the past year, and her bubbly personality worked wonders for his conversational skills. Where there would only be sulking and insecurities at first, he often sees them laugh together as they work now.
Sometimes, he feels a pang of loneliness. His status as keyward sets him apart from the rest of his colleagues. There is little interaction between him and the others from the lower circles, and he can never hope to match the intellectual wit of his Master Lahabrea.
His headache pounds harder into his brain, but he tries to listen to Erichthonios’s comment on the whole affair anyways. Hesperos wants to go to bed, but his work takes priority over anything. Anything for Lahabrea.
Erichthonios takes his note and waves a quick goodbye to him, muttering something about trusting him with the rest of the weeks schedules as well, but it’s lost on Hesperos. The keyward absentmindedly writes down his own name in the third, seventh and twenty-ninth circles of Asphodelos. He will be working there alone.
He doesn’t sleep much that week. He dreams of Lahabrea. He dreams of a Lahabrea that takes him by the hand, and leads him to an even quieter place than Asphodelos, where he can hear his own heartbeat pulsate. He wakes up from these dreams exhausted, gaunt and sweaty. He shakes when putting on his glasses for the day. Sometimes, his vision remains blurry despite them.
No amount of rest during the day seems to sate him, and he finds himself retreating to his own chambers more often than he wants to. His headache never left. At night, the dreams repeat.
Lahabrea lets him talk, listens to him. Offers him a drink, gives him a fresh breath of air when he needs it, lets him sleep on his lap when he is tired. Kisses him.
Hesperos can’t kiss him back at first, afraid that if he does he evaporate in thin air. Lahabrea would never. He has Athena. Or had. He never got over her. But the dream feels real, more real than the threat of waking up. He lets the comfort of a false fantasy convince him.
During the day, if he appears lost in his own mind, his warders don’t comment on it.
The keywards of Pandaemonium typically communicate through letters, passed by familiars so they do not have to leave their stations. It's a habit most of them pick up during their study, taught to be averse to personal emotions. It’s why it comes as a suprise when the keyward of Tartaros comes knocking on his door.
He's never seen her before, but her aether is powerful, oppressive and nauseating, announcing her presence far before he opens the door. Her appearance can’t have been further from how her aether feels. Slender, graying hairs and fragile-looking. She bows and lets herself in before he can greet her.
“’Tis most fortunate you could spare the time to meet with me, Hesperos.”
Addressing him with no title. She takes the seat opposite his bureau, legs crossed. Her aether shines, almost blindingly so, while Hesperos pours her tea. Her fingers tap impatiently on the wood of his desk, her eyes scanning the surface of his documents.
“Would that I could have written you a letter about this matter, but I deem it too personal.”
Hesperos sits across her, folding his hands.
“Speak your concerns then.”
He tries to be informal with her too, but it’s awkward. Hesperos has little peers he talks to, she is the first he talks to that is an equal. Her aura, suffocating him, certainly doesn't help.
“It concerns Hegemone, keyward of Abyssos. We contact each other weekly, as her research is often intertwined with mine. However, I sense something is amiss. Her reports have not been as precise and were lacking in descriptions. Perhaps you know more?”
Hesperos frowns. Abyssos’s keyward is a tall young woman, with her hair cropped short, and often in the company of her own familiars, Ophion and Arni.
He's seen Hegemone a couple of times before, that is certain, but if Agdistis writes to her weekly, then he’d be of no help here.
“I apologize, Lady Agdistis, but I’m afraid I won’t be of any help here. I rarely contact anyone outside of Asphodelos, our concepts are estranged from most others.”
He can’t help the sheepishness in his speech, but when her face falls, he hastily adds:
“One of my warders might know more. It’s not uncommon for them to swap shifts after all.”
“Thank you. I’ll find my answers, somehow.”
She gets up right away, already making for the door. So very bold and to the point, Hesperos remarks, she might as well be the opposite of him. She never touched her tea.
“I’ll open up the hallway for you. It’ll be on the left, then the second stairs to the right.” Hesperos says, with a wave of his hand working his own magicks. The gates below shift.
The relief when she leaves is immense, like water cascading off of him. Even when she is several floors below him, he can still sense her aether, thrumming on the beat of his heart.
He takes her tea, sipping on it while he starts a letter to Abyssos.
Another of his warders is missing, and this time it is a problem. Too many of them are assigned on their own, and Euryale’s experience is needed in the third circle.
Any circle lower than the third needs a pair to function properly, and with two of his most helpful assistants missing, he’s forced to assign his warders double shifts. At least, that would be the case, but he reassigns himself to most of them instead. A warder might not be able to handle so much at once on their own, but Hesperos is a keyward for a reason. If anything, he is motivated to make it clear to Lahabrea that the circles can be maintained, even if there are less warders available.
It comes with a cost though. His own research falls behind, the need for order in Asphodelos too high to spend time on it. Hesperos is irritated. He catches himself thinking of his warders as bothersome more than he likes to, small annoyances he can normally set aside in less than a minute, plague his thoughts for days on an end.
He hasn’t been able to take a day off for four months. He missed the play he’d been looking forward to, due to account of not being able to leave Pandaemonium. It’s fine. He’ll simply go to next one. A week later, another warder, Algea, goes missing from his roster as well.
Erichthonios worries. On his weekly scheduling, he offers to accompany him to the eight and sixteenth circle, but Hesperos refuses.
“Stick to the second circle. It needs you harder.”
Erichthonios leaves him, grumbling something about perfectionism and Lahabrea, and Hesperos feels the hairs on his skin rise, but he lets it slide. He has enough on his mind already.
Hesperos lives and breathes Pandaemonium. He works tirelessly to keep it from falling into chaos as they accept more prisoners. He transforms the cells and halls with a speed he doesn’t know himself to be capable of, often sensing problems before they arrive. He has become more attuned with the aether in Asphodelos, the tiniest changes appearing as waves to him, rather than the tiny pulsations from before.
The dreams appear with more frequency. More often than not, he finds himself waking up away from his bedside, in places he doesn’t remember falling asleep in.
He reminds himself that his rewards waits for him. Master Lahabrea visits Pandaemonium, talking to him out of concern for his concepts. Phoinix and concepts similar to it draw his attention, a simple thing that draws Hesperos’s attention in turn.
Hesperos tours the facility with him at night, when no one else is there to bother them. In his dreams, they transform, showing each other their innermost secrets.
In reality, Hesperos stumbles over his words as he explains the routine care for the Vrykolakas.
He finds his assistant. Her mangled corpse lies preserved in the stygian waters of the lowest circle, far from the entrance. The cell he is in holds semi-aquatic life, but the inhabitants are also nowhere to be found, having been released several weeks ago, on Lahabrea’s request. The enclosure consists of a beach, with a dark blue hue for both the sand and water. The ceiling is high, the space the thirty-sixth circle occupies colossal. Cybele is in the back of the enormous hall, buried in shallow water. Her face is barely visible below the surface, despite the water being pristine.
At least, parts of her face. Her body isn’t whole anymore, her skin ashen, a sickly hue to it. Her blue hair, matted, in clumps, drifting upwards, clings to parts of her scalp. One of her eyes is wide open, the other not anywhere nearby.
Hesperos is a sensitive man, with a gentle conduct. The way in which she died was everything but gentle. He retches.
When he can calm himself down enough, he comes back to her, wading through her quiet resting place, his robe heavy and soaked. He calms the waters with the tip of his fingers, stilling his own reflection above her.
The calmness of the place does little to put him at ease. He senses no aether and he surmises that if there was much of it, he would have sensed this disturbance earlier. What concerns him is that there is none at all.
When someone returns to the star, be it by force or by will, aether is left in overabundance, then diminishes slowly into lesser over time. Even so, there should have been some left. It always lingers. Cybele’s aether is gone, as if she evaporated completely, yet her body is still here.
Hesperos peers through her remains again. He needs to take a step away again, alarm someone else, but something catches his attention. Magicks. Parts of her clothes and the water around her have traces of it. Most of it is her own, but there are sparks here and there that aren’t hers.
They’re his own. He blinks in disbelief. As he stares down, his mirrored visage stares back.
Hesperos is clever. He can put one and one together easy enough, but believing it is another story. The headaches, the way he senses aether as precise as he couldn’t before, the strange waking moments he has at night. Agdistis. His increasing perception of aether. How long had he been under the impression he was in control of everything? Something horrid is taking grasp of him.
More rapid thoughts, they fire through his head. Realization after realization. He had assigned himself to the lower circles in the week of her disappearance, and since the lowest cells were unoccupied, he only performed routine checks there. He lets his hand go through the waters, feeling for anything that could disprove him, anything that could absolve him from this terrible wrong.
It swallows him, cold and whole, the depths of the sea burying him. In a flash, he sees how she died. Her own spellcasting, no match against a master like himself. All the elements turned against her, enhanced by convocation knows what, snuffing out her last breath fast with a ruthless blow. Her magics like a feeble flame in his flooding storm. Any warning she might have fired off would have bounced back, Hesperos’s control over Asphodelos perfectly executed. Then silence.
He surfaces, breathing hard, sitting upright. Next to him, her corpse is still unmoving. He waves, and the sands below her shift, covering her. He apologizes quietly, to Euryale and Algea as well. He knows he doesn’t want to find his other warders.
He doesn’t know why he isn’t leaving. Or why he closes off the hallway to the thirty-sixth circle. Why he closes the door to the enclosure, weaving up more barriers.
He knows what he needs to do. Everything he does follows back to Master Lahabrea. Lahabrea, who values research and concepts above all. Lahabrea, who will understand Hesperos’s reasoning. Lahabrea, who will undo Hesperos's wrongs. With determination, he begins casting an internment spell.
Hesperos is missing. He’s been gone for three days now, and Erichthonios is worried sick.