Helen nodded, staring at her hands without seeing them. She wrapped her arms around his chest and let the tears come . . . for Orion, for herself, and for Lucas, but mainly because she was so sick of it all. She had power over the most magnificent forces on Earth, but she still didn’t feel like she had power over the most important thing of all—her own heart.
Orion lay back on the sand and pulled her down on top of him. He banished the water soaking their skin and hair so they were immediately dry, and stared up at the stars while Helen cried a few frustrated tears. When she’d settled down, he piled their discarded clothes over them, still holding her on top of him to keep her off the cold sand. She was too tired to think straight anymore.
“So are we friends?” he asked after a long silence.
“Doesn’t seem enough, does it?” she said as sleep quickly set in and started to paralyze her. “We’re more than friends. We’re brothers. Blood brothers.”
His chest shuddered with a little laugh under her cheek, and she felt him whisper “brothers” to himself as he drifted off to sleep.
The last thing Helen thought before she drifted off after him was that she’d slept on a beach like this before with another boy. But this time there was no Helen-shaped dent for her to fit inside.
“Uncle?” Helen called out.
“I’m here, niece,” Hades replied kindly. Helen turned around and found him walking up the infinite beach in the Underworld—the one that never led to an ocean.
She smiled tentatively at him as he joined her. “Thank you for coming. I have a lot of questions.” Her voice was quivering with uncertainty. “When I’m sitting across from myself, and other people are calling me names like ‘Guinevere,’ I’m having a memory, not a dream, right?”
“Correct.”
“How?”
Hades’ dark helmet glimmered. “The dead have choices. They don’t have to stay in the Underworld forever if they don’t wish to. But in order to leave, they must wash their memories away in the River Lethe, before they can be reborn.”
“And when I touched a few drops of that river water?” she asked, following up on a hunch.
“Life experiences are never annihilated. The river remembers. Your soul called to those memories in the water, and they joined you in this life. It’s rare, but it happens sometimes,” he said, and then turned his cloaked head away. “Why don’t you clothe yourself?”
“Oh. Right,” she said. Embarrassed, she crossed her arms over her lacy bra. “I don’t know how.”
“Yes you do. Think, Helen.”
“I want to be wearing warm, clean clothes,” she said distinctly. Helen pictured a sturdy outfit, complete with the lined galoshes that she usually wore in the Underworld, and it instantly appeared on her body. Helen raised her eyes to the place behind the shadows where she guessed Hades’ eyes would be. “Okay, first question. How can I do this? How can I control the Underworld?”
“Because you have a talent in common with me, and with Morpheus and Zeus, to name a few,” he said firmly. “Each of us can make one world. I made Hades. Morpheus made the shadow lands. The Furies made the dry lands. Zeus made Olympus, and Tartarus created Tartarus eons before any of us existed. And Tartarus left the boundaries of her land open for all who share in this power, although none of us have ever seen her.”
“But what has this got to do with me?” Helen blurted out, feeling like she was in way over her head. “I’ve never made anything. I’ve never even made the honor roll.”
“You haven’t made anything yet. But you will if you choose to,” he said with a small chuckle that was hauntingly familiar. “There have been other Scions with this talent before. You call them Descenders, but that is not the correct name, really, as it only describes the allowance I made for Scions of your kind to be able to come to me for help. What help I can offer, at any rate,” he said, his voice heavy with regret. “So far, I have failed you all.”
“My kind?” Helen’s palms started to sweat. “What kind am I?”
“You are a Worldbuilder, Helen. You have the power to sculpt a land for whomever you wish to enter it. A world of your own that abides entirely by your rules. Eternal youth. Fulfillment. Or eternal trials and suffering—whatever you think will serve best.”
A thin silence wreathed around them as Helen absorbed this.
“But . . . that’s . . . just . . . terrible!” she stammered, the air knocked out of her lungs for a moment. “Have you seen my pottery? I can’t ‘sculpt’ a new world—it’ll be a disaster! Can’t you find someone who can at least draw or something?”
“I’m sorry, Helen, but the Fates do not dole out this particular talent often.” Hades smiled before he grew serious again. “In fact, there have only been two Scions before you who learned how to use the talent well enough to create their own lands, and even then those worlds only lasted a short while.”
“Who were they?”
“Morgan and Atlanta. One created Avalon, and the other Atlantis. Both their worlds dissolved into the mists or beneath the waves when their creators were defeated, but Scions remember those lands to this day. Especially Atlantis. They die for it still.”
“Wait. You’re saying that Atlantis doesn’t exist?”
“Not anymore. Every Worldbuilder must be able to defend his or her lands against any challenger. Morgan and Atlanta both lost.”
Helen sat down on the seeping wet of the damp sand, her head in her hands. She’d shouldered a lot of responsibility because she’d had no other choice, but this was beyond her.