The city gates of Elis shut behind them with a sound like thunder—final, echoing, absolute.
Macar did not look back.
Dust rose with each step of the sculptors' slow exodus, a ragged column of men carrying chisels in silence, bearing carts filled with rope, cracked tools, and half-finished forms of gods abandoned mid-gesture.
No banners flew, no trumpets mourned their departure. Only the wind bore witness.
The sun had begun to dip, turning the plains to gold, but the road ahead was long, and it led not through the olive-rich valleys nor toward any known polis of men.
It led toward the south—toward the edge of the world. Toward a mountain that few dared name.
"Mount Erebus," Macar muttered, his voice hoarse from dust and grief. "The only place Leonidas does not watch."
"You would lead us there?" asked Pyrros, one of the younger sculptors, wiping sweat from his brow. "That mountain burns from within. Nothing grows. No springs. No towns."
"No demons either," Macar answered, halting the column atop a ridge. The setting sun caught the jagged outline of their destination in crimson light—a crooked, black spire looming against the sky like a spear thrust upward by the earth itself. Smoke spiraled faintly from its crown. "And no temples. No kings. No gods."
"A place of the dead," another man muttered, crossing his chest in warding.
Macar turned to face them all, his voice rising.
"Yes. A place of the dead. A place where the Olympians do not tread. But perhaps the only place left to men like us. You saw what Leonidas became—how quickly honor turns to pride when thrones are threatened. He would exile us to the abyss if he could find it. But he cannot touch Erebus."
"Why not?" Pyrros asked. "Is it the fires?"
"No." Macar's eyes darkened. "Because it belongs to another."
The men stilled.
"Hades," he said at last. "He rules there, though no altar bears his name. That mountain is no temple, but a gate—a wound in the world, too ancient for Olympus to seal. The dead pass near it on their way below. And the living… are wise not to linger."
A heavy pause hung in the air. Then Diodoros, a stooped sculptor who had once carved the robes of Hera so finely they rippled like real silk, stepped forward.
"You mean for us to live there? Carve again? For whom? The dead do not commission beauty."
Macar smiled then—not with joy, but something older. Stern. Proud.
"We do not carve for the living. Nor for coin. We carve because we remember. We shape memory into stone so time cannot forget."
He looked out again toward the volcano.
"If we are not wanted in the world of light, then let us work in shadow. Let our hands speak where tongues dare not. Even the dead deserve beauty."
A quiet settled then, as the sculptors looked to one another. They were tired. Exiled. Cast from the cities they had shaped with their hands and given nothing but ash in return.
And still… they had their tools.
Pyrros gripped the handle of his hammer. "Then let Erebus become our anvil."
One by one, the others nodded.
Meanwhile, at Elis;
Within the palace courtyard, far from the sanctified marble of the sanctuary, a smaller space had been set aside for Thea's punishment.
A square cloister surrounded by low columns and dry fountains—once a garden of philosophers—was now her prison.
There were no guards.
Only leaves.
Tens of thousands of them.
Brown and brittle, with veins like brittle ink, the oak leaves rustled softly with every passing wind.
They were gathered into bundles, stacked into crates, and some strewn along the stone floor like broken parchment.
Each leaf bore a name—the same name—written by her trembling hand: Zeus
Over and over, the same curves, the same letters. Always careful, never too heavy. One tear, one rip, one stain, and the work began again.
Her hands were stained with ink and red at the knuckles. Her eyes burned from the strain of repetition. Fatigue draped itself over her like a funeral shroud.
She barely noticed when her head dropped onto the stone table, her fingers still brushing the rim of an ink bowl.
And then she slowly slipped into a dream.
It was a dream she had hundreds of times. A dream that haunted her like a nightmare.
She stood on the edge of a black sea. No stars above. No winds. The sky was a dome of ash, and the waves below barely moved. The shore crackled underfoot—obsidian shards and pale bones scattered like forgotten words.
Something stirred in the fog.
A figure, distant but moving forward. With each step, the sea around him receded, as though even water feared his path.
He was tall, impossibly so. Draped in a robe the color of ash and night. A helmet covered his face, forged of dark iron, smooth and featureless, save for the crown of black serpents twined at its base.
And in his right hand, he held a bident—twin-pronged, jagged, and blacker than the void around him.
She could not breathe.
The figure stopped, only paces away now. He did not speak. But something pulsed behind that mask—a gaze, ancient and piercing.
"Who are you…?" she tried to speak, but her throat was dry as sand.
The figure responded by raising the bident, and the sea behind him parted, but like a wound opening in the earth. From its depths came a soundless scream, vast and hollow.
Thea fell to her knees.
The figure pointed the bident at her.
And from the darkness beneath the helmet came a voice—not a sound, but a feeling, carved directly into the bone of her mind:
"Don't think of me, Thea. Don't remember me, Thea. Don't try to find me, Thea. There is nothing but death awaiting you at my abode."
"Ahh!"
She awoke with a cry.
The courtyard was still.
Her ink bowl had spilled. The wind had blown dozens of leaves into the dry fountain basin. She scrambled to gather them, eyes wide and breath short.
Her hands trembled.
She clutched a leaf to her chest.
"Don't think of me, Thea. Don't remember me, Thea. Don't try to find me, Thea. There is nothing but death awaiting you at my abode."
She repeated the words she remembered from the dream.
But, she pushed those thoughts away and dipped her brush again.
And wrote the name of Zeus again.