And with those final words, he flounced away, carelessly cruel in the way only children could be, leaving Death to languish in the dark.
* * * *
It took another three days for his next visitor to come—not Sisyphus, who had never reappeared in front of Thanatos, not even to gloat, but someone new.
“What? This is…”
He weakly raised his head, blinking to clear the dots from his vision.
Standing there was a woman, her long brown hair pulled up into a bun, plaited in elaborate patterns. The weaves of her cloth denoted her as a woman of importance to the palace, and given that he knew of no daughters that Sisyphus had borne, this must have been his wife.
And based on the horrified look on her face as she raised a hand to cover her mouth, she knew quite well who he was.
“Lord Thanatos,” sh
