her. She sighed softly. “Very well, I shall not tell him… but… I wish you would make some effort with him. He is so very proud of you most of all.”
He was? Thanatos glared at her, shutting down the part of him that felt warmed by that.
Nyx didn’t help matters. “Out of all his children, it is you he is most concerned with and you he often asks about during my visits to him. Hypnos runs a close second of course. I think he was always pleased I gave him twins, both so handsome and powerful.”
A huff burst from his lips. “It sounds as if he likes the thought that if something were to happen to me, then he would still have Hypnos to admire and laud to others. Am I so replaceable?”
Her slight shoulders lifted in a delicate shrug. “I do not think so… but speaking of Hypnos… He mentioned he had been to the castle to visit you but you were not there, but Calindria was most accommodating. So much so in fact that he returned just today to see you… or was it to see her?”
Thanatos growled at her as rage rolled through him, as the thought of his own damned brother attempting to court Calindria out of his hands stirred the darkness within his soul and had him hungry with a need to end him. The flash of mischief in his mother’s eyes revealed she knew what she was doing, had said such a thing to stoke him into a rage and send him back to Calindria rather than to the palace and Hades. She was meddling. Pushing him and Calindria together, and to what end he wasn’t sure, but it had worked. Thoughts of delivering his report to Hades disappeared in an instant and he couldn’t stop himself from teleporting to his castle instead, the need to see Calindria and see that she was still his and his alone driving him.
He was not replaceable.
He appeared in what had become a garden in the short time Calindria had been living with him, his silver gaze frantically scanning the low black hedges that formed two long rectangles that echoed the shape of the pond between them and followed the line of the black walls his golems had helped construct. Columns cut across the far end of the formal garden, drawing his eye there, and beyond those columns was a smaller area of plants all created by Calindria as she attempted to master her power.
And deep in the heart of that wild patch of land, knelt his beautiful goddess, a streak of cerulean and gold against an inky backdrop.
Thanatos strode along the path between one of the rows of low hedging and the pool, his eyes locked on her, never straying for even a heartbeat. Calm suffused him as he saw she was alone, quick to come over him and ease his mood. She had that effect on him.
Among others.
He shook out his black feathered wings as nerves trickled through his veins, couldn’t quite shake what his mother had said about Hypnos, even when he knew she had only been teasing him and that his brother would never do such a thing. He had spoken with Hypnos soon after he had returned with Calindria and his twin had been overjoyed to see him and to hear about his little goddess. The second time they had seen each other, Hypnos had come to visit him and had marvelled at the transformation that had already taken place in Thanatos’s castle.
Thanatos marvelled at it himself from time to time. Calindria hadn’t only been busy transforming the grounds into something less wasteland and more garden. She had been working to make the inside of his castle more comfortable too, brightening it in her own little way.
Although she had done him the kindness of keeping the entrance hall and his throne room intact and as imposing as it had been.
Behind the scenes though, where visitors never set foot, she had softened things, and he found he liked the splashes of colour she had injected. He especially liked her drawing rooms, where the walls had been painted with a scene that resembled the Elysian Fields, with a sea of red poppies, lush green fields and trees, and endless blue sky that ran onto the ceiling and turned to starlit darkness in the middle above the chandeliers.
He liked it so much it hadn’t taken long for it to become their drawing room and he often