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From the corner of my eye, I saw her bunch her chiton and lift a leg to step in.
“Don’t.”
She froze as I turned to face her.
“What do you mean, ‘don’t’?”
“You are not a passenger.”
“Hermes left me here with you. You are in the boat. I should also be in the boat.”
“You are not dead. You have no fare, no purpose here.”
“Then what am I to do with myself?”
I sighed. “Wander the shore with the wraiths and hope Hermes returns for you in time or that Thanatos takes you quickly.”
Her brow furrowed. “What do you mean by ‘in time’?”
My hand gripped the push pole harder with my frustration. Were all living mortals this stupid?
“You are in the Underworld,” I growled. “This is not a land of the living. You will not survive here. You’ll either age, starve, or do something like fall into the Styx, thereby losing your soul to the water. It matters not to me.”
Itshouldnot matter. And yet the bob of her throat, the fearful glance of her eyes at her surroundings…
Her trepidation rankled within my chest. Why was she here? If not on some journey to pull a soul from the Underworld, why would she be dumped here to rot?
“I’ll pay you.” She spoke so softly I barely heard her words.
I extended my hand. The mortal shuddered, eyes fixated on it. This was why I covered myself.
Two fingers were exposed bone, the rest of my skin shades of nearly pearlescent white and the lightest blue mottled together. My appearance never failed to elicit shock and shudders.
From the kolpos of her chiton, she produced an obol and placed the coin in my hand.
It wasn’t the thinner coin of a Charon’s obol that had become more popular with the mortals. It wasn’t tucked under her tongue as an offering for the dead.
Still, it was an obol. The correct fare. For an obol, a person could board the ferry. I slipped the coin under my chlamys and past my chiton to rest with the others.
“Get in… Mortal.”
“Moira. My name is Moira.” Her face crinkled with surprise. Why she was surprised at her own name, I did not know. She was… odd.
Interesting, my mind corrected. She was a fleeting presence that I had no business finding interest in. I pushed the useless intrigue to the recesses of my mind; the mortal should be of no importance to me.
Moira was more graceful than most as she slipped into the boat. Rather than sit, she stood, perfectly balanced as she gazed over the Styx.
“I can’t believe you were going to sit here, leaning against that push pole, watching me wither away. All because a god was bored enough to kidnap me.”
I snorted. “As if you would wither away.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I cut my eyes at her, but she met my glare with one of her own.
“That. You’ll glare at a psychopomp, curse the only god who may spirit you away from here, all while precariously standing in a boat over a river that would gladly steal your soul.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
