Styx. The river of the Dead, the eldest sister of Lethe. It was a glass of death, just as sure as a random guy coming off the street and asking for a cup of rat poison. I chuckled at the dark humor and awaited the response, my hands sitting idle in the Well. It only took a moment before she began to speak.

"They killed him this morning. Fools. He was an artist, my Michael. A preservationist. He would go into the woods and find the fallen trees and turn them into art. Never cutting down, always bearing my honored dead from my lands and making them beautiful again.

"I came to him like this, deep in the woods. That smile... I will remember that smile while I drink. We talked of his work, and he offered to show me. Oh! Muses be praised, was his work beautiful. Ash and Thorn and Willow, they turned in his hands from dead wood to things of beauty.

"He was not perfect. He sought the sisters of inspiration in bad medicines. He would smoke as he sat on the tree stumps left behind by the loggers upstate, then it became powders. I loved him even then, knew I could fix him. I had bound the wounds of gods, what was a mortal artist's hurts to the pain of the Divine?"

She smiled then, a pained thing, and began playing with a necklace of wooden beads. A wooden cameo, her perfect likeness, played over her knuckles and she twisted and worried the thing.

"I found him in our bed this morning. Cold, the foam of his last breaths. I wanted to go with him, but I could not. It is not our way, is it? Those grand gestures. You are lucky, young one, to touch the soft veil between this world and the Divine, and not to sit wrapped in it, not mortal enough to die but not divine enough to live without hurt.

"I cannot die here by my own hand, but you are meant to serve. So serve me, wench, and let my time be done."

I wanted to tell her it would be okay. That the world was still young, that there would be other lovers. But that wasn't my place. How was I to understand the pain of a creature whose life had been measured not in years but centuries? If the trials of those endlessly stretching days had not broken her, then this was a harsh thing.

"I see it in your face. You want to tell me everything will go on. 'Oh,', you'll say, 'there will always be another lover!' I am not the Father of Olympus, dear sweet scion. Until Michael took me abed I had not been with man nor god in centuries. Our years together were the best of my life, and that life stretches before we came across Atlas' waters, before even the Shepherd hung on branches of our sacred trees.

"Asked thrice and done. Give me what I wish, and let me rest in His arms again."