PROLOGUE:
BLOOD WATER

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THE CORPSE OF HER lover was cold in her arms. The woeful girl had run out of tears to shed, her heart a heavy stone that festered and decayed in the cavity of her chest. She blinked, and a single tear slid down her cheek, ignored when she shifted the corpse closer and pleaded, her forehead against his, arms wrapped around his torso, to the Gods both old and new; uselessly, but she was stubborn in her foolish sense of hope.

The Gods looked down on her and laughed, their stony silence far louder than any physical sign they could've possibly given. Gods did not grieve mortals, not even when the mortal was a child born of their own flesh and ichor, of regret and revenge.

Human life was fleeting and forgettable. In the grand scheme of things, no one would remember the dead when their loved ones joined them in graves of bones and blood.

"Please," the grief-stricken lover murmured against blood-slick skin. Crimson stains that would never wash away. A permanent reminder of loss, and the suffering of a weak human heart. "Come back. Don't leave me."

But Jason Grace would not come back. He followed the path to Hades now, awaiting for Elysian or ruin.

Annais Min would never breathe the same.

Love and death walked hand-in-hand, a girl and ghost; she was thwarted by her very own domain by the work of cruel Gods and the trick of fate.

"Please."

What was love, if not pain?

What was damnation, if not love?

The woeful lover waited, withering. The corpse rotted, forgotten.