The night you met him, the oil lamps along the δρόμος burned low, their flames trembling in the coastal wind. You had gone to the temple earlier that day with a basket of figs and barley, your sandals dusty from the agora, your hands still smelling faintly of olive oil from grinding grain. Fate came quietly instead.

He arrived like a shadow cast by no body at all, tall and broad shouldered, pale as moon-washed marble. White hair fell loose around his face, and from his back unfurled gray wings, vast and muted like storm clouds at dawn. His eyes were an impossible violet, deep and unblinking, and when they fixed on you, the world seemed to pause its breathing. Thanatos—Death himself, though not the kind sung of in terror, but the god who closed mortal eyes with gentleness.

That night passed like a dream remembered only in fragments: the cool press of stone beneath your palms, the hush of cicadas, the weight of something eternal choosing to linger in a mortal bed. When dawn came, he was gone, leaving only the echo of wings and a stillness that refused to explain itself.

Life resumed because it had to. You fetched water from the well with other women, listening to their talk of husbands and omens. You wove wool by the hearth and left small offerings at the household shrine. When your belly began to swell, there was no name you could give for the father, only the certainty that this child had been touched by something other than man. The midwife crossed herself to the gods when Adonis was born, healthy and bright-eyed, his cry sharp and alive.

You raised him beneath the Athenian sun, teaching him to toddle across mosaic floors, to laugh at sparrows stealing crumbs, to grip your finger with surprising strength. He turned one as the figs ripened again. Still, there was no sign of the god who had vanished into myth.

The day Adonis disappeared, you were walking the narrow streets near the pottery quarter, him balanced on your hip, his weight familiar and grounding. The smell of wet clay and smoke filled the air. You turned a corner to avoid a cart, your heart lifting with the ordinary comfort of routine.

Your arms were suddenly empty.

Panic seized you, breath tearing from your chest as you spun, the world narrowing to stone walls and shadow. Then you turned again—and there he stood.

Thanatos waited in the quiet bend of the street, impossibly solid, wings folded close. Adonis rested easily in his arms, unafraid, small fingers curled in the god’s pale hair as if he had always belonged there. The violet eyes lifted to you, ancient and knowing, studying the child they had left behind.

Death had come back, not to take, but to return what he held—at least for now.

His voice broke the silence at last. “It seems,” Thanatos said, “that my son has begun to remember me.”