I wonder if there will come a time when man is surrounded solely by his own creations. Every year, every month, every day that passes man, in his insatiable curiosity, delves into the secrets of the universe. Learning is his opiate; it is his raison d'etre, to grow and change. But it was never enough to be schooled by the disciplines of science or philosophy. No, he must test his knowledge, he must be certain that the flower of the universe has opened its petals to him, has divulged every last, intimate drop of nectar from its tender blossoms. And what greater test, than to fashion the object of your studies by your own hand, what greater challenge of your understanding and wisdom than to improve upon the design? Yes, man has a lust for creation. He was indeed carved in the image of his God.

Still, God was wise enough to bless his creations with free will, that they might surprise and delight him, that he might grow to love them. Man, too, tried this-- albeit to a lesser extent. As men wrote tales characters took a life of their own. Their inventions revolutionized society in ways they couldn't begin to imagine.

And therein lie the problem. A man could exceed himself, but he could never craft anything that exceeded man, and man was not possessed of the limitless possibilities afforded a God. When they are left with nothing more than the work of their own, fumbling hands will they succumb to despair? Will nothing remain sacred or mysterious? Will man lose his will? What will happen, on that day of reckoning?

I think I know.

Yes... I know all too well.

                                                                      --Icarus Toombes

Part I: The Fruit and the Ferryman

The night that Charon appeared before Adamae Fukamori she was in the close darkness of her London flat surrounded by tattered scraps of music and newspaper, their stark black print gleaming in the light through the window. Their ink had the metallic luster of dried blood. It pooled about the keyboard smashed into the nearest wall, pooled about its mangled grave as though those keys rather than their musician had possessed a soul. And indeed, there was in Adamae's eyes the sunken, feverish depth of one who had reached their limits, had sunk so low that they could fall no farther. Articles applauding her genius were among the newsprint she'd torn, and she was, even now, setting fire to them with the most grim and terrible of miens. She was lucid enough to know she'd regret it in the morning. She was frantic enough not to care. Everything was crumbling around her, and she'd been the one to set the hammer to the foundation, to wrench and scream and pound until the walls that held her in were no more.

Only now the cornerstones were tumbling down on her head.

Surveying her trembling limbs, the raven hair scattered wildly over her brow, Charon had to smile. These were the people he loved. Formerly he'd dwelt in the long, eerie pool of her shadow. Now he rose from it as though a wisp of heady smoke, and he leaned over her, his latest curiosity. So devastated, so broken was the girl that she was too absorbed in her own self-destruction to notice him, clear up until he whispered:

"My my. This isn't like you at all, Miss Fukamori. Or is it Fukamori-san?"

The woman drew a quick, terrified breath, swinging her trained legs automatically to cripple the intruder. But her foot passed through him, pallid spectre that he was, and she was left panting, sprawled  in the ashes of her creations as she gaped for terror. What was he? A hallucination? A dream? Had her sanity fled along with her career, along with her passions?

She was white with fear. Nevertheless, it wasn't long before she hardened under the bitter summons of her iron will, the very virtue for which she suffered, and she tilted her chin up at him in proud distrust. Only the pounding of her heart betrayed her dread.

"Who are you?"

The apparition seemed impressed. His face had a grin of such calm and wisdom as to make her blood run cold. "I am the man who can make all your dreams come true."

"If you're real you're no man."

Charon chuckled, a silky rumble from his very core, and his grey eyes gleamed from under greyer hair, though his skin was smooth as a child's. "You do not disappoint, even for a woman hailed as genius. But I am a man, of a sort. And I can give you anything you can... imagine." The choice of words seemed to amuse him.

Fukamori didn't reply, not at first. Instead the stony, narrow eyes flickered, their pupils smoldering. There was an edge to the woman, a deadly one none too keen to be tested that evening. "Leave. Now."

"Come," Charon sighed, inviting himself to drift over to a leather, modish armchair. "You've had a very rough time of it. Wouldn't you like to take it out on something other than your beloved masterpieces, there?" He gestured to the floor.

"No."

"Or... is it something else?" the apparition murmured, appearing not to hear her. "Fire is a curious tool for a purge. Symbolic, really. Could it be with all that's transpired Fukamori-san thinks her pieces too masterful, too deep for this world's ears?"

"Go!" the woman barked, but there was a quaver buried in the discord of the command. The latest review of her performance shook between her fingers. Fukamori: Genius or Diva?

"I told you I'm more man than anything," Charon reminded her. "Albeit a curious one-- one that has been dead for a very, very long time. I'm not a demon. You cannot banish me."

"Then tell me what you want!"

"From you? Nothing."

Nothing. Just like her audience. Was he here merely to watch, for some idle manner to waste away his existence-- never knowing or caring what they-- what he heard, so long as it excited feeling?

"That's not--" she bit her lip, then chose to let her anger flood, anyway. "That's not fair!"

"You're right; it's not fair, is it?" Charon muttered, bending toward her to rest his elbows on his knees, his perpetual grin sympathetic, though nothing in his expression had moved. "That now, when your work is at its finest, when you've transcended form or style, they would disparage it. That they would punish you for their ignorance, fire you for your skill. Mm-hmm. Not fair at all."

Something in her glare softened, as with the tenderness of a wound, but she hid it back under dissimulation-- her parents had imparted that virtue to her, even if they'd failed with all the others. And that blank stare of hers still demanded that Charon be gone.

He turned thoughtfully toward the window. "It occurs to me we don't have quite the ambiance for this gravest of occasions." Dark clouds hung complacently over the nighttime sky, the rain pelting down on the rooftops like drumsticks beating one, singular chant at the mortals within.

Fools, fools, fools...

Charon nodded at this dreary scene, at the black, rugged skyline, and there was a flash of lightning that sent Fukamori scrabbling away from the glass, her music crackling and rustling beneath her. Before she could collide with the kitchen island, however, she felt icy hands gripping her shoulders. It was Charon, but she couldn't wrench away as he held her fast, transfixed her to the dying refulgence of his ire.

"This has been a day of tragedy for you, has it not? And I have come to offer you a choice. You had best listen."

Fukamori shivered, and it was clear his words had finally cut to her guarded heart, to her very bones. He released her, standing, reaching into his long coat.

"You have lost your job. It is clear that they will take from you, also, the means to produce on the grand style you desire-- no, need," he spoke, softly. "They don't want art no one will appreciate. And so, you can spend your existence trying to destroy every last memory of your fading dream, or..." He withdrew a small, ripe plum.

"Or you could start again, with no limit or distraction."

She eyed the fruit with suspicion-- she was terrified of him.

"I can offer you a world all your own," he told her, and at once that grimace of his wasn't just haunting, but alluring for its life, the fervency of his offer. His thin white fingers bore the plum aloft as though it were his vitreous heart waiting to be shattered. "A world devoid of all save for what you choose to fill it with, where the only terminal for your creations is your own imagination."

"You're insane," she accused, though judging by her breath her pulse had fluttered erratically at the notion, with a thrill.

"Would you care to find out for certain?" He wondered, holding the fruit out to her, his profile black against the stark explosion of yet another  bolt of lightning. "If none of it is real, then you have nothing to lose, nothing to fear. Consider this plum our covenant." This time his grin did move, widening into a pantomime of Cheshire.

She realized suddenly that his eyes had no pupils. No windows to his soul because his enigmatic essence was the soul, with no good or evil lurking beneath. She swallowed.

"No."

"Don't you trust me?" he questioned, tilting his head to the side in a manner that might have been touching if he were a dog, or even a human being. Instead, it chilled her.

"No. I don't."

"Only apples hide poison, Fukamori-san."

She didn't appear convinced.

Charon groaned long-sufferingly. "But m'dear, you can't see the world otherwise. Faith is my price, and one may not be ferried to another world without paying the toll. Still, the choice is yours." He shrugged, an indescribably facetious gesture for one as daunting as he. "But if you do decide to join me, it must be before the fruit rots."

Before she could say anything there was another crack! of lightning, Charon bit nonchalantly into the plum, and he was gone.

It landed on the smooth wooden floor with a fleshy thud, rolling just so that his teethmarks were bared to her.

The storm outside hand vanished, her heart was slowing, and the perilous auguries tightening the fabric of the air about her slackened. All was turbid once more, stagnant like the life she'd worked so hard to bring to that point, to her long fall from fame, from inspiration, from purpose.

From sanity, apparently.

Nevertheless, she stared at the soft,glowing plum. He had broken its skin, and she was filled with its aromatic scent, its pungency an invitation and warning at once. She watched the juice run down its skin like a tear, well from the flesh like blood.

And suddenly that gift was the difference between life and death.

***

There was a blackness enveloping the land, a yawning void reaching out with darkest tendrils to efface what had felt like years of effort. Various and sundry, spectacular creatures were swallowed; rivers of magic were sucked dry. Tiny cottages of fay and faerie, villages of screaming women and children, powerless heroes and wearied villains-- the void was indiscriminate.

There was one who could have saved them. Yet their father, in the midst of the ruin, shed not a tear. Not even when the stars and their angels were snuffed out, their flame expired, and they were the dearest of his children. Indeed, he did not weep for any of it-- felt nothing at all. The man was numb with the same, all-consuming gloom that devoured his world. He was empty, and the existence of anything save his very being was an eyesore.

At least he knew there was a rhyme, a reason to his creation. A master hand wiser, larger than his own that had plucked and spun him from the grand tapestry of life-- or so he hoped. Lying in the eternal, formless deep, he stared at the pen and journal in his feeble grasp, then he willed those, too, to disappear. It seemed that he was the only being, the only truth in all the universe, but that had held true from the very beginning, from the moment he'd let himself dream that he could start a world all his own.

What a fool he was. There was nothing. He had nothing.

He wanted to go home.

Did he have a home, though? Or was it a memory he'd fabricated, here in this timeless existence he led? Hundreds of years had passed, according to the generations of heroes he'd sired, and yet he felt it had been a much shorter time, an eternity. What would inventing thirty years of life before his lonely cultivation of this void be for his subconscious? He'd raised giants. He'd felled tyrant and king alike. And yet, what senselessness there was to it all. Year after year he felt less sympathy for his children, left them to themselves and their pernicious ways for longer and longer. There was no progress.

In the history of the world he remembered man had built bridges and ships to the heavens, they'd divined meaning from the thread of space and time. But not his failed creations. Without a push from him, a hint, they might never move, might as well seal themselves in a cryonic time chamber.

How futile. How meaningless.

He would go mad like this, he knew. Already he'd begun to doubt the only certainties that had sustained him for this long-- that there had to be a way out, that surely someone would join him here, in his world. As in someone indigenous this dimension, or his dimension, or any dimension outside his imagination. So long he'd waited, trying to entertain himself by breathing life into his musings. And all for naught. He ached from the cold, the loneliness of his unassailable power. He wanted to end it. He was too scared to.

What if he failed, after all? What if enough of that fibre of reason in him remained to keep him from his own destruction? Suicide had been possible, even before his new-found authority, but he had become a demigod, and could such a monstrosity die? Hell, if even that was lost to him, then what did he have? And if death came, would he be denied an afterlife? Now that he'd watched himself sweep his world into nothingness the thought of enduring a similar fate made him sick.

No. He couldn't die; not like this. There were still the memories, invented or no, of that world. The one where people hurt you and helped you, where life had meaning. Such precious meaning... and to think he'd left it all behind.

"You are fortunate," said a voice as it surveyed the void, the yet nubile devastation, "That gods are not as eager to destroy as humans."

Eyes widening, the man jolted to his feet. "C-- Charon?" he breathed, praying to God this was real, that it wasn't a manifestation of the deep yearning inside of him.

The pale spectre grinned. "I hadn't expected that you would be so glad to see me, Icarus."

Icarus threw himself at him, seizing his collar with wild eyes. "Please-- I'm done!" he cried frantically, terrified that this chance would elude him. "I'm begging you: take me home! I can't take this, I--"

Charon's grin softened a tad at its corners. "It has only been seven days. You would abandon this place so quickly?"

"It's only been--?! Never mind--yes!" the man choked, sobbing now for relief. His wide, tearing eyes had all the ambiguous joy and resentment of a child once abandoned, yet the former sentiment was prevailing. It was hard not to succumb to it, when moments before he'd had naught but despair for company. Now, even if it was just a ghost, a ferryman-- even that was proof of something!

"Yes, please!" he cried with renewed fervor. "Take me home! I'll do anything! I-- everything is wrong. I'm not a God. I want to go home! I--!"

Charon frowned. "I'm afraid that's not quite possible."

He might have twisted a dagger through Icarus's heart. The man's spirit sunk from his breast back to the low, hellish pit of his stomach, his shoulders sagging with its weight. He might have staggered from the blow, but he had been too expectant, too fearful that it would fall, and he was left only with agony.

"Don't say that again," he begged in a small voice. "Don't... say it... Damn it!" He seized Charon by the shoulders now, a fierce and wounded beast. "Why did you do this to me?!! You knew what would happen, didn't you?! How could you even have--?!" A sob robbed him of his anger all at once and he slumped onto the spectre's shoulders, heaving tears and pounding the immaterial breast. "Why?!!"

Charon patted his back. "I only said," he spoke, refusing to answer the man's questions, "That it wasn't quite possible." That inscrutable grin, the cruel tear of a knife through his features, returned. "I have a feeling someone will be joining you very soon."

Icarus looked up at him, and he really was angry. "You mean you wish to drag another into this hell?! Is that supposed to comfort me?! The exchange of my life for another?!"

"She," Charon murmured, slipping away to turn and shrug his shoulders, "Chose to come here, just as you did."

"A... woman," Icarus seemed only to take the news harder. "Back then you didn't warn me-- not about this place. Did you warn her?"

"I warned both of you," the spirit spoke patiently, as though to a child. "That you didn't listen was no concern of mine. And it will take more than her coming here to free you, I'm afraid."

The man's fists clenched, his jaw tight. "What will it take, then?"

Charon turned, and materialized so quickly in Icarus's face that he stumbled and fell in the darkness, only to find the spirit looming over him.

"Your will is too feeble to leave of your own accord. You must convince her, too, to accompany you."

"That will be no problem," the man assured him acrimoniously. "A few days here is enough to make anyone long to go."

"Ah, but she is terribly stubborn, my dear Icarus," Charon murmured, almost pityingly beneath his unerring grin. "It would not surprise me if you had to win her trust twice over before she so much as began to listen to your philosophical musings, your reason. And there is a limit to how long before the two of you become a part of this dimension. You cannot taste idly of worlds and expect to emerge in all in one piece."

The fear had returned to Icarus's blue eyes as the words, Charon's silky voice, trickled under his skin, into his blood, through his veins. Sweat dampened his clammy skin, and when next he spoke his voice was hoarse.

"How long do I have?" he whispered, and Charon's pupiless eyes narrowed with satisfaction.

"A week," he declared, his face inches from that of the trembling man. "You have one week, Icarus."