It was a meaningless marriage, destined never to be consummated, yet that acceptance buoyed him immeasurably.

Perhaps he had, in his downfall, accomplished part of what he sought: to gain some improvement in the processing of good and evil from souls, minimizing the suffering of the mortals involved.

It could have been a second or a century, but it seemed closer to the former. Another visitor came to him. This one was neither woman nor spider, but rather a nebulous form reminiscent of the nature of the Void. It overlapped him, and then he recognized it.

Nox! The Incarnation of Night, she who knew all secrets and preserved most of them. Parry had not known she could navigate chaos, but it made a certain sense in retrospect. She was closest of all the Incarnations to that state herself.

"Here is what you lost."

Something touched his hand. Then the ineffable presence departed.

Parry considered what she had brought him. It was an almost invisibly thin line of a web, the kind a spider might spin. What had caused Nox to take the trouble to bring such a thing to him? What could be her purpose? She was aloof from most mortal and immortal concerns, and her business with him, by her own assessment, remained unfinished. Yet she had not chosen to complete it now.

Then he understood:

It was the thread!

He followed it. The thing was silken, perceptible only because he was attuned to it, hardly more than a thought.

But it led through the swirling randomness, even as Fate's thread had guided Niobe through the Void. It was the single aspect of diminished entropy in his vicinity. He followed its essentially uphill guidance.

As he made progress through chaos, some anomalous formulations occurred. There were shapes of objects in no particular order of classification. The outline of a rock drawn in pastel, a squashed beer can, the curve of a naked woman's hip, the stem of a rose, a crooked ray of starlight, the left eye of a harpy, a sprouting grain of wheat, one drop of rain, a purpling bruise on the shoulder of a rabbit, a torn page of a calendar marking Friday the thirteenth.

He passed it all, diverted by none of it, following the thread.

Then land appeared, a shore, and he was swimming in a disgustingly polluted stream. It was the River Acheron, the waters of woe that coursed around much of Hell proper, having no true egress. But it was familiar; now he knew approximately where he was.

He landed near the station of the three Judges, and there they were, dispensing the justice of the infernal region to arriving souls, classifying the difficult cases. Minos, formerly King of Crete, who had the Minotaur, the terrible offspring of his wife's passion for a bull. Rhadamanthus, his brother, noted for his fairness. Aeacus, formerly the King of Pydlia, noted for his piety. They were good judges, and Parry had left them in place, extending their authority.