That was how Danny came to realize that someone who knew his situation was trying to pass messages to him. After a couple of days, he realized that the pertinent emails all seemed to come from three senders, none of whom he recognized: [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].

All three of these referenced classical women who went to the land of the dead and returned. Well, Isis didn’t go to the land of the dead—rather she gathered up the fragments of Osiris’s murdered body—murdered by Set—and put them all together. Lacking only one piece, his penis, she made one out of gold, attached it to his corpse, and then brought Osiris back to life by the use of a spell she had learned from their father, the earth god Geb. He lived only long enough to impregnate her with Horus, though he continued to be worshipped as the god of the dead, among many other things.

The other two women, though, were definitely taken down to the land of the dead. Eurydice stepped on a snake and died from its bite, and her husband, Orpheus, went to Hades to retrieve her. He sang so sweetly that Hades’ heart was softened and he allowed Orpheus to take her home. Some versions of the story included a don’t-look-back warning, which mythic people always ignored, and so Eurydice was snatched back to Hades until Orpheus himself died.

Persephone, though, was particularly interesting because she was rescued from Hades by Hermes—the traditional name for gatemages in the Greek Family. Of course, Persephone wasn’t really one of the original Westilian names, because her cult was practiced around the Aegean long before any of the Indo-European tribes arrived. Hades’ kidnapping of her was sometimes viewed as a symbol of the conquest of the female-deity-worshipping Aegean by the male-deity-worshipping Pelasgians or Phrygians or Danae or Hellenes or whatever name the first Indo-European invaders used.

But because the Earth wept and suffered with Persephone in the underworld, Zeus decreed that she must come back to the surface. Hades, having tricked her into eating six pomegranate seeds, was able to make her come back to the land of the dead for six months of the year. All very just-so, but it mattered that Hermes was the messenger that Zeus sent to Hades to bring her back to the surface.

Though the three addresses were different, the emails all repeated the same kind of subject line. First it was, “Take me home and find out what I know.” Then, “You can be a god if you follow me into the shadows.” And finally, “I’m old enough to decide. Don’t make me go home alone.”