Yeah. Yeah, okay, this is. Nice.

"—I should probably move on ahead though," he says after a while.

“Okay,” she agrees, just a trace sadly. She gives him a little squeeze. “But you can ask later if you’d like a hug, okay?”

"Yeah, okay."

She pulls away from the hug to look at him, “And, hey. I’m going to do my best to get you out too, okay? Within reason. I don’t want to break the Underworld completely open and let all of the dead and imprisoned dangers cause mayhem in the mortal realm, but. I thought about it. I will definitely yell at your dad and maybe literally fight him about it. Okay?”

He laughs.

"Alright. Onwards."

“Onwards!”

She melts back into a puddle of darkness and stars, and then hops back onto his shoulder. In the skulls.

Thanatos's first destination is a war camp on a plain, hidden by rocks. There are tents strewn about, with soldiers standing at attention at the edges of the encampment. He appears right in the middle of the encampment, and starts floating towards a specific tent. Despite his towering, ominous appearance, no one seems to notice him, even when he floats right by their faces.

Medical tent, probably. That'd be the obvious first destination for the personification of death. What she'd like to do is figure out a way to heal everybody in it and put Thanatos out of a job, but actually she doesn't... have the knowledge or the power to do that. Yet. And besides;

"They just go right back to killing each other if they recover from their injuries, don't they," she sighs.

"Such is the condition of mortals."

"What a damned waste. Thank you, for this. I know it probably sucks. Though, to be fair, the minute I figure out how, I'd like to put you out of a job."

"Death is inescapable."

He floats over to what does, indeed, seem to be the medical tent, larger than most others, and ducks his head to get in. Inside, various beds with patients in conditions of varied severity await, with medics flitting this way and that to take care of them, or writing documents, or just resting.

"Fine, then I'd like to make your job cushy and boring and meant only for extremely old people after long, fulfilling lives who want to move on to hanging out in the Underworld with all of the cool people," she sniffs.

Thanatos doesn't reply. Instead, he floats to one of the beds, where a particularly pale young man lies asleep. Although he is covered by a blanket, the volume of his body under it betrays the loss of one leg. His sickly visage seems like it would be sleeping fitfully if it had the energy for fits, but as it is he merely waits.

Thanatos lowers to the ground, dropping to one knee, and puts a hand on the boy's forehead. "It is time," he says, and the death knoll rings, disturbing none but the dead himself, whose eyes open suddenly.

    "Lord Thanatos?" asks the shade.

"You have fought well, and now you shall take your leave."

Yvette has the good grace and sense to not interrupt. Her tiny little mote of night just stays nestled on the top of his head, hidden by his hood and hair. Warm and small and hopefully some measure of comforting, for the one guy that has to watch every single mortal in the world die.

He offers the shade his hand, then stands up, pulling the man to his feet as well. "Hermes will be here soon."

The shade nods, trembling a bit, and Thanatos turns to leave.

Thanatos's head is very snuggled by this tiny warm mote of darkness.

"He doesn't tend to slack on the job, does he...?" murmurs Yvette, a little concerned for lost souls wandering around in the world.

Thanatos looks over his shoulder and nods in the direction of the shade to show that he is already gone.

"Oh, good." Head snug!

"Would you like conversation, music, or companionable silence?"

"I don't have much to talk about."

There's a frame skip and they are elsewhere. A small village, in front of a stone house.

"And I'm atrociously out of practice! But I can probably still chatter at you, if it wouldn't get on your nerves."

"I do not have nerves."

He floats up to the door and opens it, and the noises become sharper and resolve into a woman moaning loudly in pain.

Yvette thinks that statement is bullshit, but it's probably not productive to say so, so she doesn't.

"Hmm. I suppose you must have a high tolerance for things," she agrees.

For some reason, listening to someone moaning in pain sort of distracts from her ability to chatter.

    They move to a back room where a woman is in a bathtub, being helped by two other women. "Push harder," one of the women says, "I can almost see his head!"

"This might get uncomfortable," says Thanatos in his usual monotonic drawl. "She is not going to deliver the baby. I am meant to take both."

“Oh, fuck pre-industrial standards of medical care and child mortality rates,” she swears fiercely. She opens an eye to peer more closely at the scene before them. Is whatever’s going to go wrong obvious, and possible to maybe fix on a shoestring budget?

It's not obvious at first, but given that Thanatos probably did not take them to an hour before the actual deaths—and there it is, the first thing the woman manages to push out is not the baby's head. Or feet. Or anything else; it seems to be the umbilical cord.