Instead, Thanatos caught Maci and company off guard by striking out - ''not'' at any of them in the palace, but at the goddess [[Lethe]], seemingly out of the blue. During the many gaps of time Maci'd lost to unconsciousness during her pregnancy with Neo, Tory had undertaken a project of his own and worked with Lethe to locate the three goddesses Thanatos had terrorized and vanished before he'd dated Maci. [[Sophie]], [[Hess]], and [[Amey]]. When he had found them, injured and traumatized, Lethe had assisted in helping them voluntarily erase the worst of their memories of what Thanatos had done, allowing them to start anew. With Tory and Maci safely in Elysium, and the Styx oath he'd sworn to leave the palace untouched, he had lashed out in (what Maci assumed was) his revenge and come after non-palace resident Lethe with his scythe. As they sought medical attention for her, they rationalized that Thanatos must have assumed that Lethe was a "safe" person to attack; that since she didn't live within the palace, she didn't fall under the umbrella of his Styx oath. Tory and Maci summoned the Furies nevertheless. Lethe was an ''ally'' of the palace, and surely this counted as a violation. The Furies agreed.

The Furies set after Thanatos with the assurance that he would quickly be found - and he was, arrested safely away in Tartarus for breaking his oath. Once they had dropped him off and left, Maci and Tory arrived in Tartarus to process and interrogate the Underworld's newest prisoner - information about any pending evil plans, the whereabouts of the child he'd just created, et cetera. They had left Neo (now about three months old) in the care of her newly immortal uncle Jesse to babysit. But speaking to the imprisoned Thanatos... something was not right, as his demeanor seemed different than what they, Maci especially, had come to expect from him. The reason for the dissonance became quickly apparent - for the deity that the Furies had arrested was ''not Thanatos.'' [[Eris]], pseudo-Olympian Goddess of Chaos, known shapeshifter, and a longtime friend of Thanatos himself, had disguised herself into his form to throw the Furies off his tracks. Confused and furious, Maci and Tory summoned the Furies back to the jail. The Furies were madder than they were at being tricked and took over this new interrogation - had she been the one to stab Lethe, coincidentally her own daughter, as as a boon for Thanatos, too? More urgently, ''Thanatos was still on the loose,'' and in this chaotic mess, the reason for all of this confusion and deception became quickly apparent when Maci and Tory felt themselves being beseeched by an unfamiliar patron. Vanishing to answer the call, they found themselves teleported to Jesse's side.

In the moments of panic that followed, what with Neo missing and Jesse grievously injured ''and pregnant'', the stun curse from Chal faded and Jesse awoke. He choked out the confirmation of what they all already knew: Neo had been taken by Chal and Thanatos, who'd ambushed and attacked him after somehow getting through the barrier, beseeching Maci and Tory as they left so they'd find the aftermath faster. Maci only needed to hear this once, and she did not think twice about her next moves. Consumed by complete mama bear rage, Maci vanished to find her daughter, and take Thanatos apart with her bare fucking hands.

''(An addendum - as Maci rushed to find Neo, Tory stayed back with Jesse cradled in his arms and before he could do a single thing about Jesse's injuries, the two of them watched together in utter shock as his wounds knit back together seamlessly. As it turned out, Jesse's newfound divinity came with a special new power of healing and regeneration, both for him and, in this moment, absorbing of course Jesse's own ichor in utero, his unborn baby. What a horrific way to discover this! But Jesse was fine.)''