by Melody Rose
Poseidon fell into a defensive position, his knees bent, as he pointed the trident outward before him, his eyes sweeping the room in search of any sign of me. It was time that I leveled the playing field in my favor a little bit.
Having spent so much of my life living within the confines of the underworld, I had grown quite accustomed to the darkness. Hidden within the shadows, creeping within the silence, I ruled supreme. I closed my eyes and waved my hand before me, sending an icy breeze throughout the room. One by one, as a thick fog rolled into the main hall, the sconces of Poseidon’s temple began to go out.
Poseidon raised a brow before pulling one hand away from his trident to snap his fingers and relight the sconces. When nothing happened, he snapped his fingers again. With every new snap, another sconce was extinguished. Finally, my brother stood in absolute darkness with only the faint glow of the bioluminescent algae around him.
“Coward!” My brother snarled as he lashed out blindly with his spear.
I stalked towards my brother in the darkness, silent as a shadow, watching as he lunged left and right unsuccessfully. With another flick of my wrist, I conjured a set of daggers. I waited until Poseidon swung his trident to the left before I lunged towards him and carved through his thick leather jerkin, slicing the delicate skin around his ribcage open.
Poseidon let out a cry of pain before bellowing like an enraged beast and whirling on his heel to where he assumed that I was hiding. But I was light on my feet and managed to dance around him swiftly and place another artful slice down his back. With my eyes accustomed to the overwhelming darkness, I watched my brother with profuse amusement as he lunged towards nothing once more.
I snuck to his right, all the while keeping my breathing steady and even, and drove the tip of one blade into his meaty thigh. Poseidon bellowed furiously, then slammed the end of his trident on the ground, sending a shockwave of bioluminescent algae raining down on us from the ceiling as the entire room shook from the brute strength of his rage. I stepped back and looked up at the ceiling with a feeling of dread.
The algae that rained down from above landed haphazardly on all surfaces, giving everything a distinct shape in the darkness. As Poseidon turned to face me, I could see that he was smiling. He could see me clear as day now.
With a thunderous boom, Poseidon lunged towards me again. I transformed my daggers into a large spartan shield and raised it up in defense as the trident came crashing into me. Sparks flew from the impact and skittered around the dark hall. Here and there, the sparks had begun to eat away at the tapestries. Before long, there were half a dozen small fires burning around the room.
“Tell me where Persephone is!” I howled again as I shakily held the shield against my brother’s spear. He chuckled as he continued to push his weapon towards me, the metal slowly giving away to the razor-sharp blades of his trident.
“I’ll tell you when you’re dead!” My brother snarled.
A sharp pang of pain shot up through my midsection, causing me to lose my balance. Poseidon laughed wickedly as he pushed the trident all the way through the shield and drove it straight into my left shoulder. An indescribable pain exploded from my newest wound as Poseidon knocked me off my feet and onto my back with a thud, pinning me onto the shattered tiles beneath us by my shoulder.
Blinding white pain ached through me as my brother stood over me and placed his foot on the head of the trident, driving the blades into my shoulder until they could go no deeper. I choked on my cry of pain as my brother leaned down with a victorious chuckle.
“You’re not half the man you think you are, Hades. You’re on my turf here. Did you really think you were going to stand a chance?” he laughed.
I gasped through the pain in my chest and shoulder as I reached up with both hands to grip the hilt of the trident. “I just wanted Persephone back. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
“Oh, but it does,” Poseidon snapped. “When father spat you out like a rotten carcass, you came back as a different person. You tried to kill us all more than once, you threw a hissy fit over having to rule that dank little shithole of yours, and now you’re starting to cause a whole shit storm over one stupid little bitch. And for what reason? Was the pussy that good?”
“Don’t you dare talk about Persephone like that!” I cried as I attempted to pull the trident out of my arm.
“Oh, so it was that good, huh? Well, I guess when I’m done here with you, I can find out how good her tight little pussy is for myself. Sound like a plan to you, big brother?” Poseidon cackled. I felt my body burning with rage as my eyes burst into bright blue flames. Poseidon’s laughing ceased as the flames slowly started to travel from my eyes down to the rest of my body until fire completely consumed me. He bared his teeth as I finally started to lift the blades out of my flesh.
“NO!” I roared. The force of my roar was enough to hurl Poseidon and his trident clear to the other end of the great hall and send a torrent of flames around us. The blue fire obliterated all of the tangerine flames from our prior collision with little effort as they consumed everything in their path. As the fire raged, I used my power to lift myself up off the ground and slowly stitch together my wound.
I could feel my abilities dwindling faster with every new wound that marred my body, but I couldn’t give up now. If I could hold on a little longer, Poseidon was sure to tell me what I wanted to know. And if not, then I would simply rip his tongue out from his throat and let him choke on his own blood. With my feet firmly back onto the ground, I summoned a sword to my hand.
Poseidon sat up from the ground, blood oozing from a large gash on his scalp. He narrowed his eyes at me as he climbed to his feet and hissed, “You’re dead.”
He extended his hand and flexed his fingers open wide, allowing his trident to fly back into his grasp. The moment that the silver staff touched his palm, four figures appeared on either side of him. They were transparent at first, allowing the raging cerulean flames that burned behind them to shine brightly through their watery corpses. But little by little, the water started to form four identical copies of my brother. Poseidon laughed darkly as his clones all fell into an offensive stance.
“Catch me if you can,” he hissed.
With lightning speed, Poseidon and his clones flashed themselves from one end of the room to another. With my waning powers and my level of injuries, I could scarcely focus on all five enemies, let alone one. I was going to have to just take my chances and attack each one individually until I located the right Poseidon.
The first Poseidon flashed before me, wordlessly bringing his trident in a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arch in an effort to slash at my chest. I jumped back quickly and parried the blow with my sword, then lunged forward, bringing my sword down at his neck in a diagonal swing. The blade cut clean through the clone, and he exploded into a half a million droplets of water.
The next clone came at me from my right. I swung my sword in an arc just in time to catch the blades of the trident. I glared at the mirror image of my brother with loathing as I took a swift side-step and drove my fist into his chest. Seeing as there was no heart for me to rip out, I simply ignited a cerulean flame in my palm and steamed the bastard from the inside out. Once he dissipated, I felt the sting of a trident in my left calf.
I fell to one knee with a sharp yelp as I grabbed hold of the trident’s blade and glared up at the clone from beneath my dark eyelashes. The clone flashed a grin before I smiled back and set the entire trident on fire. The blue flames made quick work of the spear and eagerly danced up the clone’s forearms until he too was engulfed in my hellfire. He, too, met the same fate as the previous clone.
The last clone attacked from behind, bringing his trident over my neck and squeezing towards him in an effort to crush my windpipe. I grasped up at the staff as I gagged, struggling to get a quick breath as my vision started to dim. Perhaps it was the fact that I was losing power quickly, but this clone of Poseidon seemed stronger than the other three.
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As the clone grunted from the effort and strain that he was using to choke me, I used all of my weight to drop into a low crouch while still holding onto the trident. The clone tumbled forward under my grasp, which allowed me to flip him over me and onto his back on the floor. He fell with a huff and stared up at me with large eyes as I stomped a large boot down onto his head, reducing to a puddle under my size twelve boots.
Before I could whirl around to face my brother, Poseidon drove the blades of his trident deep into my back. I gasped at the pain as blood oozed from my lips and from the triple wounds across the back of my shoulder blades. I collapsed onto my knees, struggling to take a breath of air without choking on my own blood, but to no avail. Poseidon threw his head back in laughter as he sauntered around me, leaving the trident impaled in my flesh.
“See what happens when you don’t listen, big brother? You end up getting yourself killed. I warned you to leave, didn’t I?” he snickered. I glanced up at my younger brother, my body slowly growing cold and numb from the overwhelming pain that devoured me whole.
“B-Brother….” I wheezed. Poseidon cupped a hand over his ear before he leaned forward mockingly.
“Speak up, Hades! I can’t hear you over your death rattle,” he laughed once more. “Oh, big brother… Who is going to watch over your little Persephone when you’re dead? Should it be me? Or should I let Zeus do it? You know, right now, he has her locked away with him at Eros’s shitty little club in the mortal realm. I bet he’s drilling her as we speak. Tell me, Hades, how does she sound when she moans?”
There it is, I thought to myself weakly. He just told me exactly what I needed to know. Now I can end this.
“Th-thank you,” I choked before I fell forward onto my hands. Poseidon reached forward and took hold of his trident, then painfully pushed it back so that it lifted me off my hands to look up at him.
“What did you just say?” he hissed. I smiled, flashing him a blood-coated toothy grin as I struggled to chuckle.
It was true what my brothers said about me. There had once been a time, very long ago, when a city full of humans had once become quite separated by their beliefs. On one side, half of the city had denounced all of the Gods and had refused to worship the mighty Olympians. On the other half of the city, those who had kept their faith had begged for the Gods to have mercy on them for their brethren turning their backs on the pantheon. Zeus was furious with the humans for their disrespect. In an effort to set up a major coup and reclaim my rightful place in Olympus, I had gone to my baby brother and told him that he needed to teach the humans a lesson; they needed to learn to fear us so they would never stray from their faith again.
At the time, I had a mighty creature at my disposal that could level the entire city in a single blow. He was a glorious beast. Zeus had agreed to my suggestion and allowed me to set loose my terror on the city. My beautiful Kraken had wrought absolute destruction on the town and consumed thousands. What Zeus didn’t know, however, was that my loyal beast was also a God-killer. And once he was done annihilating the humans of Ancient Greece, he would make his ascent to Olympus and destroy them too.
But I hadn’t taken into account that my brother had half a dozen bastard off-spring in the human world. His demi-god brat, Perseus, had destroyed my Kraken and saved the town, and I had fled Olympus in defeat, never to be seen again. However, while I hid away in my domain, I had created another Kraken, a female counterpart to the one Perseus had killed.
And she just so happened to live in the entrance to the underworld that was safely hidden beneath the Mariana Trench. I laughed once more as my eyes began to glow white. Using the little power that I had left, I sent out an emergency sonar to my beast. Poseidon, though he was the King of the Sea, was quite clueless to exactly what kind of sea life lived in the deepest and darkest shadows of the watery abyss.
“Why are you laughing!?” Poseidon roared, growing visibly more frustrated with each choked laugh. As if in response, a thunderous howl echoed throughout the entire ocean around us. My brother froze and looked up at the ceiling with terror hidden deep behind those deep blue eyes. “What the fuck was that?”
“I s-said,” I breathed, bringing my brother’s attention back to me, “thank you. Th-thank you for telling me wh-where to find Persephone.”
“No,” Poseidon hissed as he yanked the trident from my back. I hit the ground and landed on my right side as another roar shook the entire kingdom. “What the fuck did you do, Hades!?”
I laughed again, a little harder now that my body had slowly begun its intensive repairs before I whispered, “Release the Kraken.”
My brother had no chance to respond before my pet tore through the dome protecting his territory with minimal effort. Poseidon whirled around and held his mighty trident up defensively as the Kraken slunk into the opening and extended a large clawed tentacle towards the temple, effectively tearing the roof off. Water poured into the kingdom by the thousand gallons as my brother shrieked in terror at the glory of my creation. Like her brother, my Kraken was inexplicably large with hundreds of claw-tipped tentacles and glistening white flesh. Her eyes were red as rubies, and her mouth was lined with billions of lethal teeth that could consume anything.
Poseidon swung his trident in an effort to cull the rushing water, but my Kraken was faster. I hastily climbed to my feet and stepped back, already waist-deep in water, as my baby neared the temple, scooped up my brother in her grasp, and shoved him down her throat.
31
Persephone
I groaned as a light throbbing pain pulsed through my head and slowly blinked away the grogginess from my eyes. I looked down at myself and froze. What the hell was this? I was now wearing a powder-pink dress, and I was lying on a large bed with black satin sheets. What the hell was going on? How long had I been unconscious? The last thing I remembered was being on Olympus with my mother, Zeus, and Poseidon.
I glanced around at my surroundings.
The room was painted in a deep crimson with an impressively large golden chandelier hanging from the center of the ceiling. Sheer black curtains hung around the entire length of the king-sized four-poster bed that I was lying in. Lining the walls, hanging from numerous black tracks, were a multitude of sexual accessories. There were black whips, cat-o'-nine-tails, paddles, and even a paddle riddled with small metal spikes. At the far end of the room, there was a giant black “X” with four sets of restraints on either of its ends.
What the fuck? I thought to myself.
I brought my hand up to my nose in an effort to keep myself from breathing. The room, while it appeared to be clean on the surface, reeked of stale sex and urine. Sitting in a large black Victorian chair at the foot of the bed sat Zeus, wearing nothing but a loose pair of denim jeans and a disgusting smile.
Startled, I crawled back towards the headboard as Zeus leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “So, you’re finally awake.”
“Where the hell are we?” I snapped. Zeus chuckled as he rose to his feet and slowly sauntered around the bed towards me.
“You’re safe and sound with me,” he purred as he pulled aside the sheer curtains and climbed onto the bed. “You don’t have to worry about anything. I’m not going to let my big brother get you.”
I curled my lips back from my teeth and hissed with disdain. “Stay away from me.”
Zeus bit his lip as he raked his swirling silver gaze over my body. “Now, see, I can’t do that. I had the misfortune of finding out that Hades got a taste of you before I could. I can’t imagine that fucking that walking corpse was any good. Let me show you how a true king can make you feel, Persephone.”
I hadn’t a moment to reply before Zeus darted towards me and grabbed at my ankles with both of his hands. I screeched as he yanked me towards him, raising the pink tulle dress up as he did so. Zeus moaned low in his throat as he gazed down at the sight of my bare womanhood.
“NO!” I cried as I kicked in his grasp in an effort to free myself.
“LET ME GO!”
Zeus tightened his grip as he drew me closer and parted my legs, then positioned himself between them. In a last-ditch effort to be free of this monster, I reached up and grabbed at the pillows on the bed, then threw them at Zeus. He dodged each pillow with ease as he barked out in laughter. To both of our surprise, however, hidden beneath one of the pillows was a pair of metal handcuffs.
As Zeus continued to hold on to my ankles, I grabbed the handcuffs and threw them with all my strength. There was going to be absolutely no way in hell that I was going to allow this pig to touch me. The surprisingly heavy metal cuffs collided with Zeus’s mouth, and he was finally forced to let go of me as his hands flew to his face.
I didn’t wait.
I hopped off the bed and quickly darted towards the only door in the entire room. When I reached it, I grabbed onto the gilded golden handle with both hands and attempted to turn it. To my horror, the doorknob didn’t move. Not wanting to give up, I started to beat my fists against the door.
“Help!” I screamed as loudly as I could manage. “Someone let me out! Help me!”
“No one can hear you, baby,” Zeus said as he watched me with amusement from the bed. I glared at him over my shoulder to see a thin line of blood oozed from the center of his lip and down his chin. “The room is soundproof, and it’s got a very, very strong warding put up. No matter how loud you scream, no one is gonna hear it.”
“No,” I whispered in disbelief. “No, you’re wrong! Hades is going to find me here. He’s going to get me.”
“I doubt that,” he replied as he quickly appeared behind me. Before I could scream, Zeus wrapped his hand around my throat and squeezed tightly. “You see, my big brother has no idea where you are; Poseidon masked your scent while you were sleeping. In fact, I’m pretty sure that he’s already found Poseidon, and the two of them are duking it out.”
I gasped for air in his grasp as Zeus brought my face close to his, and he buried his nose into my cheek. He took a deep breath and sighed blissfully as I struggled to breathe.