by James Welsh
At that same moment, as Athena contemplated while digging her toes in the cool dirt of the road, the world thousands of feet beneath her had scratched back. There was a life beneath the world, a civilization that murmured and occasionally erupted geysers of magma. This life, this ecology, this home, though, was much cooler to the touch than you might think, tasting almost of frostbite.
It was the Underworld, the cellars of history, the eternal cemetery. The mortals above, in the real world, they either burned their loved ones’ corpses in the funeral fires, or they buried them in the fields or the seas. But that, all of that, was just an illusion. A pound of dirt can pin down a dead man’s hand, but it was like cloth to the soul, still breathable, still opaque. And so, as the bodies withered and rotted, the souls tried to wake up – they tried to live the lives they always had before. But, it was too late – the souls had lost their looks the moment they lost their bodies – to those around them, the spirits looked like little more than puffs of chalk, suspended in the air. Some mornings, when you walk outside and see a thick mist, you know that there had been a battle somewhere, if not here, then somewhere else.
And, as hard as the spirits tried to be free, the world was just a muscle stronger and had a more magnetic pull. And so, by the thousands every day, the souls of the departed had sank into the soil for good, passing through the dirt and worms and rock, until they reached the core of everything, the Underworld itself.
When they landed in the Underworld, the place where they could sink no more, the souls found themselves in a cavernous room, one so huge that it took twenty echoes to cross it. Still, the chamber was barely large enough to contain all of the fresh souls, recently arrived, the wisps assembling themselves into a long, winding row. From there, the souls marched, all through a narrow hallway at the far end of the room, which was a sloping slide, shallow yet so slippery the souls would have surely fallen if they still had feet.
When the souls reached the end of the sloping hallway, they found themselves in an even larger cave, one where the stalactites hung from the ceiling like chandeliers, where the stalagmites grew up from the ground, looking vaguely like marble statues. The newly arrived souls weaved between the statues carved of calcium, all until they found themselves at the shore of a river. It was not so much one river as it was a confluence, a splitting of one into dozens. Some of them flowed slowly, others briskly, but all of them were green and rotten from the inside-out, as if the souls were downstream of a catastrophe. Sometimes, the rivers even spontaneously caught on fire, and when they did they burned for days, weeks at a time, lighting up the entire cave by their putrid light alone.
As the souls gathered and crowded at the shores, they waited for the approaching ferry. There was only one ferry, and so many souls waiting, but the boat was slick on the waters. The ferry itself was obviously quick, given the talented ferryman – Charon himself was the fastest ferryman in history, and it helped that he had thousands of years of training. Though more bone than man, more shockwhite hair than youth, Charon still manned his daily chore as he always had – the alternative to the ferry was far worse. Charon would always remember the deal that he had made, on his deathbed so long before, that instead of dying, he would row the new souls into the Underworld. It was a fair trade – at least he thought so at the time. Because although he couldn’t die, he still decayed, and so as the years wore on, his skin sloughed off, his nose and ears fell off, his eyes began to mush and leak, and his teeth had all fallen out years before. But he couldn’t go back on his deal, even though he wanted to now. Some things could not be broken.
Charon threw some ropes and tied the ferry up to the splintering dock. The souls clambered onto the ferry until the boat became overloaded, because even souls weigh something. Each of the souls paid Charon their two golden coins – the coins their loved ones placed on their body at death, the coins they needed to pay for their passage – and a few minutes later, the boat began its travel across the sick river, to whatever was on the other side, waiting for them.
As the whole process was going on – the same as it had been for centuries – there was someone watching as the souls traveled across the river. Sitting on a balcony looming above the far shore, dug high up into the cave wall, barely noticeable, a creature stood. He looked down at the ferry as it plunged through the water towards the other dock. He smiled a little as the ship came down a little too hard after one wave, and a soul slipped on the deck and fell into the water. The soul tried to swim, but it had no real arms to speak of, and so its dust sank beneath the currents in a few moments, never to be seen again, lost.
Hades laughed – it was his usual short and bitter chuckle, more of a hyena’s gasp than anything else. The god – the rich and powerful Ruler of the Underworld – turned his back on his new subjects and strode back into his royal bedroom. As immaterial and vague as the Underworld felt, he as a god was very much real. With his long brown hair combed back, his rustling beard scraping against his chest, and his silvered eyes with just a glint of scarlet, Hades was the concrete alone that kept his kingdom of spirits glued together.
But, as strong as he was, Hades had desperation as his muscle. It had just been a few days before that Hades had lost his wife, his own wife, and all because of his brother Zeus. The marriage began less than a year before, when Hades was swimming in an underground stream, washing off a cake of grime and dust. And somewhere – Hades wasn’t sure where, because the stream broke into a series of tunnels and everything echoed from all directions – somewhere he heard someone singing. It was a beautiful sound, perhaps the most beautiful that Hades had ever heard – it reminded him of happier days, when he was younger and singing because he was young.
Eagerly, Hades stopped bathing and began to storm through the tunnels, the water splashing beneath his heavy footsteps. The tunnel began to dry beneath him, though, and he found the tunnel rising up towards the surface. And the singing was getting louder and louder, so much so that he could almost make out the words. Up ahead, there was a tiny burst of light – Hades’ jog turned into a feverish dash, and the burst of light became an explosion, expanding in front of him like a loaf of bread.
And suddenly, all was bright around him. Hades blinked hard, his hand to his face, trying to adjust to the blinding brightness of the outside world. It had been so long since he left the dim Underworld, so long that he almost forgot there was anything else. Yet there he was, the god of death in a field of life, where birds sang and the long grass swayed either with life or the wind. Hades recoiled from the fertility that laid siege to him, and he almost jumped back into the hole (which was a sinkhole, possibly formed by torrential rain just a week before) when he heard the songs once more.
Hades spun about, almost dizzied, and that was when he saw her: she was walking through the field, her back to him, still singing, her short oak-colored hair bouncing with every step. It would be the first, and only, time that Hades would ever fall in love – he knew that, even then.
No longer the cool and withdrawn god he always was, Hades felt like a mortal fool, and so he ran towards her. The woman was so caught up in her song – Hades thought he heard the song before, the lyrics having something to do with the fall harvest – that she did not hear the rushed footsteps behind her. She didn’t know until two hands sprang around her, one hand covering her mouth, the other wrapped around her waist. The woman desperately tried to struggle, but it was no use as Hades effortlessly plucked her off the ground and ran back to the sinkhole, with the woman at his side, unwilling.
It was a stupid moment, dangerous. There was not only the injustice behind the kidnapping, but there were politics to the crime as well. But it wasn’t until Hades brought the woman back to his underground palace that he heard her story. The woman wasn’t mortal, but instead the goddess (and Hades’ niece) Persephone, who was daughter to Demeter, herself the goddess of all things fertile. Hades wanted to scream like one of those mortal children whom he always h
ated. That he kidnapped a woman was serious, that he kidnapped a goddess, amongst the royalty of the world, was worse. It would only be a matter of time until Hades’ sister Demeter would find out about her daughter’s desperation. Once that happened, she would protest to Zeus – as Hades knew she always did – and Zeus would have to demand back Persephone.
Any other god would have returned Persephone, just to avoid a crisis of consequence, but Hades was greedy, even by a god’s standard. The vast pile of money that collected in his treasure room – the tolls demanded from souls ferried into the Underworld – that was not enough. Hades would have paid for Persephone’s love with all of that gold – its shimmer what lit his palace through the eternal night underground – but he knew Zeus would not allow it. It was not so much that Zeus wanted peace as much as he wanted order. Zeus had been the tyrant for as long as Hades was his brother. When they had overthrown their Titan parents and the world was finally theirs, Zeus, Hades, and their brother Poseidon all stood on a mountaintop and divided the world. Zeus had convinced Hades with the Underworld (“It’s a kingdom of its own, brother, one where you answer to no one but yourself”) and Hades believed him for the last time.
And so, when a massive eagle squeezed through the crevices of the earth, landing with a royal pomp in the window of his palace, Hades’ fury began. Zeus obviously refused the mountains of gold that shone behind Hades, instead asking for Persephone.
Hades snarled in his low voice. “She’s in my world now, Zeus. Those who enter can never leave. You know that.”
Zeus shrugged, as if there was nothing he could do. “She’s a goddess, my brother. She can come and go as freely as I can.”
Zeus looked past Hades, at Persephone who was hiding in the corner. She had only been in the palace of the dead for a short while, but she would be scared for centuries because of it. Zeus asked soothingly, “Don’t you want to leave, child?”
“Very much so, Zeus.”
“Then come with me.”
Zeus extended a hand to Persephone, who began to creep out of the shadows, entranced by the warmth in the Father God. But Hades, without even thinking of it, swatted Zeus’ hand away. The King turned, not sure whether to be shocked or angered.
“How dare you challenge me, Hades? If she wants to leave, there is nothing you can do about it. Besides, why would the daughter of everything fertile want to live with a prince of death?”
Hades shook – he wanted to hurt Zeus somehow. But he still remembered the last time Zeus threw a thunderbolt, and how it rattled the world for days – and he saw then how Zeus’ hand gripped the sheathed bolt at his side. Hades was immortal, yes, but ironically the Underworld was very much alive. All it took was one shatter of the thunderbolt and the entire realm could cave under the tons of limestone from above. Hades bared his teeth, but only a friendly “Of course, Zeus, if she chooses” came out.
Persephone walked towards the pair of brothers, but slipped past the expecting Hades and slinked under Zeus’ arm. From beneath the blanket of Zeus’ arm, she gazed back at Hades, wild-eyed, terrified that the prince would grow insane.
And, although a look of shock snapped in Hades’ eyes, a new insanity swept through him, something that Persephone had never seen before.
Hades crooned, “Well then, before you leave, Persephone, won’t you do me the honor of trying these pomegranates? I plucked them from a tree in my garden earlier.”
Persephone was hesitant about accepting anything from Hades. Not once since she was captured had she asked for a morsel or a drop from him. Hades seemed like a creature that would season his food with poison. But Zeus, without thinking, spoke up for her.
“Yes, I imagine that she would like to have them. Wouldn’t you, Persephone?”
He took some of the pomegranate seeds from Hades and offered them to the young goddess. When Persephone still refused to eat, Zeus whispered, “It would be poor manners to refuse a gift from your host, no matter what he has done to you.”
Zeus said this, not really believing in the rule of hospitality – even though he was the patron of guests – but he did not want to offend Hades and ignite something far worse between the two brothers. So, with Zeus’ encouragement, Persephone gingerly took the pomegranate seeds one by one and put them in her mouth, slowly chewing. As she chewed, a glint of something passed once more through Hades’ eyes and he almost began to smile, though he contained himself. He said, a little too eagerly, “Perhaps you should try some as well, my brother. I think you will love them.”
Zeus, always the glutton for more food, was happy to oblige. He took one of the seeds and almost bit down on it before he stopped. Horrified, Zeus threw down the seeds, scattering them across the coldstone floor. He spun towards Persephone and commanded in a terrible voice, “Spit them out, child, spit them out!”
Hades could no longer help himself. He burst out laughing at the sight and it took him a few moments to recover. As a bewildered Persephone tried to cough up the seeds, a panicked Zeus watching her, Hades could finally say, “You forgot, Zeus! No one can eat the fruit of my kingdom and escape! The Fates made that law years ago. The girl is my guest, she has accepted my gift of the pomegranate seeds, and she will have my hospitality, for as long as I rule!”
And it was so, and Zeus could not fight the twist, for even the Olympians had to bow before the Fates, those spinners of all fates and destiny. Since Persephone had eaten six of the pomegranate seeds before she discovered the trick behind the gift, she was forced to live as a guest with Hades for six months of the year. During those six months, her mother Demeter wept, because she loved her daughter as much as she hated Hades, the god of decay. And so Demeter, the goddess of fertility, became cold with vengeance, and the whole world froze with her in those bitter months. Only when those six months had passed, and her daughter was back in her arms, that Demeter’s world warmed and brightened again.
It had been the same heartbreak every year since.
But even that conquest was not a triumph for Hades. It was only six months of the year that he had his lovely Persephone in his arms. The other six months, he was left to his own imagination, which was little, and his kingdom, which was vast but felt empty. And so, instead of counting the days until Persephone was forced back to him, Hades instead counted the days since she was snatched away from him. It had been five days since Hades had lost his wife.
“How can my brother do this to me!” Hades roared, picking up a handful of gold coins lying on the floor and scattering them across the room. “What right does he have to my kingdom!”
It was true, at least it was to Hades. And so his anger grew, and even worse, it knew no bounds. To him, Persephone’s leave was no less than a mortal losing their loved one. And, because he heard their funeral cries from above so well, and because the line of souls across the river never slackened, Hades felt not so much comforted as justified by the sheer numbers.
Hades walked to the end of his bedroom, where a series of statues were perched. Each of the statues was carved to look like an Olympian – they were given as a present when Hades first became Ruler of the Underworld, so that he would not forget the family of which he was once a part. But that love seemed ugly now – to Hades, the statues seemed mocking, as if to say, “Remember, these are the gods you are meant to serve. Don’t forget them.”
Hades walked past the row of them, until he found the one he wanted: Zeus. Hades walked around the statue of his brother, looking for some sort of weak spot in his armor, some limp, some anything that could finally down the King God. But Hades could not find any weakness, but he was expecting that.
But everyone, even a god, can fall sometime. Hades knew that because he remembered the last time he spoke to his brother like an actual brother. It was centuries before, actually just before Hades was fatefully given the Underworld to rule. Ironically, the Olympians had been fighting their parents, the Titans, because Zeus and his brothers and sister
s felt powerless. And their Titan parents were so vast yet so ignorant. The mortal world at that point was filled with volcanoes and deserts and tundra and salty oceans. There was no life, because the Titans had no imagination to create life, and so the mortal world burned and froze. But the young Olympians had a child’s imagination, and they saw a world in their minds teeming with creatures, a landscape gusty and crowded with life. But the Titans refused to change their world, and they only became more insulted with every suggestion from their Olympian children. And finally, the heavens came to civil war, as the old generation fought the new. And it was Hades himself (at least, that’s what Hades thought) who was responsible for winning that war for his siblings. The night before the battle that decided everything, Zeus asked Hades to sneak into the Titans’ camp and steal their weapons. And so Hades put on his cap of invisibility, a gift from his rare kind uncle Oceanus, and vanished from sight but not touch. He snuck into the camp that very night, and he put all of the Titans’ swords and shields and axes into a massive bag, and he left with them. The next morning, the Titans surrendered, and Zeus dictated the terms.
As Hades remembered, he could have sworn he had heard a distant clanging coming from somewhere, somewhere even deeper than the Underworld, even though that should have been impossible. But Hades knew what that sound was, and it was the only thing that could make him, the Prince of the Dead, shiver – and he did shiver.
He forced himself to think again about Zeus, and the injustices that his brother had committed against him over the years. For so long, Hades had been accepting all of those crimes without question – whether Zeus was vouching for a soul’s extra years in the mortal world, or Zeus wanting to ‘borrow’ a bag of gold coins – but this, this was different to Hades. Zeus had walked into Hades’ home and demanded back Persephone, all that Hades had held dear.
And that was when an idea took a hold of him. It gripped him so harshly that he suffocated, the words coming out of him in a hoarse gasp: “Of course. Of course.”
It was a dangerous idea, but it had to be.
Hades strode out of his room, walking towards the main chamber of the underground palace, all the while going over the ideas in his head. He would go and visit the Fates – yes. He would ask for their help in destroying Zeus – yes. He would turn the order of the world upside-down, he would rise above Mount Olympus and take back all of his rights – yes. He would become the King he was meant to be, one who was never challenged, one who had his own Queen, all to himself. Yes, yes, yes.
The main chamber of the palace was vast and empty. Hades never kept any guards or entourage in his palace – what was the point? He was the most solid being in the Underworld. If a soul attacked him, like the occasional one did, it was nothing more than a breath on his neck. Hades woke up every morning, never afraid of a coup, never afraid of a knife pressed against his neck like many kings secretly are.
That said, while he didn’t have guards, Hades still kept around a favorite of his. As he walked through the dim chamber, his feet crushing tossed bones beneath him, Hades remembered. He went to the side of the chamber, where there was a massive pile of corpses, their skin long since sloughed off, their insides now outside, rotting away. Hades used to hate the smell, but that was millennia ago. He grabbed what looked like the freshest body and dragged it behind him, the corpse’s blood trailing, soaking the floor scarlet.
Up ahead, Hades could hear a deep-throated growl in the darkness. He smiled and picked up the bloated body with one hand, and he tossed it into the darkness. There was a moment of silence, then a scream of delight as Cerberus bit into the meal. The lumbering, three-headed dog had been guarding the palace for almost as long as Hades lived there. Born to a normal dog in the mortal world above, Cerberus was a mutation, a freak of nature, having been born with two extra heads. When its mother abandoned him, Hades took him as a pet, feeding him corpses of the fallen and leftover ambrosia. And so Cerberus grew monstrous and immortal – although eating the diseased bodies for centuries would drive any other creature mad, Cerberus celebrated his rabies. He loved the nonsense of the moment, almost as much as Hades did. It was no wonder, then, that during the months that Persephone was ripped away and put back in the world above, Hades treated Cerberus as his only friend for miles and miles around.
“I’ll be back, Cerberus, don’t you worry,” Hades said soothingly, patting the dog through the darkness, feeling the dog’s muscle as it peeked through the patchy fur.
Hades left the palace, the massive stone doors swinging open silently and automatically before him. As he walked along the trail towards the River Styx, the massive river of sewage and death that separated the Underworld from everything else, Hades kept going over the plan in his head. Hades found that the more he thought about it, the more it made sense to him. He made it to the shore as soon as Charon’s ferry landed. Hades pushed his way through the swarm of souls gliding off the boat. He sat down in a seat at the front, and he turned to Charon and said in his always-harsh voice, “Start back. Hurry.”
A rare look of emotion swept over Charon’s ruined face as he hastily turned the ferry around and began the long trip back across the river, towards the other shore. Bored, Hades reached into his robes and pulled out a plain leather headband, twirling it between his fingers. The headband looked simple enough, perhaps too simple, until Hades would put it on his head. The second he would do this, the god would vanish from sight. When his uncle Oceanus gave him the Cap of Invisibility as a gift so many years before, the greedy Hades asked why it was so simple, indistinguishable from any other piece of leather.
“What if I lose it?” The young Hades demanded.
“You won’t lose it, trust me,” Oceanus laughed, like he always did. “Thieves steal things that only look beautiful, never things that actually are beautiful.”
What Oceanus said to Hades then didn’t make much sense, and it still didn’t make sense years and years later.
Hades felt drops of liquid on him, and he looked up at the ceiling of the cave, a ceiling that seemed so far away, but it was as close as each of those drops. No, it wasn’t raining in Underworld – it wasn’t rainwater as much as it was libations. The grieving from above would pour their best drinks into the soil, honoring their fallen. Hades used to love tilting his head back and drinking the juices that seeped through the cracks in the ceiling. But he was older now, and the drink had long since lost all taste.
The moment the boat touched the shore, Hades leapt out of the boat, landing on the dock. He began to walk, then snapped his fingers and turned back to his ferryman. “I almost forgot.”
There was a soul gliding past Hades, preparing to board the ferry for the other side, where his eternity awaited. The bit of change that the spirit held onto, the coins jingling about in his blustery hand, it was just enough to pay for the passage. Yet Hades, without even thinking, took the coins from the spirit without a moment’s hesitation, and he gave the coins to Charon instead.
“Thank you, Charon,” Hades said. “I’ll be back in a few days.”
And Hades left, abandoning the grieving soul to the shores of the River Styx. As heartless as that was – taking the coins from the poor spirits to pay Charon for his own passage – Hades never thought of how much those coins were worth to those spirits. And, even if he had, he would have reasoned away the cruelty: just as he was denied his Penelope, so too did everyone else deserve the same. Besides, anticipation was the end of all things – there was nothing after.
To that spirit in particular, belonging to a body named Anastasius in the world above, that money had meant the world and more. It was just a week before that the shade was a man who could feel and be felt, an aging farmer who kissed his wife every time he left for the market, as if he would never see her again. This time, though, it was she who would never see him. That night, when Anastasius came back from the market – hiding behind him some fine wool his wife had wanted for the
longest time – he found the door of their hovel kicked open. Rushing in, the poor farmer found his wife slumped in the center of the only room, her forehead bloody, her leg bent at a terrible angle. Anastasius screamed unearthly and crouched over his wife – he tried to shake and cradle her back to life, but it was too late, it was no use. In his moment of never-ending grief, Anastasius plunged into his bag and pulled out a knife that he used to protect himself on his trips. His first thought was to hunt down the bandit that killed his wife, to teach him pain in all of its shapes and colors. But he knew the thief’s death would not bring his wife any closer to him – and so Anastasius held the knife above where his heart beat like madness – and he drove the blade into his chest until he couldn’t anymore. As he collapsed to the floor, the last thing he saw was his wife’s eyes closed. He hoped that when he saw her in the Underworld – and he could only hope he saw her soon – he would see her eyes opened again, those cool blues, infinite like the sky only wishes it could be.
But now that dream had been denied. Anastasius screamed and raged at the injustice, but all that Hades ever heard was a rustle of wind behind him. All of the other shades heard Anastasius, though, because they were like Anastasius, and in a few moment, all of the shades in earshot rasped together until even Hades could feel a strong spring breeze.
Yet Hades ignored them still. That was because in the Underworld, all of the spirits had long lost their faces, their fingers, their toes, and their breath. They had left all of those features in the world above, in their graves, their funeral pyres, their seas. The only way a shade could recover those looks was by returning to the mortal world, where their looks rotted and composted in the soil. But no shade had ever returned to that world, and so no shade ever regained themselves, and so the renewal was nothing more than imagination.
In the Underworld, there was no real life after death.
And Hades never admitted it, but he felt much the same when he was in that world with those wispy creatures. It was only when he was in the world above that he felt the old traces of life, but like winter changing to spring, it was painful, it was crawling, it was prickly. The pain was enough that Hades almost wanted to turn back into the Underworld each time he left it. But, as he walked up a long and steep tunnel towards that world, and as the loud wails of the shades dimmed behind him, he thought he heard a new sound: Persephone’s old songs. The music stung him to tears. Worse, Hades knew that she wasn’t there – at least, she wasn’t there yet – but those old memories of her were enough to push him into the future.
Book 5