by James Welsh
It was all too late, though.
On a jagged island of rock just off the coast of southern Greece, there was a vicious-looking volcano. The volcano was just as charred as the rocks it was plastered in, the whole island looking like death because it was death. The volcano had been sleeping for generations, and no one ever remembered it waking up. But it was stirring awake now – the volcano’s mouth spat out boulders that sailed through the air and splashed into the sea around the island. A deep steam was also coming from the volcano, like someone exhaling hard on a winter’s frozen day.
People from the mainland could see the volcano clearly – they looked on in horror as more and more steam, then smoke, then ash, began to boil up into the heavens. The sun was changing colors in the sky, first yellow then orange then a crimson red. The ash gathered in the sky, distorting the sun – people who looked at the sun swore they saw the red sunlight dripping down like blood.
And then the world seemed to split open.
There was a lion’s roar as the volcano gasped. A massive, billowing cloud of darkness erupted into the sky. Some people on the mainland turned and ran – they didn’t know where to run to, but they knew they had to run. But there were those who stood still and watched, mesmerized, as the storm grew above the volcano. It wasn’t until the cloud of pitch was the size of a city when those people knew they had to run, now.
But it was too late for those who stayed behind. The vast, deep cloud slipped down the volcano and began sailing across the water, towards the mainland. The waves of smoke and ash washed over the shores, and the cloud reached the first of what would be many villages. People in their homes had just enough time to look out their windows and scream as the dust exploded through any window, any open door, any crack in the foundations that it found. It wasn’t long until the entire village was lost in the darkness, the ash filling every pore. When the cloud rolled over the land, the village was no longer blanketed with black but white. Several feet of ash had snowed down on the village, and nothing moved – nothing would ever move in that village again.
As the storm moved through the plains and the valleys, sculpting the landscape with dirty ash, the cloud cried. Anyone who got close to the storm and somehow survived the slaughter saw that the cloud was far from ordinary. The storm was actually thousands, perhaps millions, of shades, writhing and clawing about the soup of soot. The shades were crying from frustration – when they were asked to join in the invasion, the shades accepted. They wanted to be a part of the world again, the world they had lost when each of them had died. But now, as they looked down at the path of ash that they made, they saw nothing but death. They were reducing the living world into the land of the dead, where nothing crawled and nothing breathed. And so, while the shades thought they were finally leaving the Kingdom of the Dead, they were actually bringing the kingdom with them wherever they went. It was then that they realized they could never escape their deaths, no matter how hard they tried.
Some of the shades even recognized the living below. The shades fluttered down from the cloud, wanting to hug their loved ones once again. But when the shades hugged their family and friends, they pulled away to see their loved ones gasping for air before collapsing. The shades wept over the people they hugged to death, their ashes a lukewarm blanket over the bodies.
The invasion quickly became too successful, and the shades did not want to march ahead anymore. They wanted to return to the Underworld, where they could not hurt and spread death any more. But as much as the shades wanted to turn and fly away, they couldn’t – that was because Hades was at the front of the cloud. The shades had to move wherever Hades wanted them. The King of the Dead was hovering in the head of the cloud, the shades holding him up with their ashy wings as they flew. While the shades were in agony over the destruction they were causing, a smile began to take over Hades’ face. While the shades only saw others’ deaths, Hades only saw his life. Every acre of land covered in ash was another parcel of land to add to his kingdom. And another addition to his kingdom meant more control for Hades. Soon, the whole world would be enveloped in ash and death, and then Hades would be the master of all.
Buoyed by the thought of conquest, Hades turned to the swirl behind him and roared, “Push on! Soon, this will all be ours! And no one can stop us then!”
And since Hades commanded it, the shades did it. Hades turned the cloud towards the shoreline, where there was a thick wind going north. Once the wind hit the shades, the army picked up speed as it was dragged deeper into Greece. The shades watched with sadness as fishermen along the shore choked to death on the ash that thundered past. But Hades was thrilled when he saw the collapsed bodies in the boats below – every person dead just meant another soldier for his army. And so, as the living gave, the dead took.
What the living gave, the immortals also lost. The mortals watched as their decades of life were lost in a matter of a few minutes, for some, seconds. At first, they didn’t know who to blame for their tragedies. But it did not take long for the mortals to begin blaming the immortals for the disaster rolling through the land. The immortals were supposed to be there to protect the mortals from harm, and yet they had failed something that for them should have been easy. And so the mortals spat in the rulers’ faces – the lesser gods were the first to feel their worship slipping away. The centaurs and the tree-gods in the forests, the nymphs in the seas, and the harpies in the skies, they all screamed as their worlds closed in around them. But there was nothing that they could do – their mortal subjects simply refused to believe in something that caused them so much harm. The rebellion in the mortal hearts grew tremendously and went through the land like a plague. If it reached Olympus before Hades did, it was possible that the mountain would collapse.
And so, further up shore, Hades began to become even greedier. Initially, his plans were simple: he was going to invade and conquer the entirety of the mortal world, and make the gods atop Olympus surrender. Hades would make sure that the terms of surrender included exile for the gods – once the gods were banished from the world, then Hades would become the true master of everything. However, he could not wait that long for that plan to unfold. He wanted to be the one who torn down Mount Olympus – he refused to let anyone else have that honor.
And so he began to devise a new plan. He turned once more to the shades around him and commanded, “Lower me down the world! I also need a formation to follow me!”
A pack of shades lowered Hades down to the sandy beach below. The moment Hades touched the gritty sand, the shades that lowered him began to gather around his neck. The shades began connecting with one another, interlocking until they formed a long, flowing cape behind Hades. The cape stretched for almost a mile behind him – it felt addicting to wear the darkness, and he wondered if this was how the night felt when she washed over the world.
Book 15