Chapter 15

Chapter

Fifteen

H ades

Gray clouds, thick with the threat of a storm, conceal the sun as a cool wind whips over a barren land untouched by growth. It has been cursed to exist, eternally out of reach of the sun. The same storm that bleeds threat into the ominous sky scents the air, always threatening, never passing.

In the distance, a small hut crafted of thin wood planks stands rickety against the howl of the wind. My ears pick up on a high, constant whistle as the whipping wind slithers between the cracks in the wood of the hut. If the heavy clouds ever loosed the rain they keep, he might have been able to slap mud over the slivers between the wood to silence that high, maddening whine. Such a thing would have been a reprieve he does not deserve.

My shoes crunch over dry, cracked land that begs for moisture that will never come. Not here. Not in this world. Not for him.

Red lightning arcs in the sky, reminiscent to the blood I’ve bled into this land. This canvas. It flashes again, striking the land just outside the hut’s door. The whiplash of the strike is loud, and I can tell by the curse of my name that follows, it’s a constant and yet unpredictable thing. By design, of course.

Something smashes inside the hut, and wood splinters.

I smile.

“Hyperion,” I call, letting the wind carry my voice to the Titan who hides inside. A Titan crafted to possess the golden glow of the sun, the light of life. The same glow I’ve seen reflected in the eyes of my wife reborn.

The rickety door bangs open, wood splintering and falling to the dry earth before I see the Titan. His once golden hair is now bleached of all color, his tan skin as white as an arctic snow, and thin enough that I can see the dark silhouette of his ebony bones. The bones that mark our lineage as Gods. His eyes, once sky blue, are the color of the gray clouds above when they land on me. Hatred spills into his faded eyes, the branches of it growing from roots established long ago.

“Hades.” My name is a growl. A curse. A threat. “Has this new world failed you so quickly?” His lip curls, cracking like the dry earth beneath his bare feet. Red blood beads over the crack, reminiscent to the arc of ruby in the stormy sky. “Your weakness grows.”

I let my hands slide into my pockets, letting my gaze drift over the rags that try and fail to conceal his windblown flesh from the violent world of my creation. Before this world dies, those windblown rags will turn to dust, scattering like ash in the wind.

“Whether you remain in this world or not, Hyperion, is entirely up to you.”

Interest arcs like lightning in his angry eyes. He laps at the blood of his cracked lips with a dry, nearly shrivelled tongue. He rasps, “I’m listening.”

“I am here for information.”

Rags lash at thin flesh like a whip, scoring marks of red into the pale of Hyperion’s bony legs as he dares a step closer. “Information regarding?”

“A child,” I say cautiously. “A girl.”

Hyperion cocks his head. Even through the pale, thin flesh of a wasted Titan, his once magnetic features bleed through. “Who is this child?”

My teeth grind as the wind gusts, pushing pebbles over a crusted, water-starved land. I don’t wish to tell him this, but bound to this world of isolation, there is no one he could tell, even if he wished to speak. “Persephone.”

His eyes flash with much more than interest now. “She has been reborn?”

Gossip always spreads. Before I’d kept the Titans bound to their own personal prisons within my art, they’d roamed the fires of Tartarus, not unreachable by the chatter that traveled the lands of the Underworld.

I still recall the way they’d roared their rejoice at her brutal death. The celebration of enraged Titans had split the land of Tartarus for new rivers of magma to flow. It had been so loud, so raucous, souls felt it in Asphodel City as a quake in the land. A first of its kind, and what I would come to learn was the first instance of my prison realms’ failure to contain the beasts that roamed in wait for their day of destruction.

I admit, “She has.”

“And you’ve found her.”

I don’t see the point in telling him she found me. That she heard the call of my soul, the torment I suffered without her. That, despite the impossibility of it, she sought me .

“Yes.”

Hyperion narrows his eyes on me. “Why are you here, Hades?”

I decide to get right to it. “Did you father her?”

For a moment, he can’t hide his shock. “Persephone? ”

“Yes.”

“A child with Demeter?” The Titan has the balls to laugh, even knowing I could sentence him to a world far worse than this. A world of night. His laughter fades and his eyes sharpen. “What am I getting out of this conversation, Hades?”

“A new world,” I offer my deal. “One where the sun will touch your flesh.”

His body shudders, knowing the worth of a deal offered by me, and how infrequently I offer such things. “Will it be warm?”

“Yes.”

“With no wind.” I nod again. His lips curl as desire flashes in his eyes. “I want a woman.”

I shake my head. “No.”

“How long have I been alone, Hades? Centuries? Millenia?” His voice grows quiet even as the hatred in his eyes screams louder. “Pull one of the souls from Tartarus. A human soul, I don’t care. As long as she is a woman,” his weak wishes are plagued with desperation, “I don’t care.”

“No.”

His jaw hardens. Hatred spills from his eyes, seeping between chapped lips. “Then we don’t have a deal.”

“Very well.” I turn to leave as the wind picks up.

The wood of the hut creaks and groans under the violence, and a frantic note fills Hyperion’ s call. “Wait!”

I stop, but don’t turn. “I get one hundred years in my new world. One hundred years of warmth.”

“You have yourself a deal.” I turn back to face him. “If you answer every question I have here today with complete honesty.”

Hyperion falls to his knees, taking the ancient stance to complete a deal with the God of Death. I move closer, feeling the God lurking close to the surface of my human flesh. It’s been so long since I let him free, let him loose. Even now, I won’t offer him that freedom. Not in its entirety, at least.

I lift my hand, and Hyperion’s faded eyes fall to my thumb where the skin splits, making room for the long, obsidian claw to slide free. I have no doubt, it is the baser form of a God in which bred the legends of monsters. Shifters, and vampires, and skin walkers, and more.

I touch him with nothing but the tip of my bone-claw, watching hungrily as obsidian meets the pale flesh of a depleted Titan. He tips his head back and to the side in an offering I take as I slide the blade of my claw into the offered artery, slicing a thin, clean, deep line.

Red beads the surface of his flesh before trickling down the thin skin of his throat. The ancient God I shelter inside hums his hunger, ravenous for the thing which we haven’t tasted in far too long. The blood of a God must be offered freely, lest it turn rancid on my tongue, tasting little better than poison in my veins .

As the first son of Cronos, the first male to be devoured by him, it is little wonder that the God under my flesh formed this blood-hungry beast. It makes sense that my sister, Hestia, the firstborn child of Cronos, and the first to be devoured by him, became the Goddess of virginity and sacrificial flame, the first of the Olympians to claim her sacrifices during the ancient times of worship. Where my God craved the consumption of another’s blood, the Goddess who formed under Hestia’s human flesh became selfish with her blood after far too long where it spilled into the belly of our father. It is because of this she chose to remain untouched, the blood of her virginity remaining unspilled to this day.

Such a thing doesn’t mean she does not hunger for blood in her own way. Hestia, as the Goddess of virginity has a spectral beast under her flesh in which is present to collect the sacrifice each virgin offers, devouring the innocence and cherishing it close to her own—feeding her own.

If humanity knew of the Gods who lurk within the shadows of these modern times, they would surely rebel. And they would surely be crushed.

My burning eyes track the dribble of blood as it slides the length of Hyperion’s pulsing artery. As soon as I touch my tongue to the life which drains from his veins, the deal will be sealed. He will be contained by the binds of our agreement as his blood settles in my belly, unable to resist fulfilling his end. As I will be bound to the deal, under threat of his blood turning into the very poison that could damn me if broken.

Hyperion angles his head further to the side, urging me to taste. To take.

Saliva coats my tongue as the scent of his blood, powerful even in his wasted state, taunts me. I bend low, feeling the pressure of my God’s fangs sliding over my human canines, pushing at my lips. It still makes me grin, the name my God’s beast crafted into modern legends: Vampire .

I haven’t allowed my beast to drink from the vein of a living creature, Titan, God, human, or animal in millennia. The gift of blood from a God is a rare thing, for the power it offers is massive. Same for a Titan.

Humans, although there is a burst of power, have a more aphrodisiac quality to their blood. The same is true for the Nymphs, and the like.

After the loss of my wife in such a heinous way, to the agony of my God, I abstained.

Now, though, the urge to seal a deal only heightens the desperate hunger that sears inside me. I dip low, the tip of my tongue connecting with the spill of hot blood. I loose a sound of starvation as I dip my fangs into the flesh around his vein, puncturing it on either side of the cut my claw made. Venom spills into his flesh as I pull his blood into my own, with deep, binding swallows. I can feel the bars of our binding deal slamming into place with each long swallow I draw from his vein. When his hand slams into my chest, a wall trying to push me from him, I grip the back of his head with both hands to keep him pinned in place. We’re beyond the draw needed to seal a deal, and well into the ancient desire for power. It is the same desire that led Cronos to devour his children. The internal desire all Gods war with to possess the all the power that we can. To consume.

A gargling noise meets my ear as Hyperion’s hand slides from my chest to land, slick with sickly sweat, against the cracked earth.

The struggle within my body is violent as I withdraw my fangs from his flesh, watching as Hyperion, a Titan once known for his bright strength, falls to the dust of the earth.

My fangs continue to drip venom, for my hunger hasn’t been nearly sated as I watch the Titan gasp shallow breaths. He is kept, like the others within my prisons, on the brink of life. Their eternal soul taunted with glimpses of power to remind them of what they were, and the power they will never again know.

“Tell me, Hyperion,” I begin, sounding more God than man. “Did you father a child with Demeter, Goddess of Harvest and Fertility?”

Hyperion looses a low gurgling moan. “No.”

I sense no lie. The blood that surges hot in my belly would alert me to an untruth, as per the binds of our deal. But I don’t know how it is possible, then, that she possess the gifts of this Titan. Of the light of all life, the sun .

“Are you sure?”

“You know I cannot lie,” he spits, finding the energy to curl his lip. “Not while my blood lingers in your belly.”

“Then how, if you did not sire her, does she possess your gifts?”

Hyperion freezes. I watch as his mind races behind pale eyes, muscles locking under near translucent flesh. “She holds the gift of the sun? The light of all life?”

“Yes.”

“Are you certain?”

“I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

Hyperion is quiet. I can see the thoughts as they form, see as he tries to push them away. I only have to ask the right question to spill the secrets he tries to keep.

“Who else could give her this power?”

Hyperion growls low in his throat, eyes flashing with revived rage. He grits, “Have you spoken to Helios?”

I had not. I hadn’t considered the Sun-God, for his feelings regarding Demeter have always been clear. Helios shines his sun on Demeter’s earth, encouraging lush harvests that she claims sole credit for, earning the worship of the people while he is a God forgotten. The idea that the two could come together long enough to create a child without clashing in bloody destruction is near unthinkable .

“You think Helios fathered Persephone?”

“No,” Hyperion admits, finally pulling himself to boney knees. “Did Demeter not claim Zeus as the father? And did Zeus not take responsibility for the Goddess?”

“She did, and he did.” But we all know Zeus is known for his ego. More, he is not known for honor.

“Then why are you here?”

“I told you. She possesses the gift of life. Of the sun.”

Hyperion shakes his head. “If it is not me, and it is not Helios, then you must be mistaking this light for the light that flashes when Zeus looses a bolt.”

That’s what I once thought, what I once told myself. Before her murder, that light had been dim, arcing in much the same way a bolt of lightning arcs. Flashing quick to come and go, like lightning.

Now, it is not a light that can be mistaken.

“Zeus is not her sire, and the light is not a bolt.”

“I’ve fulfilled my end of the bargain, Hades.” Hyperion glares up at me from knobby knees. “Now give me my sun.”