[ that dog — that giant, impossible dog — comes barrelling in and mercymorn takes an instinctive step backwards, horrified, even as the left head leans forward and shoves a wet nose into her shoulder. the fact that she's wearing hades' jacket makes it even worse; makes her smell like their master, and makes the dog even more content to slobber all over her in a cheerful manner. she raises her hands as if to try shoving the face away, then looks at the jaws and and sharp teeth and reconsiders. cerberus licks that raised hand, and mercy's mortified expression makes it look like she could shrivel into dust right here as we speak.
she takes another skittish step back, and tries to primly wipe her hands off on the jacket. she needs a wash. she needs a shower. she needs clothes. she can still feel the drying saliva on her. ]
Oh.
[ then: ]
I didn't? [ there's a blank look in her hurricane eyes. normally, she doesn't ever have to introduce herself. people know her. the cohort snaps to attention, they even crack their heels together whenever she passes by, it's very cute. but then she gathers the shreds of her dignity (paltry), and knows the goddess will likely laugh at her, but: ]
Mercymorn Cristabel the First, Saint of Joy, Second Saint to Serve the King Undying, although I suppose I'm not serving any longer.
[ at the very least, hades has the wisdom (and, temporarily, the self-control) to not laugh at the lyctor’s confusion and panic. though she does take a moment to absolutely dote on cerberus: ] Who’s a good boy, you are, yes you are you dumbass, I love you so much.
[ speaking around half an octave higher than normal, faux baby-talk and everything. because if she’s going to make an ass out of herself to mortify her guest, hades is going to go all out.
(also, that jacket definitely has worse on it than canine slobber.)
she keeps one hand underneath cerberus’ middle chin, thumb looped around his collar. there’s another moment as he continues to sniff and investigate the lyctor, before hades takes mercy and yanks him back. ] Down, boy.
[ hades looks at the lyctor - at mercymorn - top to bottom, mostly-nude and in her own jacket and all. ] No, [ she says, and it’s almost kind. ] You’re not. No saints here, Mercymorn Cristabel.
No saints. So how does this work? Are you really here alone, except for the dog?
[ Mercy cranes her head, peering around the eponymous Hades, and there's the sense that she's gathering data, jotting meticulous mental notes on what the real-world underworld (afterlife?) is like.
Because her familiarity with myth is, frankly, abysmal. So much had been lost to time: the Blood of Eden carried off some of the only data archives from before the Resurrection, and the rest was destroyed or doled out to them by God Himself from memory alone. Incomprehensible jokes and references. His favourite poetry. Everything had come metered from their deity's lips and, for a woman who was admittedly a neurotic control freak, it had gotten a little tiresome. There was so much she wanted to know. ]
I don't think he even knew there was something else on the other end of the River. Not like this, I mean. Also, where can we get some clothes, because this is starting to be ridiculous.
[ There is just something about wearing a jacket and nothing else which seems to emphasise your nakedness, more than fix it. ]
I told you. [ it’s said slowly, as if speaking to a child. ] There’s the souls.
[ they’ve been quietly surrounding the pair without fuss or noise, flicking in and out of corporeality like fireflies, or embers, or the after-image when a screen flicks off. it’s not like in the River, where souls moan and writhe and grope. they’re just - there, milling about, passing by. on instinct, they give hades and cerberus a wide berth, crossing to the other side of what passes for a street. no blood, no bones, just shades and hoods and robes. ]
Yeah, alright. [ she lets go of cerberus at long last. the dog gives mercymorn one last sniff and look before hades whistles and jerks her head. he drops back down, ears tucked to the sides of his head in embarrassment, and obediently trots away. ] There’s some stuff in the palace. Come on.
[ as they approach, the city starts to feel more - well, more. what had been shadows form into actual buildings: brick and stone and girded metal. stalls, shopfronts, alleyways, and people to run them. the shades here are a bit more animated, chatting quietly amongst themselves. sometimes, one even had their hood down: a blonde blacksmith hammering on an anvil; a girl sitting on a low roof; a couple laughing over a book. all of them are translucent, all of them flicker. only hades and mercymorn seem to be whole. ]
Used to just be meadows down here. Most people live dull fucking lives, just got to stand around forever. But turns out that eventually, you’ll go fucking mad without something to do, and - [ she shrugs. ] They started to build.
Interesting, [ she says slowly, thoughtfully, head pivoting on a swivel as they move through the city and the visuals start to solidify. Trying to take it all in, and skittering a couple steps away from the shades if one of them drifts a little too close to her — she doesn't seem to have the same invisible forcefield around her that Hades and the dog do. Even if they're not hungry and grasping, Mercy still has a healthy fear of ghosts. (Cassiopeia, she always remembers Cassiopeia; that vision is carved permanently into her memory.) ]
So it's a bottleneck. They're all building up and stuck down here where they're not supposed to be. Like he's constructed a dam in the River.
[ She sounds like a doctor, compiling symptoms and trying to diagnose an illness. ]
[ it takes a moment for hades to register what mercymorn is theorizing. and it's not fully incorrect: gaius has fucked the afterlife a whole new asshole, but even a usurping god can't reach past the river. ]
Everyone in the River is supposed to be here. That's why it's a fuckin' river, it flows. [ separates the living from the dead on a metaphysical level. there's always been ways into the underworld: passageways around the back for the likes of orpheus and heracles and diana. but now, there's only the river, and the stoma blocking the path at the bottom. ] I say used to, I mean fucking used to. Back when I started.
[ when the blood of her father was still drying on her hands. ]
Nyx ruled the afterlife back then, it was just - black, far as the eye can't see. This was - fuck, I don't know. [ it's been too long, and time doesn't work right down here. ] Thirty, maybe forty thousand years back. I waded across Styx and brought light with me.
I hate sounding a fool, but this admittedly isn't my specialty, [ the lyctor confesses, world-weary, as they skirt their way down the streets and towards the palace and towards some semblance of dignity for her. ] Spirit magic is Augustine the First's realm, and out of all of us, he knows the most about the River. If only he were here—
[ and for that lingering second, there's a different cast to the persnickety woman's voice: a kind of bittersweet longing. a kind of homesickness.
and then she rips that sentimentality out of her own voice, and reorients. she hardens again, like a wound scabbed over, and starts digging for information: ] So. Let me get this straight. First there was nothing, and then you brought light, and the souls started building this... this afterlife, this city. And it functioned, and souls crossed over from my world to yours, but now the cycle's not working. You're alone with the souls. Do new ones not come unless the stoma takes them?
[ mercymorn was not a spirit magician, but she was tinkering and chipping away at this hypothesis and her understanding of The Situation™ regardless. john gaius used the dead like ammunition, like so much kindling for the flame of his boundless power. so maybe he was chewing them up on the other side, before they could even get into the river and safely to wherever they needed to go, to hades' domain where they belonged after death.
which would make sense; necromancy had always been built on consumption, in her experience. ]
Yeah. [ she keeps her voice steady, but she still sounds tired. ancient and weary, like fabric that’s been run worn and ragged; a spaceship with a dying engine. hades has been at this for so long: first ruling, and now desperately trying to console her shades, that it’s all she knows.
she has long, long, long forgotten the sun on her skin. ] They trickle through sometimes. Not many. We had almost twenty last year.
[ twenty new souls in a year. felt like a gift.
the palace looms in front of them, a massive construct of obsidian and black marble. it doesn’t look built so much as it was carved, or even grown. no seams and no bricks, just cold, dark stone, rising out of the not-earth. it came nearly out of nowhere: if a building could sneak up on somebody, it sure as hell did. in the mist and gloom, it looks like a void, a black hole, a ghost.
hades trudges forwards as she has every day for myriads, flicking her wrist with well-practiced apathy. the gates, rusted iron and remnants of gold, creak open. it’s brighter inside, gemstone lighting flicking on as they pass by some unseen sensor. there’s morgues louder than this.
after another minute or so of walking through semi-lit hallways, they come to a patch of knotwork and ruins, a circle ten feet in diameter. hades steps onto it, motions for mercymorn to follow, motions for mercymorn to stop.
she jerks her head up, and the circle seamlessly separate from the floor and starts to rise. ]
[ she joins hades on that platform, and catches her balance on a graceful foot as the gravity shifts and tugs at them. she’s very short next to the other woman (or woman-shaped thing), and it’s all the more apparent now that they’re standing shoulder-to-shoulder. she finds her hands drifting to each other, fingers catching and fidgeting restlessly as they wait. it all feels so queerly unfamiliar— like she’s an employee visiting from a rival firm, or something. ]
I’m not even going to ask you how it operates. And frankly, part of me was expecting more… skulls? More underworld decor, at the least.
[ john had such a Thing about the skulls; he’d have liked the goth bullshit of this obsidian and marble. mercy had always thrown up her hands about the aesthetics of it all; she would’ve worked in a blank clean metal lab and not cared about how it looked. ]
Because I’m the King. [ simple, straightforward, easy. ] And I said so. [ king of shadows, king of shades, hades is king of the underworld. but more than that, hades is the underworld. just as she is the river styx: cut her veins and the river flows, strike her down and the ground crumbles. l'état, c'est fucking moi. ]
What the fuck would I want with more skulls?
[ the elevator goes up three floors. the ceiling gives way, opening up like a camera’s aperture, big enough for the platform. and then, as they continue to rise, it closes below. first is up to another hallway, stretching out in all directions. then a library - dusty and disused, but undeniably massive, endless rows of books and parchment and scrolls. it finally stops (definitely not on the top floor) somewhere a little smaller than the grand halls below. there’s more lights, and it’s a touch warmer. if anything, it’s approaching comfortable.
hades steps off impatiently before the elevator’s fully stopped. she walks thirty feet, past a couple of worn couches and side tables, and then to a door. it’s nowhere near the cavernous entrance, just - a door.
inside: rows of hangers, racks of clothes. it’s not organized well, worn stola and ragged himations next to jeans, next to overcoats - but it is massive. In the center, a spiral staircase going up. and, somehow, down. ]
Help yourself. [ she heads straight to the stairs, pausing only to grab another jacket along the way. ] I need a fucking drink.
[ mercy sneaks a look at the library as they pass it, her chin tilting and rubbernecking, before she forces her gaze straight forward again. it was more augustine’s sort of thing, but she was a voracious reader herself. by the time she’s led into the massive walk-in closet, that frazzled stiff-jawed demeanour thaws a little into relief at the sight of the hangers. ]
Oh, thank— [ god, she almost says, but then course-corrects at the last second: ] fuck. The indignity was starting to get to me.
[ all of the saint’s attention is on the clothes, and she barely notes which direction hades stalked off to. she goes rummaging, picking her way through the chaotic racks with a finicky attention-to-detail which contrasts her weary acceptance of the earlier nudity. now that there is an opportunity to be dressed again, why not get it right?
and with enough time, she cobbles together something fitting. the palette is darker than the spring-like colours she’d once favoured (an inevitable touch of hades’ taste seeping through), but she does eventually find a white himation to wrap herself in like a shawl. (like a safety blanket, for how it reminds her of the white canaanite robes.) she tidily hangs up the leather jacket again. she laces up a pair of black combat boots, which don’t fit the saint of joy at all — they’re more like something pyrrha or gideon would’ve enjoyed — but at least they’re sensible. now dressed, mercy heads for the stairs, climbs it and peers out to each storey until she finally finds the king. her gratitude always used to be snappish and peevish and grudging, but this time it comes out like a sigh. ]
[ the room hades is in - three floors up - looks, more than anything else, like some dive cohort bar. namely because it is a bar, dominated by a long, polished slab of mahogany running nearly from one side to another. it’s old, pocketmarked with scratches and stains and deep ravines in the weathered wood. behind it is a full cabinet of liquor, bottles glistening clear, gold, red, gold, blue, brown, violet, brown, brown, red.
but that’s almost it, other than a few stools, the rest of the room is shockingly empty. on the opposite side of the bar there’s a window overlooking the town; perpendicular is the saddest-looking stage and one of her guitars on a rack. the rest is empty.
hades herself is at the bar, already working on a second glass of something slightly lighter and less viscous than blood. she stops mid-sip when she sees mercymorn enter, setting the tumbler down before she drops it. ]
You remind me of my niece in that.
[ god, she’d give anything to see athena’s smug fucking face. ]
Here. [ she nudges another glass over, pouring from the same bottle. ] Pomegranate liqueur. Old tradition for newcomers.
[ mercymorn takes in her surroundings warily, walking on the balls of her feet like a half-tiptoe. still instinctively half-waiting for the trap to reveal itself, despite the fact that the trap’s already sprung and the worst has already happened, so what’s there to lose, anyway? she stares out the window for a moment — what with living on the mithraeum, it’s been a while since she’s been anywhere with a view — but then eventually joins hades at the bar. the saint leans forward, hands pressed against the edge of the chipped wooden counter, mouth pursed.
an ancient recollection is needling at the edge of her memory. they knew a tiny bit about mythology; bits and scraps, enough for augustine to say dios apate when they meant to distract god, and now she remembers one detail. six pomegranate seeds and— ]
I suppose it’s no particular foul if I drink this and it means I have to stay.
[ a joke, kind of. where else would she go? so she takes the glass, holds it primly, sets her lips against the edge and takes a tentative sip. and god, but it’s sweet: it doesn’t taste like ash. it tastes alive, when so much of the empire is rot. they kill planets wherever they go. her tongue curls, presses against the roof of her mouth, tries to savour every last stinging tartness of that flavour. ]
[ there’s a moment as the wheels turn, as the joke lands. and then hades laughs: far from the bouncing mania from earlier on the shore, this is groaning and wheezing, like an old radiator on its last legs. ] Yeah. Fucking figures he keeps that around.
[ though it’s also a little strange, that john gaius cared to remember anything about her family, let alone talk to his saints about it. maybe she should clarify, tell mercymorn more about her wife - but no, the very thought stabs hades in what passes for her heart. it’s hardened in the last myriad of solitude, like it’s been calcified with seawater after a shipwreck. and just because she’s taking a lyctor in (ugh) doesn’t mean she’s about to open up like a fuckin’ therapist.
so instead, she cants her head to the side and thinks about athena. ]
Athena. Goddess of wisdom. You ever play cards with somebody and fall for their bluff? Or chess, and you take their queen, and they’ve got some fucking smug look that everything’s going to plan? That, but all the time.
[ she knocks back the rest of her glass, trying to cut off the morose loneliness before it settles in. ] Fucking stuck-up bitch. Miss her like hell.
[ and here, unfortunately, is the tragedy of it all: mercymorn knows the sound of that emotion in hades’ voice. the bitter wistful longing, the nostalgia humming beneath it, the long familial familiarity which doesn’t fade despite literal thousands of years without. the loss of someone who was irreplaceably like you. because mercy has, of course, lost her family, too.
this is what john has taken from both of them.
her mouth feels thick and dry as she says, ] Yes. Ours was Cassiopeia— Cassie— but she was so nice about it even as she absolutely tore you apart in chess. Didn’t even have the decency to rub it in our faces or anything. I loved her for it.
[ there’s that tight thread of pain, echoing in both of them. staring into the depths of her glass as she rolls the liquor around within it, she adds, droll and poisonous: ]
I watched her get torn apart by ghosts in the River. We were fighting a Resurrection Beast on the Emperor’s behalf.
Yeah. No shit. [ but there's less bite in it than there would have been – hell, an hour ago, when mercymorn was first dragged out of the river. the thing about immortality that nobody knows (except the immortals, and they ain't talking) is that you go bugfuck crazy after a while. normal lives pass through in the blink of an eye – speedrun the seven ages of man, glitch through the cannon's mouth right to shrunk shank – and there's only a handful of people who really get it. so on that rare, once-in-a-million chance you sit down and talk to one, you tend to latch on, like fellow countrymates in a foreign land.
which is why, when hades pours herself another glass and tops mercy off, she takes a moment to clink one rim against another. ] Cheers. To Athena and Cassie.
[ she knocks it back, and – well, alright, maybe she is morose. fucking sue her. ]
You know what they used to be called? The Resurrection Beasts. Back when they were planets, humans used to look up into the stars and name 'em after us. I got – shit, that dinky one at the end of the system. Pluto.
To Athena and Cassie, [ the former lyctor echoes, just as maudlin, because she’s reminded sharply and suddenly of the last time she’d been toasting to people long-dead. to absent friends. and to our cavaliers. to cristabel.
instead of letting herself think too much about it, mercymorn knocks back the drink. and then turns her attention to that interesting tidbit hades just dropped. chewing on that intellectual curiosity, she says: ]
The dinky one at the end of the system? What, you mean the Ninth House? It’s actually called Pluto? [ john had stolen all of the original names, papered them over with new ones of his own. even her own name had been lost to history and lost to all memory except god’s. ] What are the others?
Fuck. [ she wonders if she can even name any of them off anymore. she’s been hoarding it for so long: the names, the memories, her family. sharing them with somebody else seems almost profane, like it’s surrendering a part of her. but then again, who else is she going to tell?
hades doesn’t answer immediately, she pours herself another shot, downs it, slams the glass back on the bar hard enough to nearly crack it. ] Let’s see. [ thumb out, counting them off. ] There’s me. Jupiter and Neptune, my brothers. Venus and Mars. Uranus - [ she pauses here to spit onto the ground. her grandfather died before she was born, but fuck him and everything he stood for anyway. ]
Gr - [ but before she can bring up Grandmother Gaia, who she felt die before the world of the living was cut off from her, there’s a rumbling from below them. not quite an earthquake, not quite the grinding of massive gears, more like an enormous beast stirring in its sleep, turning on its side. ]
Fuck. Gimme a sec. [ hades stands - sways a bit, thanks to a few shots of liqueur - and staggers over towards one of the walls. she reaches up and to the left, grabs at something like she’s balling up cloth in her hand, and moves it diagonally down, like she’s tearing a curtain away.
the wall opens up, showing a window. rather than looking over the underworld, or into the next room, it’s - it’s something. fire, and smoke, and flashing lightning far, far in the distance.
there’s a moment’s pause, and then a massive fist - the size of hades’ entire upper body - pounds against the other side of the glass(?). she doesn’t so much as flinch. ]
[ mercymorn the first does not often curse. she’s too prim and rigid and uptight, with a mouth quick to wash out with soap (and somewhere buried deep under her skin, some ancient instinct and muscle-memory from catholic school rearing its ugly head, although she doesn’t know it). it’s already slipping more in the past hour, though, because she’s tired and dead and out of fucks to give, but she still doesn’t like to do it.
but this does the trick.
that massive fist hits the glass and mercy propels herself backward from the bar, still clutching that tumbler in her hands, almost sloshing some pomegranate liqueur on herself. her fingers tighten on it almost enough to shatter the glass, and her voice hits its own high, supersonic pitch. ]
[ there is Something on the other side of the glass.
which is – alright, that's stating the fucking obvious, no? of course there's something, there's always something. even a place like the depths of canaan house or the murkiness of the river have dust, or disused equipment, or the endless, writhing mass of moaning ghosts and spirits. but then there's the odd place with nothing: corners of the galaxy where a nebula blots out the distant starts, leaving everything in darkness. the great maw of the resurrection beasts, with heaps and heaps of nothing.
there is Nothing on the other side of the glass. there is Something on the other side of the glass. there are many, many, many Things on the other side of the glass.
hades still does not blink. ]
Ornery fuckin' asshole today, aren't you? [ the Something rages again – pounds once more, then draws away, then leans down. for a moment, there's what could be a face. certainly something with rotting teeth (the size of a human hand), with an unkempt beard (though it might be a stormcloud), with glistening, hate-filled eyes. hades snarls right back. ] Fuck off, old man.
[ the glass, or whatever it is, holds. that's old magic, nearly the oldest there is. cronus, usurped king of the cosmos and leader of the titans, lumbers away. on the other side, there are – more Somethings. many, many more.
hades sighs and glances over her shoulder. ]
You're safe. I promise. [ there's another, lengthy moment where she looks out the window. ] Johnnyboy wasn't the first to overthrow the Gods
[ mercymorn has seen resurrection beasts in all their ever-shifting myriad forms, has seen their heralds, has seen sacs of pulsating flesh and half-formed nightmares which didn’t seem quite certain what shape they wanted to take. their appearances differed depending on who was doing the looking. reality blurred. the mind filled in the blanks, and not well at that.
that is what that thing reminds her of. a resurrection beast. ]
It makes me think of Number Eight. It was a giant head, too.
I—
[ it occurs to her, then (and this thought only ever occurs to them rarely), that the beasts once had other names. and john has not bothered to use them. he and the lyctors don’t like to use them. gives the RBs too much power, too much identity, rather than safely thinking of them as mindless angry spirits, all instinct and hunger rather than sentience. ]
You know, I don’t actually know which one was Number Eight. Which planet it used to be. What name. And who the hell was that out there?
Dunno which one Eight was. [ eighth planet was neptune, (her brother’s laugh, his beard, how he always smelled like saltwater and brine), sure, but gaius fucked up the order of everything. rended each planet’s soul to cinders, then rearranged them as he saw fit.
as for mercymorn’s question, hades doesn’t answer for a long, long moment. ]
They’re called the Titans. Our forbearers, the Gods before us. [ until cronus’ paranoia grew too much to bear, until he ordered hestia’s execution - and that, that was a hair too fucking far for all of them. zeus may have led the charge, but it was hades’ knife that cut their father open. ] That one’s Cronus. He’s always been an asshole, but he’s had it out for me ever since I gutted him from cock to fucking chin.
[ hades flicks her wrist, closing the window entirely, and stumbles back to the bar. she fumbles with her glass for a moment, reaches for the bottle, drops her hands. ]
[ the window closes in front of them, like the bulkheads and viewports of the mithraeum slamming shut to block out that madness-inducing view of the approaching Beasts, and the whole feeling is faintly familiar. turtling down. mercymorn drifts in hades’ wake, still sipping primly at her own drink, finger worrying at the edge of the glass.
(she hasn’t felt real glass on her skin in so very long. it’s a rare commodity; not much of the empire has bothered with natural production when plastic does better.) ]
That thing is your father?
[ dripping incredulity and a little bit of disgust in her voice. the topic of parents and children has become more and more alien to her over the years; she’s infertile as all get-out, as notably established. the lyctors can’t reproduce. ]
How do you even… I mean, logistically. Was your mother the size of a skyscraper?
[ the saint of joy, ladies and gents. she’s not great with the whole consolation thing. ]
[ she shrugs. what’s she supposed to say to that? go deep into the celestial birds and the beads? it’s hard to explain. hades herself is concept as much as she is blood, and her generation are closer to human comprehension than any of their predecessors. look at nyx, look at master kaos, look at grandmother gaia. cronus is towering, massive, titan - and he was small enough to hoist hades up on his shoulders, when she was a toddler. rhea wrestled hard enough to cause earthquakes, and she wiped the tears from hades’ eyes. ]
Gods don’t play by your rules, kid. [ it’s all the answer mercy’s going to get.
but still, hades goes on. she stands - a little wobbly - and starts to browse the shelves of bottles behind the bar. ] He’s imprisoned down there. All of them are. [ an explanation as much as it is to console a woman who’s not used to this shit. ] When we took over, we wove it into the laws of the universe. Take any fucking thing you find - stars or rocks or flesh - and break it into molecules, and atoms, and fucking protons and quarks and shit, and you’ll see it written. The Titans are imprisoned in Tartarus.
[ what john gaius did with life and death: necromancy, flesh magic, bone shaping, the works - so too did the olympians, eons before. any halfway-decent dictator will tell you that, the first thing you do when seizing ultimate power is make sure nobody can take it. ]
[ mercymorn cristabel is having a religious crisis.
she doesn’t remember being m—, doesn’t know what beliefs she once held before the resurrection, but it is faintly distressing to reach the other side and then discover that her God was not the only God. that there are scores more. that john took said gods and brought them to heel; that hades’ own brothers jupiter and neptune have been made monstrous, turned into resurrection beasts. that his crimes were even more than she realised. ]
I want,
[ she says slowly, thinking of her aborted attempt at rebellion and mutiny and deicide, strangled in its womb, and what the hell happened to augustine? ]
to finish what I started. I want to find and recover Augustine Alfred Quinque, if he’s somewhere in your River as well. I want to kill John Gaius. I want to stop whatever he’s done. It sounds like we might be aligned in that.
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she takes another skittish step back, and tries to primly wipe her hands off on the jacket. she needs a wash. she needs a shower. she needs clothes. she can still feel the drying saliva on her. ]
Oh.
[ then: ]
I didn't? [ there's a blank look in her hurricane eyes. normally, she doesn't ever have to introduce herself. people know her. the cohort snaps to attention, they even crack their heels together whenever she passes by, it's very cute. but then she gathers the shreds of her dignity (paltry), and knows the goddess will likely laugh at her, but: ]
Mercymorn Cristabel the First, Saint of Joy, Second Saint to Serve the King Undying, although I suppose I'm not serving any longer.
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[ speaking around half an octave higher than normal, faux baby-talk and everything. because if she’s going to make an ass out of herself to mortify her guest, hades is going to go all out.
(also, that jacket definitely has worse on it than canine slobber.)
she keeps one hand underneath cerberus’ middle chin, thumb looped around his collar. there’s another moment as he continues to sniff and investigate the lyctor, before hades takes mercy and yanks him back. ] Down, boy.
[ hades looks at the lyctor - at mercymorn - top to bottom, mostly-nude and in her own jacket and all. ] No, [ she says, and it’s almost kind. ] You’re not. No saints here, Mercymorn Cristabel.
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[ Mercy cranes her head, peering around the eponymous Hades, and there's the sense that she's gathering data, jotting meticulous mental notes on what the real-world underworld (afterlife?) is like.
Because her familiarity with myth is, frankly, abysmal. So much had been lost to time: the Blood of Eden carried off some of the only data archives from before the Resurrection, and the rest was destroyed or doled out to them by God Himself from memory alone. Incomprehensible jokes and references. His favourite poetry. Everything had come metered from their deity's lips and, for a woman who was admittedly a neurotic control freak, it had gotten a little tiresome. There was so much she wanted to know. ]
I don't think he even knew there was something else on the other end of the River. Not like this, I mean. Also, where can we get some clothes, because this is starting to be ridiculous.
[ There is just something about wearing a jacket and nothing else which seems to emphasise your nakedness, more than fix it. ]
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[ they’ve been quietly surrounding the pair without fuss or noise, flicking in and out of corporeality like fireflies, or embers, or the after-image when a screen flicks off. it’s not like in the River, where souls moan and writhe and grope. they’re just - there, milling about, passing by. on instinct, they give hades and cerberus a wide berth, crossing to the other side of what passes for a street. no blood, no bones, just shades and hoods and robes. ]
Yeah, alright. [ she lets go of cerberus at long last. the dog gives mercymorn one last sniff and look before hades whistles and jerks her head. he drops back down, ears tucked to the sides of his head in embarrassment, and obediently trots away. ] There’s some stuff in the palace. Come on.
[ as they approach, the city starts to feel more - well, more. what had been shadows form into actual buildings: brick and stone and girded metal. stalls, shopfronts, alleyways, and people to run them. the shades here are a bit more animated, chatting quietly amongst themselves. sometimes, one even had their hood down: a blonde blacksmith hammering on an anvil; a girl sitting on a low roof; a couple laughing over a book. all of them are translucent, all of them flicker. only hades and mercymorn seem to be whole. ]
Used to just be meadows down here. Most people live dull fucking lives, just got to stand around forever. But turns out that eventually, you’ll go fucking mad without something to do, and - [ she shrugs. ] They started to build.
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So it's a bottleneck. They're all building up and stuck down here where they're not supposed to be. Like he's constructed a dam in the River.
[ She sounds like a doctor, compiling symptoms and trying to diagnose an illness. ]
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Everyone in the River is supposed to be here. That's why it's a fuckin' river, it flows. [ separates the living from the dead on a metaphysical level. there's always been ways into the underworld: passageways around the back for the likes of orpheus and heracles and diana. but now, there's only the river, and the stoma blocking the path at the bottom. ] I say used to, I mean fucking used to. Back when I started.
[ when the blood of her father was still drying on her hands. ]
Nyx ruled the afterlife back then, it was just - black, far as the eye can't see. This was - fuck, I don't know. [ it's been too long, and time doesn't work right down here. ] Thirty, maybe forty thousand years back. I waded across Styx and brought light with me.
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[ and for that lingering second, there's a different cast to the persnickety woman's voice: a kind of bittersweet longing. a kind of homesickness.
and then she rips that sentimentality out of her own voice, and reorients. she hardens again, like a wound scabbed over, and starts digging for information: ] So. Let me get this straight. First there was nothing, and then you brought light, and the souls started building this... this afterlife, this city. And it functioned, and souls crossed over from my world to yours, but now the cycle's not working. You're alone with the souls. Do new ones not come unless the stoma takes them?
[ mercymorn was not a spirit magician, but she was tinkering and chipping away at this hypothesis and her understanding of The Situation™ regardless. john gaius used the dead like ammunition, like so much kindling for the flame of his boundless power. so maybe he was chewing them up on the other side, before they could even get into the river and safely to wherever they needed to go, to hades' domain where they belonged after death.
which would make sense; necromancy had always been built on consumption, in her experience. ]
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she has long, long, long forgotten the sun on her skin. ] They trickle through sometimes. Not many. We had almost twenty last year.
[ twenty new souls in a year. felt like a gift.
the palace looms in front of them, a massive construct of obsidian and black marble. it doesn’t look built so much as it was carved, or even grown. no seams and no bricks, just cold, dark stone, rising out of the not-earth. it came nearly out of nowhere: if a building could sneak up on somebody, it sure as hell did. in the mist and gloom, it looks like a void, a black hole, a ghost.
hades trudges forwards as she has every day for myriads, flicking her wrist with well-practiced apathy. the gates, rusted iron and remnants of gold, creak open. it’s brighter inside, gemstone lighting flicking on as they pass by some unseen sensor. there’s morgues louder than this.
after another minute or so of walking through semi-lit hallways, they come to a patch of knotwork and ruins, a circle ten feet in diameter. hades steps onto it, motions for mercymorn to follow, motions for mercymorn to stop.
she jerks her head up, and the circle seamlessly separate from the floor and starts to rise. ]
Elevator.
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I’m not even going to ask you how it operates. And frankly, part of me was expecting more… skulls? More underworld decor, at the least.
[ john had such a Thing about the skulls; he’d have liked the goth bullshit of this obsidian and marble. mercy had always thrown up her hands about the aesthetics of it all; she would’ve worked in a blank clean metal lab and not cared about how it looked. ]
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What the fuck would I want with more skulls?
[ the elevator goes up three floors. the ceiling gives way, opening up like a camera’s aperture, big enough for the platform. and then, as they continue to rise, it closes below. first is up to another hallway, stretching out in all directions. then a library - dusty and disused, but undeniably massive, endless rows of books and parchment and scrolls. it finally stops (definitely not on the top floor) somewhere a little smaller than the grand halls below. there’s more lights, and it’s a touch warmer. if anything, it’s approaching comfortable.
hades steps off impatiently before the elevator’s fully stopped. she walks thirty feet, past a couple of worn couches and side tables, and then to a door. it’s nowhere near the cavernous entrance, just - a door.
inside: rows of hangers, racks of clothes. it’s not organized well, worn stola and ragged himations next to jeans, next to overcoats - but it is massive. In the center, a spiral staircase going up. and, somehow, down. ]
Help yourself. [ she heads straight to the stairs, pausing only to grab another jacket along the way. ] I need a fucking drink.
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Oh, thank— [ god, she almost says, but then course-corrects at the last second: ] fuck. The indignity was starting to get to me.
[ all of the saint’s attention is on the clothes, and she barely notes which direction hades stalked off to. she goes rummaging, picking her way through the chaotic racks with a finicky attention-to-detail which contrasts her weary acceptance of the earlier nudity. now that there is an opportunity to be dressed again, why not get it right?
and with enough time, she cobbles together something fitting. the palette is darker than the spring-like colours she’d once favoured (an inevitable touch of hades’ taste seeping through), but she does eventually find a white himation to wrap herself in like a shawl. (like a safety blanket, for how it reminds her of the white canaanite robes.) she tidily hangs up the leather jacket again. she laces up a pair of black combat boots, which don’t fit the saint of joy at all — they’re more like something pyrrha or gideon would’ve enjoyed — but at least they’re sensible. now dressed, mercy heads for the stairs, climbs it and peers out to each storey until she finally finds the king. her gratitude always used to be snappish and peevish and grudging, but this time it comes out like a sigh. ]
Thank you.
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but that’s almost it, other than a few stools, the rest of the room is shockingly empty. on the opposite side of the bar there’s a window overlooking the town; perpendicular is the saddest-looking stage and one of her guitars on a rack. the rest is empty.
hades herself is at the bar, already working on a second glass of something slightly lighter and less viscous than blood. she stops mid-sip when she sees mercymorn enter, setting the tumbler down before she drops it. ]
You remind me of my niece in that.
[ god, she’d give anything to see athena’s smug fucking face. ]
Here. [ she nudges another glass over, pouring from the same bottle. ] Pomegranate liqueur. Old tradition for newcomers.
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an ancient recollection is needling at the edge of her memory. they knew a tiny bit about mythology; bits and scraps, enough for augustine to say dios apate when they meant to distract god, and now she remembers one detail. six pomegranate seeds and— ]
I suppose it’s no particular foul if I drink this and it means I have to stay.
[ a joke, kind of. where else would she go? so she takes the glass, holds it primly, sets her lips against the edge and takes a tentative sip. and god, but it’s sweet: it doesn’t taste like ash. it tastes alive, when so much of the empire is rot. they kill planets wherever they go. her tongue curls, presses against the roof of her mouth, tries to savour every last stinging tartness of that flavour. ]
What’s your niece like?
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[ though it’s also a little strange, that john gaius cared to remember anything about her family, let alone talk to his saints about it. maybe she should clarify, tell mercymorn more about her wife - but no, the very thought stabs hades in what passes for her heart. it’s hardened in the last myriad of solitude, like it’s been calcified with seawater after a shipwreck. and just because she’s taking a lyctor in (ugh) doesn’t mean she’s about to open up like a fuckin’ therapist.
so instead, she cants her head to the side and thinks about athena. ]
Athena. Goddess of wisdom. You ever play cards with somebody and fall for their bluff? Or chess, and you take their queen, and they’ve got some fucking smug look that everything’s going to plan? That, but all the time.
[ she knocks back the rest of her glass, trying to cut off the morose loneliness before it settles in. ] Fucking stuck-up bitch. Miss her like hell.
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this is what john has taken from both of them.
her mouth feels thick and dry as she says, ] Yes. Ours was Cassiopeia— Cassie— but she was so nice about it even as she absolutely tore you apart in chess. Didn’t even have the decency to rub it in our faces or anything. I loved her for it.
[ there’s that tight thread of pain, echoing in both of them. staring into the depths of her glass as she rolls the liquor around within it, she adds, droll and poisonous: ]
I watched her get torn apart by ghosts in the River. We were fighting a Resurrection Beast on the Emperor’s behalf.
Fucking mistake, in hindsight.
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which is why, when hades pours herself another glass and tops mercy off, she takes a moment to clink one rim against another. ] Cheers. To Athena and Cassie.
[ she knocks it back, and – well, alright, maybe she is morose. fucking sue her. ]
You know what they used to be called? The Resurrection Beasts. Back when they were planets, humans used to look up into the stars and name 'em after us. I got – shit, that dinky one at the end of the system. Pluto.
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instead of letting herself think too much about it, mercymorn knocks back the drink. and then turns her attention to that interesting tidbit hades just dropped. chewing on that intellectual curiosity, she says: ]
The dinky one at the end of the system? What, you mean the Ninth House? It’s actually called Pluto? [ john had stolen all of the original names, papered them over with new ones of his own. even her own name had been lost to history and lost to all memory except god’s. ] What are the others?
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hades doesn’t answer immediately, she pours herself another shot, downs it, slams the glass back on the bar hard enough to nearly crack it. ] Let’s see. [ thumb out, counting them off. ] There’s me. Jupiter and Neptune, my brothers. Venus and Mars. Uranus - [ she pauses here to spit onto the ground. her grandfather died before she was born, but fuck him and everything he stood for anyway. ]
Gr - [ but before she can bring up Grandmother Gaia, who she felt die before the world of the living was cut off from her, there’s a rumbling from below them. not quite an earthquake, not quite the grinding of massive gears, more like an enormous beast stirring in its sleep, turning on its side. ]
Fuck. Gimme a sec. [ hades stands - sways a bit, thanks to a few shots of liqueur - and staggers over towards one of the walls. she reaches up and to the left, grabs at something like she’s balling up cloth in her hand, and moves it diagonally down, like she’s tearing a curtain away.
the wall opens up, showing a window. rather than looking over the underworld, or into the next room, it’s - it’s something. fire, and smoke, and flashing lightning far, far in the distance.
there’s a moment’s pause, and then a massive fist - the size of hades’ entire upper body - pounds against the other side of the glass(?). she doesn’t so much as flinch. ]
Hi, Dad.
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[ mercymorn the first does not often curse. she’s too prim and rigid and uptight, with a mouth quick to wash out with soap (and somewhere buried deep under her skin, some ancient instinct and muscle-memory from catholic school rearing its ugly head, although she doesn’t know it). it’s already slipping more in the past hour, though, because she’s tired and dead and out of fucks to give, but she still doesn’t like to do it.
but this does the trick.
that massive fist hits the glass and mercy propels herself backward from the bar, still clutching that tumbler in her hands, almost sloshing some pomegranate liqueur on herself. her fingers tighten on it almost enough to shatter the glass, and her voice hits its own high, supersonic pitch. ]
What the fuck is that??!
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which is – alright, that's stating the fucking obvious, no? of course there's something, there's always something. even a place like the depths of canaan house or the murkiness of the river have dust, or disused equipment, or the endless, writhing mass of moaning ghosts and spirits. but then there's the odd place with nothing: corners of the galaxy where a nebula blots out the distant starts, leaving everything in darkness. the great maw of the resurrection beasts, with heaps and heaps of nothing.
there is Nothing on the other side of the glass. there is Something on the other side of the glass. there are many, many, many Things on the other side of the glass.
hades still does not blink. ]
Ornery fuckin' asshole today, aren't you? [ the Something rages again – pounds once more, then draws away, then leans down. for a moment, there's what could be a face. certainly something with rotting teeth (the size of a human hand), with an unkempt beard (though it might be a stormcloud), with glistening, hate-filled eyes. hades snarls right back. ] Fuck off, old man.
[ the glass, or whatever it is, holds. that's old magic, nearly the oldest there is. cronus, usurped king of the cosmos and leader of the titans, lumbers away. on the other side, there are – more Somethings. many, many more.
hades sighs and glances over her shoulder. ]
You're safe. I promise. [ there's another, lengthy moment where she looks out the window. ] Johnnyboy wasn't the first to overthrow the Gods
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that is what that thing reminds her of. a resurrection beast. ]
It makes me think of Number Eight. It was a giant head, too.
I—
[ it occurs to her, then (and this thought only ever occurs to them rarely), that the beasts once had other names. and john has not bothered to use them. he and the lyctors don’t like to use them. gives the RBs too much power, too much identity, rather than safely thinking of them as mindless angry spirits, all instinct and hunger rather than sentience. ]
You know, I don’t actually know which one was Number Eight. Which planet it used to be. What name. And who the hell was that out there?
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as for mercymorn’s question, hades doesn’t answer for a long, long moment. ]
They’re called the Titans. Our forbearers, the Gods before us. [ until cronus’ paranoia grew too much to bear, until he ordered hestia’s execution - and that, that was a hair too fucking far for all of them. zeus may have led the charge, but it was hades’ knife that cut their father open. ] That one’s Cronus. He’s always been an asshole, but he’s had it out for me ever since I gutted him from cock to fucking chin.
[ hades flicks her wrist, closing the window entirely, and stumbles back to the bar. she fumbles with her glass for a moment, reaches for the bottle, drops her hands. ]
He’s my Dad.
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(she hasn’t felt real glass on her skin in so very long. it’s a rare commodity; not much of the empire has bothered with natural production when plastic does better.) ]
That thing is your father?
[ dripping incredulity and a little bit of disgust in her voice. the topic of parents and children has become more and more alien to her over the years; she’s infertile as all get-out, as notably established. the lyctors can’t reproduce. ]
How do you even… I mean, logistically. Was your mother the size of a skyscraper?
[ the saint of joy, ladies and gents. she’s not great with the whole consolation thing. ]
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Gods don’t play by your rules, kid. [ it’s all the answer mercy’s going to get.
but still, hades goes on. she stands - a little wobbly - and starts to browse the shelves of bottles behind the bar. ] He’s imprisoned down there. All of them are. [ an explanation as much as it is to console a woman who’s not used to this shit. ] When we took over, we wove it into the laws of the universe. Take any fucking thing you find - stars or rocks or flesh - and break it into molecules, and atoms, and fucking protons and quarks and shit, and you’ll see it written. The Titans are imprisoned in Tartarus.
[ what john gaius did with life and death: necromancy, flesh magic, bone shaping, the works - so too did the olympians, eons before. any halfway-decent dictator will tell you that, the first thing you do when seizing ultimate power is make sure nobody can take it. ]
What do you want next, Mercymorn Cristabel?
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she doesn’t remember being m—, doesn’t know what beliefs she once held before the resurrection, but it is faintly distressing to reach the other side and then discover that her God was not the only God. that there are scores more. that john took said gods and brought them to heel; that hades’ own brothers jupiter and neptune have been made monstrous, turned into resurrection beasts. that his crimes were even more than she realised. ]
I want,
[ she says slowly, thinking of her aborted attempt at rebellion and mutiny and deicide, strangled in its womb, and what the hell happened to augustine? ]
to finish what I started. I want to find and recover Augustine Alfred Quinque, if he’s somewhere in your River as well. I want to kill John Gaius. I want to stop whatever he’s done. It sounds like we might be aligned in that.
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