14. Tartarus
Danae sat on the bench opposite Hades as Charon guided his barge through the inky waters of the Styx. The river rushed past them, the glowing crystal at the end of Charon’s staff casting oscillating ribbons of light across the dark water. The Lord of the Underworld sat in silence, brooding amongst the folds of his midnight robe. Danae stared at the ferryman’s back, her mind blank as the fabric of his grey cloak.
Every day for what felt like weeks she had been brought to Hades’ laboratory and strapped onto the cold, marble slab. Sometimes he’d leave her alone for hours, sometimes moments, before returning to channel more pain or pleasure through her unwilling, powerless flesh. Her life became a cycle between sleep and torture, punctuated by the trudge down the corridor that connected the two. Then one day it was not the laboratory the shades escorted her to but the river.
‘Would you like to know where we are going, little Titan?’ asked Hades.
Danae did not reply.
‘We are journeying to Tartarus. You will know it as the realm of everlasting torment, but before the age of Olympians, it held no connotations with the afterlife and was known simply as the deepest region of the world.’
Hades’ words were met with more silence. He cocked his head, surveying her. ‘What is it that you want?’
Danae blinked. What did it matter? What did any of her wants matter now? After what Hades had done only one desire burned within her, a single flame warming her coldhusk. Every heartbreak, every tormented breath, every tear of her spirit could be traced back to one event. The night Alea was taken from the Thesmophoria on Naxos.
She wanted vengeance.
‘To kill Zeus.’
Hades nodded.
‘I will make you a deal. When we reach Tartarus, I will ask you to complete one simple task. If you do it, I will know you are ready. I shall remove the collar, and together we will storm Olympus with an army of Underworld creatures and kill my brother. Do you accept?’
Still staring unfocused at Charon’s cloak, she whispered, ‘Yes.’
A smoke-dark mist, thicker than the one that lingered on the Asphodel Meadows, had crept across the sandy banks, lacquering Danae’s skin with a clammy sheen. After a while she noticed a scent she recognized. It was like hearing a stranger hum a familiar tune.
Salt water.
The echo of a memory sounded in her mind. A man’s voice; warm and rough and kind.All seas are the same beast. When we’re riding her, no matter how far apart, we’re riding together.
She blinked, properly taking in her surroundings for the first time. ‘We’re not on the Styx any more, are we?’
‘No, we are not,’ said Hades. ‘This is the Acheron. There are three rivers that feed the Underworld, but this is the only one that flows directly to the sea.’
A river that ran to the ocean in the world above. When she had first arrived in the Underworld it felt like a dream. Now she could barely remember what sunlight felt like on her skin.
They travelled on in silence. Eventually, the mist became so thick she could no longer see the banks on either side, only Charon’s light bobbing ahead of them.
‘When I was a child,’ said Hades, ‘my father used to entertain my siblings and me with a magic trick. He would hold an almond in his palm, then close his fingers and blow upon them. When he opened his hand, the nut would have vanished. When I asked how he did it, he said he made the almond invisible. I was disappointed when Zeus told me that it was a lie and our father had merely hidden the nut through sleight of hand. He became lesser in my eyes that day. But I never forgot the wonder he stirred within my soul. The idea that anything is possible.’
It was strange to hear Hades talk of his father and brother as though they had been part of a family like any other. Once, they had been innocent children.
‘Why did Zeus banish you to the Underworld?’
Hades was still for a while, a pillar of chalk and ash blurred by the fog. Then he muttered, ‘My brother has no imagination.’
Danae gripped the wooden seat beneath her as the barge knocked against the rocks to the right of the river and Charon wedged his staff between two crags, steadying the vessel. She had not noticed in the mist, but the soft midnight sand had given way to hard banks of stone.
Hades stepped onto the lip of rock and turned to Danae. He stretched out a thin, pale hand and helped her onto the rocks.
Danae and Hades walked in silence across the mist-dampened stone, following the ferryman’s light through the dank fog. A dull ache had spread through Danae’s legs and back by the time they arrived at the entrance to a cave. A faint orange glow pulsed from within.
The head of a giant snake had been carved from the rock, its jaws stretched open as though the cave entrance was avast mouth. Gleaming eyes, forged from sparkling emerald stone, had been sunk into either side of the serpent’s head. A forked tongue flicked over the lower jaw to form a walkway down to the rocks below, and from above two fangs, each as long as Danae was tall, stretched down like stalactites towards the ground.
Hades approached the stone reptile, the mist swirling about him with a lover’s caress. He paused on the threshold of the forked tongue and glanced back at Danae.
‘Welcome to Tartarus.’
