Athena stepped forward then, her golden armor crying out with the friction of her movement. She interposed herself between me and the King of the Underworld, her spear held low but ready.
"Do not listen to him, Aria," the Goddess of Wisdom warned, her voice tight with a fear I wasn't used to hearing from an Olympian. "Once you enter his domain, there are rules. Ancient rules. There are prices that cannot be paid in gold. You become his."
"She is already mine," Hades countered softly.
His gaze flicked to my right hand, the one that had crushed the Titan's Heart, the one now fused with star-metal and pulsing with a volatile violet light. He looked at it as though he could see the spectral remnants of the gore still coating my palm.
"She ate the fruit of the heart. She absorbed the essence of the Deep Earth," he murmured, his voice like velvet over gravel. "We are just negotiating the terms of her residency."
He looked past Athena, dismissing the War Goddess as if she were nothing more than a nuisance fly, and stepped around her to face me.
"Option one," Hades said, holding up a single pale finger. The movement was crisp, jarring against the chaotic backdrop of the melting mountain range where rocks were dripping like wax. "You are the vessel, Aria. You already ate the Titan’s heart. You survived the Primordial Flame. You are, for lack of a better term, a cosmic trash can."
My jaw tightened. "Charming."
He gestured grandly to the sky, to the screaming, ragged maw of the Devourer that was currently chewing through the stratosphere, turning the blue horizon into a bruised purple void.
"You fly up there. You open yourself. You suck the Devourer inside, just like you sucked up the Titan’s rage. You become the prison. You are a Keeper of Pandora's line, are you not? You would become the jar." He grinned at me, a jagged, skeletal expression, as if he'd made a clever insider joke. “It is what you were bred for. What you were trained for."
"And then?" I asked, my voice ringing with impatience, though a cold pit of dread was opening in my stomach.
"And then you lock the door from the inside," Hades said simply. "You enter a state of permanent stasis. You become a star in the sky, cold and unmoving, holding the darkness for eternity. You will be conscious, in a way. You will see the world turn, watch civilizations rise and fall, but you will never touch it again."
He paused, letting the silence stretch, before delivering the kill shot.
"But, the world lives. And your boys..." He glanced toward the monstrous forms of the Princes, his expression mildly pitying. "Without the bond anchoring them to a singularity, toyou,the Titan magic fades. They return to their normal, manageable divine forms. They walk free. No chains. No cages. Just... life."
I felt the air leave the valley.
I looked at Kaelen. The Dragon Prince was a terrifying silhouette of obsidian scales and jagged spines, his massive chest heaving like a bellows. Black smoke curled lazily from his nostrils, carrying the scent of sulfur and rage.
I looked at Thane. The Bear Prince was waist-deep in the bedrock, fighting a losing battle against the earth that seemed intent on swallowing him whole. He looked exhausted, his massive paws trembling as he tried to hold his ground.
"And option two?" I demanded, the star-metal on my arm pulsing hot and fast, syncing with the frantic beat of my heart.
"We go downstairs," Hades said, pointing a thumb at the scorched ground. "Tartarus. The roots of the world. The Devourer is eating the sky, but its stomach is in the Void beneath the Pit. We go down there, and you kill it at the source."
"The catch," I prompted, narrowing my eyes. "You’re a banker, Hades. You're a bureaucrat of souls. There’s always a fee."
"A keen eye," he smiled, and the temperature dropped another ten degrees, frosting the metal of my arm. "The Titan blood you absorbed? It belongs to the deep earth. If you enter my realm voluntarily, carrying that much Old Magic... you trigger the Law of the Soil. You become subjects of the Underworld."
I froze. "Subjects?" There was no way he'd just treat us like run of the mill subjects.
"Citizens with... extreme contractual obligations," he corrected smoothly. "You survive, you save the world, but you never leave. You belong to me. My enforcers. My hunt dogs."
He looked at Flynn. The Wolf Prince was currently gnawing on the trunk of a petrified spruce tree, his amber eyes darting wildly, chewing to keep his anxiety from overwhelming him.
"Fitting, really," Hades mused. "I’ve been needing a new hound."
The choice hung in the air, heavy as the toxic smoke choking the valley.
Option one? I die, essentially. I become a celestial ornament, a frozen guardian. But they go free. They get the life that was stolen from them for a thousand years. They get to feel the sun, taste wine, walk through a city without fear.
Option two? We live, but they trade one cage for another. They trade Hera’s chains for Hades’s leash. They trade a prison of light for a prison of stone.
I looked at Athena. She was pale, leaning heavily on her spear, watching the exchange with unmasked horror. She knew what servitude to Hades meant.
It meant erasure.
