A/N: For those returning readers who might be wondering, I moved the Foreword for this story to my profile and replaced the first chapter with the Prologue. Hopefully, it will make for a stronger first impression and won't drive any readers away with the prospect of having to wade through rambling walls of text.

James Barnes was straining to hold on to his fleeing consciousness as they loaded his stretcher onto the medevac. The first thing that he noticed was the blades.

Giant blades were flitting in and out of his vision, slowly, deliberately, like crude scythes. The image seemed to last for an eternity, then disappeared almost in a flash. It was as though time had gone very wonky in these last few minutes.

The noise was deafening. The chopper lifted off, and James felt weightless.

A medic was busy cauterizing the stump on his left shoulder; it didn't matter, his extremities had gone numb in the first few minutes. The medic moved on to the gaping hole in the middle of his chest, and promptly realised there was nothing he or any surgeon worth his salt could do about that.

"Ma'am...I am sorry. He's a fighter, but the wounds are too severe. He's not going to-"

"Don't!" Natasha retorted.

Natasha was a mess. Her ageless, pale features were marred by the running mascara on her cheeks. James had never seen her so vulnerable before. He hated himself for doing this to her.

He tried to say something to her. Something along the lines of "Relax; dying ain't what it used to be. That trick never works!" But did he really want his last words to be that corny?

He wanted to say that he loved her.

He wanted to talk about their past, but that always hurt. He was in enough pain already.

But still, he had to try.

"Nat...I..." he managed to gurgle out, hand trembling as he tried to reach out to her. The effort exhausted him entirely. His already blurry vision now was now starting to fail him completely.

"He is fading," the medic announced, fingers on James' pulse, "If you have any last words..."

Natasha's lips trembled, and she seemed to hesitate. Then reluctantly, she nodded, eyes tightly shut as she drew closer to James' ears.

She mumbled something. James couldn't hear her.

He was already falling.

This was where he had been headed all along. The Fall. The Explosion. Suspended in air. That sense of nothingness where his left arm should be. Deja vu didn't begin to describe it.

He had escaped it these past few years, but the Fall hadn't forgotten him. It had been waiting for him all this time. The Fall would lead to the Water, and that's where he had been headed the entire time. Frozen in a block of ice. Forgotten by history.

Everything has a place in the grand scheme of all things. This was his rock on the totem pole. Everything was starting to fall into place.

It all made sense.

This was how it was meant to be.

Prologue: Inferno

Ares waited. Patience was not his virtue, but he had learned enough of it to get by. Before long, the answer came, and as he had anticipated, it was not a pleasing one.

"No," Charon stated. Despite his countenance- a thin, scraggy, grey loincoth was all that garbed his withered old flesh, dried sinews and all, with wooly, hoary locks of white obscuring his face, save for his fierce, yellow eyes- the old man possessed a quiet, if strained, dignity.

"Ah. So your feet remain on either side of the line in the sand, as they are wont to." Ares was understandably disappointed, but he did not let it show on his haughty features. "But if you will entertain me further? Elaborate."

"Very well." Charon had just finished harboring his boat to the modest dock, and now he turned the entirety of his attention to the War god. "Your tactics are sound, but your strategy is not as fortuitous. Whether be it by fate or choice, you have ever been an agent of chaos. Unfortunately, order is the perennial victor in our realm of concern. For comparison's sake, you are akin to this..." Charon picked up a nondescript pebble and flung as far as he could into the water with his feeble (but surprisingly hardy) arms. A multitude of ripples poured forth from the point of impact, but after a few moments Acheron returned to its state of dreary serenity.

Charon would have proceeded to explain the meaning behind this demonstration, but Ares raised a big, meaty palm, his beady eyes contracted towards his prominent nose. It was clear that the 'elaboration' had been a bit too patronizing.

"Your point has been made, I would think. I take my leave then," Ares placed his impressive war helm on his stocky scalp, "with the implicit trust that none of this will reach the ears of your current masters. Fare ye well, ferryman. I leave you to your work."

"Have you ever known me to be a tattle-tale?" Charon muttered, mostly to himself; the patron-deity of Sparta was well on his way. Charon was mildly amused- and daresay, even impressed- by the tact displayed the War god. Death, it seemed, had tempered his rage. Before, it was all surface, a mighty, blunt bludgeon with which he sought to flatten any and all opponents. Now, it seemed more akin to a finely sharpened dagger, wielded deftly and cunningly at the most opportune times to maximise the damage dealt.

These were interesting times in Hades.

Charon turned his attention to his work. The rabble of freshly dead were lumbering towards his boat. Generally bereft of any sense of their state, they sometimes aroused themselves to brief sparks of cognizance. In such moments, they were prone to grumble, bicker and cause other forms of general unrest. And Charon was prone to whack such offenders with his mighty oar. And that silenced them again into blissful non-identity.

It was hard work, and there was no reward whatsoever. But such was his lot in eternity, and he would make do with it.

As he stood by the side of the boat, he outstretched his palm in front of the newest passenger and asked, in a hoarse, broken voice, that question he had repeated an endless times since the pantheon's creation.

"You have the coin?" or so it went.

Scoundrels! Beggars, the whole lot of them!

He had forever dealt with the penniless, but they had never proliferated within the flock to this degree. Soon, there were none left for Charon to ferry but the destitute, and they swarmed the shores by the thousands, an endless stream of them arriving from whatever godforsaken battlefield had spawned them. Uncultured, misbegotten swines! And they were so many. He hadn't seen such numbers since the height of his pantheon's influence.

He was on his boat, quickly unfastening the moored rope from the dock. A dozen of the dead were approaching his vessel, wading into the water, and the unfiltered contact with the sin residues of the processed dead stung their souls. But they were far too ignorant to take such suffering into account.

"Back. Back, I say!" the ferryman bellowed. The rope unfastened, he threw it into the water and leapt into his boat with surprising agility.

As if following his cue, they now proceeded to swarm his vessel from both sides. Charon responded in appropriate fashion with his oar, smacking the would-be boarders away with the front blade. Even the blind and sense-deprived can gauge fear and terror, if only vaguely; and thus they recoiled from further attempts at unlawful entry and huddled away at the shore.

Charon took his chance, and oared deeper into the river, quickly increasing his distance between the growing horde. He spared a last, scornful glance at those rudderless sheep, before turning his mind to the present dilemma.

Something was afoot. And it was interfering with his work in a grossly unbecoming manner. Whatever the cause behind this sordid affair, Charon was determined to find out. He looked at the water. Wispy, ethereal remnants of mortal sorrow peeked through the dark surface. Their vague, nondescript faces (which always seemed to sport an uniform frown) seemed more alert than usual.

The rivers would provide the answer. He was sure of it.

With new purpose, he began heaving his oar, driving his boat towards the heart of Acheron.

And thus began the journey.

Unfortunately, for the ferryman of the dead, it wasn't going to be very fruitful.

The languages of the rivers were lost artifacts, and even an old soul like Charon was but crudely versed in such repertoire. Shunned and neglected, the streams of Hades had long outgrown the need for earnest communication. Their words had become warped beyond recognition, and even their speakers barely understood the entirety of their faint mumblings.

Despite their reluctance, the rivers talked about great many things. They could not help it, for the souls passing through them left behind sediments of all kinds of mortal idiosyncracies, and such trivial trinkets spurred the great waters into flickering bouts of verbosity.

Having travelled to the heart of ancient Acheron, where such chatter was likely to be most frequent, Charon laid his ears to the floor his boat and remained still. At first it was all gibberish, of course. It took a while for his rusty mind to remember the precise details of such linguistics, and when he did, the wailings became all too apparent. The aftertaste of denial, of the sorrow that came with the realisation that life as one knew was now well and truly over. It was nothing Charon wasn't accustomed to, by then. He sorted out through the irrelevant anecdotes and focused solely on current developments.

Acheron spoke most often of a new war, waged by an ancient, forgotten entity whose name musn't be invoked. The world quaked at his growing power, and if not for any last moment miracles it was doomed to fall under his dominion.

Charon was not impressed in the slightest. He remembered the Titanomachy, where Zeus Pater of the flowing red locks ascended to the sky throne, and the Gigantomachy, where Gaia herself raged to bring Olympus down through her deviant spawns. Such struggles were epic and legendary precisely for their rarity in occurrence. Wars and death tolls were far too common in this day and age. Nowadays, there was a crusade to bring down the earth or the cosmos every other afternoon.

As Hades had managed fine enough during those most recent struggles, logic dictated that it should not be affected in the slightest by this latest scuffle.

Consequently, Charon spoke to Acheron directly in order to gain a greater understanding of this particular dilemma. After the initial surprise of being addressed so bluntly and explicitly, the river tried to overcompensate and launched into a grandiose, meandering tirade as it desperately sought to entertain this unexpected guest. Charon was amused; both of them were old souls, and perhaps, Acheron was even older than he. But it was quite difficult to carry a conversation with an entity which lost coherence at every third sentence. And even then, Charon was hardly in the mood to socialise.

The god-river was disappointed, but Charon even more so when the latter realised that the former had no answers for his queries. "But go to my children," Acheron the father spoke in that fluid, flummery tongue, "they are more well-versed in such matters than I."

And thus Charon crossed over to Styx, through the great Marsh at the center of Hades. The younger tributary of Acheron, Styx had always been an irritable fellow. In its own perspective, it had drawn the shortest straw of the lot- to be chosen as the receptacle for all of man's anger and sullenness. But that day, the river was even more vexed than usual.

"And what troubles you so?" Charon inquired of the errant stream, and Styx was quick to reply in a hateful, venal scowl- for its tongue was easily the most well-versed amongst all its peers and sires. "Look thither, at yon shores to thine right! Savages! Do they not know the import of such hallowed grounds?"

And Charon turned to where Styx pointed, where he saw, to his eternal surprise, a strange gathering of the newly dead. They were all locked in various modes of assault. Naked and muddied, they not only struck each other with their hands, but head, chest and feet, mangling each other with their teeth, bite by bite. Such a show of wrathfulness bamboozled the ferryman greatly- for never before had he seen destitute wander so far away from the docks, let alone engage in such acts of brutality.

"And there persists the gurgling! Look, how my skin itches at such poking!" Styx bellowed spitefully. And Charon looked, and saw thousands of tiny bubbles spurt out at the river's surface.

Charon was truly perplexed, but he had no time for such perplexions. He hurried to his principal inquiry, and was disappointed once more when Styx yelled a resounding non-affirmative. "But go to my mirror stream, if you must. He might care to take note of such happenings!"

And Charon ferried himself to Phelegethon of the crimson, boiling froth which ran parallel to the river of hate. It was a trek that Charon wasn't entirely keen to undertake. Though his vessel was made of hardy wood, scrounged and scavenged from the leftovers of the gods, it was not made to withstand the rigors of extended contact with volcanic lava. When he arrived, the river of fire was in something of a mood. Small spires of brief flames shot three feet above into the air. Charon knew it to be a sadistic soul- but he had never found the river so clearly amused.

"And what keeps you in such high spirits?" he inquired, warily, for even a merry Phlegethon was a dangerous river. "O, can you not hear them?" it whispered gleefully, "I have no inkling as to how they came to be here, but this is most fortuitous, indeed! Look! Peek, if you can, below my fiery hide!"

And Charon looked down, though he had to squint a long time to make out anything beyond the glowing magma at the surface. Then he saw fingernails pierce through it, connected to decaying, bony finger-flesh, before they were dragged down by some unseen force.

"How they bargain! Peddlers of the most wondrous sort, they are. A precious moment or two, a marriage here and there, a son or daughter or father gladly traded for one's own safe passage!" Charon was unnerved by how eloquent the river had become at such suffering. "But the wranglers at the horizon spoil the fun, with their sticks and stones and pitchforkses! How uncouth."

Charon would have asked of these wranglers, had he not seen them, first. Charcoal-skinned demons stood guard, cackling madly at nothing in particular. And what were they doing there? Charon did know. Too many unanswered questions; it left a bad aftertaste in his mouth.

The ferryman had braced himself for the inevitable letdown, but neverthless felt that familiar sting upon hearing that Phelegethon, too, had no true clue as to the cause of such disturbances. "But hold! Did you not hear? Father's elder spawn is in a most troubling predicament," the river of fire advised furthermore, "Make haste to his domain, for his pathways are shifting and twisting even as we tarry with vapid words."

Indeed, it took Charon more than a few detours to reach the waters of Cocytus, first tributary of the god-river that was Acheron. And more than once did the ferryman encounter unexpected bends; they ever forced him to travel downwards, edging ever closer to the dreaded abyss that is Tartarus. His instincts informed him that he was on the correct path, but memory told him otherwise. Fortunately, he reached Cocytus before long; but he found the river changed immeasurably. He could travel no further by boat, for the river of lamentation was now completely frozen! And it couldn't be called a river anymore, even; more like a lake, judging from its shrunken dimensions. He oared to the nearby shores and tied his oar to the back of the vessel. He resolved to carry the boat on his back for the time being, for he was wary to leave his prized possession unguarded in such strange territory.

When he felt he had walked long enough, he approached the frozen waters, and with a mighty heave, pushed through a sizeable chunk of ice to reach the water below. His withered flesh felt almost petrified at the sheer coldness of it. He quickly pulled his hands away and put his ear as near to the exposed water as he dared to, and listened. The river was even more despondent than usual. And Charon asked, "Why are you thus dispirited?"

Cocytus wailed in reply, "The distress is but too much for me to bear. Long have I bore the burden of man's rueful nature, all the despair and woe to be experienced at death having extracted and distilled through my body entire. But now I am riddled with the corpses of the faithless! Can you not see?"

And Charon peeked through the water, and he saw countless humanoid figures, the details obscured by formation of ice around their bodies. Hades was changing before his eyes. He asked Cocytus once more, "And why are you in such a state, frozen and immobile?" Cocytus whimpered, "I know not the cause. Perhaps the Old Man does, whose tears now flow into my flesh and nourishes it, or perhaps, plagues it with this newfound pestilence. Thither he sits, on yon distant mount."

Charon turned towards the mountain, to see a distinct statue, a waterfall flowing from its head. He surveyed his surroundings a bit more, and saw stranger sights still. Further into the landmass, a massive figure wandered, naked, old and venerable, with beards flowing down to his knees. He knew of this one: the giant Antaeus, though how the creature had gotten to here the ferryman had no clue. Further still, he saw similar figures bound to the surrounding hills, hoisted near their peaks; he recognised Briareus, Tityos and Typhon, whom Zeus had hurled down to the great abyss at the end of the Gigantomachy.

And now Charon was truly afraid, for he feared that he had descended into Tartarus itself, or perhaps the pit itself had been mangled and warped into a caricature akin to the rivers themselves. He made haste and prepared to move, but then saw a most terrible vision; he now saw what had rendered frozen the river of lament, though he now wished that the answer eluded him ever more. A hideous, terrible beast was trapped further into the stream, its huge, bat-like wings flapping at rare intervals with such force as to create gale-force frigid winds which stuck the river solid. In shape, it was like that of a lion; coupled with the wings, it looked like a deformed Sphinx. Though it had one head, there were three faces on three sides- the front was fiery red, and the other two were whitish-yellow and coal-black. All three mouths were gnawing on what appeared to be mortal souls. Tears and demonic blood spewed forth from six eyes.

And Charon did not wait to ask Cocytus any more questions, for he knew that the river was as clueless as he, but fled the land as fast as his feeble feet could carry him. "Wait! Do not leave!" the river wailed, for misery loved company. Charon paid no heed, but sprinted head-on, shutting his eyes and ears from taking note of any more bewildering happenings.

He ran and ran, until his bones started to ache and he had to stop by to catch his breath. It was then that he noticed the water, which was liquid and flowing smoothly once again. Grateful, he went to the shore and drooped downwards, intending to take a mouthful to quench his thirst; but then, he saw the shades in the distant glades, working mechanically at repetitive, menial chores. He instantly recoiled away from the waters. He knew where he was; the fields of Elysium, bordered by Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, where souls accepted their fate and left their former lives completely so that they might start their existence anew.

And Charon knew instinctively, that it was Lethe all along which would guide him down the true path, for to think otherwise meant that he was lost, abandoned by fate to be consumed within the sweeping, inexplicable changes that were devouring Hades. Thus he set his boat down on the waters, freed his oar and resumed his journey once more.

Lethe did not speak, unlike the others. There was no voice of oblivion, only the totality of the silence that followed in its wake. There was a cool, pleasant breeze which flowed along the breadth of the stream, and it put his troubled mind at ease. Yet, the comfort of oblivion was not something he entirely cherished, and he hastened to escape the serene place.

And thus he came upon a great mist, so dense and so wide that it completely obscured any vision of what lay beyond. The old man braced himself, before resolving to oar straight through. His vision being rendered useless, his other senses also became functionally irrelevant. For a moment which seemed to persist abnormally long, Charon felt that his boat might tip over and he might fall into an endless, gaping chasm.

Then the feeling passed, and the mists gave way.

He wasn't in Hades, anymore.

The ray of sunshine poking through the foggy air stung his light-deprived eyes, but they grew accustomed to it after a while. He glanced upwards, and saw clear, blue skies. And there he saw a flash of silver, high up in the atmosphere; then a dozen more flashes streaked through.

He realised that they were growing closer.

Great wings of majestic plumage were flapping above the clouds, and soon, he caught a glimpse of the full glory: Pegasi, mounted by distinctly human figures as they sailed through the air. They were descending gradually, in a steady trajectory set for a distant target.

They must be omens, the old man thought, and resolved to follow their trail for the time being. As he did so, he took more time to fully take in his surroundings. Judging by the stillness of the water, he realised that he had to be in a lake rather than a river. A small island loomed in the horizons, surrounded completely by marshlands.

He did not know where he was; his steadfast instincts now proved useless in such unfamiliar territory. A curious feeling enveloped him- a tinge of alienation, followed by the soothing knowledge that here at least, he might be safe for the time being. But if Hades had fallen quickly to such unexplained phenomena, would anywhere else truly be safe? He wished not to ponder further on the matter, and instead, oared onwards.

Eventually, he got near enough to the target to see what it was- a small boat moored in the middle of nowhere, occupied by three dainty figures garbed in flowing, unflattering robes of white. The boat was more spacious and wider than his, he remarked sub-consciously. But almost immediately afterwards he noticed the reason for their pause- a glint of metal caught his eye, and judging by the way the figures were fishing it out of the water, he figured it was the armor doing the trick, worn by some unfortunate drowner, no doubt.

As he looked at these three maidens, with flowing, golden locks, their innocent, almost pure serenity struck him, for he hadn't seen such sincerity in purpose in all his long years. And as they fetched the man out of the water- for it had to be a male, judging by the form- three of the horse-riders descended towards this most curious sight, and Charon saw that these were maidens too.

But these were shield-maidens- they had to be. Even if they were not garbed in strange, plated armor, they carried themselves with a certain assured haughtiness, that came naturally to warriors of accomplished stature, who knew their strengths and limits all too well. They had seen him approach, of course, but did not object; and when he had reached sufficient proximity, they introduced themselves as Eir Mercy-Giver, Herfjötur Host-fetter, and Skögul Storm-bender. They were in deep discourse with the ladies of the lake, and they spoke in alien tongues which constantly morphed phonetically such that it eluded his grasping mind.

For the longest time, he stood there on his boat, leaning on his oar, listening to the indiscernible exchange, an unwanted outsider peeking through the window into a strange world. Then one of lake-maidens looked at him directly, and smiled, before speaking in a language that he could more easily understand. This was a very strange matter, she said, and they must go to the king of this land to resolve it on rightful grounds. "And you may come with us, if you want!" she laughed, answering Charon's query before it had been even asked.

And thus ended his journey, if only for the time being.

But another's had only just begun.