Crius didn't bother protesting. He didn't try to fight back. That was because he already had a plan. From whatever he had heard about Mars Ultor as the Romans called him, he was pretty stupid and cocky.
Mars seemed disappointed that Crius was giving up so easily; he had clearly been relishing a fight. Crius was almost willing to give it to him, for some reason he found a sudden urge to punch him as he stepped closer, but once he touched his sword, those emotions dissipated like water on a desert road.
Unfortunately his sword didn't seem to be able to do much else. He willed it to do something like what had happened with Demeter, but just like with Poseidon nothing seemed to happen.
But something else occurred to Crius. If Mars just decide to teleport to Mt. Olympus, then his whole plan would go down the drain. As he thought about it, it almost seemed that it was going to be likely. For some reason though, Mars didn't pick this most obvious choice. He was probably too stupid to do so.
"You've got nerve, I'll give you that," Mars said. "For one, ignoring absolutely everything you did to Demeter and Jupiter, of all of the places to hide, you chose Camp Jupiter. The very place of my patronage. For a whole week right under my nose." Crius shuddered. Mars suddenly seemed angry, and suddenly he thought that Mars wasn't going to Olympus directly because he was dumb, but because he wanted to humiliate Crius first. Crius had angered him by and the other gods were probably making fun of him for having ignored him when he was right by his doorstep, and Mars was going to exact his revenge before taking Crius anywhere. Mars Ultor. Mars the Avenger, Crius thought.
This was strengthened as once Mars was out, he didn't head towards his bike (one look at it told Crius that it had to have been his) but instead dragged him in the opposite direction.
And that's when all chaos wreaked loose. The ground opened up and out of the fissures Crius saw ghosts crawl out. And these weren't your friendly house gods as the Romans would call them, they somehow seemed to be more… real than normal ghosts. They were all carrying weapons ranging from swords to machine guns. Behind them, some more solid-looking skeletons crawled out.
"Stop!" Mars screamed. The skeletons looked at Mars and hesitated, as if they owed him something or were afraid of him even after they were dead. But despite that, they continued on, though Crius noticed none of them came close to Mars.
The light around Mars' sunglasses got brighter, as if someone had stoked some sort of fire burning in his eyes. Crius wondered just what he would see if he removed those dark sunglasses, but he had bigger worries.
Though he had no idea about what was going on, Crius took this time to escape. He dashed out, and though Mars tried to grab him at the last minute and probably got ahold of a few strands of hair, Crius sprinted as fast as he could. He threw away all of his heavy equipment and made a beeline for the gates.
Crius thought hard about what he was going to say in order to get out. After all, fleeing from battle just wasn't the Roman way.
"Lord Mars told me to go on a quest outside," he blurted out to the sentries. The sentries were watching the scene unfold, and they were clearly itching to join in but had been told to hold the perimeter for now.
Both of them looked suspiciously at Crius, but there was a call from a few feet away that said, "I saw Mars Ultor heading for his cabin."
That seemed to be enough to let Crius escape. He had learned from other people that the camp had an entrance to the outside world across the River Tiber. Crius ran towards it and plunged himself into the water without hesitating. Sure, cold water was bad, but it was certainly better than whatever was going on behind him. Crius could now hear some sort of howling along with the screeching of souls, like there were some huge dogs screaming in pain at camp.
As he got out of the Tiber, just as he was sure that he was going to get somewhere safe, something grabbed him from behind and lifted him up twenty feet in a few seconds. Crius looked up to see something he recognized from the drawings- a Fury.
Crius had heard the story about Theseus and Pirithous and how they had travelled to the Underworld in order to abduct Persephone. But the moment they sat down on a few rocks, the Furies surrounded them. Even though they were one of the greatest heroes ever, the moment they saw them their courage deserted them and all they just remained their petrified.
Crius could see why. Luckily, this Fury didn't seem to be glaring at him, and her whip hung in a non-threatening way at her side. Crius saw the landscape below turn into a blur, far faster than it should have. Suddenly, the Fury descended and dropped what Crius guessed was supposed to be a safe landing for him since he landed on a pile of grass, but still hurt.
Once Crius stood up, he saw that they were somewhere in the middle of the desert, and that patch of grass had been thrown there as if it had been specially made for him to be thrown on it.
The Fury was standing next to an oddly shaped mirror. Crius could see scenes of farmers starving from famine, people running away from a volcanic explosion, a cloud of gas settling over a group of soldiers.
Crius guessed that it wasn't laughing gas.
The surface of the mirror shimmered and began showing scenes of torture, horror, you know, the kind of ordinary stuff you expect to see in a Fury's mirror. Crius guessed it was kind of like a magical dinner plate that he had heard about, but he guessed that it would have been a bit nicer than this.
When Hades' image finally formed, the first thing that Crius said was, "You've gotten fatter."
The Fury looked at him as if she wanted to whip him, but Hades waved her aside. She glared at Crius and then took ten paces back.
"Yes, I've been eating to recover. Demeter and Persephone have each told me around ten times that I've gotten chubbier," Hades said, clearly not liking the topic at hand.
"Um, so how are things?" Crius asked. He had no idea whatsoever as to how he was going to start a conversation with the God of Death.
"Oh, the usual," Hades waved his hand dismissively. "The gods are fighting amongst themselves, the world is about to tear itself, nothing much out of the ordinary."
Crius thought differently but he just nodded.
"So," Crius began. "You sent those spirits and stuff back there?"
"Yes," Hades said. "You're rather slow, aren't you? I assumed that the spirits of the dead waking was slightly self-evident. But now we have a problem that your safe retreat at Camp Jupiter has been ruined."
"You knew I was there?" Crius asked.
"Of course," Hades said with a tone that indicated that he didn't think that Crius could get much stupider. "I was always watching you. I wanted an underground place, much safer, you know, but everyone would have been expecting that. Camp Jupiter on the other hand, it's so in plain view that no one would have bothered to notice you."
"Until I messed up," Crius said.
"Yes, but that's slightly my fault," Hades said. "I was the one who knocked that scroll into your hands- don't look so surprised, I have this helm. Anyway, it's time that you finally get to know what it is that's happening."
"I think I do kn-" Crius cut himself off. For all that he had read at Camp Jupiter, he hadn't really gotten any closer to figuring out anything for real.
Hades seemed to guess what Crius was thinking. "So anyway, let's begin with this before someone else comes along and interrupts us. I'll try to make a story of several millennia short. You see, shortly after my brothers and I had divided the world up into three pieces, and I was tricked into taking my current morbid place, I steamed over it for a long time. I saw the other gods milling about with the mortals above and their heroes. For a long time, my children weren't part of them. I merely took to hiding in the shadows and watching events above ground for a long time.
"The thing is, I started noticing… patterns. I don't think the gods ever did, perhaps because as they were directly involved with things, they couldn't. After surveying things in my domain over and over again, I reached this conclusion: life isn't fair, and neither is death."
Crius wondered if he should have said "So what?" at this point but he knew that it wouldn't do any good and would probably just end up bad. Hades had been pretty patient with him from what he knew the god was usually supposed to behave like, and he didn't want to ruin that.
"Now, many will agree with me, but I thought to myself, 'Here I see heroes and gods running around everywhere and getting into trouble, and just ending up tragically.' Let's look at things for a moment. The humans are certainly not happy; I wouldn't be in their position. The demigods especially so. But even the gods don't seem to benefit from all of this ruckus. So my question is, how is it possible that everybody is being treated unfairly? Surely all of these problems have to start somewhere? And if so, there should be someone who's benefitting from all of it.
"Perhaps you can't imagine the sheer size of it. Heroes dying left and right. Absolute horror everywhere. Who is gaining something? We gods quarrel amongst each other, but the truth is that all of us hate our positions. So there must be someone using us who has something to get by forcing all of us to attack each other. The other gods seemed to mainly just shrug all of this off, as if they didn't care or thought that it couldn't be helped. But we're gods. Things aren't to be like this. One day, I decided that I would investigate myself. I placed on my helm and was so invisible to all eyes, mortal and immortal. For a great number of years I wandered around place to place.
"And it was by chance that the idea finally hit me. There was only one group of people who were unfazed by all of the calamities around us: the Fates." Crius remembered that piece of scripture and saw that he still had it.
"I hid in their lair for a very long time," Hades said. "I would do it whenever I got free time, Persephone was sure that I was seeing someone else, but that's besides the point. From whatever snatches of conversation I heard, I finally began learning something. The Fates, the ones who feared no one, always talked about a prophecy that they were themselves afraid of. And they just went on and on about a sword. I was intrigued, and one day when Clothos went outside their lair alone, I followed as she made her way to the depths of Tartarus to check up on that very sword that you have in your hands. I stole it the second time."
"But what does this all have to do with me?" Crius asked.
"Think boy," Hades said. He was getting impatient. "Don't you get it? I'm tired of wheeling around at the whims of those old grannies. They took away one of the finest women I know, and cast the lives of several of my children in darkness. They tore away Luke Castellan's happiness and peace of mind, and they were the ones who cause my father Kronos to become as he had become in the first place. Imagine, the entire world could have been different. A happier place, one in which one can hope for genuine peace and decisions of the gods would matter. Imagine all of the ideal stories of the gods you've ever heard about, the ones in which everyone gets a happy ending. That could be more than a fairy tale if we succeed.
"Now, the part where we come into the present. I can't normally save people from dying, no matter what you hear about the gods in other religions. But, I managed to save you, because you're the 'Chose One' or something that the Fates kept harping about. Don't ask me what it's supposed to mean, all I know is that that sword is supposed to help you do heroic things with it. I'm guessing the Fates have spread some rumors about you to Zeus, and that's why every single divine entity is after you. I'm pretty much as clueless as you from now on. You're going to have to go to someone else for help now."
"Who?" Crius asked. He noticed that the Fury was fiddling with something in her purse, an ugly bag that seemed to be made out of human skin. Crius had no idea as to how he knew it was human skin, he just knew.
"I kept trying to figure out who should know more about these things," Hades said, "I was wondering about my father, or perhaps Prometheus, but that I think we should reserve for later. I have the entire dead to extract intel from, but apparently that's short. Go to Hercules."
"Hercules?" Crius asked. From whatever he knew, he didn't think that the guy was going to be too helpful to their cause. "Why?"
"Call it a gut feeling," Hades said. "If everything is left out, at least he might not be too eager to hurt you if you say that you're being pursued by Hera. He might not be too up with his father either. At the very least he should listen to what you're saying."
The Fury had taken out a toy motorcycle from her purse which she let go. By the time it touched the ground, it was fully grown and about as mean as Ares'. The image of Hades vanished in the mirror and the Fury took it.
"Oh, this bike isn't for you. You get to take the express route," she said with a nasty grin. Before Crius could protest, the shadows had leapt onto him.
Crius could constantly hear everything that dwelled in the darkness and the screaming of a thousand souls, but he sort of used to that stuff by that point. He suddenly found himself deposited on a beach, with the water all around him and a single person with a huge club in front of him.
A/N: Thanks for reading. And as for your question, I considered it slightly obvious that Crius was going to become the God of Fate eventually one way or another. And, I probably should have mentioned this in the earlier chapter, but the lines about the Fates that were on the scroll were taken from a translation of a Roman epic Ovid and was a line said by Zeus to Aphrodite.