Disclaimer: I don't own Trials of Apollo.

HADES IX
The Impertinence of Rivers

The Phlegethon was not particularly impressed with Hades for wading through it, its frigid flames searing at his essence, but it could not burn the souls of the dead, and while Hades certainly was not a soul of the dead, several of them were woven into his armour, giving him a layer of protection from the worst of the fire river's wrath.

That was not to say that the crossing was at all pleasant, but it was hardly a significant trial to wade through; the worst part was the fact that he either had to magnify his size multiple times or scramble ungainly up the bank to exit on the other side.

Needless to say, he elected for the former, although despite considering it, he elected not to remain that size once clear. It seemed more likely that his presence would be allowed to pass unchallenged if he stayed the seemingly-meek size of a mere human, rather than allowing his power to spread out like a self-important god, and Hades had no desire to confront certain, powerful, denizens of the Pit if he could avoid it.

He and his brothers had managed to evade that particular encounter on his last visit to Tartarus, and he was fully intending on repeating the feat. Hopefully, Apollo was equally reluctant to come face to face with the primordial whose body they were walking across and wouldn't do anything obnoxious to gain unwanted attention.

It suddenly occurred to Hades that Apollo was definitely not one for keeping a low profile, whatever the situation, and that separating from the younger god had meant losing the ability to at least attempt to keep his more outlandish reactions contained.

Then he remembered why they had separated and scowled, some of his essence leaking out and stifling a monster that had foolishly tried to enter his vicinity. Asclepius had done nothing at all to endear himself to him throughout his existence, and having the god banished to Tartarus where he could cause no more disruption to the order of things had been an appealing prospect.

It still was, no matter that Apollo had thrown a temper tantrum over the revelation. Why he had thought Asclepius would escape punishment for breaking his oath, Hades did not care to imagine – that he did it on Apollo's orders did not overturn the fact that he still did it, against explicit commands to the contrary.

If Hades encountered Apollo's son again, he certainly would not be going out of his way to assist the young god.

Tartarus was a vast mass of writhing death and the stench of constant respawn – almost an offence to Hades' domain if not for the fact it was not mortals who languished and resurrected again and again, but immortals in the form of monsters. There were proper processes to rebirth from Elysium, complete with protocols, permissions, and a liberal use of the River Lethe.

The Pit, meanwhile, allowed any monster a do-over so long as its essence remained. Hades grasped the hilt of his sword firmly, feeling the comforting tug of Stygian Iron against his essence. It would not hurt him – would not dare hurt him – but for lesser immortals it was a true end of the line. He had not wanted the sword, and Olympus knew his youngest brother's paranoia-induced fury had been immense at the discovery of his wife's creation, but down here in Tartarus, it would make an effective deterrent.

There would be no respawn for monsters touched by his blade, and they had – for the most part – enough self-preservation to keep their distance from it. He wondered how many had seen first-hand the damage such a weapon could do. Much to his displeasure, it had been barely a year since the last wielder of a Stygian Iron weapon had passed through Tartarus, and while Nico had eventually been overwhelmed, Hades had full confidence that many monsters had met a permanent end to their existence at his son's hands before that had happened.

Beneath his feet, the sharp glass tearing continuously at his feet had slowly reduced in intensity, shifting from a constant attack to incremental, and then occasional. The prison was not, despite expectations, at the deepest, darkest part of Tartarus, but it was not in the upper levels, either. A more naïve individual might have thought the lessening of the glassy assault on his feet was a good sign, a suggestion that he was leaving the dangerous zone and entering one less likely to actively hinder those that passed across.

Hades would, not that he would have ever admitted it to anyone, have far preferred to remain in the glass-strewn upper levels, near enough to the Underworld that he could still feel faint vestiges of his domain reaching down for him and offering what assistance and boosts it could offer from so far away. The continual vicious bites of glass were inconsequential at best and a mild irritant at worst to a god of Hades' calibre – indeed, Apollo, despite being a weaker god and also separated further from his domains, had seemed entirely unconcerned by the constant tearing and healing of his feet.

Now, however, Hades had entered the first layer of what he considered to be the false sense of security. He remembered it well from his time down in the Pit with Poseidon and Zeus, his brothers breathing a surprised sigh of relief as the ground stopped attempting to tear them to shreds (and Hades along with them, although he was at loath to admit his naivety from back then). They'd still been a little on edge, a little paranoid, but there was no denying that they had dropped their guard, just a bit.

Just a bit had been all the Pit had needed to remind them where the true power lay. The denizen himself had not come out to play, but he hadn't needed to. Not when he had minions galore, and not all of them simple fodder to be tossed away like toys he had grown bored of.

Beneath their feet, any semblance of sure-footedness had been quickly stripped away. The skin of Tartarus was a soft membrane, giving yet never yielding, and more than once it had moved, unexpected and terrifyingly, sending them staggering down to one knee, or both knees. The monsters, though mostly small fry, had taken advantage of any weakness, and Hades had not had a Stygian Iron blade back then.

Not all of the monsters had been small fry, either.

Hades was not allowing himself to be lulled into a false sense of security this time. Better armed, with his sword and of course his Helm, yet alone, he kept a close watch on the skin beneath his feet, the membrane heaving and stuttering with apparent randomness as it attempted to off-balance him the same way it had once succeeded (there had been no room for rivalries between brothers back then, let alone feuds. It had been the three of them, together, against the Pit and Hades didn't quite have fond memories of their time in Tartarus, but perhaps he missed the feeling of a brother's hand clasping his arm as one of them pulled the other to their feet while the third covered their backs). He was older – far, far older – and wiser than the young trio of gods who had just defeated their tyrannical father and felt the need to check on the prison down below.

He descended slowly, heading more across than down as Tartarus thrummed beneath his feet, seemingly not consciously aware of his presence but certainly subconsciously aware of Hades walking across his skin. This time, unlike the last, he knew where the prison lay – that there was a prison within Tartarus and that the Pit was not simply one entire holding pen for enemies of the gods who should never be allowed to see the Overworld (or Underworld) again – and while it was not at the deepest level, it was a long way from the entrance they had used. That was hardly surprising – putting a prison so close to an exit was a recipe for disaster – but it meant for a difficult time when one wanted to access the prison in question.

Especially alone.

The timelessness of Tartarus had unsettled Hades the first time, and he was not comfortable with it the second time around, either. It reminded him too much of his father, and the way he could never be certain if seconds were really seconds, or if they were minutes, hours, days, or if hours were really hours, or if they were minutes, seconds, milliseconds. Not in the presence of Kronos, and certainly not in his stomach.

Hades had no fond recollections of his time in his father's stomach. Nor did he know how long he had spent in there before Zeus had forced Kronos to expel him at last, and it was knowledge he could likely never gain. At least he knew that, no matter how long he spent down in the Pit, when he departed – and he would be departing, once he had established what was attempting to summon his son and put a stop to it – and returned to the Underworld, he would know how much time had passed.

It still did not make the current uncertainty any more bearable in the meantime.

Hades did not know how long he walked. The glass shards kept decreasing in number beneath his feet until they fully gave way to the unsettling sensation of walking over the skin of a greater being, but he could not say how long it had taken for that to occur. He did not look back the way he had come once, but he could see the bright flickering flames of the Phlegethon cutting across the distant landscape in his periphery as it headed near enough straight down towards the Heart of Tartarus.

Apollo was somewhere the other side of that river, or at least that was where Hades had left him. If he had crossed it since, there was no sign of a golden light to betray his position. Hades told himself that that didn't matter, and kept forging his way onwards.

If his memory did not fail him, and Hades was determined that it did not, mostly because if it did that would make Tartarus even more of a trial to cross, but also because he found it unlikely that he could misremember such sheer terror and other such unwelcome emotions, three of the other Underworld rivers still lay between him and the prison.

He was also uncomfortably aware that compared to them, the Phlegethon was effectively harmless. They did not attack the body, but the mind, and even a god's mind could be made vulnerable. Not as vulnerable as a mortal's, that was true, but even so, Hades did not recall his crossings of those rivers last time with fondness.

Another brash moment of naivety – that the rivers that ran through his domain mostly docilely, with no serious designs of disruption or disloyalty, would be equally calm and docile outside of his domain.

Cocytus had harshly disabused him of that notion last time, and from his recollection, that would be the next river between him and the prison. It did not flare brightly like the Phlegethon, announcing its presence visually in such a way it could not possibly be missed, but Hades was familiar with the other warnings, subtle but very much there, if one knew what to be aware of.

Tartarus was not warm. Even its fiery river was a searing frigidness rather than a sweltering heat. Still, there was a specific chill that came not from the Pit itself, but from one of the five rivers that ran above and below the surface of the skin, subtle to those who did not recognise the warning signs, but for Hades a vibrant declaration.

The River Cocytus was close.

How close, Hades was not sure, but as he continued advancing, the chill crept up his form, seeking a chink through which it could assail his essence with his many failures – failures Hades usually would not even acknowledge had occurred in the first place, let alone allow himself or others to think of.

After the chill came the scent. Others might have noticed that first, but for Hades the scent of sulphur was more than just a single river – it was the scent of the fields of punishment, of souls in eternal torment, receiving their just retaliation for their crimes against the gods during their mortal lives. That despair, of course, was culminated in the river of lamentation itself.

Finally, just as he spied the dark, glittering ribbon of deepest blue winding its way almost lazily down through the Pit, he heard the whispers. Faint, almost on the edge of his hearing, the temptation was strong to strain to hear what they were saying, what the whispers might possibly contain.

That was another mistake he and his brothers had made the first time.

Now, Hades kept his attention firmly on where he was going and shut the whispers out as best as he could. Unfortunately, the voices were familiar even without the words, and it was all too easy for his mind to slip back towards when it had been the five of them – him, and the four voices he could hear – and no-one else.

No-one else at all.

Hestia's calming tones were resigned, any hope long gone, likely gone before Hades had ever met her. Demeter's voice was determined, no nonsense and focused on survival, while Hera's was fierce and sharp, lashing out at anyone who frustrated her. Most often, the subject of her ire was the youngest, Poseidon full of temperamental fury and insistent that they would not be trapped forever, that if they just kept trying, one day they would break out.

The four voices, overlapping and arguing and washing over Hades like the river itself wished to – like saliva and stomach acids and other horrendous liquids had done for so, so long, eternity after eternity after second – brought with it a feeling that he had once fought so hard to shake.

Hades was the god of the Underworld, seeing the light of the Overworld only on rare occasions and stepping foot there even more rarely. He was not claustrophobic, was not bothered by enclosed spaces and the idea of the world closing in on him.

Warm bodies pressed against him, constantly moving and fighting and writhing as their surroundings gurgled and convulsed near-constantly, periodically drenched in more disgusting, soft, half-digested items that he then had to consume lest he starve – more than once items shoved straight into his mouth by his older sister, Demeter determined even that early that starvation was not acceptable.

Unless it was on her own terms, but that was a whole other issue and the soft whisper of his beloved wife's voice mostly-concealed behind the sound of his four siblings' was a shock that had Hades almost losing his concentration.

Persephone had not even been born the last time Cocytus had dared to inflict its powers upon Hades.

He had been expecting a reprise of his time in his father's stomach, in the well of despair that had made up his first real memories, of his siblings (barring Zeus) pressing down and around him as their Kronos' stomach tried and tried and failed to digest them. That, he had heard last time, had fallen into the water alongside Poseidon and needed hauling out by Zeus, who had never known that horror but had other horrors of his own to face, horrors that Hades and Poseidon had in turn had to pull their youngest brother away from.

The sound of his wife's voice, soft but harsh like the times she'd called him nothing but the vilest of things, lashing out against him despite all the kindness he had lavished upon her because even then she was a queen who deserved no less, even if she was not yet his queen, made him falter.

And Cocytus struck.

The feeling of elation being pulled out from beneath his feet, victory and company suddenly snatched away and a loneliness even worse than before, because he'd been so, so certain that he had won but then everyone had turned against him and he couldn't defeat them all.

The cavernous hollow of despair as he'd loved and lost, when the decree had come down to him from Olympus that he was to surrender Persephone back to Demeter, that his sisters, his brothers, would not even let him have one soul by his side in a sea of subjects that depressed far more than they cheered.

Hades knew that, in the end, he had been half victorious. Persephone had eaten from the pomegranate, had tied herself to the Underworld enough that Hestia had proposed an everlasting compromise, but those memories were overwhelmed by the instant of despair that had grasped him and nearly led him to do something equally as dramatic as Demeter's own temper tantrum in the Overworld, flooding his domain with more and more and more work as she starved humanity to death.

His reputation was, mostly, undeserved, but Hades was aware that he could so easily lash out if he wanted to, and Persephone's hissed words of revile overlapped with the firm tones of a woman who was just as stubborn, yet far too mortal and had her existence snuffed out like it was nothing.

Love was something he had learned early on not to give out. He had been lucky, with Persephone, that he had at least half-won her hand and in time she truly had come to love him, and with a wife to dote upon and the strong, strong despair of loss circling him, never so far out of reach that he didn't know it could come back, he had kept his heart close even on the rare occasions he dallied with mortals.

Maria's voice laughing dismissively, insulting Zeus and seemingly not realising it would seal her doom, reminded Hades that his heart had not always obeyed his insistence that it stay close. His most recent mortal dalliance, as Persephone had disparagingly called her, had coaxed it out, and then destroyed it.

Gone, in a single flash of lightning, and Hades could smell the ozone, feel the tears down his face, hear the confused cries of young children who didn't even realise what had happened, just that something was very, very wrong.

The grief, still fresh and raw, crashed over him, his daughter's voice joining her mother's. Bianca was gone, hidden from him once more as her soul circled around somewhere on the Overworld again, his daughter but also not his daughter, not this time, and he didn't know who had that claim to his girl but someone did, because Bianca had left him.

Gone.

His lovers, his children. Gone.

Persephone on the surface for half of the year, leaving him alone in a way he truly, truly hated but could do nothing about. A daughter he couldn't acknowledge, never acknowledge because acknowledgement meant death, meant he would be the reason for her death, and Hades would not, could not, do that.

Even now, he was alone. Apollo had stormed off, no loyalty to his uncle, abandoning him without a second thought for his son, and Hades was completely, utterly, alone.

His own voice was next, a memory as he pushed away the last one, told his son he'd wished he were dead instead, grief overtaking logic, turning truths into lies, and Hades did not dwell on regrets except he did, he always did, and Nico was-

Nico.

His son's name halted the waterfall of lament, because it was Nico's fault he was down here, Nico's fault he was suffering again despite never intending on stepping foot in Tartarus ever again, Nico's-

For Nico, he corrected, to protect the son he had hurt, the son the world had tried to hurt.

Cocytus faltered, and as the voices faded away into a startled silence, Hades realised that he was in the depths of the river, surrounded by the dark blue glitter of water that was trying to pull him down, drown him in sorrows once and for all. Rage simmered in his essence; Hades was a god of the Underworld, Cocytus was a River of the Underworld. Even here, even in Tartarus, it had no right to try and destroy him.

With a single thought, he exploded out of the river, water droplets falling away from him as he stormed the rest of the way across and onto the other bank. He did not look back, did not give the river of lamentation and its invisible god the satisfaction of affecting him.

Furious with himself, as much as the river, for falling prey to its wiles despite knowing what it could do, Hades stormed onwards, across the membrane of Tartarus, determined that nothing else would catch him unawares.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari