Disclaimer: I don't own The Trials of Apollo

HADES XVII
The Long and Inconvenient Detour

Styx's refusal to let Apollo cross was a great inconvenience. It did not prevent them from completing their quest entirely, because it was possible to reach the prison without crossing the Styx, but the alternative route would lead them through areas Hades had particularly never wanted to go near again.

In the least worst case scenario – because there was no best case scenario when it came to being inside Tartarus – the deepest point of their descent down the Pit would have been the prison itself, keeping them clear of the heart of Tartarus, where the worst free-roaming inhabitants lurked, and the abyss of Chaos. Their new trajectory still kept them far from Nyx, and Hades had no intentions of nearing Chaos' edge ever again – something he was certain Apollo would agree with no hesitation in the slightest – but it posed other, otherwise avoidable, threats.

"What oath did you break?" he asked of his nephew as they left Styx and her threats behind them. While he had not expected the meeting between the goddess and his nephew to go smoothly, it had not occurred to him that Styx would refuse to allow Apollo to cross her waters entirely.

Beside him, Apollo sighed. The sound was as depreciating as Hades had ever heard the younger god make.

"Rash and foolish ones I should have never made in the first place," he admitted. "Ones I-"

"Ones?" Hades interrupted. "You broke more than one?"

Apollo's wince was full-bodied, and far more suited to a mortal than a god.

"Styx has every right to be mad at me," he said, a statement Hades couldn't disagree with.

"What were they?" he pressed – what sort of oaths would Apollo make in the first place? His nephew had said they were rash and foolish, but while Hades could certainly equate rash with Apollo and his temper, Apollo had never before reached the levels of foolishness required to offend Styx so-

"Not to use a bow for as long as I was mortal," Apollo confessed, the words quiet but astonishing enough to silence Hades' thoughts regardless. "Or play an instrument."

Rash and foolish, indeed. Apollo without his bow or music was no Apollo at all.

"I would ask what you were thinking, but you have already admitted you were not," he said in exasperated disapproval.

Apollo made a noise of mournful agreement. "I broke both within a day," he admitted.

Hades scoffed. "Of course you did." His knowledge of Apollo's time as a mortal was minimal, but he had no doubt that without his archery, at the very least, he would not have survived. Especially against Python.

He still wasn't entirely clear on how Apollo had defeated him, as a mortal, but that was a question too far, he suspected. It was one thing to probe about the broken oaths Styx was so bitter about, and another to dredge up severe trauma. Apollo had never asked him about Kronos, so he could refrain from inquiring after Python further than he had already.

Apollo did not expand further on his oath-breaking, but Hades did not need to hear more on that topic, either. His reasonings for breaking them were immaterial – as he had said, they had been rash and foolish, and breaking them had been an inevitability from the moment he made them. The exact trigger meant nothing.

No doubt Styx would get her vengeance on Apollo whenever she chose, but Hades saw no need to provoke her further – whatever she did to Apollo would no doubt make him struggle further in Tartarus, which would in turn put more pressure on Hades to get them through their mission – so he led his nephew directly away from the river rather than following her banks. They would need to approximately follow the Styx to her end, in order to go around rather than cross, but there was a large expanse between the Styx and the Cocytus they could traverse.

Since their arrival in Tartarus, he had noticed Apollo was far more prone to bouts of quietness. It was the sort of peace he would have claimed to crave ordinarily, but while it was logically appropriate to not treat Tartarus like Olympus, lest the Primordial himself take offence, it still seemed wrong for Apollo to not be constantly making some sort of noise, whether it be talking or singing.

The song he had sung against Orion had seemed very unlike anything the god of music usually composed or performed. His ballad about his children had comparatively been a breath of fresh air – trust Apollo to draw inspiration from the myriad of mortals he had spawned across the millennia, although Hades could not complain when it had been powerful enough for Hades to focus on instead of the whispers of Maria, the complaints of siblings crammed against him, and Cocytus' other snares.

He'd realised, when Apollo started talking about the daughter killed by Orion with a raw emotion their fellow gods went to great lengths to never show, that his nephew would never get past Cocytus unaided. He felt grief too strongly, no matter how much time had passed, and with so many of his children recently deceased, Apollo had never stood a chance.

Hades wasn't sure if Apollo had even fully noticed that he'd had to drag his nephew through the river, a feat that had required more effort than he would ever admit; the song had cut through his own thoughts enough for him to maintain his presence of mind and not succumb to the water, but Apollo had barely been able to remain on his feet, let alone walk.

It had felt distinctly strange to be in physical contact with another god for so long; already during their time in the Pit, he had spent more time touching Apollo than he had touching anyone, including Persephone, for several decades, if not centuries. Gods did not need physical contact the way mortals craved it, although he was well aware that several of his brethren chose to pursue it regardless, and to touch another god – to get so close to the essence that comprised their entire being – almost bordered on uncomfortable.

Hades did not mind the company of others, so long as they were entertaining company and not irritating fools, but he had spent quite enough of his existence unable to stop touching at least one other being. He saw no reason to continue seeking more.

At least Apollo, despite having a more extroverted nature than Hades' usual companions – and tactile, based on his interactions with his sons – was aware enough not to initiate contact, even if that had left Hades in the unusual position of being the one reaching out.

They continued their journey through Tartarus in silence. Despite the strangeness of Apollo's lack of noise, Hades didn't find it an inherently uncomfortable one; it seemed that neither he nor Apollo wanted to make small talk, and when his nephew was being silent he was surprisingly comfortable company (although Hades had always found him the most tolerable of his nephews, so perhaps it should not have been such a surprise). Not a word was exchanged even as Hades judged them far enough from the Styx – but not yet close enough to the Cocytus – to change their heading and once again begin the descent down the Pit, towards its deepest, darkest parts.

Monsters observed their progress from a safe distance. Hades bade them no mind, beyond periodic checks to ensure nothing that might actually pose a threat to either himself or Apollo had joined their ranks. After Orion's near-successful attempt to ambush them, which Hades could admit had only failed because Apollo's paranoia that his bane was following had in turn prompted Hades to be more suspicious, he intended on taking no chances.

Just because Orion was so far the only foe they had faced that had constituted a threat to one of them did not mean there were not others. While the Titans and Giants should, in theory, still be in a state of resurrecting and not wandering the rough landscape after the past two wars, Orion had already proven that that was not the case. The state of the other Giants, and potentially the Titans as well, was therefore an unknown element – and Hades suspected that, if the Primordial so wished, Tartarus could accelerate the resurrection of whichever monsters he chose.

It was one of the reasons Hades was not eager to advertise their presence to Tartarus any more than necessary, and he once again found himself frustrated at Styx for forcing them to take a detour which would send them passing far too close to the Heart. Given his earlier conversation with her, and Apollo's reaction to whatever she had shown him in her waters, it was clear that she had threatened his nephew's children. As soon as that had happened, it had become certain that no matter what, Apollo would not cross the Styx, and Hades had seen no point in wasting time trying to convince one or other of them to cave in their stubbornness.

Attempting to track time in Tartarus was a futile endeavour, but the knowledge did not prevent Hades' mind from trying to grasp some degree of meaningful passage of time as he and Apollo descended, leaving behind the sharp glass shards that continued to tear at their feet vindictively and instead striding out across the taut, almost leathery sensation of skin that replaced it. He could count how many times Apollo had tapped his fingers against his bow, or brushed a hand through the bristle of fletching protruding from this quiver, but he could not equate either count to the passage of time.

Despite that, he was confident that their silent journey was not a short one. It was monotonous, as monsters gathered and observed but never approached, warded off by the strength of two powerful gods, but while the silence between him and his nephew was comfortable, the ambient sounds of Tartarus were not.

The chittering, grunting and howling of monsters was little more than a backdrop to be ignored, but as they descended further and further, Hades found himself listening more intently for something different. There was the sensation rather like something holding its breath, something waiting to pounce, and Hades disliked not knowing when nor where the threat would come.

He was certain that his last journey into Tartarus, with his brothers for company, had been nowhere near as calm. When they had not been struggling against the effects of the five rivers, each seemingly relishing in the viciousness Tartarus added to their essence, they had been fighting their way through disposed and banished Titans, and monsters of Typhon's calibre.

Logic dictated that, so soon after two wars and Kronos and Gaia alike emptying Tartarus of its strongest occupants, there was simply a lull in the Pit's available threats. Perhaps he and Apollo had entered at a time of less peril – Python was gone forever, Typhon, the Titans and Giants were all newly-defeated, and only the weak had resurrected so quickly – except Orion's presence corrected the notion.

If Orion had already reformed and begun prowling around, seeking targets and a way back to the Overworld, then almost anything could be lying in wait.

And then there were the other threats.

Not all of the inhabitants of Tartarus ever chose to leave. Nyx's children, in particular, appeared fond of their existence in the pit, although their mother herself slipped out every night, and Hades recalled several encounters that had been far too close for comfort.

There were things, down in the Pit, that those who had never entered did not even know existed. Things that lurked in the darkest, deepest parts of the world, teetering and thriving on the edge of Chaos and haunted the nightmares of the very, very few who had seen them and survived. Things Apollo knew nothing of, and Hades wished to know nothing of.

It was those that caused Hades the most concern, after the Primordial himself, about their descent so far towards the bottommost edge of the Pit. Orion had been – for him, if not for Apollo – an easy fight. Little but a warm up, compared to some of the worst things the Pit had to offer.

Despite knowing that Apollo had struggled due to the connection with his bane, that Orion had been crafted as the perfect antithesis to his nephew, and that he should, in theory, fare better against other challenges they would no doubt face, Hades still found himself feeling almost uneasy at the idea of his nephew fighting the same monsters that prowled through his nightmares.

The ones that could be fought.

In his efforts to ensure as much space as was practical between their path down and the course of the river Styx, Hades knew he risked a misstep. Despite his strong memory, and the confidence he broadcast to his nephew, he did not know every inch of Tartarus well. He and his brothers had, out of a sense of duty, done their best to traverse the entire Pit, leaving no shadow unexplored, but terror had a way of mangling even the most perfect memory, even of a god's.

It was easy to recall broad strokes such as the routes of the five rivers, and the location of the gleaming brass fortress which held the worst Tartarus contained. It was more difficult to remember details such as the precise location of monsters and their lairs, especially when there was no guarantee that things had stayed exactly the same over the past several millennia. There was no reason to suspect that things had changed – but likewise, no proof that they had not.

Distant screeching reminded him of the Erinyes, not just the three sisters who had left Tartarus and served him in the Fields of Punishment, but the other ones, ones that made Alecto, Tisiphone and Megaera appear gentle in their mannerisms. His furies were intelligent, sharp and calculating, factors that set them apart from the others, for whom the best descriptor Hades could bring to mind (he was not Apollo, could not and had no wish to compose poems on the spot), was feral. Not feral in the way mortals thought, creatures that might snap and snarl and scratch if approached, but feral in the way every movement was a threat, could tear apart whatever fell in their way – some of Dionysus' followers came to mind, but even they had a degree of reasoning to their thoughts.

The Erinyes shrieking in the distance were nothing but mindless killing demons – possible to defeat, as demonstrated by Apollo when one had appeared to attack Asclepius, but vicious. Hades would prefer not to cross their paths, if it were possible.

Travelling between two rivers, attempting to keep an equal distance between both, was a sound strategy in theory, but that was only for as long as the two rivers remained separate. The sensation was gradual, but Hades slowly became aware of whispering voices in the back of his mind as the familiarity of the Styx's aura of hatred began to press upon them.

Apollo did not stumble, but there was a change to his countenance that alerted to Hades to his nephew's fresh awareness of the rivers and drew his attention to focus on the younger god. Fingers tapped faster against the bow, a useless weapon in the face of foes such as rivers, but before Hades could instruct Apollo to cause another distraction against the cruel voices of the Cocytus, the god of music was already singing.

It was not the same song.

It was similar, enough that Hades could recognise it as belonging to the same roots as the first, but it was not the same. Last time, Apollo had sung of Phoebe, and many other children Hades had never been familiar with but knew, from the lyrics, were from millennia ago. This time, the names were more recent, ones he'd heard mentioned by Nico, ones that hadn't yet passed through the Underworld for eternity. No doubt, these children were on Apollo's mind after Styx's threat, but if he feared for them, Hades did not feel it in his music.

Instead, he felt joy, pride and love, heard tales of the smallest things that somehow felt so impressive in the narration of Apollo's song, was exposed to something he had already known but had never experienced – Apollo's unconditional love for his children.

Cocytus was not so easily defied, however. Tears were sliding silently down Apollo's face, and his voice trembled in ways that didn't seem to fit the emotions of the song, warning signs that his nephew's love could so easily traverse into grief – would, in the cycle of life and love Apollo had willingly trapped himself in long ago.

He could not pass the river alone.

Hades wrapped his fingers around Apollo's arm again, letting his focus be taken by his nephew rather than the pressing river, and marched onwards, towards and then across the estuary they had reached, guiding the younger god as Apollo once again shielded them from the Cocytus and the laments it tried to invade their minds with.

Further downstream still, at the end of the estuary, was a far larger body of water. It was one Hades was not eager to approach, but they would need to pass it in time. Even at their current distance, he could feel the hatred of Styx mingling with the lamentation of Cocytus and the pain of the Acheron, while the Lethe's calmness intertwined with the fierceness of the Phlegethon and created something entirely different.

"Where are we?" Apollo asked once they were across the estuary and his song had faded away, no longer needed to get them past the Cocytus, which now ran behind them, its whispers almost out of earshot. Tears still glistened on his cheeks, but no new ones fell as he gazed downriver. The moisture flickered with deep orange, reflected from the rushing river of fire ahead.

"Where the rivers meet," Hades replied. "It has no true name that I have heard, but I believe it is colloquially known as the Delta of Despair."

That, at least, had been Poseidon's name for it when they'd approached the first time, battered and torn and exhausted, and wary of what the concoction caused by all five rivers merging could cause.

Despair was as good a description as any for the result.

"Sounds cheery," Apollo commented. Hades heard the forced injection of levity into the words but chose to ignore it; if Apollo wanted to pretend to be up-beat, despite the tears on his face, then he would not challenge it.

"That would be one word," he responded dryly. "Potent would be another."

Apollo hummed in either acknowledgement or agreement. Perhaps both.

They drew to a gradual stop as the next river cut across their path. This close to the delta, where it merged with its brethren, the Phlegethon seemed less vibrant, but while the flames had faded to a much darker orange, it made no change to the temperature.

At least, unlike the Cocytus, it did not spread out into an estuary prior to uniting with the other four rivers, but rather remained fast yet narrow, much like where it entered Tartarus from the Underworld. Apollo would not have many issues crossing – issues he could not afford to have, so far down into the Pit.

"How many of the rivers are we going to have to cross?" Apollo asked him, standing a few paces back from the bank of the Phlegethon. From the way the flames licked towards him, Hades suspected the fire river god was taking particular offence to Apollo's presence.

"After the Phlegethon, I believe there is one more," Hades replied, trying to recall his mental map of this part of Tartarus. At the time, he had left this particular area up to Poseidon and his water loving brother's area of expertise, but he was confident that neither the Styx nor the Lethe entered the delta from this side.

Unfortunately, the Acheron did.

Apollo didn't ask which one was next, perhaps because he knew it didn't matter; the rivers could not be avoided. Hades watched him take a running jump, transforming his legs into satyr limbs for extra lift and increasing his size at the last possible moment as he sailed over the angry flames of the Phlegethon. They flared up, lashing angrily, and for a moment, Hades lost sight of Apollo.

Golden drops landed in the river, shimmering for a moment before being absorbed by the flames. Hades wasted no time in wading through himself, feeling the frigid flames of the river try and fail to get through the souls of his armour, and re-emerged from the bank to see Apollo waiting for him, looking as close to flawless as the younger god could manage in Tartarus. Hades had no doubts that the golden drops of ichor had been Apollo's, but with his rapid healing and presumably shallow wounds, it had taken no more than a moment to seal the wounds again.

This far down into the depths of Tartarus, it was good to see that Apollo's strength had not waned overmuch.

Hades wasted no time in leading the way further down. Beneath his feet, the slope steepened – not so much that it was a hinderance to walk over, but enough to remind him that the deeper they got, the harder it was to get out again.

The Acheron did not merge into the delta at the same point as its brethren rivers, instead affording he and Apollo a brief respite from river fording as they continued to head down. Apollo was visibly warier, and Hades wondered if he had simply recognised the same danger in the steepening of the ground beneath their feet, or if there was something else bothering him.

"How far down are we?" Apollo asked, without prompting. "If this is where the rivers meet… the next river is the Acheron, isn't it?" Something didn't quite sound right in his voice, and it took Hades a moment to put things together.

He'd told Apollo that the Acheron ran along the edge of Chaos. That had not been a lie, although it did not always run across the edge. In some areas, at least, Hades was certain that there were still large stretches of the Pit before the abyss began.

Admittedly, he did not recall exactly where those large stretches were.

"We are not at the bottom yet," he answered, once again dredging up his mental map from his previous visit. "I have no intentions of leading us to the edge of the Pit." Something that looked a lot like relief flickered in his nephew's eyes, and he forged on. "As I recall, there is a sixth, nameless river that traverses the gap between the delta and the abyss. At this point, the Acheron does not run along the edge."

"I see," Apollo said. Hades wasn't certain if he did, but had no intentions of pushing further, not least because the rushing waters of the Acheron were beginning to reach his ears.

The Acheron was loud, not too dissimilar to the noise of a waterfall, and fast. It put any and all Overworld rivers to shame; not even the fastest, most violent river known to mortals could compare to the way the Acheron charged through the landscape, uncaring of the abyss it flirted with near the House of Nyx and anything else that occupied the same part of Tartarus. Tearing up everything in its path, or that was foolish enough to touch its waters, the river of pain was a master of inflicting it.

Hades recalled the scream Poseidon had made as he touched it, his younger brother curious and still perhaps a little naïve even so far into Tartarus. In the Underworld, the Acheron was mostly docile, winding its way through the Fields of Punishment and inflicting torment upon the souls sentenced to eternity on its river banks. In Tartarus, it was wild – the wildest of all the rivers, in Hades' opinion.

If Poseidon, otherwise lord of the oceans and with more than a slight grasp of other waterways, was so tormented by the unrestrained Acheron, none of the rest of them stood a chance. Even Zeus, young and headstrong and with a cockiness that came from being the only child not to be eaten, had baulked away from the river after it devoured Poseidon's entire lower arm in a single rush.

Not that the loss of his arm had been the cause of Poseidon's scream. They were gods; flesh wounds no matter how severe remained only flesh wounds, which would heal in short time. The scream had been from the way the Acheron tore at his essence itself – later, Poseidon had likened it to razor sharp sand grains being ground through the most vulnerable parts of his being with no remorse, no mercy, and no end.

Hades remembered dragging his younger brother back, Zeus on Poseidon's other side, and watching in horror he curled in on himself, brought to tears by the pain.

Neither he nor Zeus had dared get so much as a single droplet of the Acheron on them after that, despite the river's own coaxing – the Cocytus was not the only river with voices, after all.

It screamed, the screams of the damned souls, agony wailing its way through the depths of Tartarus, but while it screamed it also implored them to approach, to succumb to guilt and accept the punishments the river offered.

Back then, the first time Hades had encountered it, he had been young and, alongside his brothers, buoyed up on the satisfaction of defeating Kronos and his cruel family. Arrogant and victorious, the river had had nothing to latch onto to try and drag him in.

Now, Hades had millennia behind him, and regrets sprinkled across it liberally, but he still had no desire to surrender himself to eternal torment, no matter how much the river tried to persuade him otherwise.

"Do we jump it?" Apollo asked him. He looked across at his nephew to see Apollo watching the river, an unreadable expression on his face.

"Do not let it touch you," Hades confirmed. He paused for a moment, weighing up the sanctity of what happens in Tartarus stays in Tartarus against the desire to ensure Apollo fully understood the risks, before settling on, "it has brought greater gods than you to their knees."

There was a very short list of gods greater than Apollo, especially when combined with the list of gods who had ever approached the Acheron where it flowed through the lower reaches of Tartarus. From the glance his nephew gave him, Apollo had immediately narrowed down the shortlist to the obvious three.

"Perhaps deservedly," Apollo murmured, leaning forwards a little, and Hades grasped the back of his armour as though his nephew was a misbehaving child.

"You are here to protect your children," he snapped. "Throwing yourself in the river will not solve anything."

Thankfully, the Acheron was not a very wide river, and unlike some of its brethren its water did not leap up outside of the channel it had gouged for itself. Hades simply increased his size long enough to step over the river before reducing back down to human-sized, dragging his nephew with him before Apollo could think too much.

He didn't let go until the voices had quietened again. Behind them, the Acheron continued to roar its way towards the delta.

Now, they were officially in the depths of Tartarus, below any of the rivers save the amalgamation of all five that sluggishly wound its way into oblivion. The weak monsters that had been dogging their tracks from a sensible distance were behind them, none foolish enough to cross the Acheron.

The only monsters they would encounter here were the real ones, the ones Hades did not want to meet. Children of Nyx, of Tartarus, of Chaos itself.

Rising out of the miasma before them were thin, spindly shapes, swaying slightly in a non-existent breeze, and Hades cursed in the safety of his mind. This was an area he had hoped to evade, an area of Tartarus that he had no doubts was far more dangerous than it had been millennia ago.

"We follow the river," he told Apollo sharply. "Stay away from the trees."

"Those are trees?" Apollo asked. "They look more like hairs."

Hades scoffed. "Remember where we are, nephew."

Apollo's face hardened. "It's difficult to forget."

Hades found himself wondering what the Acheron had tried to tell Apollo, and instantly dismissed the thoughts as unnecessary; Apollo would never tell him, just as he had no reason to ever admit the words he had heard, either.

"We will give the Acheron a wide enough berth that you are not tempted to jump in," he insisted, and got a defensive look from his nephew, Apollo clearly offended by the insinuation that he would despite all evidence to the contrary. "Watch the trees, but do not attempt to kill anything."

Perhaps, if they were fortunate, they would be able to pass unnoticed.

Parts of this chapter were hard to write... In other news, I am delighted that people want to bash these two idiots over the head almost as much as I did when I was writing this!

Thanks for reading!
Tsari