Disclaimer: I don't own Trials of Apollo
HADES XXII
A Light Is Found in The Most Surprising of Places
"You can't defeat me!" Alcyoneus boomed, the sound of glaciers colliding.
Ignoring the ichor dripping from his lower face – he was a god, wounds like this hurt but they would never stop him – Hades drove his sword downwards, shrinking in size rapidly enough that the second blow from the staff whistled harmlessly over his head, and impaled the red serpent that made his bane's left leg.
The giant howled, the wounded serpent lashing out and coiling around his own legs, yanking him down. Hades slashed at it again, rolling out of the way as Alcyoneus stumbled down to one knee, and ending up back on his feet again, outside the immediate range of the staff.
"You can't defeat me!" the giant repeated. "Have you forgotten, Hades? I cannot be felled in my home."
Hades snorted derisively. That was not a fact he was likely to forget any time soon – he remembered the seemingly unkillable nature of his giant the first time they'd met, how even with one of the most powerful demigods of the age fighting alongside him (the one and only time he had ever willingly worked with one of his youngest brother's demigod spawn), they had been unable to take him down until Herakles bodily carried the giant many times his size over the border.
No, he was well aware that Alcyoneus could not be defeated in the land of his home. His concern was not with whether or not Alcyoneus could be killed, but how he was going to break through the nigh unbreakable skin to reach and crush the trio of diamonds he could sense tantalisingly within, pulsing with oil in a facsimile of a mortal heart.
Last time, he had both Herakles' insane mortal strength and the ground itself under his command. Alcyoneus' skin was not impossible to penetrate when diamonds and other adamant were utilised against it, but in Tartarus, Hades had access to nothing save his own Stygian Iron sword, which appeared to be struggling to even score the metal for reasons Hades was not entirely certain of, but suspected had something to do with how the giant was of the Underworld in a way nothing else was, and a weakened Apollo.
Another arrow streaked past him, this one missing Alcyoneus entirely, and the giant laughed his rock-grinding laugh.
"Little sun god," he sighed condescendingly. "You're embarrassing yourself. I will deal with you after I crush Hades. Be patient." The damnable staff struck out at Hades again, and he bodily deflected it with his sword, unwilling to receive another blow from the powerful weapon.
He heard a rasped shout – wordless, but unmistakably angry, and Apollo.
"No," his nephew snarled, hoarse and rough in a way that made it sound menacing. Dangerous. "No, I will not patiently sit down and wait."
The darkness of Tartarus seemed a little fainter, a little less there. Hades dismissed it and stabbed at Alcyoneus' more vulnerable serpentine legs again, which slithered out of the way of the dark metal.
His sword absorbed the darkness that surrounded it, but there was definitely less of it now. Alcyoneus faltered a little, a new shine ricocheting off his metallic body, and the giant's red, gem-encrusted hair whipped around as he turned his head away from Hades to face the light that had suddenly invaded the Delta.
"Little sun god," Apollo repeated, venom in each rasped word. His bow was nowhere to be seen, Hades noticed – perhaps his nephew had grown tired of firing shots that didn't land where he wanted them – but even without a weapon, he looked furious, and threatening. "If the sun is what you want, you miserable pile of rocks, then here it is!"
The steadily increasing glow emitting from his nephew exploded at his roar, the raw essence of the god of the sun both blinding and scorching, burning like the Phlegethon but infinitely brighter. Hades' vision whited out entirely, leaving him reliant on his other senses as he sensed an opportunity and slashed at Alcyoneus' legs again.
The giant bellowed, trampling around ungainly. From the way he moved, a chasm of cold and dark against the prevailing onslaught of light and heat, Hades was certain that he, too, had been blinded and unbalanced by Apollo's sudden offensive interference.
Alcyoneus was of the Underworld, of the darkness beneath the ground where the sun never reached, never dared invade. He was greed and pain and suffering, Asphodel and the Fields of Punishment, of the lip of Tartarus. He was the Hades equivalent of the giants, but they were not the same.
Hades knew the sun, remembered days under Helios' chariot before taking the Underworld for his own, remembered both its harsh burns and its soft warmth from a time before the Underworld became his home. Apollo's sun was not so familiar to him, but he knew his nephew, too.
Alcyoneus might have survived in the sunlight of the Overworld – although Hades doubted it was a coincidence that the home he had chosen for himself, had manipulated Hazel into resurrecting him within, was Alaska, a part of America known for cold weather and short days – but he was not of the Overworld.
His sword scraped against brass again, vibrating in his hand as it skated across the surface before something changed, the blade finding purchase and biting in. The oil Hades could feel within Alcyoneus suddenly had a few beads squeeze outside their given routes inside his body.
A wound.
The giant roared again, stumbling backwards, away from the supernova of light that was Apollo, and giving Hades a moment to think.
It was the light that had changed things, but Alcyoneus was his bane, and his bane alone. They were evenly matched but they were poised to destroy each other using abilities they shared. In theory, by the Fates that bound them, Alcyoneus' weaknesses should be Hades' strengths, the same way Alcyoneus' strengths sought Hades' weaknesses.
So where did light come into things, enough that it weakened Alcyoneus-
No.
The light had not weakened Alcyoneus, Hades realised suddenly, thoughts of light and warmth racing through him. Thoughts of healing, of the way his essence had been warm when he'd used it to bolster his nephew, of the Underworld in its entirety, and not just the cold darkness Alcyoneus drew into himself.
It had strengthened Hades.
The Fields of Asphodel were overcrowded, souls so densely packed they almost merged together, a sea that needed constantly organising and expanding to accommodate the ever increasing number of souls that took up eternal residence there. The Fields of Punishment often requested his personal attention, souls in need of eternal damnation who sought to free themselves again and again and again.
Elysium was the area of the Underworld he tended to the least; the souls there were happy, blessed and still in full recollection of who they were, who they had been. Hades had little need to pay it much attention, and the awareness of souls there the Laws forbade him interacting with even after death (or so his paranoid brother's interpretation of said Laws had become).
Hades was the god of the Underworld – all of the Underworld, not just the miserable and the tormented, but the joyous, the blessed, the hope and love and reunions.
There was more that he could draw on than just the dark.
He reached within himself, feeling for a lightness within his essence he all too frequently dismissed. Already summoned from the deepest depths of himself by the lure of Apollo's sun, the real thing even Elysium and the Isles of the Blessed could only generate an imitation of, it came easily at his call, growing and expanding as Hades acknowledged it, drew upon it.
It was unfamiliar in its familiarity, feelings of hope and joy and contentment that were part of Hades, because it was part of the Underworld, but unacknowledged for so long as Hades fell into bitterness and the areas that needed work. It felt right, as it settled over him, reaching out greedily for the sun it never saw.
Apollo's sun responded, obligingly dancing with the light of Elysium and bolstering it, drawing out a brightness Hades had never thought he, of all gods, could generate. His sight faded back into clarity, night vision and light vision overlapping as his domain settled into the trichotomy of light, dark, and the neutral grey in between.
Before him – before them, Apollo stood at his side, tall and proud and powerful in a way that would force Zeus into conniptions to even contemplate – Alcyoneus made like a rabid animal, cornered and starving and vicious. The black opals of his eyes reflected their light back at them, blinding the giant, but he was a creature from Tartarus, from the dark, and needed his sight no more than the god of the Underworld did.
Rejuvenation, rebirth, the feeling of a soul returning to the Overworld anew, washed over Hades' jaw, restoring it and stemming the steady flow of ichor. It was barely an observation as he stepped back, evading the desperate lash of a serpentine foot and ducking smoothly under the flailing of the iron staff.
Stepping inside Alcyoneus' reach, and once more growing to match the giant's size, Hades thrust his sword, point first, into the giant's abdomen. The brass resisted, held out for a moment, and then another, before the tip of the weapon broke through, driving into the giant's body with all the strength Hades could muster.
Pitch dark oil spilled down the brass, shimmering over the surface of the sword as Hades pulled it back, but Alcyoneus was a powerful giant and such a wound would not fell him.
Hades lunged again, ducking under the adamantine knuckles that flew towards him, and slashed at the giant's hip. The blade sank in, and Alcyoneus roared.
"You cannot defeat me!" he repeated again, the voice of conviction overlapping with the waver of uncertainty when the oil continued to run unhindered down towards the ground. "Tartarus is my home."
Apollo scoffed, Hades' nephew seemingly not entering the fight directly but continuing to be a vibrant source of lighting that the Pit had no doubt never seen before. His essence thrummed with controlled fury, but there was also an acknowledgement that this was not, strictly, his fight.
He was Hades' bane, it was Hades' only living child that this giant was threatening, luring to death and eternal torment beyond, separated from his father's domain for all of time.
This was Hades' fight, and Hades was going to finish it.
That did not, apparently, mean that Apollo was going to sit back and be quiet.
"Is it?" the sun god asked, in a condescending tone Hades had almost forgotten his kind nephew capable of. "Look at yourself, if you can."
Apollo was holding back from the fight out of a clear respect for Hades, but it was also obvious that his anger towards the giant was no less sated. It swirled through his essence, agitated but also vindictively amused; his nephew had also clearly realised what Alcyoneus had not.
When the giant had been drawn up by Hazel, his home had been Alaska. Upon his defeat, dragged out of Alaska and over the nearby border to Canada, per Thanatos' report – a careful report, which had neglected to mention the name or parentage of the demigod Arion had permitted to ride him – he had been killed and returned to Tartarus. Had that been the end of Alcyoneus' part in the second gigantomachy, then his claim would no doubt hold true – as the place of his latest rebirth, Tartarus would classify as his home.
But the giant had not been content to remain within Tartarus while his brethren continued to wage war above, and had passed through the Doors of Death, reborn in the Overworld in Greece.
He had not died in Greece. He, per his own Fate, could not have been killed in Greece. Arion and his rider had pushed him hard, but they had not been able to kill him. Hades, too, had not killed him; his role in the battle had simply been to dismiss the fallen giants back to Tartarus and, yes, in most cases, those giants had been felled by a god and demigod combination, much the same way Hades had once fought alongside Herakles, but that had not been the case for Alcyoneus.
Alcyoneus had still been alive as Hades dragged the ground beneath him open, plummeting him back down to Tartarus, and it appeared, from the brass skin, that the Fates had not deemed that a death.
Blinded, Alcyoneus could not look down at his skin, nor at his unhealing wounds, but the desperate roar he released at Apollo's words suggested that he had not needed to. After all, he could feel that his wounds were still gaping injuries, leaking oil down to the membrane of Tartarus and running into the waiting, silent lake at the base of the Delta.
"Impossible!" he bellowed, but Hades didn't care to listen to his rugged, rumbling voice any further and continued his attack, evading most of the giant's frantic hits and regenerating near-instantly from anything that connected as rebirth settled over him like a shroud. That, too, had mingled with Apollo's healing, he could feel, and the faint realisation that Apollo's voice had not been a raw rasp the last time he spoke flitted through his mind as he kept pressing forwards.
For every hit Alcyoneus managed to land on Hades, he managed several in return, until the ground was slick with oil. Eventually, the giant stumbled, falling down to the ground as his serpentine legs buckled and lost the ability to bear his weight, and Hades pounced, driving the tip of his sword straight down through Alcyoneus' left breast, directly towards the diamond cluster that made the giant's heart.
He felt them break apart, overwhelmed at the end of the assault, and for a long moment everything was still.
The gemstones ensnarled in red hair were the first ones to fall, bouncing lightly off the membrane before coming to a halt, glinting in the combined light of the two gods. Unlike most giants, Alcyoneus did not disintegrate into dust upon his death. Instead, he broke apart, piece by piece of the amalgamation of gemstones and metallic elements falling away until he no longer represented a humanoid figure, but an assortment of discarded rocks.
In the centre of the array, three oil-slicked diamonds split in two, now six smaller, flawed diamonds. Hades reached out for them with his power and watched them roll away haphazardly in different directions. One fell into the Delta itself, which churned for a moment before laying still once more – watchful, waiting.
Hades had no doubt that least one of the river gods and goddesses were in there, watching. He could feel eyes upon him, upon both of them, but ignored them in favour of facing Apollo.
His nephew had stopped shining quite so brightly, once again a form rather than mere essence. In one hand was his golden bow, a sheen to it that had been lacking, while at his hip his quiver was once again bristling with gold-fletched arrows.
Something about him felt different. He stood as tall as he always tended to, in the form of a young man just into adulthood, mortal-sized once more, but the brightness had dulled drastically. For a moment, Hades wondered if it was simply a change in his perception, now he was aware of Elysium's light swirling near the surface of his own essence, delighted at being let out and acknowledged after so long, but there was a twist to Apollo's face that was almost a grimace.
"You do not look well," he observed, stepping away from the water and the remains of Alcyoneus, shrinking back to a mortal size himself as he surveyed his nephew critically.
Apollo gave him a smile, one that looked genuine, but after their recent inadvertent sharing of emotions, Hades was not sure if he should trust it. "I'm fine," he said.
That did not clear up any of Hades' misgivings, but Apollo stepped past him, casting a wary eye towards the rivers but mostly focusing on the scattered rocks.
"Where do we go from here?" he asked. Hades frowned.
"Alcyoneus is dead," he said. "My son is no longer being summoned. That satisfies the point of this venture, does it not?"
"The prophecy has not been fulfilled," Apollo said quietly, and Hades felt a surge of irritation.
"I do not care about that blasted prophecy," he snapped. "My son is safe; why should we continue to taunt the denizen with our presence?"
Apollo glowered, streaks of golden light beginning to radiate out from his form again. "Whether or not you care about the prophecy is irrelevant!" he retorted, clearly incensed at Hades' dismissal. "The prophecy exists and will come to pass regardless of your cares or lack thereof. Prophecies, no matter their form, are inevitable, Hades."
His voice had fully recovered, Hades noticed absently. Dark eyes glittered in the depths of the Delta behind his irate nephew, but he paid all of that no mind.
"This does not concern me," he insisted, knuckles tight around the hilt of his sword.
"It concerns your son," Apollo lashed back. "If we are not the sunshine and darkness the lines describe, then Will and Nico remain at risk of being so instead and this trip was for naught."
Hades felt his own power start to rise, dark and grey and light all intertwined. "You are the one that constantly insists that those blasted things cannot be controlled," he spat out. "Yet now you talk as though things are a forgone conclusion unless we do something."
"Prophecies cannot be controlled," Apollo confirmed irritably, with the air of words spoken many times. "But," he continued before Hades could point out his hypocrisy, "they can be claimed."
Hades paused. "What are you talking about?" he demanded.
"Take the Great Prophecy that you cursed my Pythia over," his nephew continued, no small amount of ire in the words. "By rights, it should have fallen to Thalia, as the eldest of the generation. She chose to reject it, joined my sister to evade it, and it passed on to Percy. Percy then claimed it for himself, at which point the rest of the prophecy began to set into motion to align with his sixteenth birthday."
The concept of people claiming prophecies as their own was not one Hades was familiar with, largely because he could not see an appeal in intentionally throwing himself into one – although he grudgingly accepted that part of the reason he had accompanied Apollo into Tartarus in the first place was because of that same prophecy that had specified sunshine and darkness.
A prophecy Apollo was now telling him had not begun yet. Or was he trying to say that it had not necessarily begun, but if they decided that their actions did fulfil the spirit of the lines, that the prophecy would retroactively begin?
"Are you saying," he began, drawing the words out as his mind raced through the possibilities Apollo appeared to be implying, "that if we leave now, the prophecy will not come to pass yet?"
Apollo was shaking his head before he had even finished speaking.
"Prophecies aren't that simple," he said – a fact Hades knew, because the blasted things always seemed to have a way of flipping things in directions they should not go. "If we leave now, the prophecy may trigger regardless, treating us as sunshine and darkness, because the Fates have decreed that the events will come to pass at this time. Or it may trigger in a few more days, weeks, months, years - perhaps with us, or perhaps with a different interpretation of sunshine and darkness. Our choice may not change anything, or it may change everything, and we would never know the alternative solutions."
"Not even you?" Hades asked, a little disbelieving. He knew Apollo had a great degree of foresight, that the god of prophecy saw discarded future potentials at least as often as he saw what truly came to pass.
"If you're asking if I've seen something I could with certainty say would be a consequence of this prophecy, the answer is no," Apollo said flatly. Hades did not fail to notice his specification of with certainty, but suspected Apollo would not elaborate no matter how pressed and decided to let it pass uncommented.
"And if we claimed this prophecy?" he asked instead.
"We would guarantee that the events of the prophecy are in motion, and that we are indeed the sunshine and darkness mentioned," Apollo said bluntly. "The future from this point would unfold in the direction that possibility entails, whatever that might be."
Hades failed to see where the distinction lay between claiming a prophecy and controlling a prophecy, if the former forced its events to begin at the time of the claimant's choosing, but for all his dislike of them, he could at least respect that it was Apollo's domain and his nephew had a far greater understanding of the involved nuances than he could ever hope to grasp.
It was not so difficult to see the natural progression that might well fall if he and Apollo were not, in fact, sunshine and darkness, and left it nebulously up to the Fates to divine. Hades remembered Apollo informing him that his son had been one of the ones to receive the prophecy – either it would naturally fall upon Nico's shoulders as the next in line to the claim of darkness, or his son, attached as he was to Iapetus for reasons Hades had never been able to fathom, would take it upon himself to claim the prophecy if he believed it would lead to the titan's rescue.
Even if the prophecy did not actually reference Iapetus or result in his rescue – although as Hades distinctly remembered the Piercer being a silver titan, he suspected it was not foolish to proceed with the awareness that it well could relate to Iapetus – seeing it through to its completion would still prevent Nico from becoming tangled up in the blasted thing, again.
Prophecies had hurt his son too many times already.
Looking at his nephew, he suspected that Apollo had already chosen what he wanted to do. The younger god had thrown himself back into Tartarus directly on the heels of a previous, no doubt traumatic (the edge of Chaos, of all places) visit, all because he refused to let his own son enter the Pit.
Olympus, he had even sworn an oath on the Styx about the matter – Hades remembered the boom of the sealed oath reverberating through his palace. It was possible, he realised, that Apollo had already made his claim, in the eyes of the Fates, back then.
It was also likely, Hades realised, that if that held true for Apollo, then he, too, had made the claim in the eyes of the Fates at the same time, when he had decreed that Nico would not return either, regardless of the fact that he had never sworn an oath on the matter.
His nephew had phrased it as a choice, but, Hades realised resignedly, he had made the choice before entering the Pit. There could be no turning away now, not without placing Nico back in danger.
"Very well," he said, sheathing his sword. "We shall continue, and may this confounded prophecy of yours pass our sons by in exchange."
Apollo gave a fierce grin, one that did not bode well for anything – even the Fates – that further threatened the demigods. "May it indeed."
The dark, glittering eyes in the Delta behind his nephew faded away silently. Hades did not watch Styx go, exactly, but he recalled Apollo's most recent oath, and how choosing to turn back could have triggered events into sending William into Tartarus regardless, and wondered if she had been watching and waiting to see if he would break that oath, too.
Apollo's voice had been restored at some point during the mingling of their powers, healing and rebirth likely the two in particular responsible, and his grip on his bow was no longer unsure, although Hades had not yet seen him fire another arrow. If Styx felt any displeasure at her consequences passing so soon, she hadn't acted upon it.
For the moment, Hades decided it would be best to put it from his mind until they next crossed paths with the goddess.
Thanks for reading!
Tsari