Disclaimer: I don't own Trials of Apollo

APOLLO XXIII

Shadows and darkness
Bright brass in the depths of hell
The prison at last

For a moment, Apollo had feared that Hades would reject the prophecy and end the quest then and there, and had struggled to find an alternative way to keep pressing forwards alone that still did not put Nico at risk.

Will, he would never have put in danger. Even if Hades left, Apollo had known that he couldn't, had to claim sunshine for his own to keep the epithet away from his son. The dark eyes burning into his back with a waiting intensity didn't let him forget that, even if he had wanted to – Styx would not have hesitated to sentence Will to whichever form of hell she desired in recompense for a broken oath.

Thankfully, and despite his distaste – to put it mildly – of prophecies, Hades had understood the situation quickly, and Apollo felt Styx fade away back into her river, seemingly satisfied for the moment that he was not on the cusp of more oath breaking.

"Has your archery returned?" Hades asked him, and without even looking, Apollo had five arrows nocked and fired in instant succession. Each one found its mark in the non-submerged fragments of Alcyoneus' diamond heart cluster. If he wasn't imagining it, there was something a bit like relief in the black flickering flames of Hades' eyes.

"Ready to keep moving?" Apollo asked in return, rather than verbally affirm the return of his skills. Despite the battering he had received against his bane, Hades appeared to be in near-perfect condition, no doubt a result of the light he had startled Apollo by emitting, and the gentle warmth that had intertwined with his own sunlight and healing to become something greater than Apollo – or Hades, he suspected – could achieve alone. It had not been healing, but rather something closer to restoration or rejuvenation.

"I am," Hades confirmed. "I take it you still consider the prison the most likely place to search?"

If Tartarus had not simply obliterated the titan from existence, either himself or by casting him directly into Chaos, Apollo could not think of another place Iapetus was likely to be. He nodded. If the Fates required them elsewhere, then it would happen regardless.

"Very well," his uncle said. "I do not believe we are too far away now." He turned away from Apollo, and from the collection of rocks formerly known as Alcyoneus, and began to skirt the too-still waters of the massive lake that lay to their left.

Styx's eyes had left them, but they were still being watched. Apollo did not know which of the river gods were still taking an interest in their route, or if it was one of them at all and not something else, but none of the options comforted him. The fact that none of them appeared to do anything beyond observe only added to the unease.

Normally, Apollo was fine with being the centre of attention – he thrived on it, in fact. Down in Tartarus, however, attention was bad.

It was difficult to tell if it was his imagination that there seemed to be more beings watching than he could feasibly detect, or if they had drawn the attention of things far more subtle and terrifying than a quartet of river gods.

He was glad to leave the Delta behind as Hades led the way up one of its shallow embankments – the one furthest uphill, if the slopes of Tartarus could be called a mere hill. It did not fully eliminate the sense of being watched – or perhaps observed was a more appropriate term – but it significantly reduced the sensation of being a bug under a magnifying glass, fearing that any moment the sun itself would pass through the glass and obliterate his existence.

More importantly, however, cresting the lip of the Delta revealed the distant sight of a massive brass-coloured structure on what passed for Tartarus' horizon. Apollo did not need Hades' confirmation to deduce that it was the prison they had been aiming for the entire time.

Like any prison, it was well-defended. Around the perimeter and enclosed by a great moat of molten lava, Apollo could see almost nothing save a wall great enough to dwarf even the giants. Even the throne room of Olympus seemed like it might fit behind the humungous sheets of bronze. Winged creatures – Erinyes, amongst other things, Apollo was certain – glided gracefully through the air above it, barely specks even to Apollo's far sight. One level of security, perhaps, as though Tartarus itself needed additional security layers.

Set into the ginormous perimeter wall, Apollo could just about spy a large, ornate contraption that could only be some sort of portcullis, or perhaps an otherwise appropriately decorated entrance.

A large, dark shadow prowled around the wall, and despite the vast distance still between them, Apollo felt the instinctive need to duck away and hide, lest he be observed. Beside him, Hades faltered slightly, likewise affected by what was no doubt the primary guard, or at the least one in charge of more than just a single cell.

Apollo knew well who guarded the prisoners in Tartarus. Her record for preventing escapes was near-immaculate, a well-regarded trait in prison jailers across and beneath the world, but a severe obstacle for gods attempting to firstly break in to the prison, and then break out again with a prisoner in tow – if, indeed, Iapetus was there at all. He had never before encountered Kampê in person, and did not relish that the opportunity had arisen now.

His uncle appeared no more enamoured at the prospect.

"I suppose her regeneration was accelerated alongside the rest of Olympus' enemies'," Hades said derisively.

"Or because a specific prisoner required a powerful guard," Apollo pointed out. It was not proof of Iapetus' presence, but a lack of the monstrous guardian would have been far more concerning regarding the titan's currently unknown location. If Kampê had no high security visitors to imprison and terrorise at her leisure, then she would not have been set to guard what Apollo was sure had to be a mostly-empty prison after the events of the last few years, where almost all the inmates appeared to have escaped or been released at some point.

The question now was whether her prisoner was Iapetus – and if so, how they were going to find him.

Despite his clear distaste for Kampê's presence, Hades continued to lead the way across Tartarus' uneven terrain, approaching the prison – fortress, it undoubtably resembled an ancient fortress redone to meet modern aesthetical and practical solutions.

The closer they got to the prison warden – Apollo carefully following Hades as his uncle in turn picked their route cautiously to minimise the chances of being spotted, the more hideous she appeared. Whilst knowing of Kampê, Apollo had never before laid eyes on her directly, and her immediate family resemblance to Python made him feel almost ill. Her head and torso were closer to that of a gorgon, serpentine hair scenting the air and hissing discordantly in a way that set his essence on edge, but like a centaur her body changed into a four-legged beast at the waist, draconic in much the same way as her brothers. Worst of all was the point of transition, which constantly bubbled and shifted, growing new heads and other appendages before swallowing them back up again to be regurgitated as something else.

It was exactly like Python's tendency to warp his form, additional limbs and heads snapping into existence specifically to hurt Apollo in as many ways as he could manage – and they had been numerous, both the first and second times they had fought.

Gods did not scar the same way mortals did, but Apollo's mind remembered every wound inflicted by his longest enemy with perfect clarity.

"How do we get past her?" he asked quietly, drawing close to his uncle's heels. If she was like Python, like Typhon, Apollo did not want to fight her if there was another way.

Hades did not stop moving, but he slowed slightly, clearly inviting Apollo to keep abreast of him rather than a half-step behind. "By staying out of her sight," he said, which seemed far easier said than done when they could see her clearly and it was no doubt only a matter of time before the reverse became true.

The next time her patrol route turned her to face them, they would be seen.

Apollo had learnt a lot about keeping hidden as Lester, and also about the consequences of being found, but there were fundamental differences between being a mortal and a god trying to hide, especially when the seeker was as renowned as Kampê. His essence shone brightly, even when his form congealed around it enough to stifle the glow – a state Apollo had entered after fully unveiling himself against Alcyoneus. He had been too angry, in the moment, to remember why being pure essence in Tartarus felt wrong, and then his power had been cycling through with Hades' so he couldn't pull it back without unbalancing his uncle, but the edge of Tartarus had begun to seep in, harsh and stifling.

He could still feel it, gnawing at the edges of his essence, despite having re-shielded himself with his usual form.

A monster like Kampê would register an essence as bright as Apollo's no matter what form he took. His uncle's darkness might better cloak him, more akin to Tartarus' usual denizens, but he could see no way to hide himself utterly enough to evade her. It was bad enough that he could still feel that they were being watched, and had no guarantee that their location would not be betrayed to Kampê at any moment, regardless.

"This way," Hades ordered a moment later, abruptly changing their heading so they were no longer trekking straight towards the fortress. Apollo followed instantly, hoping – trusting – that his uncle had a plan. The older god wove around various pustules filled with slowly regenerating monsters, and it took Apollo almost no time to realise his uncle was heading for an area of rugged terrain, where parts of the membrane beneath their feet erupted into a range of spiny bristles.

How they made it there before Kampê noticed them, Apollo had no idea, but he was not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, and gladly ducked into the shadows of tall protrusion on the periphery of the cluster.

Shadows?

Tartarus was a Pit of prevailing gloom and near-darkness. There was little by way of light sources, outside of the Phlegethon, and thus little that classified as shade in response. To find clearly defined shadows all of a sudden was a marked shift, especially when the flames of the Phlegethon couldn't be seen and the lava moat remained docilely within its confines.

Unable to help his curiosity, he peeked around the edge to see what was casting the light, and realised that he had been able to see the prison so clearly from so far away within the Pit because the brass structure was somehow emitting its own light.

It was still not bright, but it was, apparently, enough to cast shadows.

A hand yanked him back, and he met Hades' slightly disapproving stare with a vaguely sheepish grin.

"Do not test her," his uncle warned sternly. "She does not need any more help locating us."

"Sorry," Apollo mumbled. "What is it made of, to glow like that?"

"Magic older than the pair of us combined," Hades replied, his voice noticeably lower. "In theory, the prison can contain its inmates without the help of a guard."

Apollo did not question the 'in theory' clarifier – the past few years had proven that given the right situation and outside help, anything could get out. Olympus, they were intending on being exactly that for Iapetus.

Unfortunately, there was also a guard to evade, which brought him back to his earlier question. "So how are we going to get in unseen?"

Hades' grip tightened on his shoulder, alerting Apollo to the fact that his uncle hadn't released him after pulling him back. "By not walking past her," he said. "Keep your light under control."

"It is-" Apollo started to protest, before Hades shifted purposefully within the shadow and his uncle's meaning registered. "Oh."

"Yes, oh," Hades repeated, a little impatiently.

Apollo looked at the shadow surrounding them, and recalled Nico yanking him backwards, away from the charging tauri silvestres and into the cold darkness of shadow travel.

He also remembered the more recent occasion of being forcibly expelled from the Underworld by his uncle's shadows, only to be yanked back mid-departure. Gods of light and shadow travel did not mix well.

It would, however, theoretically get them safely past Kampê's prowling outside the fortress. More crucially, it was the only way they could near-guarantee it.

Apollo closed his eyes, focusing on his essence and coaxing it into shifting around until the elements of him that were sun and light and healing coiled closest to the centre, while the melancholy strands of music and poetry skimmed further out, with the entirety of him being cloaked in plague, the darkest of his domains.

It protested, not liking the fundamental shift Apollo was imposing upon himself, but Apollo assured it that it was only temporary. That didn't stop it from being strange in the way using a different style of archery for the first time in a while felt strange, but it acquiesced to its adjusted arrangement.

He met Hades' eyes and nodded once. His uncle could no doubt also feel the shift in his essence, because there was no hesitation, no second check, before he took a single step and the darkness enveloped them.

Apollo would never enjoy shadow travel. It was too dark, too cold, too tight, compressing him down and down and down until it finally spat him out at the destination hopefully of the shadow travel user's choosing.

Whether they had emerged in the part of the prison Hades had planned to was unknown, but the important thing was that they were definitelyinside something. Apollo shivered, releasing his imposed order upon his essence and letting it flow back into its natural form, domains all intertwined and near-indistinguishable from where one ended and another began. Warmth washed over him, and he glanced up at Hades, who was observing him with an unreadable expression. If Apollo hadn't already felt this unexpected, light part of his uncle's power, he wouldn't have believed it was Hades' doing, but now at the third exposure, there was nothing else he could mistake it for.

It helped him readjust, shaking off the cobwebs that had draped over him. Gods didn't get shadow travel sickness the way mortals did, but it was still disconcerting and a touch disorientating. Hades' light re-grounded Apollo, helped him find his feet again and stand tall in their new location.

Immediately, Apollo knew they were within the prison. Much like the mortal ones he had passing familiarity with (and occasionally more than a passing familiarity with), there were cells in packed rows, although each one was many times the size of an entire mortal prison block. Instead of bars, thick sheets of the same brass that made up the exterior of the fortress segmented each section, with only a small window in each – no doubt for Kampê's pleasure as she tormented the inmates.

There were no doors.

Tartarus' inhabitants did not need things such as sustenance. They could – and would be forced to – sustain on nothing but their own essence and the ambient miasma of the Pit. It seemed that the prison had no intention of permitting them luxuries like potential escape routes, which Apollo quickly identified as a major concern. How he and Hades were supposed to break into one to rescue Iapetus, if he was in one, he had no idea.

First, however, they had to find the titan.

Apollo had not been born when the first generation of gods had fought and eventually defeated the titans. He knew of them, had heard many things over the years and in one fit of curiosity sometime around his first millennium had scrounged up as much research as he could muster on the topic, but he had personally met very few titans outside of his mother and the former celestial ones he and Artemis had one day replaced. He had seen more, in flashes of futures – some of which had come to pass, some that would never come to pass, and some which still hang in the delicate balance of the Fates' threads – and had some idea of which one out of his visions Iapetus could be (there had been one, which had not come to pass, where a silver titan had stormed an army of demigods all in orange and skewered them all effortlessly on his vicious spear without pause – that, Apollo knew, had been rendered obsolete by that particular titan's dip in the Lethe, removing him from the equation in Manhattan).

Hades, on the other hand, knew Iapetus. He had fought him, in that first Titanomachy, and then millennia later gave his amnesiac persona Bob a job within his own Underworld palace. While Apollo had only distant snatches of visions to introduce him to the concept of the titan, his presence was no doubt unmistakable to Hades, so when his uncle dropped his hand from his shoulder, gave him a surveying look, and upon being clearly satisfied that Apollo was sufficiently recovered from his shadow travel wordlessly turned and began walking down one long corridor, Apollo followed.

Much of the internal fortress was shadowed, and Hades seemed to draw them towards him as he walked. Each step sent a ripple through them, and more than once, Apollo got the feeling that they were reaching for his uncle, although as their master or at the behest of something else, he could not tell.

He hoped it was the former.

As they passed cells, Apollo could not help peering into each of them, curious what else shared Iapetus' current fate. Most cells were empty – and several bore signs of damage, both internal and external, clear residue from the occupant's successful escape during the mass jailbreaks first Kronos and then Gaia had orchestrated – but as Hades led them unerringly down twists and turns within the fortress as though he knew exactly where to go, Apollo began to spot occasional occupants.

There were creatures in there older than memory, even his own. In some cells, Apollo could not begin to guess who or what they were – or had been. In others, giants and titans languished, their names near-forgotten to the annuls of time. Grotesque monsters that seemed like they should not exist save in nightmares only, chittered and cursed and spat as the two gods walked past.

Hades paid them no mind, and Apollo followed his uncle's lead as they descended into the bowels of the fortress, deep beneath the surface of Tartarus.

Trickles of water crept along walls and down the sides of passageways – Acheron, Cocytus, Lethe and Styx, encroaching upon the prison, though never openly enough that even the most desperate of jailbreaks could utilise them in order to escape. Despite being only tributaries of the main rivers, capillaries bearing not even a fraction of their waters, Acheron screeched and Cocytus lamented.

Apollo began to hum under his breath to counter them, not enough to draw attention, but enough to feel the vibration of music through his essence, enough to distract from the echoes of the rivers. If Hades allowed him to catch up and walk barely a fraction of a step behind him at that point, Apollo didn't comment.

Evading the present rivers' various dangers – Phlegethon was notably absent, presumably because a prison had no desire to allow potential access to healing for its inhabitants – and doing his best to forget that they had descended far enough to be within Tartarus' body, rather than crossing its surface as they had been before, Apollo kept one wary hand buried in his filled quiver of arrows. Just in case.

There were eyes on them. Many of them belonged to the remaining inhabitants as they passed – a giant with almost as many eyes as Argus appeared to fix all near-hundred of them on Apollo as he hurried to keep up with Hades, but Apollo still could not shake the idea that they were being seen.

Perceived.

So deep into the bowels of Tartarus, it was hardly a comforting thought. If it was not the inhabitants, then it was almost certainly Tartarus himself, tracking their progress across his body.

Apollo sincerely hoped that it wasn't.

Hades took a small passageway branching off from the main one, this one narrow. The few milky droplets of the Lethe that ran down the wall kept Apollo paying close attention to where he stepped. He had no desire to lose any memories, let alone his entire sense of self.

It seemed deliberately cruel to place Iapetus in a part of the prison that appeared to be particularly laced with Lethe, Apollo thought as he spied more capillaries of the river winding their way ever closer. That made it likely that they were heading in the correct direction – it was a specific sort of cruelty that Apollo would not only be unsurprised at witnessing from Tartarus, but expect.

"How deep do you think this will go?" he wondered quietly.

"Deeper than even you could imagine," Hades retorted just as softly. "Perhaps you should recall the lines of your blasted prophecy."

Of course, Apollo realised with a sinking feeling. Deeper than earth. He had assumed that to mean Tartarus – certainly, it fit – but this, too, fulfilled the demands of the prophecy, and given its occurrence after he and Hades claimed it as theirs, he was inclined to believe that this may well have been its intent.

Silver, at this point, heavily indicated Iapetus himself. It was no guarantee – Apollo knew better than anyone else that prophecies did not always take the path of least resistance – but given the context, and the connection with he and Hades descending deeper than earth within Tartarus' form specifically to find the titan, it was certainly a strong possibility. Topaz remained a complete mystery, however, and Apollo knew better than to try and craft an interpretation that might fit.

It would reveal itself in time, as the Fates decreed.

As they travelled deeper, the cells became more sporadic, standing alone rather than in long rows or clusters. In a mortal prison, it would likely be considered solitary confinement – the most highly secured and inhumane area, reserved for the most dangerously perceived criminals.

Hades took another turn, accelerating as he did so, but as Apollo followed him, he almost walked smack into his uncle's back as the older god stopped suddenly – and for clear reason.

Stepping up next to Hades, Apollo found himself looking down a series of steps, precisely formed from the same brass material as the rest of the fortress. The light there was greatly diminished, but not so much so that the window set into the cell at the base of the steps – twelve of them, Apollo counted absently, and found himself unsurprised by the fact – could not be seen.

It was a small window, no larger than a mortal child's head, and crossed with fine wires in a brass mesh, not too dissimilar to the windows on the higher level cells. The window was not what had stopped Hades in his tracks.

Apollo's eyes found silver ones, staring out from the depths of the cell. The owner of the eyes appeared to be sitting some way back in the cell, not desperately pressing themselves against the window in an attempt to force their way through like some of the other inmates had done as the gods walked past.

If there had been any resignation in their eyes or posture, however, it was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the titan inside, difficult to see in the gloom of their cell save for their piercing eyes, seemed to be regarding them with calculating curiosity.

Hades saved Apollo the awkwardness of finding something appropriate to say – or the embarrassment of completely misidentifying the titan – by starting to walk again, a measured pace as he took each step sedately until he stood directly outside of the cell.

"Bob," the god of the dead said after the silence between the three of them had stretched out beyond its capacity, his eyes never leaving the titan's. Apollo's darted between the two, not wanting to miss any reaction from either of them. "Or Iapetus. Which one are you?"

Thanks for reading!
Tsari