Zeus' Olympian palace held no permanent structure, instead it manifested columns, rooms, arcades and fluted pathways whenever he deemed them necessary. His castle in the clouds, his statues, his trophies, his wife, all moved back and forth at his request, all bowing beneath delicate spirals of pink and white fog.

His front room stood open to the sky like the cutaway section of a dollhouse, open to the breeze and to the peaceful undulations of the cloudscape as the rest of the architecture trailed behind it like spun sugar. He set the golden cup on his mantlepiece and gave a grand sigh of relief. He inched it around on the shelf so that the gleaming surface reflected his masculine visage.

"Now!" he spoke with triumph, mostly to himself, "We can get things moving!"

"What was that, dear?" Hera emerged from the vapour, descending veiled steps that lead to the temporary upper floors. "Does this mean you're raising the banners for war?"

"Ha!" He let out a delighted laugh. "I love the way you talk, dearest!" Turning to her, his smile dropped. "What is it?"

His wife stood with her hand to her chest, her wide and doe-like eyes fixed on the cup. He approached her with large hands, ready to wrap them around her elbows. "Hera, honey?"

"Where did you get that?" she asked him.

"That old thing?" he replied, "Why, I had Hermes collect it for me down on Earth! An old memento of mine, that's all."

She rounded on him. "Don't lie to me, Zeus!" Her wild red hair framed her anger like a mad prophetesses, and he had always found the mature, gutteral quality of her shouting very attractive. He blinked dumbly at her.

"Lie to you? I would never lie to you!" With a warm smile he held out his hand to her. "These cups all look the same, maybe you're thinking of something else?" She dodged him and stepped to the cloud-forged fireplace. He launched after her. "Hera!"

Taking the cup into her hands, examining every detail, she spoke to her reflection. "But-" Then she turned her tortured, husky voice to Zeus. "How? How did you get this?"

"I don't know what you mean, sweetness-"

"Tell me!" Her voice ripped across the peaceful, oil-painted waves outside. Recoiling just a tad, Zeus held out his hands as if placating a raptor.

"Alright," he cooed, "You caught me! You remember Daedalus, that mortal?"

"Yes," she spoke with growing alarm, now keeping her voice as level as steel.

"Well, see, it's the funniest story! Somehow or other, that little thing ended up in that Labyrinth of his! I sent Hermes down to get it out!"

She embraced the cup to her chest. "You didn't send him inside that thing?!"

"Of course not!" Zeus replied with a bright smile, "I left the particulars up to him!" Then he began to approach her. "Now, what's this really all about?" Hera considered the golden relic cradled in her arms. Her hold on it tightened with the quietest squeak of metal.

"What happened to your cup-bearer?" she asked. Zeus answered too quickly to stop himself.

"Who?"

"GANYMEDE!" The word ripped from her throat as his hands clamped down on her shoulders. The name made his hands grip. Like a weeping willow bending away from the approach of poison ivy, she bent away from him - yet still faced him with venom in her eyes. "What happened to that boy?!" she snapped, "Tell me, Zeus!"

"Don't shout at me!" He gripped her tight. "I may be your husband, but I'm still the King of-"

"You may be King of Olympus!" she whipped the words back at him, "But I am still your wife!"

"My cup-bearer is none of your business!" he shouted into her face, stopping this with brute force before she had the chance to out-connive him.

The trill of wings send a shock of awareness through him. He dropped Hera like a hot coal as Hermes shot in through the clouds.

"I heard yelling!" he said, breathless, "Is everyone okay?!"

"This is a private conversation!" Zeus turned on him, sweeping his hand in front of his wife. "You weren't spying on us, were you?"

"Of course not!" Hermes flushed a suspicious shade of purple. "I just wanted to-"

"Everything is fine, Hermes," Zeus said. The clouds surrounding them turned black, first on the inside, then bleeding outwards like ink. Hera stepped around his arm and moved to the messenger's side, her hair starting to lift with static as the air turned sharp in their mouths. She lowered a gentler gaze on him.

"Do you know anything about the old cup-bearer?"

Hermes' eyes widened behind his glasses, drinking in her anxious warmth as behind her, the king of the gods levelled his glare and pressed down on him with such vengeance that his wings slowed their beating and landed him down on the floor. He wasn't sure why all this secrecy surrounded this boy, or perhaps more accurately he'd decided things were simpler if he didn't ask.

But then the lift of Hera's brows made the feathers flutter on his heels.

"H-he's working for Hades down in the Underworld," he answered. Her gentle response seemed louder than the crash of thunder that rolled over it.

"Aah..."

"Hermes!" Zeus' eyes, wide with fury, looked more like the mad eyes of Mars than the solemn judgement of Jupiter. Hermes, as small as a dove, leapt into the air.

"S-sorry! But why the big-!" Zeus grabbed him by the toga before he could give anything else away.

"Zeus!" Hera grabbed hold of Zeus' arm, but even when her nails dug into his flesh he paid her no mind. "You let him go!"

He had never heard her voice crack over him like that.

The air thickened. Building pressure rang in their ears. The hair on the back of Hera's neck stood on end as realisation rolled slowly over her husband's face. Though he had Hermes in his fist, he looked through him and out to the dark clouds beyond.

"You must think I'm pretty dumb, huh?"

The world blackened around them and Hera flinched back her hand.

"What are you talking about?!"

His eyes locked back on to Hermes. The world banked as he hauled him up even higher. "YOU!"

Hermes twitched his sandals away from the electricity as it jumped hotter and hotter around them. "Hey! Woah now!" The unstoppable force of Zeus knuckles throttled him by the tunic.

"You think you can sneak in while my back is turned?! You think just because I'm dealing with my brother, you can try to steal my wife?!"

Hera's outrage screeched over the thunder. "What?!"" She gathered her dress and marched for him. "You boorish, cruel-minded, over-bloated old tyrant!" Her hair whipped around her in Zeus' storm. "How dare you accuse me after all I've ignored!"

The clouds bulged up and grew fists, shoulders, a monstrous head, and a bestial cry seemed to surge through the wind. The lightning within made the deep hollows of its eyes flicker red.

Zeus' face contorted with wrath. A lance of lightning burst the marble by her feet, and as she covered her face with her hands, his attention loomed over her.

"How dare you talk to me like that!"

"Oh no you don't!"

A blue streak twisted from his grip and shot for his stomach, like a stone loosed from a slingshot. He staggered, gathered his senses, then let out a furious boom of laughter.

"That's your best, Hermes?!" He opened his arms as his nose curled like a lion's snarl. "With strength like that, I can see why she likes you so much!"

Hermes unsheathed his caudecous and slammed it across his jaw. It turned his head, but he turned it back again and grabbed him back into that one crushing fist. "Ohh... my boy," he growled as the black clouds rolled around them, walling them off from the rest of Olympus. "You're going to regret that."

Lightning flashed, thunder rolled, but Hermes made no further attempts to squirm free. He stared into the flaming eyes of Zeus, then shouted at the top of his lungs.

"Hera! RUN!" The clouds closed up around them, and blocked the stars from view.


Volcanic sand crunched beneath Ganymede's sandals. The geography of the Underworld slipped through his consciousness like an optical illusion - taken from afar, he could accept it without difficulty, but once he began dragging his attention over the individual paths and stairways he couldn't keep track of exactly what went where. If he moved without scrutiny his feet could bring him to his room, the Great Skull and the shoreline of the Styx, but any concerted effort to explore, to track his footsteps or to judge the true distance of each avenue only gave him a headache.

He entered the throne room, pulling a crumpled notepad from his pocket. Clicking the little skull on top of a pen, he scribbled lines through a few wonky symbols. "Okay man," his voice rang through the chamber, "the dog's fed, the mail's sorted, I aired out the linen closet and hosed down the front gate."

Hades stooped over his stone table and what few pieces still remained on the makeshift map. "Huh? That's great, mmhmm." He flicked over a statue as he finished a train of thought and gave the surface a smack with his fist.

"I've got a question."

"I'm a little busy for a heart-to-heart right now, kid." He didn't take his eyes from the pieces. "Can't you see I'm trying to save our asses right now?" Ganymede ignored him and tapped his notepad.

"What the heck's a Lethe? You wanted me to go put up a railing."

The god's head perked up.

"Hey, why didn't you say so?" He swept over and took the paper from his hand, though his brow immediately furrowed at it. "What're these, hieroglyphs?" The paper flapped down as he asked, "Didn't you ever learn to read?"

"Where would I have done that? The mountains of Troy?"

Hades just sort of shrugged and returned to his prior topic.

"It's a good thing you asked, 'cause that's not the kinda fixture the new guy oughtta be touching without proper training."

"But you're the one who gave me this li-"

"I do a lotta things." Hades clicked his tongue and thumbed for the stairs. "Let's go." He left no space for complaint as he gestured for Ganymede to turn around, breaking away from his inert chess pieces to engage with one of the few that was still kind-of alive.

They descended the dusty stairs to the sound of only one pair of footsteps. The cold ambient light of the Skull drew back, then the glow of the Styx washed in to replace it.

"So... how big even is this place?" Ganymede asked.

"The whole Underworld? Gee, I mean, it covers most of the Mediterranean," Hades replied. "If we ever got any sun down here we could make a killing as a cruise line." Down below their feet, the dead whispered and groaned in their never-ending, disharmonious symphony.

Ganymede raised his head to follow Hades' hooked profile. His eyelids lifted in interest. "Mile-for-mile, that's a lot of real estate."

"Yeah," Hades sighed and flapped the thought away, "but it's all about location." The lapping water grew louder as they came to the makeshift dock. Charon's Ferryboat awaited them at the bottom of the steps, bobbing in the waves, with its skeleton captain waiting mutely for instructions.

"So I guess you don't take too many vacations then, huh?" Ganymede asked, but flinched away from the boat. Hades raised an brow as he himself slunk on board.

"Who has the time these days?" he said. Then, with a flare of impatience, his pupils thinned. "Speaking of time, you're starting to waste mine."

Ganymede looked up at those pupils, then down at the gap of green water between the dock and the boat. It wasn't the depth that worried him, but the overlapping, ever-grasping bodies that drifted eternally through it. They made the water seem to go on even further, obscuring the bottom (and who knew how far down that went) with their drifting, like a lake filled with dead and dying jellyfish. Hades tapped the non-existant watch on his wrist.

With a swallow, he lifted a sandal, then leapt over the gap. The whole boat groaned, creaked and wobbled beneath him as he dropped like a rock to the bench in the middle. Hades leaned against the prow and waved for Charon to push off.

They pushed through the souls of the dead, and once again were forced to battle with the moans, cries and the lapping of the water. They floundered in the silence, and even though Ganymede now knew that silence personally, as his eyes locked on to the spirits' shifting limbs he found a rising tension clamping down around his chest regardless. Hades trilled his claws against the prow, and Ganymede grasped for a topic.

"So- so what was the deal with the Titans?" he asked. Hades waved his hand with irritation, but seemed just as relieved as him for the conversation.

"Just another brilliant plan thwarted by Zeus' dumb luck," he said, his shoulders catching a lick of orange flame. Ganymede had only heard the story in snippets, and from what he remembered from his last few days on Earth. At the time he'd had bigger problems than current events, but the memory of those four gigantic monsters booming Zeus' name in vengeance had still stuck.

He hugged his knees with further sounds of blunt and wooden clomping. "All roads lead back to him, huh?" His attempts at sounding flippant failed and the bitterness leaked out. Hades joined him with a savage,

"For all eternity, yeah."

Bracing against the existential dread, he pulled his knees away from the drifting limbs knocking the edge of the boat as his mind whirred for more ways to keep them both talking. Why was the silence so difficult between them?

"This might be a stupid question," he began, scrambling for more ways to fill the air, "but were you guys ever kids? How does that even work?"

"Aah, kinda what you'd expect," Hades replied, facing ahead and occasionally flicking a gesture out for Charon to follow. "Same as mortals, but throw in a couple of curveballs just to make it interesting."

"Bet he was just as much fun back then."

He really wanted to stop talking about Zeus, and for that loud, boring, unpleasant bully to stop dominating conversations even when he wasn't taking part in them, but what else did they have in common? What else was he going to talk about - sheep?

Hades' eyes locked on the distance as he spoke. "Back then at least I wasn't shoved in the basement, you know? I mean, Zeus isn't my only brother. That big idiot wasn't my only option."

Ganymede's eyes softened as he noticed the flicker of emotion in the god's voice - not grief over the loss of any family, Hades had been too bitter for too long to 'miss' any of the other gods, but another layer of more righteous anger. This was just one more thing, perhaps the first thing, that Zeus had stolen from him without even noticing.

Their boat slunk beneath archways as wide as the bones of a leviathan, stalactites curving like rib bones over the channel. On either side, the shoreline vanished off into blackness, and that blackness seemed to breathe with the promise that beyond it lay nothing. He watched those bodies drift in the other direction. Sometimes an elbow or a knee would crest the water like ghostly foam, and sometimes a spirit with fight still in them would grasp for freedom off in the distance - each one a distant splash to break the groaning monotone.

The boat took the crest of a short wave, knocking him askew as he scrambled to grip the bench. Hades cackled over his shoulder, but then the laughter passed, and they braced against the silence again. Puffing a tendril of hair from his face, Ganymede wondered with growing frustration what he was supposed to do next. That vision of the unknown god had promised him a way forward, but he hadn't provided a map.

He watched the back of Hades' head.

Wobbling to his feet, he tried to rise out of the mounting awkwardness - maybe some movement, any movement, would defuse the pressure around them. He flapped out his arms to steady himself, grabbing at nothing, as the boat rocked beneath his sandals with thick, clumsy knocks of wood. His feet locked into place, glued to the boards. Then, jaw setting, fighting every instinct to freeze in place, he took one ungainly step towards the prow.

"Hey!" Hades turned in idle alarm, "Watch what you-"

Whether the boat or Ganymede's centre of gravity swung first, it was impossible to tell and ultimately irrelevant. A screech of terror set Hades' teeth on edge as green water exploded up in mist around them and a dozen grabbing bodies lunged semi-mindlessly for the solid anchor tossed into their midst.

Ganymede kicked against the water and clawed at his arms as a thousand grasping fingers brushed, caressed and snatched for his bare skin. Moaning, open mouths and corpse-dead eyes, emaciated faces and outstretched arms swarmed for him, but the water cut off his screams as he plunged beneath the surface.

The spirits blocked the view through the water, but the green light faded to black below him, and as he scratched and kicked at the souls of the dead he only sank faster. He could feel them on his arms and shoulders, they took hold of his ankles - they wanted to claw their way up him and tugged palm-over-palm up his legs as he lashed back and tried to dislodge them. He may as well have been kicking at seaweed as their incorporeal bodies drifted in and out with the force of the water, impossible to bat away but wrapping their tendrils around him. His last cry of anguish sent air bubbles breaking on the surface.

Strong hands grabbed him beneath the arms and hauled him from the water. He scrambled with the force, grabbing and kicking for the lifeline, thrashing himself forwards with all the strength he had.

Hades staggered back as the young man flung his arms around his neck like a toddler "Woah, woah, hey!" His own arms hovered up and down, unsure of what he was supposed to do with them now. Ganymede clung to him with arms and his legs, and with one great clench of his body he let out one long, panicked wail.

His tunic limp with water, his hair unsettled by the grabbing hands of the dead, he screamed as hard as he could. Hades tried to reach far enough to clamp his hands over his ears and find the best place in the boat to dump him. The boy wouldn't be pried, however, even when he pulled on the back of his tunic.

"Hey-hey-hey!" he tried shouting, "Easy! You're just-! You're panicki-! SHUT UP!" A rush of flame sent Ganymede tumbling back into the boat, steaming some of the water from his clothes.

Ganymede's scream stuttered, choked, then with the slow rise of a warning siren, it cracked apart into a crying fit. Hades recoiled as heaving, gutteral sobs throttled him like a doll, and left him with just enough presence of mind to curl himself up. He looked like a mad seer as he cringed around his own body, tucking away from everything else.

Shame wracked every shaking cry as he clung all his limbs together, wordless and blinded by sounds that made the howling dead seem practically carefree. If Hades had ever gotten that funding for Tartarus, that pit for all the worst and most abandoned sinners, their wails of regret couldn't have sounded more hellish. "Geez," Hades picked his way across the ferryboat with an uncomfortable trill of his claws, "How do you turn it off?" Their skeleton helmsman continued, taking no notice.

This vision of total grief did the opposite of what noise was supposed to do - it deepened the silence. It went further than the silence; it revealed the deadly consequence of sitting in that silence for too long, and displayed plainly to him exactly why they all talked so much. This unguarded wailing ringing through the chasm proved the abject misery none of them wanted to admit to, because if they admitted to the screaming helplessness, they'd have to accept it. It made him want to start shouting too, but if he did that none of them might ever stop, and then they'd never get out of here.

And he hated the way Ganymede's body curled in on itself. He didn't like coming face-to-face with a pain so much more unfathomable than the one he'd become accustomed to.

It wasn't like he was sympathetic or anything, but his ever-present rage locked onto the same old target for brand new reasons, as he witnessed the consequences of Zeus' selfishness.

Ganymede shielded his face from him as he eased himself down on the bench beside him. "Pull yourself together, kid," he said, patting himself down for a handkerchief, finding nothing, then flourishing one into his hand. He held it out between two fingers and waggled the slate-gray rag at him.

When Ganymede's head rose, despair had hollowed out his eye-sockets so completely that he seemed to have been physically ravaged by it. His face was a mask of tragedy, rage and loathing but he still took the handkerchief with a surprised bleat of laughter. Hades watched over him as he pressed his eyes into it and hid his face away. His eyes watched the stalactites above them, the water around them, then his wristwatch.

They sat without saying a word, but the unspoken had been brought out with such force that the silence had nothing to threaten Hades with anymore. The tragedy had been acknowledged but they were all still here. They had company.

There came a rustle as Ganymede folded up the handkerchief and slid it into his pocket. "Thanks," he murmured. His eyes rose heavily up to meet Hades'. "Oh great and powerful Lord Hades."

"Yeah-yeah," Hades rolled to his feet and moved back to the prow. The mouth of a new tunnel now yawned open ahead of them. "Now will you keep your damn hands and feet inside the ride? I'm not fishing you out a second time."

Ganymede sniffed, but though he was still holding himself together, a smile wobbled across his face. "Sure."