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The boy’s name is Zagreus.
He’s the prince of the Underworld.
You meet him for the first time when you are staring at the River Styx half-heartedly after your latest reaping. Some of the faces in the river you recognize.
Most blend into the bloody mass of the water.
“Hello!” Zagreus gives you a cheery smile and a half bow. “I’m Zagreus. Nyx said she’s our mom.”
“Yeah?” You smile at the boy. At a glance, you can tell you’re older than him. He lacks the feeling of age that most gods have; he must be a new one. He lacks, as well, the feeling of endlessness carried by Nyx’s other children. “Thanatos. It’s good to meet you. What are you the god of?”
“I’m not sure yet. Nyx said I’ll find out in time.”
You swing the scythe clumsily, still unaccounted to the weight of it. Perhaps the young prince thinks you look cool, at least. His sparkling eyes say so.
“I’m the god of the dead. I reap souls from the living and bring them to Lord Hades.”
“Ooh, you get to go to the surface! Lucky.”
You smile at the boy’s naïveté. “The surface isn’t that special. It’s kind of depressing, actually.”
“Have you considered that you think that since you’re literally Death?”
“Well-!” You humph. “Maybe.”
“Tell me about the surface, though. I want to know!”
“I’m telling you, it’s not that interesting.”
He taps his fiery feet. “Princely orders.”
“Fine. What do you want to know?”
“Your first soul reaped. Tell me about it.”
...
Nyx brushes your shoulder. “Here, my child. She is ready to pass.”
The woman is old, though unlike the elderly you’ve met before. Hades and Mother Nyx have the wisdom of their years buried deep in their eyes. This woman’s age appears through pallid wrinkles and paper-thin arms.
She sees you through her crinkled eyes and gives you a smile.
“Is that you, Death?” You nod tentatively. “You can take me, dear.”
Deep breaths. You wave your hand and your scythe follows a swift cut. A content shade emerges from the body.
Her hand has no temperature. It is barely more than a wisp in your palm as you guide her to the Underworld.
...
“That’s lame.” Zagreus blows a raspberry. “I was expecting it to be all wham, blam!”
“No. That’s for the Keres.”
“Who?”
“They’re my sisters. They like the ‘wham, blam’ deaths. You don’t want to meet them, though. Hypnos said they’re weird.”
“Have you met them?”
“Not yet.”
“How come Hypnos has met them but not you? You’re literally Death!”
“Mother said that our paths won’t normally cross. Besides, right now I’m still training with more lowkey deaths.”
“Oh, so you’re new like me! We should be friends, then.”
“Sure. I’ll try to think of more interesting surface stories for you next time.”
Zagreus’s room is bare and boring. Not that yours is any better, given yours is essentially a carbon copy with purple motifs instead.
He fiddles with his toga, his legs crossed halfway as he looks at you. “You still don’t have any good surface stories.”
“Sorry,” you mumble, not at all sorry, “I’ve been going there more but it’s still basically old people. And young people, too. Like, babies, though. It’s sad, I suppose, but that doesn’t make a good story either.”
“Don’t you get into any cool battles? You’ve got that scythe,” he nods to your scythe propped against the wall, “but all you do is reap souls, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s fight.”
You prop yourself up on your elbows. “Huh?” You were quite enjoying laying listlessly on the bed.
“Out in the back, I have a deck. We can’t break anything there.”
“Okay.” You wave your wrist and the scythe returns to your back. You’ve actually never used it as a proper weapon before, only to harvest souls. It looks incredibly awkward to wield.
You suppose, as the prince withdraws Stygius, that he looks incredibly awkward with a sword two-thirds of his height as well.
It is a battle of awkwardness. Neither of you are accustomed to your weapons. You know Achilles began training Zagreus recently, but the student has yet to become accustomed to the weight of Stygius hindering his movements.
You could say the same, though, awkwardly slashing with a scythe twice your size. Normally, it moved at your will, but without a shade in sight it was an unwieldy tool. If anything, it felt heavier, as if protesting the improper usage.
Zagreus heaves his sword above his head like a hammer, and you barely bring your scythe up to catch it before it cuts you in two. His blade slides down the length of the scythe with a sharp slice.
You are both on the floor, panting. A pale gold drips from your arm. Zagreus watches it flow down your arm with wide eyes.
“Can I get a towel, Zag?”
Your voice awakens him and he hustles in and out of his room. The towel is pure white and your blood turns a dark bronze as it dries on the cloth.
“Your blood is gold.”
You nod vaguely. “The mortals call it ichor. They have red blood.”
“A-as… as do I.”
You look up from your arm. You look at Zagreus, really look at him, drink him in. One eye pale blue and the other blood scarlet. His chest heaves as his body comes down from the fight.
“That’s weird.” There isn’t much else to say. Ichor is the blood of the gods. You are a god. Zagreus is a god. Whether he has ichor or not is irrelevant. “Oh, well,” you add, at Zagreus’ contorted brows, “it doesn’t matter. We’re both children of Nyx, of course we’re both gods. Don’t waste time thinking about it.”
“Alright.” He gulps. “Maybe for round two we should use different weapons.”
“Agreed.”
You typically pass your days in your room when the souls of the surface aren’t calling you. People generally like to avoid being around death, after all. Today, however, there’s a powerful urge to avoid the call.
Instead, you sit in the lounge with Zagreus and Megaera, passing away the hours.
He twirls a hand through your hair. “Your hair’s long, Than.”
“I’ve worked hard to maintain this look. Don’t ruin it.”
“I won’t. Though, I wouldn’t mind seeing you before you straighten it one day.”
“That’s never happening. I would look like a shaggy Hypnos.”
Megaera laughs drily. “I had the misfortune to know Thanatos before his hair grew out. Believe me, it’s better when he straightens it.”
“Isn’t that a bit mean?”
You forget, sometimes, that Zagreus isn’t as old as you, that he doesn’t understand her as well. “You don’t know how cruel she can get if you think that’s mean.”
“Thanatos!” Hades’ voice roars through the House, inescapable as ever. You give a sad shrug to the pair, who nod in heartfelt understanding.
“Hello, Lord Hades.”
“You can sense it, can’t you?” Straight to the chase as always. Hades has always been a terrifying, overbearing figure. He looms above you from his desk. “The deaths aboveground. What are you waiting for, Thanatos?”
You don’t know.
You can feel the many lives being lost. It’s like an intense panging sensation, and it prickles your skin, urging you to reap the lost souls.
“Go now, before I skin you in the place of my nephew.”
You nod, despite the churning in your stomach.
The mortal realm is horrifying.
Immediately you can feel a pressure pushing down on your chest, every breath a hundred times more difficult than it would be in the Underworld.
Your senses are overloaded. The surface is bright, it’s warm, it's loud, it's absolutely horrifying. You have never felt so much at once. Beyond the senses as well, you can feel death. Death looms over the battlefield like a noxious scent.
This is nothing like the quiet dying rooms of the elderly.
A bat-like figure races past you, cackling madly. Another swoops under your chin with a mocking giggle.
Your sisters.
You don’t ask, you aren’t told, you know.
These are your kin. The Keres sweep across the battlefield in ravenous hunger, howling as the soldiers crumple.
It’s a massacre.
Achlys. You sense her as well. She looms over a fallen soldier. For a moment you think she’s tending to his wounds, but her long nails slip a flower under his nose and he begins retching violently, curling into a ball from the pain.
As your sibling, you should expect little else. She sees you and stands.
She is tall, far taller than you, with pale, emaciated cheeks covered in nail marks and a gray shawl covered in dust. Her smile seems to pull at her entire face.
“Thanatos, my brother. Here at last.”
A thin mist drifts off of her shoulders. It is the mist of death, you realize, and she is the one bringing it to this bloody field.
“I’ll leave you to it.”
She wanders away with her cloak of flowers, dropping the unpleasant blooms across the field as you take soul after soul. It becomes a contorted race, as you hurry to put soldiers out of their misery and Achlys makes their last moments as painful as possible.
At some point, soldiers stop differentiating bare grass with dead bodies and soon you are reaping souls while ducking between spears. They can’t see you, but the haunted looks in their eyes say they can feel your presence.
You’ve never seen this fear in someone’s eye before.
The taller soldier is wearing a bright red, and as you approach to take the body he’s currently stepping on, his eyes go wide.
Fear.
Total, absolute fear.
It’s nothing like the old people.
Most of them have accepted that it’s their time.
They’ll give you frowns, take one last look around their rooms, their families, but they’ll never look at you with fear .
This one does.
His opponent catches him in the neck with a swift spear slash.
The blood bursts out and he falls backward.
A Ker dives on him without hesitation; she gives you a wink as she feasts.
You cringe as his blood splashes against your front.
It’s on your face, your arms, your robe, your everything.
The battle, however, does not stop for the dead.
It does not stop for you.
You keep going.
At some point, your robes are soaked with blood. At some point, there are more bodies than soldiers. At some point, no one is left standing. At some point, you run out of souls to collect. The Keres, their bloodthirst at last satiated, vanish.
You are left floating between the bodies, grateful to levitate and horrified by. By everything. By the bodies, the blood, your sisters, all of it.
A swift god flies down next to you, already motioning to hovering Shades where they should go.
Hermes waves to you haphazardly. You can barely nod.
He looks at you. His thin, darty eyes watch your slightest shift. The blood on your cheek feels like it’s on fire.
His words tumble out quickly, in typical Hermes fashion. “I’ll take over here, coz, I can guide the rest. You need sleep, though I’m not quite sure if Chthonic gods sleep. Best to you!” With that, he darts about the field, hustling lost souls like a sheep dog.
You let the Underworld pull you downward.
The House is unchanged, but everything is hazy in your eyes.
You’re still covered in blood, you vaguely realize. You need to clean up.
Zagreus tries to pry a story out of you and you give him a slammed door in return.
Not right now. A trail of blood leads to the sink, where you scrub at your skin. It hurts, but the blood is still there, you can still feel the heat of the life in it radiating on your cheek. It’s still there, it’s still digging at you. You scrub and scrub.
Your face is gaunt in the mirror. You could be a healthier Achlys if you tried.
You pull off the sopping robes and stare at yourself.
Death.
Your name is Thanatos, and you are the embodiment of death. Today, you have faced that fact head on. Even if violent deaths aren’t under your care, they are still deaths , and--
Your hair.
Oh, blood and darkness, your hair . Caked between the fine gray waves are chunks of dried blood.
It comes off as rust-colored dust in your fingertips.
You’re nearly sick in the sink, instead heaving off the windowsill and into Styx.
With clenched teeth, you clatter through the cabinet, looking for any kind of blade. A decorated pair of scissors finds its way into your hands, and you snip quickly.
You look up.
Your eyes are gaunt, and your hair has seen better days, but you no longer feel ill when looking in the mirror.
Thank gods.
Hermes takes over guiding souls for a time, giving you respite.
Hades gives you an accusatory look as you float into the prince’s room.
Said prince is already there, inspecting himself in the endless night of his mirror. That feeling of eternity never did arise in Zagreus, no matter how many times Nyx said it was his godly powers yet developing to blame.
You flop onto his mattress. His bed is soft, and you vaguely wonder why he doesn’t lie in it more.
“You can lie on it as much as you like.”
“I’m thinking about leaving.”
You sit up in his bed as if he said he was going to pick up knitting.
“I need out of this place, Than.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m going to break out of hell. I mean, people have done it before, right? I’ll be fine. Achilles trained me well.”
“No.” The blood, the blood, you can feel the blood seared into your cheek. “Zag. The surface is terrible . Whatever reason you have for wanting to go up there, it isn’t worth it.”
“I can’t stay here, though. You know that, right?” You can imagine his bright red blood flowing out, staining the sheets, staining the floor. “This place… I feel like there’s something above the surface that’s calling for me. No matter how I look at it, I can’t stay.”
“Zag--”
“I feel so purposeless here. You and Meg both have jobs, things to do, responsibilities, you know? I feel so listless.”
“I thought Lord Hades tasked you with working in the administrative chamber.”
“Yeah, and it makes me want to ask Hypnos to make me sleep forever. It’d be more interesting than working there all day. Night. Whatever.”
“Trust me, Zag. It’s not worth it. Even if you want to leave here, just don’t go there.”
“The surface only seems boring to you because you’ve been there a billion times. If I was there, then--”
“No. No, okay? It’s horrible . I-it’s not boring, it’s baleful .” Your gut wrenches as the fire in Zagreus’ eyes goes weak. “I don’t know why, but Lady Demeter has made the entire surface freeze over. Mortals can’t raise crops in that climate, and there’s been nonstop famine and war as the resources dwindle. I’m telling you, it’s a horrible place.”
“... Okay. Okay, Than.”
You are not on the best terms with Zagreus.
He’s the prince of the Underworld, and he’s ransacking his father’s possessions. As one of his father’s employers, it’s not a great look to be assisting in the destruction.
This is a lie. You don’t care about making Hades angry, or at least, your priorities put Zagreus’ wishes far above his father’s.
It is a matter of pride and honesty.
It is a matter of pride and honesty, and your pride is wounded when you hear about the prince’s first rogue outing through Hypnos, of all people.
He has his eye mask half over his face as he tells you with whimsy certainty that indeed he saw the prince jogging out of the Styx as if he’d taken a light bath. Hypnos prodded his clipboard with a lazy smile as you learned that the cause of death was a wringer.
You avoid the House recently.
It’s fine. You don’t need the mild comforts provided by it anyway. The number of peaceful deaths has increased lately, and besides, the lounge was in a state of utter disarray the last you saw it. Your room would suffice.
Right.
Cold, terrible surface. You were able to get over the disgust of blood eventually. After seeing anything enough, a person numbs to the feeling. Though, you admittedly leave the deaths that are closer to bloodshed to Hermes if given the choice.
Right. You watch the Styx flowing with half-lidded eyes.
The wars have mostly ceased as mortal resources became so limited that it wasn’t worth it to fight for the scraps. You’ve gotten busier.
The Styx is flowing slightly faster today.
Watching the snow melt on the surface becomes something of a hobby.
Curiosity gets the better of you, after a while. Is it curiosity, or is it fear? You’re not quite sure, but Death probably isn’t afraid of anything.
Zagreus is in the breezy fields of Elysium when he is stopped in his tracks by a pale mist floating over the River Lethe.
“Than?”
He knows immediately.
You aren’t a child anymore and neither is Zagreus.
You see it now. All the subtle changes you never saw as children are smacking you in the face.
He is beautiful. In a word.
In many, well.
He is tall. Handsome. Wonderfully broad-shouldered, yet with the same kind eyes and heavy-set smile. His training with Achilles has more than paid off into a powerful, well-trained, and firm-muscled warrior. He stands with pride and confidence radiating off of him.
His face hurts, though. To see him again brings a strange twinge of pain, and you wonder if you are the reason he is here.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to escape, what does it look like, Than?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why didn’t I-?” Zagreus splutters, “because last we spoke, you so vehemently warned me against it that I genuinely considered going back to pushing papers! Why would I have told you, when we left on terms that I would consider as better off dead?”
“I never said that.”
Summoning circles form in the Elysian grass.
“This isn’t the time for chit chat.”
You spin your scythe with the stiffest face you can muster.
When was the last time Death cried? What does it matter?
Flame wheels and righteous soldiers alike fall to your scythe.
You tie. You nearly laugh until you remember the tension of your pre-battle conversation.
The centaur heart pulses in your cloak and you consider whether he deserves it.
Of course he does, it’s not a question, look at him, he’s halfway dead and literally looks like he’s crawled out of hell to get here., why would you not give him such a parcel?
“Zag, listen to me. I never wanted any harm to befall you, it’s for that reason that I was so aggressive in warning you away from leaving. The surface as I knew it was an ugly place, now it’s--”
“Listen to me . My mother is up there. I know you’ve never known a life without your mother, but I would rather face whatever monstrosity awaits me at the end of Styx than lie complacent with my father’s treatment of me and her.”
His words bite worse than the Phlegethon.
“I didn’t know.” You were so ready to blame yourself for Zagreus’ escape that you never considered otherwise.
“Well, that’s the reason,” he says sharply, all the bluntness quickly fading from his words, “but I didn’t tell Meg either, if that’s any consolation.”
“You realize Megaera currently hates you and would tear you into smithereens if she could?”
“Oh, I know, she tries to cut me terribly every time I run into her.”
Silence fills Elysium. The boon of Aphrodite they were fighting for looms in sparkling pink glory.
The surface. If Zagreus’ mother was on the surface, if she was alive, if she was out there, then what reason could you possibly have to discourage him? What reason could you form strong enough to counter that childish notion of family?
You toss the centaur heart onto the grass. “I’ll win next time, Zag.”
You vanish before he can respond.
You typically pass your days in your room when the souls of the surface aren’t calling you. People generally like to avoid being around death, after all. Today, however, is one of Zagreus’ escape days. Escape attempt days, really.
You’ve made your little visits as regular as you can with the frequent starvation and hypothermia deaths on the surface.
Zagreus has begun to give you quaint bottles of nectar each time you stop by. The little bottles are most certainly not the reason you keep coming back. You simply enjoy seeing him in his element.
And in his element Zagreus is. He never seemed comfortable in the administrative chamber, stamping papers like he was dying. In combat, though, he was confident, he was bold, he was himself. You hadn’t seen those wide, thoughtless smiles of his for a long time.
You look away during your visits. You never want to feel blood on your face ever again, for one, and for another, you like to keep the winner of your little competitions a surprise for the end.
As you spin your scythe, though, you can’t help but peek at the godling.
He has perfect form as he jumps and drives his spear into a fallen soldier. The way his hair swishes, the way he confidently smirks before throwing the blade, the way he dives after it like a bird of prey. It is all so different from his young, fumbling self.
He’s a bit too cocky, though, and a bowman sends an arrow flying across his leg. Bright red blood. Bright red blood oozes from the cut.
You grit your teeth and death’s power flows under the guilty archer. Zagreus hastily stabs the remaining soul.
“Agh,” he huffs as Zeus’ boon thunders into the room, “lucky bastard. Anyway, Than. How have you been?”
“Busy.” Your jaw feels loose. “Are you bleeding?”
“Only a bit. I’ll be fine.”
You watch the prince roughly wipe the cut with the hem of his toga and you cringe in disgust.
“Come on, Zag.” You float forward and use your much cleaner cloak to properly dab away the blood. “If you’re going to get hurt, you should at least take care of yourself when you do.”
“Ah… Thanks.”
Any embarrassment on your face is easily hid by your hood.
“Of course.” You straighten.
You’re much taller than Zagreus, by a solid handful of inches. It feels like he is looking up at a giant.
His eyes no longer sparkle at you, but a new kind of admiration has replaced the glitter.
You set the centaur heart on the grass. “Be seeing you.”
...
Zagreus narrows his eyes as Thanatos vanishes. “I lost that one, though.”