Chapter Text
The cobblestones lurched; the flames in the columns lining the halls sputtered; and the heavy stone walls of the House of Hades shuddered to the low, hollow toll of a bell few among the denizens of the Underworld would find unfamiliar. However, the unparalleled, ear-bursting intensity of the sound this time around was far more than enough to startle all that were present.
Prince Zagreus had been admiring the newly constructed fireplace in the lounge with his rather common urge to will off a general boredom, poking a finger here and there, taunting the flames. Some fingers were taunted back, but the burns were quite insignificant until the toll rang forcefully through the halls and the Prince found himself thrust forward into the coals, his back facing a sudden over-eruption of chaos. Shades were stumbling about between knocked-over tables and chairs, while the Wretched Broker scrambled to catch falling valuables that had come tumbling off shelves and the Chef looked on in horror at the remains of their fish, sliced at such an offensive angle that it may well bring their whole career into question.
The thoroughly-singed Prince’s first instinct had been to help the lounge-goers through the turmoil, but the heavy growls of Cerberus swiftly carried his feet to the main hall. The three-headed hound stood at full height, body shielding both Queen Persephone and Lord Hades, hackles raised and multitudinous rows of teeth bared as he appeared to scan the room for a foe just out of sight. Behind Cerberus, a heavy-handed fist met a desk with a resounding bang. Where the previous unexpected sound had brought disjointed unrest, this authoritative slam of jeweled flesh against stone immediately ushered in stillness and order across the entirety of the house.
Hades roared, “Thanatos! What is the meaning of this?”
To his query, the Lord of the Underworld received no response.
Eventually, after looking to and fro, and a bit even farther beyond that, it was Prince Zagreus who spoke up to say: “I really don’t think he’s here, Father.”
“Then what, pray tell, was all of that ruckus about? Are you aware of anyone else who summons the toll of Death?”
“No, but Thanatos wouldn’t do something like this, you know that. He’s not really one for…” The Prince struggled to find the appropriate word to describe this most unusual of situations before settling upon “outbursts. Even if he did do this, where is he now? Did he come to cause a scene then leave immediately or is he hiding under your desk?”
“This is not the time for that glib attitude of yours, boy,” Hades said and rose, hand curling around his spear. “Whomever, whatever is responsible shall be shown they cannot disrupt the sanctity of this House without expectation of considerable consequences.”
“Um, would it help if I said that you were both right?”
Hypnos floated lazily down the hall toward the Prince, the King, the Queen, and their monstrously concerned three-headed dog.
“What?” Prince Zagreus asked astutely.
“Like, yeah, that was Thanatos alright. That was him for sure! I mean, who wouldn’t recognize that ‘Ba-dong!’ sound of his? Not me!” Hypnos exclaimed. “But it didn’t come from here. The sound came from way far away somewhere. Isn’t that crazy? It happened so far away and when it got here it was still THAT loud! Can you imagine how loud it must have been where it originally came from? Now that would be a sound!”
Up to this point, Prince Zagreus had been able to meet this peculiar chain of events with a relative calm borne of weathering many the overly-tense situation, but Hypnos’ words brought to him a feeling of unease that was quick to nestle deep within his chest. What a sound it would have been indeed. And to what end?
"Why would he do that?” the Prince asked at the same time his father demanded: “Where did it come from?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” Hypnos replied with cheerful sincerity. “I would say we could ask my mom, but she doesn’t seem to be around either.”
The Queen, who had a placed a gentle, reassuring hand on the part of his back that the Hound of Hell had made well known was his definitive preference for any giving of idle scritches, added her worry: “I saw Nyx quickly disappear moments before we all heard the toll. The look on her face was… She was troubled.”
The heavy brow of Lord Hades unfurled from a fierce military readiness into something a shade more complex. If Prince Zagreus had not known better, he might have read the pursed lips and swift return to his seated desk as symptoms of something approaching concern in his father. However, Prince Zagreus did indeed know far better than that, or so he liked to presume.
“What are the implications of this?” Hades asked Hypnos.
Not willing to wait a second more, not even for the inevitable shrug and non-answer the Lord of the House would certainly receive, the Prince himself replied, “I’m going to find out.”
In comparison with his previous myriad attempts to traverse the bowels of the Underworld, this time Prince Zagreus’ path was clear. He simply followed the trail of increasing destruction to wherever it led him, as opposed to his more standard practice of leaving the destruction in his wake.
Close to the House of Hades, there was the occasional felled pillar and scattered debris, but farther onward through the winding passages of Tartarus, the damage wrought by the passing wave of immense sound had reduced entire rooms to seas of rubble and howling shades. Massive sections of flooring had broken off, tumbling into abysses even deeper than the Prince had ever dared visit. The dangers in this particular journey lay in where he put his feet instead of how swiftly he swung his sword. More than once, he found himself hanging by a finger from crumbling walls and shattered foundations as consequence for some of his clumsier footfalls.
“I’d like to see you do any better, old man,” Zagreus retorted after climbing up from a particularly treacherous precipice that would have ideally been avoided altogether by a more sound strategy of travel. “Really, a little support would be nice right about now.”
Ahem.
The stairway leading to the plains of Asphodel soon lay within his sight. The structure was fortunately sturdy enough to remain mostly intact, if not easily fatal to someone slightly less able to dexterously sidestep the newly formed cracks and gaps than our mostly agile, flame-footed Prince.
“I’ll take it. Thank you.”
Arriving at the heated plains, looking out at the fires of the Phlegethon, Prince Zagreus immediately spotted something he had never seen before. There, in the distance, was a giant indentation in the land—large enough to have swallowed the entire House of Hades a hundredfold with room to spare. The ground sloped severely into an unfathomably large, gaping darkness that even the all-consuming Phlegethon dared not flood. The river stayed still, silent, deferential, its flames hovering just around the edges of the gargantuan emptiness.
The unease Prince Zagreus had carried with him from the House all the way to Asphodel quickly grew to a size he could barely swallow down. His feet could not move fast enough as he sprinted from one heated isle to another, ignoring the dust and obliterated remains of the Bloodless unlucky enough to have been nearby as he approached what was certainly the origin of the sound.
The moment his foot first landed on the lip of the hole, he immediately felt the full presence of Death. It was cold, heavy, and utterly unfamiliar.
“Than?” Prince Zagreus called aloud in reflex.
To his query, the Prince received no response.
Instead, he ran forward and down for quite a while, deeper and deeper into the dark. If there was a way to reliably measure the passage of time within the Underworld, it would suffice to say that a overly sufficient amount of it had passed before the Prince reached the lowest depths of what this darkness had to offer.
A dim light appeared before him, and within it he spotted the back of the Goddess Nyx before he realized precisely what she was facing. Pristine, inevitably sharp, gleaming preternaturally in the oppressive dark, was the unmistakable scythe of Death, bereft of any owner, stood upright at what must have been the very center of this gigantic crater. The large, all-seeing jewel that adorned the back edge of the blade was shattered beyond all recognition, its shining fragments littering the floor.
Prince Zagreus stopped moving.
For the first time, the chill of Death did more than gently cool and soothe his ever-heated skin. It pierced and pricked him, twisting around his sinews, muscles, and bones like a nest of frozen vipers.
“I was too late,” Goddess Nyx spoke, and her voice sounded far more distant than she was presently placed in space from the shivering Prince. “Through the connection we share, I felt his sudden, indescribable pain. Something was tearing him apart, and it happened in nothing more than an instant. I came immediately, but it was already done. I no longer feel his presence.”
“That can’t,” Prince Zagreus began through clenched teeth, his words coming out as puffs of frost, “that’s not. He can’t just be gone.”
“Oh, my child,” Nyx said in soft agony, and Prince Zagreus was unsure if those words were for him or for the one whose hand should have held the abandoned scythe before them.
As frost collected on his lashes, the Prince desired only to move forward and inspect the scythe. He wished to find a clue that would provide knowledge of what exactly had occurred and lead him to wherever Death was, because while Death could certainly leave for a moment or longer, that absence would never be an eternity – this he knew. Death was inevitable. Never completely gone.
“Thanatos is immortal,” Prince Zagreus said, stating his claim instead of surging forward to act upon it, because his feet would not move.
In the Prince’s stead, Nyx did move. She drifted toward the scythe and held out a cupped hand underneath the tip of the blade. His eyes following the motion, Prince Zagreus spotted the bead of purple-hued black that hung there. Nyx cradled it for a moment before pulling her hand back.
Like water drawn from a stone, Darkness was coming from deep within the scythe, collecting at the end, coalescing into something.
“Death is reforming,” Nyx said. “However, he will not be as we remember. You can sense it too, can’t you?”
Prince Zagreus had indeed felt the absence of the Death he knew the moment he entered this terribly dark place.
“Yes, but I don’t accept it.”
It was these words of stubborn defiance that had the Goddess Nyx turning toward the Prince, with the sight of him providing her with even more worry than before.
“My child, your feet!”
Prince Zagreus finally looked down to see a shocking absence of the flames that perpetually adorned his soles. They had been fully extinguished, only to be replaced with an interminably deep and unyielding frost. So heavy was the cold that his feet had firmly frozen to the floor.
“Must you really take after your grandmother in this particular aspect?”
“My feet are the very least of our problems, Father!” Prince Zagreus declared as he paced in front of the desk in the Main Hall of the House of Hades.
After a bit of excessive pulling and tugging, the Prince had managed to remove his feet from the ground the first time, and, following that, was able to remain unstuck as long as he continued to move regularly. During his journey back into the true heat of Asphodel, he quickly began to discover some of the benefits of having frozen extremities, particularly when it came to navigating areas encased within the flames of the Phlegethon. While he still had not determined how to come to a sudden stop without sliding more than was reasonable, it was a quirk of circumstances easy to ignore in light of far more pressing matters.
“We need to organize a search party immediately to find Thanatos,” the Prince continued. “I’ll take every shade you can spare.”
“We need to do no such thing. It is my understanding that you have already found him.”
“Whatever is forming in Asphodel, that’s not him! Something attacked Death, a fundamental pillar of the Underworld, and you’re just going to sit there and take it? I thought you had a little more backbone in you than that.”
Putting his quill down for the first time since the conversation began, Lord Hades snapped, “I will not be told how to manage my realm or my House.”
He looked ready to carry his words further, but a significant exchange of glances between him and Queen Persephone appeared to significantly alter his course.
“If you need to mourn, do so,” Hades said with a carefully even temper and the smallest conciliatory grain of consideration. “Just take it outside of my place of business. You have your chambers, don’t you? Go use them.”
The Prince took the opportunity to pour over rolls upon rolls of parchment he had spread around his decidedly unkempt room. In absence of immediate answers, he hoped he could find even the subtlest of hints regarding the whereabouts of Thanatos tucked somewhere within the clutter of minor prophecies he had received from The Fates. So long and intense was his scrutiny of the letters flowing across the papers that his toes had frozen to the floor where he knelt, encased in slowly, steadily growing layers of ice, but he did not yet seem to have noticed this.
“Oh, I have noticed,” Prince Zagreus snapped. “I just don’t particularly care.”
While he may have noticed the condition of his feet, the Prince most certainly did not notice the presence of his mother until her hand was on his shoulder. He startled for a moment before recognition settled in, his skin accepting the touch even while his muscles remained more tightly wound than the most wretched souls in Tartarus.
“I am so very sorry, my son,” Queen Persephone said.
Prince Zagreus accepted this as well, albeit with strained reluctance.
“Thank you, Mother, really. You are being kinder than I deserve, but it is this sort sentiment that makes me think most of this House has given up on finding Thanatos before we have even started looking. I believe he deserves the courtesy of a careful search before we determine it time to provide him the courtesy of our grief, and those who knew him our sympathy.”
“You misunderstand. I am sorry that someone you care for is missing, but I do not pretend to know the outcome of his absence. Neither does your father, for that matter.”
“Would that he acted upon his uncertainty,” the Prince muttered bitterly.
Here, Queen Persephone smiled. It was large and bright in a way that was rather mismatched with the fearsome reputation of the House.
“The Furies are making a detailed sweep of Tartarus as we speak in order to create a report on the damage to the halls and the general status of the resident shade population. We have such representatives doing the same for every part of the Underworld. While their primary objective may not be to uncover a missing individual, they certainly will know what to do if they were to come across one.”
Prince Zagreus looked up from his parchments at this. It was clear that while his father was unwilling to openly search for Death, he was comfortable with carefully stumbling upon him should such an opportunity be made. The theater of it all smelled overly-ripe of politics to the weary Prince.
“I suppose anything further would risk causing unrest among the shades,” he concluded.
“Yes. There are rumors circling, but nothing substantial at present. If too many realize that something has happened regarding Death, we fear the consequences may be great.”
“I see. I regret causing a scene earlier; it can’t have helped matters.”
Prince Zagreus held his mother’s gaze for an appropriate amount of time before returning to scouring the words of The Fates.
After a heavy moment, Persephone asked, “May I stay with you?”
“Of course.”
And so the Queen did sit next to her frost-bitten son as he looked over parchment after parchment. She offered nothing further, remaining a silent but warm presence at his side as he continued his search. Over time, the room gradually began to smell of the garden freshness of the blooming plants she had raised from tiny seedlings – the ones she had known and cared for from the very beginning, instead of first encountering them at full maturity. The Queen was not as knowledgeable when it came to caring for plants that had already grown, but she aspired to be adaptable in her own way.
Prince Zagreus’ voice was unnaturally soft as he finally spoke: “Nyx said something at the time.”
While the Goddess Nyx had left the Prince in Asphodel once they were both certain a lack of flames on his feet was not a development of the fatal kind, she had also notably not yet returned to the House.
“What did she say, Zagreus?”
“She knew he was hurting. Indescribable pain, she said. And by the time she got there it was too late. She can no longer sense his presence.”
The Prince had crumpled a parchment of The Fates in his hands before he realized what he had done, and he then hurried to smooth and put it down among the others. He stared at the writings on the floor. It was easier to look at them than think too deeply about the implication of his spoken words.
“You never mentioned that,” the Queen said.
“I wasn’t able to before. I struggled to say it just now. I’m sorry.”
A hand met his shoulder again and squeezed.
“I should let your father know.”
“Yes,” Prince Zagreus agreed, and silently watched his mother leave before returning to the parchments.
If this added perspective could lead to success in the House’s covert search for Death, the Prince would be glad. He was saving all his gladness for that hypothetical future time, and wished for it to be soon in coming.
However, in the moment, he could not stop his worry from nearly overwhelming him. If, despite her immediate efforts, Nyx had been unable to rescue Thanatos from whatever had assailed him, what possible conclusion remained? If Nyx could no longer sense her son, what did that leave?
When the Prince was not fully focused on the words of The Fates, his mind wandered to scenarios that had Thanatos alone, suffering, gravely injured, or worse. His thoughts spiraled, traveling to more and more terrible locales, while he did not even dare to consider more positive alternatives such as the possibility of others having succeeded—even partially—where Nyx had not in her rescue attempt. Such acute speculation could only have been borne from a deeper knowledge of the problem at hand than the Prince had yet to obtain.
Zagreus looked up sharply.
“Old man, just what are you implying? Do you know something?”
Erm, there were indeed a great many paths Prince Zagreus had yet to explore on his quest to find his answers.
“If you know anything about what happened to Thanatos, you have to tell me. I, um, demand it on my authority? Does that work on you?”
So let us take a step back from our view of the Prince, and reflect on what we know as we move forward into this rather mysterious tale.
“No! Hey! Wait a second! Don’t go! I’m stuck! I can’t chase you; I’m stuck!”
As Prince Zagreus wraps his hands around one of his ankles and desperately pulls, we pull back more successfully to see the large, sprawling House of Hades from up on high. The walls stand tall, appearing absolutely immaculate in comparison to the vast destruction of Tartarus that surrounds them. However, the foundations of Tartarus will be much more easily repaired than the invisible wounds suffered by those within the House on this day.
That process of healing or stagnation in many ways depends on what happens next—on how precisely this story unravels. Perhaps it will all be as tragic as our worst fears, or perhaps there will be joyful reunions and resolutions that seal gaping wounds into faint scars. Perhaps posing those two possibilities in conflict is over-simplifying matters.
As we consider what the future holds, a suddenly freed Prince Zagreus dashes out into the courtyard and looks upward, eyes immediately fixed upon us. He grabs his trusty Stygius and, with a heavy throw, the Prince embeds his sword into the wall of the House, a good distance above his own head. He vaults upward, using the weapon as a handhold, and begins scaling the wall, rising quickly to our height. On the upper balcony he holds out both hands, palms up, in clear supplication.
“I’m not asking for much. A scrap of anything would do, really. If it’s a secret, you can tell me and I won’t tell anyone else. We can make whatever pact you’d like in that regard.”
The Prince continues his fruitless efforts to search for answers in places they cannot be found.
“They would not be fruitless if you would just tell me what I want to know! Stubborn old man!”
Knowledge is hard to come by in a prologue. This is a place far more suited for uncertainty than resolution. We will begin to learn in due time, but that education will not come from me. Beyond this prologue, the primary story is much better told through the eyes of another: the one who lies at the crux of this matter.
“You must mean Thanatos! He lives?”
The Prince asks one final question, and it is an important one. We should consider it carefully.
Does the incarnation of Death known as Thanatos still exist? In that same vein of inquiry, what in the world would it mean if he does not?
Prince Zagreus pales considerably, but remains silent.
Out of the many unknowns, there is perhaps one certainty we can define in this moment. If Thanatos remains in some shape or form, and if he were to meet Prince Zagreus again at any point in the future, his first action would undoubtedly be to ask the Prince what has gone wrong with his feet.
It is here that Prince Zagreus remains much less silent and considerably less polite, but pay him no heed.
The story lies elsewhere. It has come time for us to pay it a visit.