Chapter Text
As he fell, Keith thought about Hesiod, the old Greek poet who’d speculated it would take nine days to fall from earth to Tartarus.
He hoped Hesiod was wrong. He’d lost track of how long he and Lance had been falling—hours? A day? It felt like an eternity. They’d been holding hands ever since they dropped into the chasm. Keith already felt his grip on reality fading. Lance switched from holding his hand to pulling him close, burying his nose on Keith’s hair. He held Lance tight and tried not to sob.
Wind whistled in Keith’s ears. The air grew hotter and damper, as if they were plummeting into the throat of a massive dragon. His recently broken ankle throbbed, though he couldn’t tell if it was still wrapped in spiderwebs.
That cursed monster Arachne. Despite having been trapped in her own webbing, smashed by a car, and plunged into Tartarus, the spider lady had gotten her revenge. Somehow her silk had entangled Keith’s leg and dragged him over the side of the pit, with Lance in tow.
He couldn’t imagine that Arachne was still alive, somewhere below them in the darkness, patiently waiting for their fall. Keith knew he wouldn’t survive another encounter with the giant spider.
Life wasn’t easy for demigods. Most died young at the hands of terrible monsters. That was the way it had been since ancient times. The Greeks invented tragedy. They knew the greatest heroes didn’t get happy endings.
Still, this wasn’t fair.
Just when he’d succeeded in retrieving that statue of Athena, when things had been looking up and he’d been reunited with Lance, they had been plunged to their deaths
Even the gods couldn’t devise a fate so twisted.
But Gaea wasn’t like other gods. The Earth Mother was older, more vicious, more bloodthirsty. Keith could imagine her laughing as they fell.
Keith pressed his lips to Lance’s ear, holding him just as tight. He could feel the hot tears falling from both of their eyes. “I love you.” he croaked out.
He wasn’t sure he could hear him—but if they were going to die he wanted those to be his last words.
They had been through so much, together and alone, just to end up like that. He tried to come up with something, anything to save them from being flattened on impact.
He was seriously wondering whether they could fashion a parachute out of their shirts—that’s how desperate he was—when something about their surroundings changed. The darkness took on a gray-red tinge. He realized he could see Lance’s hair as he hugged him. The whistling in his ears turned into more of a roar. The air became intolerably hot, permeated with a smell like rotten eggs.
Suddenly, the chute they’d been falling through opened into a vast cavern. Maybe half a mile below them, Keith could see the bottom. For a moment he was too stunned to think properly. The entire island of Manhattan could have fit inside this cavern—and he couldn’t even see its full extent. Red clouds hung in the air like vaporized blood. The landscape—at least what he could see of it—was rocky black plains, punctuated by jagged mountains and fiery chasms. To Keith’s left, the ground dropped off in a series of cliffs, like colossal steps leading deeper into the abyss.
The stench of sulfur made it hard to concentrate, but he focused on the ground directly below them and saw a ribbon of glittering black liquid—a river.
“Lance!” He yelled in his ear. “Water!”
He gestured frantically. Lance’s face was hard to read in the dim red light. He looked shell-shocked and terrified, but he nodded as if he understood.
Thank the Gods, Lance could control water—assuming that was water below them. He might be able to cushion their fall somehow. Of course Keith had heard horrible stories about the rivers of the Underworld. They could take away your memories, or burn your body and soul to ashes. But he decided not to think about that. This was their only chance.
The river hurtled toward them. At the last second, Lance yelled defiantly, gripping Keith’s hand tightly. The water erupted in a massive geyser and swallowed them whole.
Keith didn’t die from the impact, but the cold was surely trying to kill him.
Freezing water shocked the air right out of his lungs. His limbs turned rigid, and he lost his grip on Lance. He began to sink. Strange wailing sounds filled his ears—millions of heartbroken voices, as if the river were made of distilled sadness. The voices were worse than the cold. They weighed him down and made him numb.
What’s the point of struggling? they told him. You’re dead anyway. You’ll never leave this place.
He could sink to the bottom and drown, let the river carry his body away. That would be easier. He could just close his eyes.…
Lance gripped his hand and jolted him back to reality. Keith couldn’t see him in the murky water, but suddenly he didn’t want to die. Together they kicked upward and broke the surface.
Keith gasped, grateful for the air, no matter how sulfurous. The water swirled around them, and he realized Lance was creating a whirlpool to buoy them up.
Though he couldn’t make out their surroundings, he knew this was a river. Rivers had shores.
“Land,” He croaked. “Go sideways.”
Lance looked near dead with exhaustion. Usually water reinvigorated him, but not this water. Controlling it must have taken every bit of his strength. The whirlpool began to dissipate. Keith hooked one arm around his waist and struggled across the current. The river worked against him: thousands of weeping voices whispering in his ears, getting inside his brain.
Life is despair, they said. Everything is pointless, and then you die.
“Pointless,” Lance murmured. His teeth chattered from the cold. He stopped swimming and began to sink.
“Lance!” He yelled. “The river is messing with your mind. It’s the Cocytus—the River of Lamentation. It’s made of pure misery!”
“Misery,” Lance agreed.
“Fight it!”
He kicked and struggled, trying to keep both of them afloat. Another cosmic joke for Gaea to laugh at: Keith dies trying to keep his boyfriend, the son of Poseidon, from drowning.
Not going to happen, you hag, Keith thought.
He hugged Lance tighter and kissed him. “Tell me about New Rome,” He demanded. “What were your plans for us?”
“New Rome…For us…”
“Yeah, Blue. You said we could have a future there! Tell me!”
Keith had never wanted to leave Camp Half-Blood. It was the only real home he’d ever known. But days ago, on Voltron, Lance had told him that he imagined a future for the two of them among the Roman demigods. In their city of New Rome, veterans of the legion could settle down safely, go to college, get married, even have kids. Keith never even dreamed of living to see his twenties, much less think of any kind of future.
“Knives,” Lance murmured. The fog started to clear from his eyes. “Thought you’d like their blades and cool swords. They have a hairdresser, maybe they could save your hair from that mullet.”
Keith huffed. “Screw you.” I love you, so much.
He started making progress against the current. His limbs felt like bags of wet sand, but Lance was helping him now.
“College,” He continued. “Could we go there together?”
“Y-yeah,” Lance agreed, a little more confidently.
“What would you study, Lance?”
“I..I dunno,” he admitted.
“That’s okay.” He could see the shore now, the most unnatural black he ever saw. His body was burning, and he didn’t know if his face was wet from sweat, tears or the water. “Marine science,” He suggested. “Oceanography?”
“Surfing?” Lance asked.
He laughed, and the sound sent a shock wave through the water. The wailing faded to background noise. Keith wondered if anyone had ever laughed in Tartarus before—just a pure, simple laugh of pleasure. He doubted it.
He used the last of his strength to reach the riverbank. His feet dug into the sandy bottom. He and Lance hauled themselves ashore, shivering and gasping, and collapsed on the dark sand.
Keith wanted to curl up next to Lance and go to sleep. He wanted to shut his eyes, hope all of this was just a bad dream, and wake up to find himself back on Voltron, safe with his friends (well…as safe as a demigod can ever be).
But, no. They were really in Tartarus. At their feet, the River Cocytus roared past, a flood of liquid wretchedness. The sulfurous air stung Keith’s lungs and prickled his skin. When he looked at his arms, he saw they were already covered with an angry rash. He tried to sit up and gasped in pain.
The beach wasn’t sand. They were sitting on a field of jagged black-glass chips, some of which were now embedded in Keith’s palms.
So the air was acid. The water was misery. The ground was broken glass. Everything here was designed to hurt and kill. Keith took a rattling breath and wondered if the voices in the Cocytus were right. Maybe fighting for survival was pointless. They would be dead within the hour.
Next to him, Lance coughed. “This place smells like my ex-stepfather.”
Keith managed a weak smile. He’d never met Smelly Gabe, but he’d heard enough stories. He loved Lance for trying to lift his spirits.
If he’d fallen into Tartarus by himself, Keith thought, he would have been doomed. After all he’d been through beneath Rome, finding the Athena Parthenos, this was simply too much. He would’ve become another ghost by now, melting into the Cocytus.
But he wasn’t alone. He had Lance. And that meant he couldn’t give up.
He forced himself to take stock. His foot was still wrapped in its makeshift cast of board and Bubble Wrap, still tangled in cobwebs. But when he moved it, it didn’t hurt. The ambrosia he’d eaten in the tunnels under Rome must have finally mended his bones.
His backpack was gone—lost during the fall, or maybe washed away in the river. He hated losing Daedalus’s laptop, with all its fantastic programs and data, but he had worse problems. His luxite blade was missing—the weapon he’d carried since he was a baby.
The realization almost broke him, but he couldn’t let himself dwell on it. Time to grieve later. What else did they have?
No food, no water…basically no supplies at all.
Yep. Off to a promising start.
Keith glanced at Lance. He looked pretty bad. His hair was plastered across his forehead, his T-shirt ripped to shreds. His fingers were scraped raw from holding on to that ledge before they fell. Most worrisome of all, he was shivering and his lips were blue.
“We should keep moving or we’ll get hypothermia,” Keith said. “Can you stand?”
He nodded. They both struggled to their feet.
Keith put his arm around his waist, though he wasn’t sure who was supporting whom. He scanned their surroundings. Above, he saw no sign of the tunnel they’d fallen down. He couldn’t even see the cavern roof—just blood-colored clouds floating in the hazy gray air. It was like staring through a thin mix of tomato soup and cement.
The black-glass beach stretched inland about fifty yards, then dropped off the edge of a cliff. From where he stood, Keith couldn’t see what was below, but the edge flickered with red light as if illuminated by huge fires.
A distant memory tugged at him—something about Tartarus and fire. Before he could think too much about it, Lance inhaled sharply.
“Look.” He pointed downstream.
A hundred feet away, a familiar-looking baby-blue Italian car had crashed headfirst into the sand. It looked just like the Fiat that had smashed into Arachne and sent her plummeting into the pit.
Keith hoped he was wrong, but how many Italian sports cars could there be in Tartarus? Part of him didn’t want to go anywhere near it, but he had to find out. He gripped Lance’s hand, and they stumbled toward the wreckage. One of the car’s tires had come off and was floating in a backwater eddy of the Cocytus. The Fiat’s windows had shattered, sending brighter glass like frosting across the dark beach. Under the crushed hood lay the tattered, glistening remains of a giant silk cocoon—the trap that Keith had tricked Arachne into weaving. It was unmistakably empty. Slash marks in the sand made a trail downriver…as if something heavy, with multiple legs, had scuttled into the darkness.
“She’s alive.” Keith was so horrified, so outraged by the unfairness of it all, he had to suppress the urge to throw up.
“It’s Tartarus,” Lance said. “Monster home court. Down here, maybe they can’t be killed.”
He gave Keith an embarrassed look, as if realizing he wasn’t helping team morale. “Or maybe she’s badly wounded, and she crawled away to die.”
“Let’s go with that,” Keith agreed quickly.
Lance was still shivering. Keith wasn’t feeling any warmer either, despite the hot, sticky air. The glass cuts on his hands were still bleeding, which was unusual for him. Normally, he healed fast. His breathing got more and more labored.
“This place is killing us,” He said. “I mean, it’s literally going to kill us, unless…”
Tartarus. Fire. That distant memory came into focus. He gazed inland toward the cliff, illuminated by flames from below.
It was an absolutely crazy idea. But it might be their only chance.
“Unless what?” Lance prompted. “You’ve got a brilliant plan, haven’t you?”
“It’s a plan,” Keith murmured. “I don’t know about brilliant. We need to find the River of Fire.”