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The sundered had ridiculous notions about the relationship between love and the soul.
‘He’s my soulmate,’ they would say. ‘She’s the other half of my soul.’ As though souls were poured into vessels and then repoured precisely so that half of any given soul ended up in one newly born individual and the other in someone else, simply waiting to be reunited and fall in love without needing to put in any of the work involved in building familiarity and trust with another person.
Nonsense. Every one of them was a discrete entity, as distinct from one another as the individual flowers composing a meadow. Each of a slightly different hue, unique, but altogether as common and unremarkable as asphodels.
Regrettably, the Angel of Truth himself was partially responsible for this wayward mythos. In the early days, before the first rejoining, he had thought to enlighten the sundered regarding their predicament, to rationally explain and bring them into the fold in service of their own salvation. He told them about the other shards, about the sundering and the Final Days, about Amaurot and their people, the power and memories that had been stripped from them and the loved ones they had left behind.
He had, of course, gravely overestimated their intelligence and ability to reason or sacrifice. They resisted, died, and over the generations the takeaway from the truths he had imparted got warped into something about parts of souls being somewhere else and loved ones they had yet to meet.
And then it became pop pseudo-science, and then it became a belief, and then they killed one another over it, just like they killed one another over everything. Utterly ridiculous.
There were so many things these warped abominations would never understand.
-
It’s a leisurely afternoon in their apartment. He reaches for Hythlodaeus’s hand, presses it to his lips. Watches the surprise and then warm joy in his violet eyes as he wraps his hand around his and pulls him close. And his soul glows. Responds to Hades’ touch, radiates in his proximity. Hades’ soul, too, illuminates more brightly in these moments that he shares with Hythlodaeus—in these moments that they share together. Words are not needed for such a thing.
They are not soulmates, for soulmates as the mortals conceive of them do not exist among the unsundered. They are simply two souls enjoying one another’s company, for as long as possible, and as close as possible.
“I love you,” he would say.
“I can see that.”
“Why won’t you ever tell me you love me?”
“Why would I?”
“Oh, a critical blow, delivered directly to the heart!” he would cry, dramatically pressing the back of his lithe hand to his forehead and perhaps crumpling to the ground for added effect. “To be wounded in such a way by my very dearest friend, for surely that is all I am to he who won’t even say that he loves me.”
“Oh, come off it.”
It isn’t the same as dynamis, or entelechies. Emotions are fleeting things, experienced and then gone in a moment. The experiences—and bonds—that affect the soul are something else entirely, and even after rebirth—even after sundering—a soul will bear these scars.
Love. Hate. Duty. Trauma. Principles we hold so dearly they become the basis of who we are. These are the things that touch and shape the soul.
Hythlodaeus understands him in a way others cannot. He knows what things make Hades’ soul burn brighter and when it is ambivalent; knows its color and intensity; knows that when he touches him a certain way, when they share breaths and heartbeats and moments that are theirs and theirs alone, his soul will always, always react to his presence. Knows him in the same way that he knows Hythlodaeus.
Words are not needed for such a thing.
-
Allag was, without question, his finest work in the art of civilization building. Oh, there had been empires before and empires after, all guided under the meticulous hand of the shadowless, but to achieve what he did with the quarter-men of the Third Astral Era was a notable feat.
But nothing lasts forever—least of all that which was built for the express purpose of destruction. A certain wayward scientist attempted to reverse the inevitable decline of the empire with an equally notable feat: the resurrection of Allag’s founding emperor Xande. And he succeeded.
What he failed to consider was the state of Xande’s soul over the thousand-year interim. A soul rarely remains dormant for that amount of time; “Xande” had likely been reborn, lived, and died several times over before being forced to reprise the same role again.
Nor is a soul a stagnant, static thing that remains as it was once for all eternity, fit to live a previous life at any point in the future—not without crystals such as those the Ascians utilized, at any rate. A soul’s hue will remain the same throughout lifetimes, yes, but to force a soul to reprise a previous identity after its shape has already changed… The results were problematic, to say the least.
In the end, Xande could not escape the scars left on his soul. The memory of death haunted him, drove him mad, made him crave nothing else. Amon’s experiment was a failure in as far as he meant to achieve, but happily it was one so profound that it yielded not one, but two Rejoinings.
As it turned out, reincarnated Ascians couldn’t entirely escape the scars on their souls either.
-
It alarmed and unsettled him the first time he realized he was forgetting Hythlodaeus’s features. His smile still played in his mind—his eyes ever glowing just inches away when Hades closed his own—but they were disembodied; fragmented glimpses of moments in his memory, innumerable and unremarkable for their frequency. How exactly had the curve of his nose been, the precise jut of his cherubic little chin? The bones of his knuckles, his collarbones—places he had touched and loved and kissed and studied, fading into nonspecificity. And as the memories of all these little details slipped away from him, so too did Hythlodaeus.
Were he an artist, a sculptor, he might have sought to recreate his lover’s likeness in order to hold onto those memories. And he was. And he did.
But it was always an exercise in futility. His creations could move like Hythlodaeus, could laugh like Hythlodaeus and even speak like Hythlodaeus, vaguely look like Hythlodaeus, but it was never Hythlodaeus.
In time, he wasn’t even able to recreate his appearance anymore, only his essence. Long after details had eroded away from his immortal but ever aging mind, it was the sense of simply being with Hythlodaeus that had rooted itself deeply enough in his heart to endure the eons.
The kindness and comfort that he radiated. That maddeningly frustrating way he had of putting anyone at ease. It was Hades’ nature to fixate, to overdwell, to gnaw relentlessly upon a problem until he found its solution, and Hythlodaeus’s was often the gentle hand guiding the metaphorical bone away from the dog’s mouth. But sometimes that was precisely what he needed, and he knew that. They both knew it. They had developed this dynamic over millennia.
Sometimes he confessed his burdens to his shades. If he employed enough skill in their creation, they might even tell him things that he needed but didn’t want to hear. Something closer to what Hythlodaeus would have said. Something close to how Hythodaeus would have acted and what he would have done.
And it was always, always empty and unfulfilling.
He could not recreate his soul.
-
No dynasty will last very long without progeny. The child born has the most downy hair he has ever seen. Blond, like the woman he has selected to be its mother. And so incredibly fine, like silk beneath his fingertips. It curls about his fingers when he cradles its tiny head.
He plays with his son. It’s hardly becoming to see the Emperor of the Garlemald Empire crawling about on the floor, blowing raspberries and attempting to teach a toddler to snap its fingers, but none close enough to witness such a thing will ever dare be indiscreet about what they see.
Sundered infants are impossibly unintelligent. The child learns little, but it stares at its sire with such intensity, such rapt attention. Imprinting, he realizes. The babe is committing its father’s face to its feeble little memory, likely one of the only pieces of information it can even properly store. And when he contemplates this, gazing back at the child, it removes its stubby little fingers from its unsanitary mouth and favors him with the widest, most delighted, mostly toothless baby grin.
Despite himself, his soul burns brilliantly with all that he feels in his breast. His soul burns as it hasn’t in millennia, and none can see it but him.
Yet it bears not the genes of an ancient, but of Solus zos Galvus, and all the half-formed creatures that brought him forth. An endless line of shoddily-built savages only survived to adulthood by happenstance. It is barely two decades later when this one is brought to him lifeless in a box, defeated by its own flesh of all things.
And then his soul burns again, not with love but with anger, with all-consuming rage, and he is glad that none of these fools are even capable of possessing the sight because if they did then they would know how foolish he had been to begin with.
Never, never will he be so foolish again.
“That feeble corpse is no son of mine.”
-
The lilac shade of Hythlodaeus’s hair has not been natural for ages. He was born with it, yes, but puberty had replaced his bright childhood locks with something far darker and duller.
“I have no skills in transformation,” he would helplessly claim. Because he was expending what ability he had on his hair.
Hades runs his fingers through it, gently setting the lavender plait back upon his shoulder. It peeks out from beneath his cowl, and Hythlodaeus is well aware.
“This is vanity, you know.”
“I haven’t the faintest clue what you’re talking about.”
“Mm hmm.”
“I was born with this color, as you well know.”
“Two thousand years ago.”
“How could anyone begrudge me my hair? It would be terribly uncomfortable to keep it tucked under my cowl all the time.”
“You could trim it.”
“Now you’re speaking nonsense.”
Hades plucks a flower from the ground, a concept recently approved. Tucks it behind Hythlodaeus’s ear, then gently arranges his cowl to cover it. It is only for them.
Hythlodaeus himself has suggested the name narcissus for this flower, and he knows well what it means; the name needs not be invoked. Hades’ smirk as he kisses his forehead is enough. Hythlodaeus’s breath is warm, and his hair is lightly fragranced with a familiar scent.
Perhaps this, too, is a detail that will be lost to time.
-
The color of a soul does not change, but everything else that is his becomes purple. His magick. His aether. His crystal. His heart.
There is a shade of lavender that this sundered world’s sky takes on at sunset and he can hardly bear to look at it. His soul burns when he does.
In some of his least productive musings, he wonders how Hythlodaeus would have fared had he taken the seat. Would he have survived the Sundering? Would he have retained his mind, or would he have lost his self and sanity like Lahabrea and Elidibus? Would he have drowned in his grief, like Hades? How would he have chosen to remember him?
One of the most important roles Emet-Selch has had in all of this is identifying the sundered souls of other Ascians to raise them to their seats. Hythlodaeus would have excelled at that, and the surplus of collaborators might have very well outweighed his aetherial weaknesses. He always was the true master of the Underworld; Hades merely his consort.
Every day, the sun sets. Every day, the sky turns purple for a time.
What scant communal recollection of the Convocation that remains twists and warps them into deities. They use this to their advantage; the other Paragons and he craft mythologies around them, and use this to control mankind in the Age of Gods with disgusting ease.
He permits himself a conceit to vanity and sentimentality both: the twin deity of Nald’thal. For never has he presided over the Underworld alone.
The Twelve outlast them all.
-
They recline on the lawn of the manicured grass outside their home in Achora Heights. The hour is late and the passersby few, so they eschew masks and cowls, the better to lie cheek to cheek as they silently take in the sights above. It would be an embarrassment to be seen thus, but the context their figures telegraph affords them a measure of privacy; no one who espies them is like to intrude upon two lovers stargazing.
Yet it is not the stars they gaze upon, but the multitude of souls swirling around them. It is the light show they have both witnessed since their infancy, and one that has ever enraptured him in his moments alone. To witness it alongside another gifted in the sight, however, is an altogether more intimate experience. Souls of the departed dance formlessly on the aether above, while theirs pulse with life on the ground below, anchoring them to the world of the living, anchoring them to one another. Their hands are intertwined like the spectres they watch. Hythlodaeus’s hair smells faintly of pomegranates, and his soul feels like home.
“Someday, we will return to the star together,” he says.
“Do you see the future now as well? Surely not even your sight is that keen.”
“I am declaring my intent.”
He lifts the hand that is already entwined with Hades’s fingers, pointing and thereby forcing Hades to gesture skyward with him.
“See those two there, how they travel together? That will be you and I. For my purpose is your purpose, and when your time here is complete, so too shall mine.”
“And what if I decide to linger about indefinitely, just to try your patience?”
“Then you will find it quite inexhaustible. I will wait for you.”
“Not even a moment's peace in the Underworld,” he bemoans with a deeply affected sigh.
“You would hate all that peace without me.”
Hades pulls his fingers back down to Etheirys, kisses his knuckles, and holds him to his lips with a smile that Hythlodaeus cannot see, but he knows. They do not need words to clarify such things.
-
“From this day forward, I shall strive to bring honor to the seat of Emet-Selch.”
Fourteen people governed all of Etheirys. Fourteen people bore the weight of all of their brethren’s futures. Of the fourteen, three survived the Sundering. Of the three, one retained a firm enough grasp on his faculties to carry out their duties.
He could not fail… For Hythlodaeus, and for their entire star.
His grief is not exceptional save for the fact that he alone remains to feel it. Every single soul on Etheirys lost what he did: their homes, their lives, their inimitable loved ones. Countless, countless loved ones… Far more than any one person could ever love, or feel the full weight of. But through personal experiences did they better relate to the whole, thereby forming empathy with others. It was his duty and his responsibility to never forget that.
He was not the first choice for the seat of Emet-Selch, but he is the one who has accepted the honor and the responsibility. In his heart, he has always served the seat for the both of them.
He will not— cannot—fail Hythlodaeus. He will not and cannot fail their people.
This was fundamental to his very being. It was written in his very soul.
-
The sky burns. Fire and ash rain down from above, tearing their home and their world asunder. Nightmares become flesh and once-noble souls give birth to abominations which devour themselves and all they hold dear. The star weeps, the cycle of nature comes to a halt, and their end is all but assured but for those who choose to offer up themselves that others might live.
He says goodbye… He says goodbye… But so do so many others.
His pain is not unique, or special. They are all asphodels.
And Emet-Selch of the Convocation of Fourteen has as much of an obligation to those he did not personally love as he does to those he did.
-
Ten millennia pass, and he has failed in his duty.
After seven rejoinings, the sundered are now half their original strength. It is enough for the mightiest of theirs to join together and overcome him, though barely. The soul of Azem. A worthy inheritor, perhaps.
Still, he fights. He fights until the end. He will not—cannot—give up on Hythlodaeus or his brethren unless he has no other choice. Unless he has given all he has, unless he has resisted that end with every ounce of strength in him.
And he fails.
A part of him cannot deny that he is tired, and disgracefully relieved.
For his failure, he suffers isolation. The aetherial sea he rests in is not even that of the Source, but the thin, paltry mockery that flows through the First. Perhaps someday in the future, this reflection will meet its natural end independent of the Ascians’ guidance and his soul will rejoin with the denser ones there, but his sense of self will long since have faded by then.
As a final insult and mercy both, this does not become his fate.
Instead, he is ferried back to the source by Hydaelyn, though he will not forgive her crimes against mankind and the star for this one act of kindness.
The fragmented shards of Azem and Fandaniel come to blows over the fate of Lord Zodiark. And without a body, without lungs to breathe, the keeper of the Underworld bates his breath nevertheless.
Like a clay pot that he has spent all these years protecting that someone has now smashed against the pavement, the vessel of Zodiark shatters, and an influx of pure souls burst forth and surge into the Lifestream with a light that is blinding and overwhelming to one such as he. He is even more sensitive to the Underworld now that he is within it, every undulation in its currents like a lover’s nails dragged across his skin—and of course that is precisely what (or whom) he seeks. Every one of these souls is a fallen brother or sister, a noble hero who has sacrificed themselves (now for naught), and the knowledge of that threatens to drown him, but at the same time he remains propelled forward by a force that fiercely attunes him to that one hue that has not left his heart for ten thousand years.
The hue of the soul that likewise rushes to him, elated despite all the circumstances of their reunion.
There are no arms with which to embrace nor lips with which to kiss, only a presence. He is surrounded by comfort, and warmth, and love, the likes of which he has not known in millennia, and if he had a physical form it would have no choice but to weep. But he has only his soul, and the soul of the other who has known him so well, and they are home together at last in the Underworld.
They were never soulmates. Nor do they need words such as this. They are simply home.