1 - Honest Intentions

"Just tragic, man, like you wouldn't believe." He flopped backwards in midair. "I've got this creative block going and it is just killing me."

The central plaza of Mt. Olympus had been cleared, the only structures left being fluted columns whose trunks steamed in the morning sun and the broad, marble steps leading up to the throne of the king of the gods. Normally there were a few members of Zeus' entourage floating around and sampling the ambrosia, but as Hermes craned his neck around them he could see nobody else, not even a handmaiden.

After the celebration of Hercules' return, a certain sobriety had passed through the pantheon - sweeping broken gold and shattered pottery off of the ground was difficult to do with dignity, even for the victors, and the Titans' escape had retroactively spoiled Zeus' favourite war-story. All of Olympus looked forward to the way he would re-tell their entrapment from back when the Earth was new, his boisterous laugh and the expected, joyful titter in response. It had been as simple and as easy as clockwork, and that meant it's absence took active effort to ignore. It also meant that some names had become taboo, even though they featured prominently in the story of Zeus' sons triumphant return. It sullied another legend, and one Zeus had been so looking forward, for eighteen years, to retelling.

"Oh, don't worry about that," Zeus replied. He sat in his throne with magnanimity, arms straight, feet flat on the ground, like his statue in the Temple of Zeus down in the mortal world. His great chest seemed more weighted than normal, burdened with a grand and lonely sorrow. Then he leaned towards him, the throne creaking under the weight of his strength. "But I wanted to ask you a favour, Hermes. Strictly off the books."

"You see, Hermes!" Zeus flung his arm around Hermes' shoulder and pulled him into his side, knocking his glasses askew, "it's a touch embarrassing."

Hermes made a worried, midair backflip. "My bad, your highness! My bad, I guess we've all just been a little on-edge since the coup-"

"Right. Great job from Hercules, by the way." He nudged Zeus' side with a sprightly elbow. "Really did his old man proud."

"You're gonna have a daughter-in-law before the end of the year, you mark my words," Hermes continued. Zeus puffed out his chest.

"I can't begin to tell you how excited that's made Hera and I. Now..." He beckoned Hermes in close, enough that he could taste the static electricity on the inside of his mouth. "About that favour?"

With a wave of his hand, the king of the gods drew up a pillar from the clouds that surrounded them. It twisted itself up, furling into a bubbling, pink spiral. The loose fronds of water vapour smoothed as if a carpenter had run over them with one perfect sweep of sandpaper, revealing a delicate arm, strong hands, a coquettish tilt of a knee.

"So a couple of years ago," Zeus began, "I answered the summons of a young lad - a very troubled boy, really, in very bad shape." Hermes caught only a glance of the cloud-figure's head before it's silhouette flared. Long hair consumed all details of the figure's face before he could observe any more than a sneering (but immaculate) twist of the lips. It made the figure look less like a human being and more like a rearing cobra.

"Now, you know that we aren't really supposed to go granting gifts all over the place - things get messy with mortals, we know this - but..." Zeus winced. Hermes clapped him on the shoulder.

"Well anyway, the boy ended up falling in with a bad crowd, and the last thing I need is one of them finding my old symbols of favour on him. It might give them the wrong idea about the kind of thing we approve of in these parts! I wouldn't want to justify their bad ideas, and I certainly wouldn't want it getting back to..." He thumbed to the empty plaza and by proxy the rest of the gods. "You know how Apollo is."

"Right. Well, what do you think?" Zeus gave Hermes another broad grin, leaning back in his throne with a greater ease than Hermes had seen from him since the attempted coup. "You think you can go pick it up for me?"

"You bet your bottom drachma!" he replied. Then, tilting his head at the faceless statue, he drew in a gasp. "Hey, I recognise him! Wasn't he your cup-bearer a couple of years ago?"

"So you do remember him!" Zeus straightened up, his voice rising to another bright boom - this one a little louder, Hermes fancied, than the others. "That's him! I gave the lad a job, tried to keep him out of trouble... Not much, I admit - it can't have been easy, standing around here all day," he gestured to his side, "just holding onto my root-beer, but I didn't know what else to do for the poor kid. Unfortunately, it didn't last." He deflated with a sigh that seemed to bottom him out from the very depths of his largesse. "He gave his notice and I had no choice but to send him back home."

"Not mine either, babe!" Hermes flapped, grabbing his helmet as it popped from his head. Zeus' laugh boomed across Olympus and he clapped him on the back. Hermes soon joined in, then with a kick of his heels careened up and across the dreamy horizon of Mt Olympus, calling behind him, "You can count on me!"

A network of dead souls ran beneath the surface of the earth, gutting it like worms through the corpse of a great, dead animal. Sometimes, in the silence of the mountains, still-living mortals could hear their moans drifting from small caves formed in the base of cliffs and buried at the bottom of gulches. These were the dark eyes that gazed with apathy at the humans twitching past them, noticing them as they passed and then glazing over, returning to unintelligence, when they were gone. The dead would fall through granite and bedrock, igneous shards the size of temple columns, and gravel mats that suffocated like quicksand, until - sucked by underground winds - they were dumped into the River Styx in an unending sluice.

These walls tore at the boy's elbows as he tumbled down from rock to rock, buffeted by the spirits, as his solid shoulders, hips and skull cracked against every outcrop, the tunnels echoing with his hisses, yowls and grunts of pain. The flow veered to the side, swept along by the current, but the boy still had a body and so gravity continued to drag him straight down. He tore, alone, through the gaping black hole that lead straight to the centre of the earth.

The air barked from his lungs as he landed face-down on a table. Impact rang in between his ears, but the shock kept him completely still. Like dust, the sound rose up, out, and then fell to stillness again. Silence, but for some low, quiet background string orchestra and the dripping of cave-water, covered him again. He tried to move but felt nothing.

He wrenched himself upright with a yell, kicking up one leg - but the other one was gone. Pulling up his arms, he tried to look down at his hands and saw only a stub on his left, and nothing at all on his right. Screaming in panic, his head darted back and forth only to see his right arm and left hand come scampering across the room. He saw no blood, no viscera or shards of broken bone; just clean - if green - meat animating itself in blind confusion. Pushing himself away from them on the bits of himself that remained, they sensed the movement and lunged for him like rats.

With a shriek he kicked out his remaining foot, missed his hand as it ran up his knee, then felt a jolt fly up his elbow as it reattached itself to his wrist. Staring, wide-eyed, he brought it up to his face and gave it an experimental wave. Something - he presumed his leg - reattached at his hip. He stumbled off of the table, accidentally kicking a chess piece across the floor.

"What?! What?!" Pulling long, blond hair from his eyes, he rounded on the source of the noise. His eyes darted along the black walls and their gaping holes, passed the strange and spindly ornaments, saw nothing, then glanced down. "Ugh!"

More chess pieces skittered under his feet as he recoiled from the rotund little gargoyle at his ankles. It spoke again, toeing a line between panicked and aggressive, its mouth filled with needles.

"You can't be in here!" It scuttled after a few of the kicked pieces, picking up one shaped like a boar and another shaped like a centaur. "Do you have an appointment?!"

The boy snatched for the dagger at his belt, but his fingers closed around nothing. Patting himself down, he took a step back from the creature and grabbed an unlit candlestick. In the gloom of the Underworld his pallid skin seemed phosphorescent - no longer lit from within by blood, but reflecting a sick, greenish light. His voice, as cunning and clear as a raven's, measured every word it spoke. "I think..." His eyes never left the beady little eyes of the imp at his feet as he weighed the makeshift weapon in his palm. "That I might."

The imp perked right up. "Oh!" Then its expression melted from clownish delight down into a mask of tragic horror. "Oh no!" It flung itself for the door - an archway carved into the rock. "Wait right there! Don't move! Panic!" This sounded like a command, but then a thinner and equally wretched little voice replied,

A turkey-like squabbling followed, batting back the silence as it sank down the stairway outside. The boy kept the candlestick gripped in both hands as he stepped across the chamber.

An organic sphere, it seemed to be both the central heart of the Underworld and its head. Rising from the Styx, suspended on a column of rock stretched into the shape of teeth, it leered out of two gigantic, empty sockets and dominated the central channel of the eternal river. Above it, like brain blasting out the top of its cranium, endless temples spewed in impossible and eldritch ways until they morphed or crashed into the vaulted dome above.

The squabbling faded, the silence settled once again, but as his ears adjusted the boy noticed that this wasn't true silence. He could hear high, discordant violins and deep, miserable cellos, all thrumming together without a tune but with nevertheless a certain harmony. Ice flooded his stomach when he realised these were the voices of the dead spirits in the water outside.

Even though a living creature had been yelling only a moment before (if that goblin could be called 'living'), this chamber seemed to hold a deep emptiness. The near-silence seemed older than any other sort of silence he had ever known. It seemed to build upon itself, grief upon hollowness, like the hush of a mausoleum in the centre of an abandoned city.

The God of the Dead filled the entrance. His silhouette swallowed all of what little light there was, but for a thin, blue halo of fire around his head. For one split second a majestic figure imposed its weight on the entire cave, sucking that silence in and turning it into malice - and then it swept for him, clapping in front of his face and forcing him to scramble around the table.

"Do you have any idea how busy I am right now?!" the figure yelled. "I've got a list half a mile long, I've got Furies lining up outside my door baying for my blood, and you think you can just skip the line?!"

The boy backed up, but the god persisted, harrying him around the room. "I'm on major damage control right now! The wolf is at my door - and you'd think having a three-headed one of my own would count for something, but Fido's had his tail between his legs ever since that C-show superhero rubbed his nose into the tiles!" The boy opened his mouth to speak but was steamrollered by a pair of staring, yellow eyes. "So what could you possibly want that is so important you thought you could roll into my office without a prior-freaking-invitation, huh?!"

The boy opened his mouth again. Something hot surged up from his stomach that made his hands shake and his face freeze with unpumped blood.

"I don't know, young lady," the god continued, his self-perpetuating fury lighting the fire around his head higher and higher and catching down his arms, "If you're here to make some sort of deal or if you've just picked a very unfortunate day of sight-seeing, but I'll tell you right now!" The tirade rose to a shout as the heat of a furnace smacked into the boy's face. "My office is -!"

"Will you shut up for just one second?!" Shock sucked that fire back in. Spurred on by fury of his own, the boy screeched, "I'm an offering, you moron!"

"Oh hey," the god reacted like he'd been kicked in the head by a mule, "he's a guy." Then he wiggled one long, spidery finger in his ear before leaning over to better hear what the young man had to say. "I'm sorry, did you just say 'an offering'?" He flicked some imaginary speck across the room. "As in, no-strings-attached?"

Stomach tightening in disgust, the boy scanned the monstrous face now leering down in front of him. He'd seen fishermen trawl up creatures from the deepest parts of the ocean, whose long teeth and staring eyes had given him nightmares as a child - now he was looking at the prototype that had designed them all. His lip curled into a sneer. "That depends on what strings you wanna attach."

Hades straightened up again, his anger replaced by curiosity. He folded his arms, tapped his cheek, and glanced over the thin strip of mortality now standing before him.

The boy kept his weight on both feet, causing him to sway an inch to the left, then to the right, as if adjusting his aim or preparing to run. Now that his heart no longer beat, the dark shadows of his face made his eyes seem sicker, less trustworthy, and the thin, grey line of his lips seemed practically reptilian. A sour-faced and bitter animal, but probably a looker if he smiled.

"Lemme just clear this up..." Hades began as a vicious grin slid across sharp teeth. "I get to decide exactly what I want to do with you, and if you don't like it I can just toss you back overboard?" The boy tightened his fists around his candlestick. Casting a lazy glance at the movement, the god waved a hand through the air as if wafting away a bad smell. The boy's wrist snapped to the left as the candlestick yanked itself out of his hold and rattled along the floor. "Cute. Well..." His face elongated with feigned thought.

The two imps scrambled into the room. "Throw this kid back! Next time some joker upstairs sends a eunuch my way, just send him packing. Got it?"

Hades continued to mutter to himself. "Just what I need right now - some death cult upstairs making waves with Zeus already breathing down my neck."

Pain and Panic dragged the boy towards the exit, but he heard those muttered words and pulled himself back around. He tried to dig his heels into the floor, but the soles of his sandals skidded over the rough stone no matter how firmly he tried to force himself back. "Wait!" he cried. The creatures didn't let go, and Hades certainly didn't think the command had anything to do with him.

He lodged his foot into the round flesh of Pain's stomach. The imp let go with a howl as he tore the other one from his arm and bowled it like an overgrown spider for the stairs. Rounding back upon the god of the dead, he threw himself at his feet. "Have mercy on me!"

He flattened himself to the floor and covered his head with his hands. Thinking as fast as he could, he cried, "I have information on Zeus!" He heard the flames cease. The smell of granite rolled over him like a cold front as the dense presence of the god loomed closer. Hades crouched beside him, and he felt a strand of his hair lift as the god fidgeted it carelessly between his fingers. He allowed it without comment - the gods took what they wanted - as his mind ran through reams of calculations as fast as the synapses could blast.