5 - Honest Intentions

Light and darkness were unseparated in the Underworld; night and day saw no difference, nor any indication of sunrise or sunset. Ganymede's body never felt tired, but also never seemed to have any real energy - it, like the permanent gloom of the tunnels, existed in a greyness so grey he couldn't feel anything at all.

He stared at the ceiling through half-lidded eyes, one arm draped over his forehead with a limp but poisonous frustration. He tried to chew away the brick of tension in his jaw, but a lump sticking in his throat kept pressure pushing up against the roof of his mouth. He burned with anger, and if it ever began to fade he would stoke it back up again. The screams of the Styx annoyed him, the constant background noise eroded his patience until their voices scraped directly against the muscle of his heart. He swung himself out of bed, snatched up the jug still lying on the floor, and hurled it out the window.

"SHADDAP!" If the flames of his anger ever died down, he might feel everything else underneath.

Somewhere above him, something shattered. He blinked, drew himself upright and listened. Grabbing his shepherd's crook, he leant as far out the window as he dared, craning up to scan the bewildering architecture above him. He could see nothing, and so for the sake of distraction if nothing else, he strapped on his sandals and slipped out of his room.

His shadow rolled like a flickering zoetrope as he passed behind rows and rows of identical columns, his soles crunching in light but certain treads. He imagined that all these half-formed and unfinished buildings represented temples to Hades still standing in the mortal realm. Each shrine on the surface generated a shadow down here, a reflection that lay not across the water, but deep down in the abyss below.

The maze of empty colonnades opened wide to reveal a circular courtyard, cracked like an old saucer and lousy with tripping hazards. From this high plateau, he could see so far down the river that it vanished into a single point far, far ahead of him, further and deeper into the tunnels than he had ever seen before. Three cloaked figured stood hissing in the centre, surrounded by the open contents of some sort of suitcase.

"Quiet, Clotho!" he heard the tallest one whisper. "You'll wake the dead!"

With a set of his jaw, Ganymede drew forward.

"Too late," he said, stepping over the uneven paving stones. The figures turned to face him, and with a lurch of his stomach he saw only one eye between six bare sockets. His lip curled and his hackles rose.

Thumping the shortest one on the top of the head, the tallest dislodged the eye from her skull and popped it into her own.

"Well?" she snapped, brandishing her talons at the mess around them, "Be a gentleman and help us!" Her certainty caused his horror to dissipate to merely caution, and that caution acted as a thick anti-acid over everything else he had been feeling, so with a tuck of his hair he stooped down to help with whatever it was they had dropped.

He held up a bottle. "Sunscreen?" He picked up something else. "Travellers' checks?" A trunk appeared at his elbow and clacked open like a hungry bird. Rearing away from the snapping clasps, he dropped the items inside. "Are you... on vacation? Here?" Comprehension hit him.

He threw himself backwards in a scramble of bare leg and bent angles. "Are you the Fates?!"

"Hmph," said the tallest one, folding her arms. "And I thought only we knew everything."

"Not enough to keep hold of her bags, though," the short one croaked like a frog, casting a pointed look to their third sister. Her sister, whose bare sockets seemed to be somehow more vacant than the others', gave a guilty and toothless smile. Pulling himself off the ground, Ganymede glanced around for his crook. The eldest had already picked it up.

"Hey! Do you mind?" he fumbled himself upright and snatched out his hand. "That's got sentimental-"

"You?" she said, drawing the crook out of reach, "Sentimental? And no, we're not here on vacation."

"For one thing," the shortest one said, "the service here is dreadful."

"We're passing through," the eldest continued. "We have a meeting with Lord Hades tomorrow at sunrise - a courtesy, for old time's sake - and then we're leaving."

Ganymede nodded slowly, his eyes on his staff. He took an innocent step towards her. Her eye rotated in its socket, and just as he came within arms' reach she snatched it away from him. "You're Ganymede, yes?" she asked sharply. Before he could answer, she held out her free hand. A spider fled up her wrist. "My name is Lachesis. This is Clotho-" her smiling sister wiggled her fingers, "- and Atropos." The shorter one gave an affected, dignified nod.

His nose wrinkled with disgust at the state of her hand. "Careful, boy," she said, "Remember what happened to Narcissus."

He held his breath and shook her hand. He felt tiny legs crawl along the skin of his wrist, but locked his hand with hers until she was finished with him.

"Good," she said. "A firm shake."

"There's a lot of him that's firm," Atropos croaked with a smirk. The whites of Ganymede's eyes flashed and he snatched back his hand. Lachesis jabbed her sister with her elbow.

"Mind your tongue!" she snapped, "It isn't welcome!" Ganymede's eyes softened, just for a moment, but none of them paid him any attention.

Lachesis moved away from her sisters and over to the edge of the courtyard. Balustrades ran along the perimeter of the stone plaza, preventing any hypothetical (extremely hypothetical) wanderers from plummeting two-hundred feet into the water below. Above them stacked more buildings, towering like turrets of unshelved books, until they met the ceiling. Then, those stacks turned into a frozen geyser of black bedrock and melted seamlessly into the cavern's vault.

She beckoned to him, standing in her hooded cloak and holding onto his shepherd's crook, more the Grim Reaper than even Hades himself. He followed after her, those two remaining pairs of eye sockets following the sound of his feet and sending a creep down his spine.

He stood beside her. Beneath them, almost imperceptibly, the spirits groaned.

"We don't reveal the future," she said the moment he opened his mouth. "Not even if you ask nicely. Not even if you have something we want." He shut his mouth. "The last time we did, it almost destabilised the entire cosmos."

There came a very clear pause as Ganymede waited to see if she would anticipate his next question. She said nothing. He opened his mouth.

"Yes, that thing with the Titans."

With a growing frown, he snapped his mouth shut again. Then, quickly, "I remember that. I was on earth during that whole thing."

"I know."

He took a steadying breath.

Lachesis raised her withered hand and pointed to something in the rock high above the river. He followed her nail and peered up into the vast darkness. "Do you see that?" she asked.

The details filled themselves in as his eyes adjusted. There was a crack. It ran in a huge and perfect circle, big enough for a whole town to fall through, large enough even for the whole of the Styx to flow down it. The edges had been sanded down by time, rounded and blunted down until it was nearly invisible, and even when looking directly at them he had to force his eyes to focus on it or they would blur back into the rest of the rock.

"You know that I do," he said.

"It's been there since the beginning," she said. "And it's never opened before."

He watched her.

"It's a door," she explained.

"Yeah! I gathered that."

She turned to face him like the guardian of a tomb, her long beak facing him directly. His took a step back. "Do you want some advice, boy?" Ganymede drew in a breath to reply, and she continued, "Convince Hades to send you to Delphi. Here," she reached into her robe and pulled out two silver coins. "For the Ferryman. Hailing a cab around here is next to impossible." Then she passed him his crook. "You'll need this, too."

Standing beside her, pocketing the change and hugging his arm around his staff, she finally allowed him to ask, "What... on earth are you talking about?"

The river droned beneath the bright and heedless voices of Clotho and Atropos. He couldn't make out their words, but as he became aware of them he also felt something from Lachesis - not through her body language (if she even had a body beneath her robes at all), nor through her expressions (of which she had none), but through a strange vibration in the air that connected them for one brief second in empathy. Her unseen attention hovered over her sisters, and he could tell that she was leading them away from something.

"Big things are coming, boy," she said at last. "It's the end of the gods."

"Don't shout at us, young man," Lachesis said, crossing her arms. "That bluster won't work."

"Right, right-right," Hades replied, taking a deep breath and running a hand over his head. "My apologies, ladies, but did you just say that you're leaving?"

The three Fates stood by the window, joined together in one silhouette by the grim light of the throne room's left socket.

"That's right!" she said, lifting up a travel case covered in souvenir stickers from all over the Mediterranean Sea. "Our time is coming to an end."

"We're about due retirement," croaked Atropos.

"You do realise," said Hades, breathless with the sense that he was the only sane man in the room, "That this is kind of a big deal? I-I mean, I only just crawled outta that whole mess with the Titans, and now you're telling me you guys are packing it all in? This hasn't happened before! I-I mean, you guys have been here since before the primordial soup!"

Lachesis held up a gnarled hand. A flight case appeared in her clutches, opened in midair, and as she rifled through it flashes of summer shirts and tropical petticoats struggled for freedom past her fingers. "Our services," she said, "Are no longer required."

"But what does that mean?" Hades asked through gritted teeth. Pain and Panic twitched behind the god's throne.

"Why can't they ever give him a straight answer?" Panic groaned towards the ceiling.

The steps leading down from the throne room terminated at the thrashing waves of the Styx. Like a cat refusing a bath, Ganymede gripped onto both sides of the Ferryboat as Charon, the skeleton helmsman, pushed them silently through the haunted waters. Every time a limp hand broke the surface he flinched his arm away - which would rock the boat, and he'd be forced to snatch back into position before he accidentally threw himself over the side.

By the time the prow bumped against the steps, his elegant dismount was more of an unsticking as his fingers refused to let go and his rear end tried to navigate blindly for the pier. Scooting onto the rock, finally, in a flurry of heel-kicks he backed up to the wall and let out a sigh of relief.

"Thanks, pal," he said, reaching into his tunic and pulling out the coins Lachesis had given him. He flung them into the boat and pushed himself to his feet like a baby giraffe. "Keep the change."

"That's _enough, Hades!" Lachesis snapped. "Change must come!"

"And I love change!" cried Hades. "Who doesn't love change?! But a guy likes to know what's coming down the pipe for him, you know what I'm saying?!"

"Take this," she snapped, and shoved a twisted piece of twine into his hands. "And hold onto it."

Hades held up the wire and stared at it, then her, then her sisters, as if they'd all gone completely insane. The kinked piece of piano wire had tape holding it together in the centre. "What?!"

"Don't worry," said Atropos, "We'll see ourselves out."

Green light flooded the chamber. Their cloaked forms whirled into empty, tattered rags as a point of void in the centre of the room span and grew to the size of a fist. They sucked themselves into the vortex and vanished from the Underworld.

Silence followed them for the space of two, great heaves of Hades' chest.

"AAGHHHHHH!!!" Flames burst out the doors and windows, every orifice in the huge skull blasting fire and dominating the length and breadth of the Styx. Another roar came, and another pillar of fire shot from one eye, then another, then out and down the hallway just as Pain and Panic scurried for the door. Panic ducked in time. "WHAT-!" Hades' figure could barely be seen through the flames surrounding him, "DID I EVER DO-!" Fireballs gunned from his body and into the walls as Pain bounced, black and singed, around the room, "TO DESERVE THIS?!" The underground chasm, the huge tomb carved by the eternal sludge of the river of the dead, flashed red as fire swallowed its ceiling and a heatwave engulfed them all. Even the river steamed.

Panic dove for cover. Pain rolled to a stop.

"Did I get a say in this stupid job?! No! Do I get a choice in working environment?! No! All I do in thousands of years is try and negotiate a little cost-of-living increase and what happens?! Even those over-hyped," another fireball singed the wall, "hook-nosed, beady-eyed," the room shook with a third impact, "wannabe Furies are leaving me out to dry!"

Pain paused his slow crawl to freedom, pulling himself just far enough away that he would have time to dodge any further projectiles. "You did try to murder Zeus' only son, your great Distastefulness..." He did not dodge the further projectile. Hades swiped him off the ground in one clutched fist. With the strength and form of a professional discus player, he vaulted him out of one of the skull's sockets, and he was still sailing in a clean arc, followed by an ever-diminishing shriek, as Ganymede flattened himself to doorway.

He dared to poke his head around the corner. Catching sight of him, Hades threw his arms wide open. "Heyyy! If it isn't our dead little free-loader! Sorry to love you and leave you but, hey-" he swept around him as Ganymede entered, making for the exit in a bloom of smoke, "You're used to that by now, eh?" Ganymede rounded on him, eyes ablaze, but Hades gripped his face in a hold so crushing that it made his bones creak. "Don't get cute with me, kid. I'm not in the mood to play nice."

Ganymede snatched himself away and rolled his jaw, slapping his palm to the side of his head in an attempt to ease the muscle.

"You want a prophecy," he sneered as the god's jagged profile turned to the doorway, "... Why not try Delphi?"

Hades' vicious bark of laughter ricocheted from the walls. "Ha! Some mortal hopped up on cave fumes? Why don't I just roll a dice and see what that gets me?" He gave a disgusted gesture. "Get real, kid."

Still trying to ease the ringing in his teeth, Ganymede replied, "She's got one thing the Fates don't have."

Hades turned and rose to his full height. Drifting back over, his chest puffed, he spoke down to his wretched new minion. "Oh?" he asked, "And what might that be?"

With a curl of his lip, Ganymede straightened up too. They locked eyes with a rock-solid stubbornness that encouraged Panic to sneak for the door; pupils boring holes in pupils, Hades' yellow headlamps meeting the tunnels of Ganymede's numb and sunken sockets. The young man spoke through his teeth.

"She'll take your appointment."