Wrath "Rise of the Fallen"

“How bad is it?” Zeus asked.

“Your coins, lords.”

“Seriously, ferryman?” Zeus growled, scowling at him. “In the midst of all this?

Charon made a cavalier show of looking about the area, seemed unimpressed with the firelight dappling the far shore of the Stygian Marsh where a demon horde was encamped in front of the main gate to the Underworld against a backdrop of twisted, barren trees, and shrugged. From behind his frazzled beard, which hung down from his wizened face like a century of cobwebs, he said, “A soul’s gotta make a living, Lord.”

Zeus turned to Hades. The ruler of the Underworld shrugged with a slim grin. “A god’s gotta make a living.”

Zeus stared back stonily. Hades’ eyes turned quite round and then he grinned even bigger. “Fine, fine.” He reached into his black tunic and pulled out two silver coins, danced them over his finger tops before flipping them to Charon. The stooped ferryman caught them with surprising agility in a grubby, veiny hand, ogled each coin in turn, and bit down on each to test their integrity. He vanished them somewhere within his cloak. “The Underworld has been overrun, Lords. By far more creatures than those arrayed along the Styx here. They compelled me to convey them through the Marsh; fearing for my soul, I complied. I learned that their general is named Maw. Cerberus has been subdued, I know not where. They also hold Demeter.”

“What?” Hades said, grin gone, the fire above his helm flaring. Zeus hoped no demon across the river saw.

“Yes,” Charon said timidly, dropping his gaze to the small, rickety dock, a sad collection of buckled boards teetering out a meter or so onto the inky waters of the Stygian Marsh.

“Where?” Hades asked quietly.

“Tartarus,” the ferryman said. “I heard tell of a plan to open a way to their world. They need Demeter to unlock a gate.”

Hades looked grimly at Zeus. “That is a line crossed.”

“I get it, but we don’t know what we’ll find down in Tartarus.”

“Doesn’t matter. We will deal with whatever we find.” Hades pulled his eyes from Zeus and scanned the encampment. “But we need to get there first, and that means crossing the Marsh and getting past that little impediment.”

“So, then… a plan?”

Slowly nodding. “Starts with a distraction.” Hades’ eyes shut, then flashed opened with purple light like puffs of mist hovering about his face. The spiritual fire above his helm roiled from green to the same purple as he extended his arms before him. The fire withdrew into his helm like a plant growing in reverse and reappeared in his upturned palms, two hazy violet orbs. His hands rotated around them until he clutched them and then he pushed them toward the far side of the Marsh. The fuzzy orbs flitted from his hands and expanded into clouds that dissipated about halfway across the Marsh. Nothing happened.

“And so now what?” Zeus wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” Hades said. “I had a thought about what to do, an idea, and I used my Fell Stone and Grace to realize that thought. There’s… energy here. In the rock, in the waters, in the fields and structures. The energy of the countless souls who have traveled my kingdom. And I thought to tap into that energy…. Maybe my instincts were wrong about the Grace. Maybe I don’t know what—”

“Look!” Charon said.

Across the Stygian Marsh, chilling wails rose into the darkness and the thick forest behind the encampment stirred. The demons appeared to be alarmed and taking up arms. Zeus sharpened his vision and immediately made out dozens of whitish shapes moving out of the trees toward the demons. “What are those things?”

“Looking like shades, my Lord,” Charon said.

“Shades?”

“Yes,” Hades said with an icy smile. “Hants, specters, wisps. That was my thought: manifestations.”

The shades poured over the encampment with manic speed, an undead fog. Demonic cries joined the shades’ unnerving cries as many demons died in the immediate onslaught.

“Nice,” Zeus said.

“Charon, get us across now. There.” Hades pointed to a dark spot jutting into the Marsh beyond the last cook fire.

Charon flourished that skeletal hand behind him toward his long, low skiff. He leaned on a pole as aged and gnarled as he and leered at the gods as they stepped past him. Zeus did not care much for the look and met it with a glare of his own that ruffled the old soul not a bit. Charon shuffled on behind them and poled the skiff away from the small dock.

The low skiff was also wide with two warped benches polished to a high gloss from the asses of countless souls journeying to their final judgment and beyond. Zeus stepped over the benches to the prow and stared out over the reed-choked Stygian Marsh to where the battle raged. The demons had regrouped and were fighting back against the swirl of white warriors. Zeus crossed his arms, nearly hugging himself. Not because he was cold—in fact, the air was neither cold nor warm; it was… nothing; even the breath of the skiff’s motion massaging his face and fluttering his beard was characterless. But rather to steel himself against an unease creeping from out of the darkness. And not just from without, but also from within. Never before had two such armies clashed—demons and… ghosts. And yet the sight was no less bizarre than the rising—and deeply dismaying—certainty that he and his brothers, and all the others, were no gods. Were in fact partly human. He still couldn’t grasp the entirety of what that meant. He pulled out his baton and prepared to manifest his weapon.

Zeus looked to his brother beside him, but Hades wore a closed, smoldering look that brooked no interruption. These fiends had overrun his kingdom. They had Demeter. The one thing in all of creation that Hades would willingly die to protect.

The skiff barely scuffed against the rocky shore before Hades was moving. “Charon,” he snapped, “wait for us on the Phlegethon, the mooring near the Vale of Mourning.” Without awaiting a response, Hades marched down the shoreline toward the chaotic battle, his double-pronged staff out and already aglow.

Charon mumbled an unenthused, “Of course, Lord. Safe travels, Lord.”

Zeus hurried after Hades, snapping his baton into the lightning staff. The two Greeks crashed into the battle from the rear and ripped through demons on their way to the main gate. Flames from scattered cook fires spread across the ground, and fallen demons piled atop each other. Hades led the way, cutting a near straight line through fire and demon; many died by his hand without ever seeing their slayer. Zeus slew many too, but his attention drifted toward the white shades swarming through the collapsing horde of demons. Their facial features were faint, but one looked like an old man, another a woman, yet another a young boy. All wore expressions of unnatural fury. When a demon weapon struck a shade, it would burst like a cloud of smoke, sometimes reconstituting, sometimes vanishing. Zeus could see no rhyme or reason to it.

He and Hades broke past the encampment and sprinted up a wide, stone-lined trail. The main gate to the Underworld yawned before them, perhaps 5 meters high but easily a score or more meters wide, cut into a grey wall of scarlet-streaked rock that soared upward into infinite darkness. The gate was framed by a massive arch hewn from that same and crazed with intricate bas-relief scenes of madness, some agony, some ecstasy. At each end of the arch, the flames of the braziers whipped the dark air. And behind those braziers stood a tall guardian sculpted from volcanic stone. Both statues wore flowing hooded robes and carried huge scythes tilting toward the dark entrance in a gesture of warding.

Behind them, the strangely deep-throated noises of dying fiends. They passed under the arch and the battle behind them faded almost immediately to the grainy echo of an old memory.

The edge of the Underworld showed no signs of the invading force. “There will be other legions like that one,” Hades said. “I’m sure of it. Standing by in strategic points to hold my kingdom. We’ll avoid them. For now. I must get to Demeter.” The Lord of the Dead broke into a fast-paced trot.

Zeus followed his brother on a seemingly meandering route through the Underworld. Never once did they run into a demon, or a soul. The merest of breezes stirred the hairs on Zeus’ arms, rattled the branches in the strange trees, but nothing else moved. “Yes,” Hades agreed when Zeus muttered his concern, “it is entirely too quiet.” His words were low, as desolate as the dim land around them.

They saw their first beings of any kind at the unassuming entrance to Tartarus. Four armored demons, sleepily standing about a ragged slash in a wall of black volcanic rock. The Greeks stopped behind a cluster of boulders. Hades rested his chin on a fist and pondered for a moment, the spiritual fire pulsing a bit and swirling from green to purple before withdrawing down into his helm. As if no time had passed since his earlier comment he said, “And we need to keep it quiet.”

Zeus tilted his head and gave a nod to Hades’ spiritual fire capering about his head. “I’m not the one with the green beacon letting everybody know exactly where I am.”

Hades favored his brother with a baleful look. “Just let me deal with this.” His spiritual fire withered into his helm, and his eyes flushed a deep violet. He spun toward the entrance and thrust out his hands as if trying to shove the demons.

Four purple ropes spurt from Hades’ fingers and spilled to the ground in fat coils. Like serpents, they unfurled and sped silently toward the guards. The purple creatures reached their boots and twisted up their legs, winding completely around their bodies so fast that not a sound escaped any of them.

Zeus could see the serpents squeezing, the panic building as the demons struggled. One threw its head back, helmet falling off, mouth opening in a silent wail that spewed only a gurgle of black blood. Another’s face blackened as both eyes bulged then popped from their sockets to dribble down its cheeks, twin sacs hanging by wet strands. It collapsed to its knees and tipped face first into the dust. The two remaining guards whirled in a shambling, panicked frenzy. One of them spun hard into the wall and that seemed to do the trick as its head ruptured with a terrible squishy crack and a splash of gore. The other tumbled to the ground and spasmed several times before going still.

The serpents vanished in four purple puffs. Hades grunted, broke cover, and vaulted the corpses to disappear through the entrance to Tartarus. Zeus followed and found himself moving down a spiraling staircase carved from the volcanic rock. Thin lines of flame issued from vertical fissures in the rock walls, casting wavering yellow light in the stairwell. The stairs wound and wound and wound, and Zeus moved so fast that he actually began to feel dizzy, surrounded by rock and the echoing slap of his feet on stone steps. Unlike the nothing feel of the Underworld, the air dried and grew warmer as he descended, and it carried a whiff of char—and something else. It had been centuries since Zeus’ last trip down to Tartarus, and he was even less thrilled to be heading there now than he was following the war with the Titans.

The stairwell spilled him out on an open plain of fine grey sand pimpled with rocks where a frail, mournful wind scared up phantoms that danced for a bit and then collapsed back to dust. Zeus knew well enough that Tartarus was not actually beneath the Underworld, but… somewhere else. So the fact that he was also looking at a streaky sky colored like a blood drop in murky water did not concern him. He was more concerned with the silhouette of Hades moving rapidly a couple hundred meters ahead of him.

It took Zeus a lengthy sprint to catch his brother. He fell into step beside him and between deep breaths asked, “Where are we headed?”

Hades lifted his staff and pointed toward the desolate horizon. “There.”

Zeus stared out at nothing and said. “Okay.”