The sky above had long since darkened, but it bore no stars—only a heavy, suffocating void.
There, at the edge of the overworld where light bowed to shadow, stood Hades.
His cloak fluttered even with the absence of wind as he stared into the vast, yawning hallway carved into the fabric of the world itself.
This was no ordinary tunnel—it was the entrance to the Underworld, a corridor of infinite dusk that devoured all noise and warmth, and pulsed with the heartbeat of death itself.
Hades took a step forward.
The world behind him—of gods bickering, of humans beginning to write their legend—faded with each footfall.
Stone beneath his feet no longer felt like earth, but something older, darker, forged in the chaos of the first dawn.
With every step deeper, he could feel the invisible shackles that once bound him in the overworld slowly dissolve.
His authority, once veiled under his oath, the constraints of Olympus' law and Zeus' false supremacy, returned like the tide.
