On an ordinary day on a beach, a man laid on the shoreline.
The sea kept its own indifferent liturgy. The waves rose, broke, and reached for him. Water splashed against his legs and the sand stung against his skin.
It was a pain tangible enough to get anyone off the brutal sand, but this man remained, sprawled arms wide.
The likely reason was because he was dying.
The sea washed away his blood but it still oozed from him, pouring from the wounds that Hera had inflicted on him.
His entire chest had been carved open, his organs advertised for the vultures circling above.
Any second now, he would die.
Leodro breathed painfully.
Despite the pain, all he felt was anguish, rage and despair. His entire family had been killed by the gods.
His doting mother. His beautiful lover. And his unborn son.
It was a cruel punishment veiled as a reminder that he was only a demigod and not a real god. That acts of defiance and rebellion would be met with ruthless judgement especially in his case.
Leodro couldn't take away the images of his defiled lover and his mother's head; the tongue ripped out of it.
The laughter from the gods and the soulless glare in Hera's face.
Reincarnating into this mythological world had given him a peaceful life at last, so why did this tragedy befall him?
Why…?
Leodro knew he was asking no one but himself. The sky above him, even though it appeared calm and soothing, was the same one he had been thrown down from, after witnessing the suffering and murder of his family.
The pain—abstract and physical—was immense, but so was his rage. Leodro struggled to lift his hand to the sky, blocking the sun as he forced speech out of his blood-clotted throat.
"I swear it," he rasped. Blood poured out of his mouth. "All the gods. Every one of you. I swear that I will kill you all. That… I will make you suffer, like I have suffered."
His hand weakened.
"I swear it."
Then it fell.
It was an oath no logic would honor. A dying demigod promising rebellion to the masters of the realm.
But oaths are not built for logic. They are built for need.
And so, Leodro's eyes opened once again.
He woke to a hollow sound, like the darkness inside a cave.
The air was cold despite the embers of fire flickering at the corners of the basalt walls—blue fire.
Leodro looked around him, trying to figure out where he was. He found stalactites leaning like teeth and water drops falling from the endless ceiling above.
Far ahead, a black shore rose and fell very gently, and beyond it a slow-bellied current sighed around a landing where a long, narrow skiff waited with no oarsman in sight.
Countless faces turned in that water, the faces of souls.
Leodro realized that he was in the underworld.
"You wear the place well," said an unafraid voice.
The speaker stepped from a pocket of shadow as though the shadow had been designed to fit him.
He was a tall, thin man, yet his aura was nothing of one. He wore a robe the color of midnight, and carried a strange staff.
His eyes were as blue as the flames, his face was pale but handsome and his smile, while terrifying, had its own enigmatic beauty.
He smelled like death.
"Hades," Leodro said.
The god of the under-earth spread his hands in a gesture that could be welcome or indictment. "Names, names. They break like waves against the same shore."
He tilted his head, listening to something only he could hear. "Leodro, son of Zeus. I have wondered when you would try my threshold, dear nephew."
Leodro clenched his jaw, disgusted by the word but refusing to acknowledge it.
"This is River Styx?" Leodro asked. "Where I must accept my death and move on to the underworld?"
Hades smiled. "Correct."
"I won't go," Leodro said. He glanced toward the skiff and the black river beyond. "Send me back."
"Back?" Hades's brows made a little theater of surprise. "To flesh? To breathe that rattles? No."
He walked gracefully, letting the blue fire slide over his sleeves. "You're dead, nephew. What you were has been rendered. If you don't want to move on that's fine, but if you loiter here, the murmurs of the asphodel will enter your bones and make them hollow."
He sat on a darkly built chair. "In the underworld, you will find your mother's soul, your lover's soul, and the soul of your unborn child. There are meadows for the many and courts for the few.
"So move on. You will forget about it all in time."
"I refuse forgetting." Leodro growled, his eyes burning with rage. "You think I can allow this to be my story? Death in the hands of the gods after my mother was slaughtered and my wife was defiled until she and my child died!!"
His chest heaved as his breathing loudened, silence reigning for a while.
"I will never forget."
Hades's smile sharpened. "Then we have a little problem of jurisdiction, and I so enjoy those. There is a third path, as any good labyrinth offers." He let the silence wait upon his words. "A bargain."
Leodro scoffed. "A bargain. With a god."
"Not the sort you fear." Hades lifted a hand of honesty.
"No price. No tithe. No years shaved from your lamentable life. I will ask nothing of you that is not already in your marrow."
His eyes smoothened, turning calm and cunning.
"I will allow you to return to the mortal light."
Leodro froze, the sentence swirling in his mind as though he had heard it wrong.
"Allow?" he echoed.
"And I will give you a… device, let us say." Hades's fingers sketched a sigil in the air; where they passed, faint sparks smoldered and went out.
"A magical scroll that offers immense power. It will speak to you. But you must do what it says."
Leodro's eyes narrowed. "You just told me I would owe you nothing. Now you tell me to obey a thing I do not control."
"Semantics," Hades said, amused. "It will tell you only what serves your thirsty quest for vengeance, I promise you that. It will never require kneeling to me."
Seeing that Leodro wasn't convinced, Hades leaned in. "Think of it as a discipline for your hate. You burn very brightly, nephew. Bright fire consumes itself. I am offering you a hearth."
"With this scroll, you will find your path to revenge more plausible than it already is. The power you require to face the gods you do not have on your own, you know that."
Leodro hesitated, glaring at Hades.
"What do you gain?" he asked. "You are not Hades, the patron saint of vengeance. Surely you must want something."
"Don't we all?" Hades sighed. He looked past Leodro toward the long water and the slow, shifting faces in it.
"The Underworld is a library of the same story. Falling. Regretting. Quieting. It makes a god contemplative." He sat back, heaving yet another sigh. "It also makes him bored."
"My brother's house crackles with noise and vanity; my sister-by-law's crown gleams with grievances. I will not lie: the spectacle will please me. To see their order strained."
He looked at Leodro. "I merely want to be entertained. And a bastard's conquest to kill all gods, kekeke, isn't that pure entertainment?"
His smile softened into something almost like courtesy. "I have not had a good play in an age, dear nephew. If I let you return, will you give me one?"
Leodro was silent. He knew to be careful with gods. They were the ones who had killed his family and him. But revenge was all he could see before him now.
It might have clouded his judgement, but it truly was the only way. A man desperate for revenge barely has the comfort of choices.
For Leodro, a deal with the devil of this world, was his only choice.
"I agree," he uttered.
"Excellent," Hades said with a satisfied grin. "Then we begin."
He opened his palm. Blue radiance quickened there—at first a mist, then a swarm of characters Leodro did not recognize, then a single bead of bright light sparked from its center.
The god pressed that star through the air and sent it straight into Leodro's chest.
Instantly, pain shot through the demigod's body. His entire muscles clenched and a groan clawed out of his throat.
Hades's other hand lifted, almost gentle, and pushed.
Leodro was sent flying through space and time, before falling into his lifeless body.
"Arrggghhh!!"
The groan continued as he pushed himself from the sand.
Gulls and carrion birds that gathered to feast, suddenly flew away in fear, leaving him alone in the silent beach.
He looked down and saw that all his wounds were gone, even their pain was now a memory.
Then before him, light folded into itself and a magical scroll unfurled.
Leodro narrowed his eyes. It must be the scroll Hades had bound to him.
It hung there, patient, demanding nothing, permitting no other sight to matter until it had been read.
And the words were not that complicated at all.
[Welcome back, son of Zeus], it said.