💀 Love Like War
L&W8: "Haides, Lord of the Underworld, is a twisted, conniving son-of-a-Titan." Or so everybody says...
Previously on 6 LITTLE SEEDS:
When Demeter realized that all that destruction had been illusory—nothing but one of Haides’ notorious manipulative tactics, she let out an irate screech.
Then she glared at the pool. She could feel it. Could feel him. There. Deep, deep, deep underground. It was so minuscule, but for a god of his meticulous vigilance, it was enough. That tiny trickle, those droplets, that distinctive splash they made as they hit his festering waters.
With one stomp of her mighty foot, she sent a shockwave down into the bedrock beneath the spring that fed her pool. The earth jerked. An entire plate shifted, blocking that traitorous stream and forcing it to divert. It would have to find another way through the rock now.
So would he…
From: Valuables
—Start at the beginning
—Mature Content Warnings for this series
Also. Nobody calls Persephone by her true name. They call her KORE, “the Maiden,” and it’s pronounced like “ko-ray” or “kora” not like “core of the planet.” KLYMENOS is one of Haides’ gazillion epitaphs. It means “illustrious” (or depending on who’s grumbling it, “notorious.”)
HAIDES, LORD OF THE UNDERWORLD, KRONOS-SPAWN COMMANDER OF MULTITUDES
🔥💀🔥
He had known better.
He had fucking known better, but he had done it anyway. Of course Demeter would wrap the chokehold of “never” around her latest refusal, and of course she would break that conduit between their realms the second she learned of its existence.
Why do I keep believing in them? Any of them?
Because your brains have rotted along with everything else down here?
Go hump our father’s sickle.
Yet he couldn’t deny that his own idiocy was more infuriating than what Demeter had done. He just could not seem to get it through his thick skull who she was. Who Zeus was. Who every one of his siblings were, and even his own supposed friends and allies.
This was Hekate’s classic meddling at work.
Well, apparently De-De had been just as right about him—that Haides hadn’t changed at all—because his toes dug into the muck. He reached his essence down, down, down, past the slime and earth and layers of stone, into the magma chamber that lay beneath. Its heat matched the hate in his heart. Its fumes matched the bile in his guts. The force of it shot up through his legs. His balls swelled. His roar went apocalyptic. His hands turned to skeletal claws as he fired off dual blasts of his destructive vitality. With it, the lakebed heaved up in a putrid plume around him—rock, muck, water, and fire punching the floor of the cursed world above.
A crack ruptured, sending a row of stalactites crashing down into the Akherousian Mere. Every deity, daimon, nymph, water creature, wind, and winged creature vanished. The reeds swallowed their fronds down their hollow stems, retracting into the mud with a ripple of thunp-th-th-thunp-thunp along the shoreline. Kerberos skulked into his cave, while Kharon suddenly realized that he had forgotten something back there on the far shore. Both he and his barge dissipated, appearing as a far-off speck beside the dock. There the ferryman heaved himself onto dry land for the first time in months, and made himself like mirth in the Underworld: scarce.
Only the ghosts remained, but they couldn't be harmed by the debris. The fallen rocks couldn’t even pin them in place. Unconcerned and unblinking, they stood inside the jagged hunks—until they didn’t. A few noticed the fallout. Fewer still noticed its source: the quaking, panting god a-glow in the middle of the lake, transforming water into vapor with the heat of his hate.
With one last curse, Haides transpired in his throne room, seated on his jewel-vomit eyesore in his armor and ceiling-scraper horns. Foul Akherousian water dripped from his lower half. Ash and dust fell from the screaming mouths of his skull-shaped shoulder plates.
Through clenched teeth, he spat out the invocation. “HEKATE.”
All three of Spellweaver’s forms appeared in identical billows of purple smoke, her most dramatic and formal mode of arrival. Golden masks obscured each of her three faces so he couldn’t tell which of them was which. Couldn’t see her expressions either. Even when unmasked, she constantly changed the configuration in which she stood, like one of those games with three shells and a seedpod that mortals played to infuriate and swindle each other. Worked pretty well for gods, too.
Her three torsos hinged simultaneously. Each of her mouths claimed one word.
“Yes…”
“My…”
“King?”
From up on the dais where he leaned on an armrest, chin on knuckles, legs skewed recklessly across the length of the platform’s skull-encrusted lava, he twisted his mouth into a sneer. “Do you enjoy laughing at me?”
Another synchronized bow. A triple voiced reply: “Always.”
His gaze snapped away. Infernal fuck. The embers in his eyes gave a savage flare of amusement. “I suppose this is all a big jest to you then. Bored with our duties, are we? Not enough mortals to haunt, so you need to dredge up some Olympian skeletons?”
“Never enough…”
“Mortals to…”
“Haunt.”
“Rattly Olympian…”
“Skeletons…”
“Are best.”
Her three voices hummed, “Yummy.”
He sucked on a tooth and gazed out over her perfectly motionless heads. Simmer down. She’s just trying to rankle you. Don’t let her win. She always wins when you take her bait. It’s the only way she can defeat you.
Except today I’m playing against all three of her forms, Past, Present, Future.
“Fucking Titans,” he snapped.
“I am…”
“Technically a…”
“Titaness.”
Drawing in a long, calming breath, he vented scorched air through his nostrils. As if that could suppress everything she was poking at. He shifted into a more kingly posture—a more aggressive posture—and curled long fingers around the golden skulls that stared down upon his petitioners (or his hecklers) through alexandrite eyes. Tonight, the eyes matched the hues of his aura: more dark green than violet. His own black gaze bored into the shadowy eyeholes of Hekate’s center mask. “Why did you tell me to corner Demeter? You had to know how she’d react to that.”
“Of course…”
“I…”
“Knew.”
Haides leaned forward on his throne to thrust a finger at the form that stood to his left. His armored digit sliced right, pointing at every one of those concealed faces. “You said she would give me what I want.”
“No,” the left form said.
“That is what you heard,” quipped the right.
The central explained, “You wanted a swifter resolution to your problem. I provided one.”
He snorted. “Did you now.”
“When I sensed the approaching end of your renowned…”
“Inexhaustible…”
“Patience…”
He growled at the triple-smirks dripping through all of her masks as she batted words from tongue-to-tongue the way mortals batted balls.
“I said nothing less, nothing…”
“More...”
“Than you would need to press Earth Mother…”
“In a way…”
“She could not...”
“Ignore. You now have all the…”
“Ammunition you...”
“Require to gain the answer you truly…”
“Desire.”
She sang through her trio of smart mouths, “You’re welcome.”
"Ammunition!” he shot back. “What ammunition?”
For a millisecond, the masks disappeared. Hekate returned fire with three simultaneous looks—one challenging, one haughty, one mischievous. “Yes,” said the youngest, her Form of Future Seeing. “I know you do.” Then she vanished in three more billows of purple smoke.
He launched up from the throne and mule-kicked it into the back wall, then jumped down from the dais to hurl at her wherever she had gone, “I hate your blasted riddles!”
Nothing but the echo of his own voice.
And the far-off drip from some leaky something-or-other that shouldn’t be leaking in the palace of Haides, Host of Many A Ghost, Commander of Multitudes, Illustrious Lord of the Great Below.
A chuckle teased through the shadows, so faint that he couldn’t be certain it wasn’t his own mind playing tricks on him as relentlessly as Hekate did.
Only another claw-handed, cataclysmic bellow would suffice as reply. The marble ceiling and the pyroclastic rock of the roof tiles crashed to the palace floor. One chunk upended the black dais, sending its polished skulls and their ruby eyeballs flying into the dining room. As more spiderwebbing cracks in the ceiling reached the banquet hall, the golden chandelier broke free of its moldings and smashed the table into kindling.
The additional fallout he hadn’t meant to cause just pissed him off more.
His face snapped up toward the innumerable layers that lay between him and the Cursed Queen of the Earth. “I didn’t have to ask your permission, you know! I didn’t have to consider you for a single rotting second! You’re not her father, so the choice isn’t actually up to you! Vindictive, moldering, teeth-laden twat!”
With one final roar, he deflated into the heave of a sigh.
Once the dust finally lay still, he took in the wreckage. Now there was a blast from his caustic past. He hadn’t been able to mistake himself for a firestorm like that in centuries.
Not since he’d had to give up petitioning for a much-needed vacation on Olympos for part of the year. A lunar cycle would have thrilled him. Even a fraction of one, once a century, but no. Good King Zeusy wouldn’t hear of it. His Majesty On High had threatened demotion if Haides didn’t quit pressing for it (and fine, sending up snide jibes…eventually some intimidations…maybe a few heavy-handed ultimatums). Had threatened to throw Haides in Tartaros along with their father and uncles, too. Ruthless Titan pricks, the whole lot.
Kronos had been the last individual Haides would have wanted to be jailed alongside, so he’d had to back off and drop the entire vacation issue.
That’s when it had truly settled into his bones: he was stuck down here.
Forever.
As a result, various locales in the Underworld had been subjected to his frequent eruptions, a cinder cone that had needed to blow and keep ejecting over the next couple centuries.
That kind of inconsolable fury had always plagued him in his youth. As such, his oldest epithets included the Raging King, the Furious One, and simply The Burner. Nothing would abate it. Only time, the weight of responsibilities, and eventual exhaustion.
Even arising victorious in the Titanomachy hadn’t been able to calm him. While his siblings all celebrated and basked in the triumphant ending of a ten-year war, Haides had grown more irritable, more volatile. They’d all lounged around in the new banquet halls on Mount Olympos, toasting to glory with nectar and month-long feasts, but he’d had nothing upon which to unleash the wrath that still scalded his veins.
Of the three brothers, Haides had seethed in Kronos’ belly the longest before being vomited up to war against him. The girls, who’d marinated even longer, had been able to shrug it off by toppling the Titans’ supremacy and spanking them down into Tartaros.
They had all crooned and cajoled and beckoned and prodded. “Come revel with us, dear Klymenos. We’ve won, so smile and be happy.”
Happy.
That’s not how Haides had been made. Although Hesita had festered longer than any of them, her fire was so different. Homey and snuggly. Haides was more furnace than hearth. Always had been. He may as well have been belched from the Pyriphlegethon, for once he’d been launched up their father’s gullet, he hadn’t been able to stop burning. Rampaging. Even after the war was won, he’d taken it out on anyone or anything that pissed him off. Or annoyed him. Or existed.
So they’d manipulated him into the Underworld.
Permanently.
Best thing that had ever happened to him, really.
When he’d told Demeter that she had no idea how much he’d changed, he had meant that. Dedication to his new role as a ruler had finally given him the means to channel his energy in any productive way besides warfare. The Underworld’s needs were vast and could easily get out of control if not tended diligently. Plus, everybody was fanged and furnace-eyed down here. His own court suited him so much better than Olympos. Age and sovereignty had mellowed him.
Or so he had thought.
Apparently, even after a millennium, there was still nobody who could bring out the worst in him more quickly and efficiently than his siblings. Because here it was again, blowing up in his face. Demeter and Zeus may as well have shot a pair of flaming arrows into the too-parched kindling of his heart and his guts.
It burns, it burns, it blazes.
It razes everything down….
He was just so blasted agitated all the time these days. That is, whenever he wasn’t mooning around, love-struck. Damned Eros. With a low growl, he paced the wreckage like the caged beast he was, wracking his mind for what he could possibly do about it now.
De-De’s got a point, you know.
Burn in the River of Fire.
You never should have reached out to Zeus again with any sort of confidence and trust.
He sniffed down his nose at himself, far too accustomed to having no one else to confide in but his own insufferable conscience. Think I don’t know that now?
You never should have written him that message and let him catch a whiff of what you want most, just like you never should have let him throw Her in—
Rot in the River of Hate.
Too late. Already there.
Yes, I am. While they’re all upstairs, frolicking in the sun. Fucking whoever they want. Stabbing each other in the back without a second thought for anything they’ve ever done.
Oh, he was so glad that he had the eternal excuse to avoid their every feasting occasion. Thanks to Zeusy’s decrees, Haides remained eternally obliged to decline all Upper Realm invitations. Even if I was capable of accepting, I doubt they’d send me any. Cannibalistic fucks, eating each other alive.
Yep. Father taught us that one well, didn’t he?
Drown in his bile-filled belly.
But it was true. All those years crammed down the Titan King’s gullet had twisted every one of Kronos’ children in one way or another, except for the youngest. Of course, escaping that fate and being raised as the Shining Savior of Siblings hadn’t done Zeusy any favors. In some ways, he was the most corrupt of them all.
At least there was one good thing about being a twisted son-of-a-Titan. Haides knew how to hit someone where they lived. He also knew how to keep going—how to never, never, ever stop, even in the face of relentless opposition and onslaught.
Sure you didn’t inherit that one from Mother?
The thought brought his pacing up short. His head tilted. Actually, I probably did.
Of all the six siblings, Haides was the one she’d never had the chance to hold. He’d never gotten to be rocked in her arms and hear her lullabies while nursing. He’d never gotten to suckle at all, for Rhea had been imprisoned at Haides’ birth. It was why the ravaging marks of his father’s bile upon his immortal flesh were permanent—something he never allowed to shine through in front of anybody except the damned souls he was charged with purifying.
That gruesome visage tended to terrify the evil straight out of their eternal essences with little more than a flash of his ravenous grin.
The flavors that had been scorched into his essence at his conception only added to it.
Kronos had just caught his wife and youngest daughter after a relentless chase over mountains, under the earth, and deep in the sea inside a bubble blown from a pair of protective whales. The Titan King had finally cornered them in a cave with no outlet. He’d swallowed the three-year-old Hera, then imprisoned Rhea as he raped her again, which had resulted in yet another child.
She’d decided on a son that time: Haides, the progeny of her chained, trapped, pent-up fury.
Demeter could argue about the Oldy Goldy Ways until her hot air ran out. Because all that ancient power of feminine supremacy…the explosive creative forces that had dominated the Cosmos back to Khaos…back to the births of the original mothers of Below and Above—Nyx and Gaia, the primordial essences of Night and Earth Her Very Self?
What a tragic failure.
In spite of all that generative power, the Queen of the Titans and her newborn children had been helpless against her husband’s brute ferocity, just like Grandmother Gaia and her offspring had fallen prey to the violence of Ouranos. Gaia was too peaceable. Too nurturing and forgiving. So was Rhea. Those queens had longed to rule the Upper Realms through harmonious cooperation. Oh, sure, they possessed a fearsome wrath when angered, but they would choose honest and peaceable solutions over underhanded, ruthless domination every time.
Kronos had taken advantage of that, just like Ouranos had.
Because Gaia and Rhea were not Nyx, and their husbands were not Erebos. Those chthonic primordials—the Night and the Darkness—were each powerful in their own way, reigning over the blackest reaches of the Cosmos as One.
Of course, even the Underworld—that last stronghold of feminine rule—had fallen to the might of Zeus. Nyx had chosen to ally with him in the Titan War, and she had whispered not a word of reproach when he blasted the Great Drakaina to ash, then handed over her throne to his brother.
The Burner.
The Notorious One.
Now the Divine Jailor. The Tormentor of Tartaros. The eldest son of Kronos.
The one who looked just like him.
Rhea had only ever spoken to Haides once about his father, and about the way he’d been conceived. In the wake of the Titanomachy, they had walked along the beach, arm-in-arm beneath skies that had, after ten long years, been painted in tranquility and beauty once more. It had just been the two of them.
The single moment Haides had ever spent alone with his mother.
Everybody knew that the Titan King had eaten all his children the moment they were born, until Rhea was able to hide one of them—Zeus. Everybody also knew that, once Zeus was fully grown, he’d helped free his siblings so they could take Kronos down together.
It was also widely suspected that not all of Rhea’s children had been the product of a willing, happy mating.
But what Haides had not known—what Rhea had never told anybody was that, as Kronos was raping her for the second time, Rhea had decided to battle might with might. The Titan King was too big, too strong, and nobody would stand up to him and help her. All her attempts to flee him had failed. So since she hadn’t been able to take him out in a direct assault, she had determined to give birth to someone who could.
It had been prophesied that Kronos would be dethroned by his own child. That’s why he had devoured them. “You were to be the one who would set us all free, my Haides.”
That’s what she had confided in him on the beach that day.
“I thought that if I could escape with you like I had with Hera, if I could run far enough and outwit him, if I could give you the time to mature and prepare…”
But the big Titan had squatted across the cave entrance for the duration of Rhea’s fourth pregnancy, blocking her escape until she gave birth. Kronos had grabbed Haides by his hair the second his head had crested her womb. Dangling, wriggling, squalling, he’d thrashed in his father’s grasp until crying had turned to bawling had turned to rage. “Oh, he would’ve been a big one,” Kronos had said, laughing. “Nice try, sweet thing.” And then GULP.
His malicious, lusty eye had landed on her again, and then he’d lunged at her, pinning her down to rut.
Knowing that her husband could keep that up longer than she had the strength to stomach it, she had flung herself at him, pouring out kisses and caresses, wooing and snuggling, (plotting and conniving) as she begged for a return of his tenderness.
And oh, he had given it until her belly swelled again. Poseidon this time. Glimmering fount of charisma and affection—with a deep, dark, treacherous sea raging beneath. The siblings all called him Fickle Trickle. Naturally. It was how he had been conceived.
They were all products of their conception. Hestia, eldest of them all, who had been created from the blissful, passionate union of two Titans in love. Demeter—still so warm and nurturing but with that clinging, smothering paranoia born of a mother who had seen her first child eaten, and feared that her husband had lied when he said he wouldn’t do it again.
Kronos was a dirty, rotten liar, just like he was a dirty, rotten lech. So as Rhea lay smashed and struggling underneath him while unwillingly conceiving a third child—Hera, Star-Brilliant—the Titan Queen had fallen into bitterest, darkest outrage, clinging to that one gleaming mote of hope that the prophesy would come true: that someday they would all be free from her husband’s savage rule and he would get his.
The making of Zeus had finally achieved that.
But it had cost her two more swallowed children for her to figure out how. After Haides was ripped out of her and gobbled, Rhea had switched tactics, fawning to buy herself some time so she could figure out how to take the bastard out once and for all.
It had worked. Kronos had always been a sucker for flattery and sex.
A trait which he had passed on to Poseidon. And to Zeus, his Child of Nemesis.
Trying to say you’re any better?
I try to be. I’m just so…
Angry.
Yeah.
Hurt.
Fuck yes.
Sad.
He stared at the still-smoking mess of his throne room for a long time before he could choke it down and admit it.
Yeah. I’m really sad that I want nothing to do with my toxic, brutal family ever again. I don’t want to be him anymore—the god I am when I’m with all of them. The spawn of Kronos and Ouranos, passing it back and forth, handing it down, generation after generation. I want something else.
That’s why he needed this game of keep-away with Kore to be resolved. If he could just get her down here, he wouldn’t ever have to deal with his siblings again except for the most clearcut operations between the Underworld and Olympos.
In that respect, he was no longer Haides with his fellow Titan-spawn.
He was merely the Lord of the Underworld administrating logistics with the rulers of neighboring domains. Nothing personal. Nothing to rile him into reaction.
Unfortunately, things were never clearcut or impersonal when it came to asking the Blessed Mount for anything. Heavens forbid Haides should need something from them. It was always a double-edged sword when they said yes.
Then is that really the answer you want to this marriage proposal?
He shut his eyes and shook his head. He supposed he could marry Styx, and battle witticisms for eternity. Or perhaps Hekate would say yes if he promised not to pester her for sex. As long as she didn’t pester him about finding it elsewhere, that could work.
Except he knew, deep in his heart, that it never would. There was only one goddess who could ever take the throne at his side. The one whose song interwove with his as neatly as two opposite-hued strands spun into a single, strong thread.
He did not relish his options: rule the Underworld alone for eternity (not happening), continue wheedling and begging (he’d rather castrate himself and live alone), or he could do what was necessary like a conniving, ruthless son of Rhea and Kronos.
Fuck me on the flaming wheel.
Well, what was one more act of back-stabbery in the grand scheme of his family’s politics? Those pretentious Olympian traitors looked down their noses at him no matter what he did, so it’s not like he had any loving brotherly connections to destroy. Demeter had become a stuck-up, overbearing mother-gone-rabid. Poseidon was too self-absorbed with his own realm. Who knew where Hestia was? Hera had become Zeus’s creature, and Zeus was…
Zeus.
Thankfully, Haides knew both of Kore’s parents well enough to know how to maneuver them on the game board and get exactly what he wanted out of them.
His gaze fell upon the spot where Hekate had smirked at him, doling out her latest little trail of clues.
You now have all the ammunition you require
To gain the answer you truly desire.
Spellweaver was never wrong, even if she had to entertain herself by making things harder than they needed to be. Haides simply had to play her game. It was the price she exacted for her prescient advice.
Ammunition, eh?
Well, he had a whole arsenal stored up, just waiting to be fired, so he booted a hunk of rock across the room, clearing a straight line through the wreckage. His mouth drew back into the leer that marked him as his father’s son.
Then he invoked the needful name. “HERMES.”
Up Next: Eros has a slight problem — AN ITCH TO SCRATCH
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