💀 Taking Care of Business

6LS12: Because. It needs to be handled.

If you’re new to this tale and curious about reading the whole thing, I do not recommend starting here. This chapter will spoil some earlier stuff if you know this in advance. 🤓

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.”

Previously on 6 LITTLE SEEDS:

Sitting up straight, she bent over the pool and looked into the reflection of the sky. Within all the black spaces, she imagined his dark form. And oh, the gleam of that gaze, more heavenly than the stars.

It had been ages since she had been allowed to attend any Olympian events where the gods of her generation might show up. Even then, she had always been corralled amidst a gaggle of handmaidens with the Queen of the Earth’s broad shadow menacing a great swath around her. Mother only brought her to fertility rites or small Annual Feasts anymore—and lately, not even those, so the Bringer of Blossomtime could no longer count upon happenstance. A chance meeting at someone’s Millennium Celebration. “Ohhh, pardon my clumsiness as I trip straight into your arms. Tee-hee.”

No.

It was time. It was so long past time.

Heedless if her mother should hear, she said with full summoning intention, “ARES, GOD OF WAR!”

~From: A Scent To Rob Reason

—Start at the beginning
—Mature Content Warnings for this series

All aboard

HAIDES, LORD OF THE UNDERWORLD, KING OF THE DEAD

🔥💀🔥

His mouth hung open, still on the verge of speaking.

He closed it.

Inhaled.

Severed the connection with a slice of his hand over the water.

The Akherousian Mere went dark. The Underworld went more hushed than when Styx had goaded him. He pushed out his breath in one fully composed, equally silent exhalation. If he had to hear that name on Kore's lips one more time…

Bloody Ares? Worse, if the God of War should respond to her. And why wouldn’t he? Haides had no interest in knowing what Kore would have to say to that blaze-eyed, knuckle-dragging, one-trick warhorse. Walking phallus. Erect spear mounted to an ever-bolting chariot. Grinning, guffawing, swaggering, blood-swigging—

An ever-so-entertained cackle shot through the chamber. It smacked the craggy ceiling and ricocheted off every stalactite, dragging Haides fully back to the Underworld with its condescending spite. “Well-well,” came the voice, a crystalline sound that pricked his every nerve. “That must be…” He could practically hear her licking her chops back there. “Disappointing.”

He didn’t bother turning around. Minthe’s voice was unmistakeable.

He would have preferred Styx.

More so, he would prefer to vanish and transpire straight into the House of Judgment where his on-again-off-again lover dared not follow him. But he refused to give her the satisfaction of seeing him bolt. That would prove to her and everyone in the vicinity that he was upset, and proper kings did not publicly show their personal upset. (Unlike how they ran things up in the tantrum-throwing storm clouds.)

Keeping his profile turned sharply toward her, Haides plowed through the water, heading back for the shoreline at a sharp diagonal. Not a single specimen of the usual cadre lurked anywhere nearby.

As smart as their mouths, that lot.

Alas, Minthe had never been attractive to him for her intelligence. The gorgeous river nymph tossed her indigo hair and slunk down the bank to meet him head-on, a lithe, leggy eye-treat of ice-blue skin, wrapped in a length of smoke-infused spidersilk and thread-of-silver. She had draped it off one shoulder to fit close and hug her scrumptious curves from bosom to ankles, except the one leg that kept sneaking in and out of the side slit. The opening went up past her hip, territory that Haides knew intimately.

He didn’t let himself look. That was the last drink he needed to drown himself in tonight.

She snickered. “I didn’t believe the rumors when I heard them—couldn’t believe them. The King of the Dead swooning and mooning in the River of Woeful Wah? Truly, Agesilaos?”

He flicked a glare of warning at her for using that epithet so snidely. Usually she whispered it or crooned it, if she wasn’t screaming it in ecstatic delirium. It meant, “the one who attracts all to him,” and she had adopted it as her personal pet name for him.

My irresistible one, my Agesilaos.

Now she sneered at him down her nose. “You are the Host of Many. He of Innumerable Names and Unfathomable Wealth. And some flighty little flower goddess has you all turned about in your head? You? The Commander of Multitudes? You rule the entire rotting Underworld, Degmon.”

Stepping up onto the bank, he met her nose-to nose. “You’ve always had a quick, sharp tongue, Minthe, and there are ways in which I find that pleasurable. This is not one of them. I advise you, never allow your occasional position riding my rod to put you under the delusion that the ruler of the entire rotting Underworld will allow you to snipe disrespect without consequence. I do not make intimate companions of those who do so. Neither do I hesitate to issue correction to my myriad subjects, should they earn it, so choose which one you would rather be.”

She held her ground and lifted her chin until her lips nearly grazed his. “You know what I choose. And I advise you, Illustrious King, my darling. Never mistake my intentions.” Before he could fire back a response, Minthe’s gaze went as frosty as her tone. “If that nitwit is moaning Ares’ name rather than a dozen of yours? Pfffft. She doesn’t deserve you.”

Haides blinked hard. He couldn’t help the kindling of vindicated gratitude for Minthe’s opinion. Nevertheless, he sidestepped her and distracted himself with vaporizing the wetness from his long chiton and skin. He exchanged his circlet for his official diadem and re-curled his already perfect hair and beard for a night on the throne.

“You know it’s true,” she said.

“It’s none of your business. Be gone. I have work to do.”

She chuckled and came up behind him. “Oh, work...” she murmured into his ear. “I’ll show you work, my irresistible one.” Molding her form along the back of his, she traced the line of his sternum with one hand. The other slid across his hip and then lowered. Her fingers cupped, gripped, then massaged the spidersilk of his chiton against his balls.   

It felt good to his skin, but not to anything else, which surprised him. That had never happened before. Rather liberating as he realized that it had less to do with having so recently blown off his charge and more to do with Minthe. Another vindication. He stood motionless, grinning at his impassivity to her touch with his gaze fixed out across the misty lake.

“My intoxicating one,” she whispered. “Aidoneos.” Her teeth nipped his earlobe.

He jerked his shoulder against her, ripping his ear from her grasp. “Don’t.” She was the last one he wanted to hear whispering such an ancient, intimate version of his name.

She switched to rubbing his godhead. He kept waiting for the response. It didn’t come. Her chilly nose ran along the edge of his ear. “You don’t need to slip off to work tonight. You’re the Lord of the Underworld. You can do as you please.”

He smirked. “I can. And I do. Always.”

She replied with an enraptured hum and traced a line of frost up the side of his throat with her tongue. “Of course you do, if you’re here with me, my hands upon you—”

“You’re wasting your time. And mine. I’m not in the mood.”

“Oh, I think you’ll find that you are.”

“I think you’ll find yourself incorrect.”

She switched to using both hands on him. “You simply need a little encouragement. To be reminded that all the tastiest and richest delicacies come from the Great Below.” She yanked him close with an extra tight squeeze of his crotch.

He gave an overt stare at his continued flaccidness, then took fanged satisfaction in quipping, “Obviously not.” Plucking Minthe’s hands away, he dropped them in midair and strode back to the lake. “Leave off. I’m busy.”

“It’s not like any of them are going anywhere.”

“Precisely.” He glanced at the hundreds of ghosts backed up to the Gate of Shades. No doubt Kharon had plunked down on his barge, far around the bend of the lakeshore. At this very moment, he was probably picking at his calluses or picking his nose, irritated at being kept away from this bank while his liege remained occupied with personal stupidity. Haides refused to heap on another layer by ensuring that others had to shirk their duties along with him. “The dead are not going anywhere while you delay my arrival across the Mere.” He sent the vibration of invocation through his body as he called, “KHARON.”

Minthe tisked. “Now why would you go and do a thing like that?” Coming up behind Haides, she gripped him under the chin, grabbed his hair, and jerked his head back against her in a way that usually boiled his ichor and induced the urge to grab, fling, launch, mount.

Tonight it just pissed him off. Clenching her wrists again, he slipped under her arms, faced her down, and drove her three steps backward. “I said let me be.”

When he maneuvered her hands to her sides and released her, she crossed her arms and thrust her statuesque nose in the air. “Oh, very well. Have done with your mood. Catalogue your mumblers and grumblers, then go burn it off with some flaying downstairs. You know where I’ll be when you’ve rectified yourself.”

At the sight of Kharon’s silhouette out on the lake, one corner of Haides’ mouth curved upward. “I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting.”

“You can stop with the pretense anytime. We both know you want it. And tonight, you need it.”

“I sincerely do not,” he said, thrilled to discover how deeply he meant that. That was new. “Nor will I in the future, so I suggest that you acquire amnesia about the location of my palace and my innumerable workplaces. What good fortune, there’s a river for that. Why don’t you go jump in it?”

She scoffed and opened her mouth to retort, but in her attempts to seduce and jibe, she had missed the arrival of Kerberos. The delightful mutt had slunk out of the shadows to loom over her. A long line of drool made its way toward the luscious blue waves of Minthe’s hair. Alas, before it could land, the spotty-eyed head bent down, stuck a snout up under her buttocks, and took a loud sniff. She squawked and jumped, then fumed. The monster’s center head slathered a drooling tongue up her bare arm and cheek. Her screeches this time rained disgust as she she fought to wipe herself clean. “Bad Kerb! Bad!”

Haides’ grin broadened. “Good boy.”

Kerberos whuffed out a triple-throated laugh.

Minthe hurled her glares back and forth between the hound and his master. “Oh, I despise you both!”

Without so much as meeting her eyes, Haides pointed in the direction of her home.

“Unseen fiend! You get rid of this slobber this instant!”

Haides chuckled. He could have done, with no more than a blink. But why would he? “Plenty of rivers for that, too. Including the one in which you live. You might want to stay there.” He tossed a wink at her from beneath his few derelict curls, and then strode out across the water to meet Kharon, adjusting his diadem and hair from the wreck she had made of it.

“May you earn an eagle to eat your liver for eternity, you slick prick! Oh, you are such a slinking, stinking, glowing…” Her infuriated pants sounded across the water. Finally, she came up with one of the worst things anyone from the Lower Realms could ever think to hurl at him: “Olympian!”

Haides answered with nothing but a guffaw, tickled to have won so easily. That term always signaled her depleted arsenal. His unwavering lack of arousal had undoubtedly done half the work for him. For several more seconds, her retreating curses and insults bounced off the cavern walls until distance finally (blessedly) swallowed the last of her presence.

He heaved an aggravated sigh, unable to fathom why he had dallied for so long with such a malicious creature. The relief of sexual frustration wasn’t nearly enough to put up with her. She never abated his loneliness. In fact, spending time with her usually worsened it. The precise thing he did not need this night.

The vision smacked him in the face again—that enraptured gleam in Kore’s eyes as she gazed into the water and invoked that name with such yearning.

Not Haides’ name. Not any of his myriad monikers.

Nope, just the name of the brash godling who occupied all her imaging. All her steamy, creamy dreams. Her orgasmic, cataclysmic, cosmos-splitting fantasies about Ares’ pumping pecs and his too-bold grin.

And yet it’s my song she hums. What else is new? It wouldn’t be the first time Ares had been given credit for something Haides had done. There was that tale about the venom-spewing giant who had been vanquished when it almost took out Zeus. One of Ekhidna’s spawn. That had been Haides who slew it, not Ares. That Second Generation knockoff hadn’t even been born yet! None of them had, but who usually got the credit in the telling?

And who was trapped on this side of the Impassable, unable to set the record straight?

Haides gnashed his teeth and stomped across the water to meet his ferryman, at last able to give his reaction its head, now that he’d gotten rid of Minthe. For this one moment to himself, he let it all race down the mountainside. Do you fucking jest, girl? Ares? The hotheaded, degenerate, throne-less, ball-less God of War? Worthless wastrel.

What was she thinking?

Those blasted second-generation Olympians. What a pack of frigid virgins and ornamental ding-dongs. And the boys? Golden, glittering Zeus-lings with their clean faces and hairless chests. No doubt their ball sacks were hairless as well, a tribute to some perpetual state of adolescent innocuousness beneath the King on High, for nobody up there dared arise better or greater than He Almighty.

Hence, the fate of banishment and barren solitude for the eldest Olympian son.

Ares now held that title.

Unqualified upstart.

Haides snarled.

But after a few seconds, he rolled his eyes. He couldn’t actually despise his nephew. Truth be told, he held a particular fondness for the God of War. Ares never failed to deliver from either side of victory or defeat, and his dark, rebellious stench was a breath of fresh air up there. He exhibited far more dam than sire in both looks and manner, and fine then! He was anything but hairless. He was, however, clean-faced and snot-nosed, lacking any authoritative station that required a drop of responsibility or maturity.

Apparently Kore cared nothing about that. She was still so young, made more so by her perpetual cloistering. Were all the first-generation gods nothing but decrepit father-figures to her eyes? Such a mortal notion as incest was impossible between divine beings. Immortal essence had been designed to mix and mingle in any possible combination for the vast creation of the Universe. Age was as unfathomable a notion, for gods were deathless—ageless, as the saying went.

And yet…

Haides glowered.

Did Zeus’ second-eldest daughter refer to the god who ruled the Underworld as her nasty old uncle?

No doubt Demeter had hammered the image into her. What would the blossom-flinging Sprite of Light ever find alluring about the Tormentor of Tartaros?

Don’t ever forget who you are, he chastised himself. You are the Notorious One. You dwell in shadow, dine near Death, and breathe rot every hour of every day for eternity. You are the last god any shiny Olympian princess would choose as a mate, so quit moping about and get back to work.

He crossed the final distance between his nose and Kharon’s in several decisive strides.

Although he did not wear his diamond-studded armor or the spectral war-helmet topped by his towering headdress of horns and thorns, everything else he wore in his posture and visage quelled the ferryman’s usual quips to an eyebrow-raising, “Evenin’, m’lord.” The grizzled daimon doffed his hat. That gesture and his status as Haides' second-in-command saved him from a tongue-lashing for all the sniggers he kept harnessed behind his rotting teeth. Being the Lord of the Underworld's best friend always helped, too. As such, the flames in Kharon's eyes still dared to dance as he said, “Takin’ care o’ business?”

“Always,” Haides fired back. “And only one piece of it is any of yours.”

Kharon’s head tipped. “Fair enough. Headed down to the Lethe before squattin’ yer seat then?”

Haides stared him down. “No.” The water beneath his feet quivered in the rumble of his ire. “Is there some particular reason that the River of Forgetting should be a desirable destination for me right now?”

The daimon shrugged. “None I can think of. Unless Yer Mightiness has one.”

“I do not.”

“Huh.”

“Exactly.” Haides nodded at the ghosts Kharon had delivered. As they awaited the king's arrival, they milled about the shoreline, wandered in the reeds, plodded up the hill in a ragtag line toward the stately, columned rotunda. “Keep them coming,” Haides snapped. “Double-time.”

Without awaiting a reply, he skimmed the remainder of the lake. He transpired upon the shore and stalked up the hill, wading through the shades as if through air. It couldn’t harm them, but something about barreling through them always made Haides feel better. They didn’t notice, just kept shuffling.

Upon entering the House of Judgment, the King of the Dead plopped down on his business throne. The sleek ebony-and-obsidian number matched his disposition. He assumed a regal posture and an impartial deportment, then began measuring each soul’s deeds before cataloging it into its place of rest or redemption.

With a glance at the endless queue awaiting him, he snuffled out a Kerberos-like laugh. I’m not the Host of Many. I’m the Host of Too Many. Of late, he had considered delegating this task to underlings so that the lines would no longer get backed up and he could find more time for his other duties. Could perhaps even have enough time for leisure.

Now he was glad that this task and so many others fell solely upon his shoulders. It would leave him no idle hours for foolish musings or fanciful spying on naked, orgasmic goddesses who were infatuated with unworthy, swaggering hotheads. It would leave him even less opportunity to notice the empty chair the next time he sat down for supper.

Up Next: Eros woos his most formidable ally to ensure his victory. Wut? He might be the God of Love, but he was spawned from the God of War’s lust, and armed with Ares’ most keen, ruthless aim. Thus does he seek out the Mistress of Crossing Between Above & Below, the Threefold Goddess: HEKATE.

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