💀 The Rivers of Pain & Fire
6LS5 - Haides. (You may know him as Hades. Commander of Multitudes. The Unseen One. Divine Warden. Host of Many a Ghost. He of Way Too Many Names.)
Previously on 6 LITTLE SEEDS:
—From The Act of Bathing:
…The underwater fronds coiled and twined like dark serpents, flicking pleasure there and here and oh, there! Within every shadow of the forest, she imagined she could make out his eyes watching her, equally dark, equally intoxicating. She thrilled to the thought of him spying on her, although she knew she shouldn’t. That he shouldn’t. That irresistible one. The one destined for her by the Fates.
She dared not invoke his name, not even in her mind. Names had power, especially when voiced with such surging emotion. That would call him to her, which could only bring disaster. Yet she couldn’t help imagining his voice, his song, his gaze, his scent.
All around the pool, trees burst into buds, then blossoms, then leaves. The leaves crinkled-ignited-fell. Ash. And then buds-blossoms-leaves-cinders-buds-blossoms-leaves…over and over until a short, piercing cry shot from her throat, incinerating every leaf and blade of grass in earshot.
Silence.
Slowly, gently, blossoming came to the forest once more until all appeared as it had before. No one would be the wiser, for nothing was altered.
Nothing but her.
—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.”
HAIDES, LORD OF THE UNDERWORLD, KING OF THE DEAD
🔥💀🔥
The dingy water of the Akherousian Mere lapped at his thighs. He closed his eyes with a slow exhalation to hone his focus. Then he drew in a deep breath—
And gagged.
He should have known better. He at least ought to be used to the stench by now, but after a millennium of ruling this place, it still hadn't happened.
At the final bend in the River Akheron, the tight course gave way to this broad lake that sprawled between the Gate of Shades and the House of Judgment. In order for newly arrived souls to receive their post-death sentences, they had to pay for transport and be ferried across. The Mere was much calmer than the river, and warmer. Fouler. No matter. If the odor was too pungent on a day Haides didn't want to smell it, he banished all scent from his nostrils.
Today was one such. How could he conjure the sweetness of blossoming flowers in his mind with the Akherousian reek rising into his face? But this was the only place in all the Underworld where he could see her.
Since the barrier separating the Upper and Lower Realms had been rendered impassable to all who crossed into the Lands of the Dead, including—no, especially their lord, Haides had developed clandestine ways of surveying the homelands of his youth. There were still breaches. There were obscure fissures, if one knew where to look. Scarcely any who resided in the Great Below knew as many as he did. It was, after all, his divine duty to discover such rifts and close them.
Or use them, as was his prerogative.
As it so happened, Demeter’s Protected Grove possessed a pool fed by a natural spring. The basin of that pool cut deep into the bedrock. Uncommonly deep. The Lord of the Underworld had secretly named the spring Euphoria, because a minuscule amount of its water seeped downward through a hairline fracture, as if knowing (no matter what the rest of the water thought) where it belonged.
Where she belonged.
After many turns and trickles, some of those derelict droplets found their way into an underground stream, which shed water into one of the chthonic tributaries that fed the River Akheron and thus its stenchy lake.
Haides hadn’t allowed himself the pleasure of spying on the Bringer of Blossomtime for over three moons. Three dark moons, to be precise. At that time of the lunar cycle, the veil between realms was at its thinnest, making it easier for him to bend shadows and darkness to his will.
No shortage of darkness between the Akherousian Mere and Demeter’s pool.
Unlike Euphoria, the Akheron’s nickname was no secret. Haides hadn’t bestowed that one. Since long before he had descended those 999,999 stairs to the Underworld, it had been called the River of Woe, and for good reason. Millennia of misery and loss had seeped into the Akheron’s waters from every soul ferried into the Lands of the Dead.
It was also called the River of Pain. If Haides tapped into his own sore spots until he vibrated in compliment, he could weave it all together—darkness, pain, mist, water—transforming the lake into one giant descrying bowl that let him see into the Protected Grove.
On the night of the dark moon, he could even form a conduit between his domain and Demeter’s pool.
Haides had secretly named the conduit Convenient.
Kore loved to swim in that pool.
She also bathed there.
The Lord of the Underworld could not actually leave the Lands of the Dead anymore. Good King Zeusy had seen to that 789 years ago. He’d said it was for “continuity.”
Although Zeus had banned unchaperoned ghosts from haunting the Upper Realms upon claiming the Throne On High a millennium ago, he had still allowed Haides to ascend for official duties and family gatherings. But then had come that spat between Zeus and his wife where Hera had threatened to ask Haides to storm the Upper Realms with the Underworld’s legions of the dead—a threat that had been bandied about one too many times in Zeus’ rule by one too many upset goddesses, and a couple times by Haides himself.
Considering how tense relations had been between the Sky King and the Lord of the Underworld at that time, Zeus had formally closed the borders, made the Walls of Bronze and Night impassable, and even forbade Haides from crossing without official Olympian sanction.
(Haides suspected that this decision may have also been influenced by the night he and Poseidon had rearranged Zeus’ temple on Mount Olympos, turning the Sky Dome upside-down and placing the statues of Zeus and Hera to look like his was kissing the ass of hers.)
(And that other time that Haides and Poseidon had dissipated Baby Brother’s cloud-steeds three minutes before the chariot race at their annual games. It usually took several hours to wrangle those flighty beasts back into a form capable of pulling a chariot. Haides couldn’t remember who won, only that it wasn’t Zeus. And isn’t that really what mattered?)
(The Sky King’s decision may also have had something to do with the way Haides had looked at Kore at the same event. Since Demeter had refused to let the Fiend of the Underworld so much as introduce himself to the girl, Haides had made the mistake of trying to get Zeus on his side. But he hadn’t realized how protective the Thunderer was of his daughters—as irrational about them as Rabid Mother. Within the year, the Walls had been double-warded, imprisoning Haides behind them as permanently as the ghosts he jailed.)
(Coincidence?)
(Sure.)
Since then, the Lord of the Underworld had only been granted permission to cross into the Upper Realms once—when the Titans had dug through to the walls and bashed a crack into them. So now the walls were triple-warded.
As a result, the Unseen One, the Host of Many A Ghost, Haides the Notorious had to rely on sneaking through back-channels for all his spying needs. One of the advantages to having his immortal essence bound to the Great Below: he could become as shadow himself now. The spectral echo of his divine visage could slip here and sneak there, bending space and skipping through time via the dark breath of Erebos the way they used the light of Aither on Olympos or Khaos in the Mortal Realm. With great concentration he could cast his consciousness through any unsealed fissure between Below and Above, snooping on his old haunts and one-time companions the way mortals watched their entertainers.
When it came to Olympos, there wasn’t much difference. Tragedies and dramas. Epic adventures. Buffoonery more than anything. Some of the best yarns required snacks.
What? How else was the Lord of the Underworld supposed to learn the truth about what his allies and enemies were up to? They certainly weren’t going to divulge it to him. Bonus that he received amusement out of the deal.
In the Underworld, you took that wherever you could find it.
Not like anybody ever knew. (All right, fine. Not like anybody but Kerberos ever knew.) When the Unseen One donned his Helmet of Invisibility, even the most sensitive deities couldn’t detect his scrutiny. They hated that he could do that, and accused him of being a creepy, spying lecher.
They weren’t wrong.
Although for many centuries, his lecherous thoughts primarily revolved around one individual.
So hurl him into Tartaros, what the fuck else was he supposed to do down here?
Rest assured, every time he spied on Kore, he paid for it. To create the link cost vast stores of his vitality. Plus, he had to dredge up his own woe and wallow in it.
Ever since realizing that his banishment—do please pardon—his transfer to the Underworld was permanent, Haides had ceased letting that much emotion course through him unchecked. To do so served no purpose. The realm ran more efficiently beneath his veneer of phlegmatic elegance and irrefutable authority: the quintessential king.
Linking so intimately with the River of Woe disrupted that.
Completely worth it, to catch even the merest glimpse of Kore.
More often, he could hear her through the conduit. That distinctive song, so dulcet, so luring, rippling across the waters. It haunted his dreams and lodged in his ears at the most inopportune moments. Usually while he was working.
(When wasn’t he working?)
In the past years, she had begun humming a new tune—a higher-pitched version of the song he tended to sing while wading in the Mere, gazing upon pretty little things that liked to fling flowers. (The amount of undiluted blood-nectar that he had consumed over supper may or may not have contributed to his decision to sing. Or to spy, for that matter.) Upon first realizing that she could hear him as well as he could hear her, his heart had thrilled.
Then thudded in agonized longing.
Yet swelled with something he hadn’t felt since ass-thrashing those Titan fuckers into the pit a millennium ago.
One droplet of hope.
Those were his favorite times watching her. When she hummed his song while prancing about, punctuating it with her own chimes, whirling and swooning to his melody, painting trees and bushes with all the hues he could no longer behold. Hues like the cascading curls of her hair.
To his eyes, they looked pinkish-silver. He had heard they were rose-gold.
Since taking up the Chthonic Throne, golden tones had been all but lost to him, along with sunlight. Whenever he peered through the shadowy conduit, everything was murky, as though a thin, gray veil had been draped over his eyes.
As for using his Akherousian descrying bowl, few blazes were powerful enough to cut through the nighttime hues of the Underworld and let gold shine with the warmth of its natural splendor. Only the molten brilliance of the River Pyriphlegethon could do that.
And a few of the nastier torture pits filled with fire.
And Haides’ aura on occasion.
None of which were conducive for spying on the Protected Grove.
Tonight, his aura cast its customary light across the surface of the lake. Upon bonding with the Underworld, his golden Olympian glow had been replaced by an eerie greenish-pink. His skin had gone bone-white, his ichor ran like mercury, and his once-dark hair was now a silver-gilt ash. So was his beard. Only his eyes had gone darker, as black as Night herself.
He avoided looking upon his ghoulish visage as often as he could, but in order to synchronize with the Akheron, he had to peer into its depths. His reflection glared back, a spectral mimicry of his former splendor. His eyelids tightened and his teeth gnashed. Yep. That would do it.
Deeper. Deeper down. The light of his aura dulled. The mist swirled.
Deeper still. Into the depths of his own guts. There he found the needful things. Bile. Acid. That stone splashing down to settle on the bottom with everything else. Silent. Motionless. Hopeless. And the blinding deluge. Rage and fury and war and revenge, all woven into a nine-layer ring! The River of Bitterest Damned Hate.
His eyes closed.
Too much.
The River Akheron was pain, not hate.
To synchronize, he would have to back it down. His breath eased out, hovered, then drew in through his nostrils. He looked again. A grisly, hollowed out husk stared back. Ravaged flesh. One cheek laid bare to the bone.
His lids slammed shut. Another focused breath. The echo of his solitary footsteps on stone…the unceasing drip of water off stalactites…the musty cave-scent…the never-ending rush of rivers…
There.
It hummed between his flowing ichor and the water.
Synchrony.
His eyes eased open.
The glow of his aura had gone a duller green, closer to the Akheron’s putrid hue. The Mere had gone black, showing no reflection. With another inhalation, he pierced his mind into a singular focus: the scent of orange-blossoms in the sun.
Demeter’s pool shivered into sight, and floating within its heart—
His eyes flew open. His breath huffed out in disbelief.
Amidst the Mortal Realm’s midday, he usually had to prowl the shadows of the forest to find her, but there she was, bathed in sacred waters, afternoon sunshine, and bliss. The Akherousian murk and the Underworld’s gloom smeared a film over the image, but he could see her as clearly as his outstretched hand.
As she floated with her eyes closed, a smile lit up her face. The rest of her body was submerged, except for what bobbed just above the surface. Oh, the most heavenly, perfectly, delectably divine breasts. Nipples taut and pointed skyward. Two rosy buds dotting peachy skin. Her berry-sweet lips twitched into a puckered quirk, as though some thought had made her hold back words to keep it just for herself.
Haides could conjure about five dozen secret-worthy thoughts in a blink. Not that he was capable of blinking at the moment. He wouldn’t have let himself anyway.
And miss a millisecond of Kore?
Naked?
He had only ever seen her alone and clothed, or naked and bathing alongside her mother, which always snuffed his enthusiasm for fantasizing. With Rabid Mama watching over her chicklet, he really did feel like a creepy old lecher, so he winced away and left them to it.
Now finding Kore alone and unclothed, her mask of childlike modesty shed upon that bank along with her chiton, it was clear. That goddess was anything but a chicklet. Her languid sprawl brought him to spear-stiff attention. As for looking away?
Not happening.
Her dainty toes fluttered against the water in a few soft kicks. Her arms wafted up toward the drifting filaments of her hair, then trailed back down. She swayed her spine to one side and then the other. Her hair trailed after. She inhaled, which buoyed her breasts further. The exhalation she let out was more of an ecstatic sigh, as if some unseen hand had just caressed them.
His fingers tensed. His jaw cranked open, but nothing would issue forth except a choked breath and an overjoyed chuckle. How had he been favored with this timing, in all these centuries? Before he marred the vision by reaching into the water, he balled his hands up and thrust them behind his head. “Oh, fuck me on the flaming wheel."
Her eyes opened and she righted herself, scanning the shadows of the forest as though she had heard him, had perhaps felt his eyes upon her. She panted shallowly. But that was not fear in her face. Rather, exhilaration. Her hunger mirrored what he felt.
He edged closer to the shadows surrounding the pool. One side of his mouth crept up. She had never been so blatant about it before. Usually, she glanced into the thicket and then whirled away, blushing and springing off. The last time, she had whispered, “Who’s there?” Haides hadn’t been merely descrying in the Mere that day. He had cast himself up there. Now how she had sensed him through his Helmet of Invisibility, he had no idea. But that had only stoked his desire more.
He had almost taken off that helmet and revealed himself. But the last thing he wanted was to frighten her. Or offend her. But would it?
The way she kept staring into the shadows, it felt as though she could see him, and that his presence intensified her heat.
Pillars of the Pyriphlegethon, he mused in silence, not wanting to scare her away from the pool. You like it. Don’t you? The thought that someone could be watching you right now.
Or was that just his wishful thinking?
Whatever was going on in her mind, he liked what it did to her face.
The shadows crept from the trees into her gaze as she took one more furtive glance around, then swam toward the shore. Haides watched in anticipation. He had the perfect angle to view her emergence from the pool.
The rear view.
But she remained in the water. It took him a moment to realize what she was doing. When comprehension struck, his arm slapped around his ribcage and he jerked his head aside, muffling his tormented groan-of-delight in his palm.
Yet he couldn’t stop watching. When the foliage surrounding Kore burst into life, he shifted the water to gain a better angle. He needed to see her face, the overwhelmed luster of her eyes, almost desperate in her attempt to keep silent. How her mouth kept opening anyway. He wanted to fill it. With his tongue. His thumb. Wanted to grab her by the legs with their faces in each other’s crotches and torment each other, tease-for-tease, grind for grind, lick-for-grab-for-suck-for-thrust. See who could make the other cave first. He wanted to grab her by the face and pile-drive.
Kore was a goddess. No chance of causing damage like he would to any mortal. (He’d learned that one the hard way, in spite of the extreme self-restraint he had used. He had been so stunned that he fired off an unsanctioned divine healing, which had earned him a thorough ass-chewing from the Olympian Council.)
(Back during those brief years when he’d had a seat on the Council.)
Even the sundry river nymphs down here couldn’t take him. Not truly. Not fully. But a goddess sired by the Thunderer Supreme and birthed by the immeasurable Queen of the Earth?
Damage was not an issue. It solely came down to desire.
Would she want it or not?
Could she ever want him?
Kore’s heavy pants filled the forest. A moan escaped her—swiftly clamped behind her lips. Haides did the same, burying his ravenous sigh behind the hard compression of his knuckles.
When she began undulating in time with her panting, his fist tightened. So did his godhead. It was a painful pike, snagged on his apron and demanding adjustment. As he tugged at the cloth, the pressure released but that simple brush shot a bolt through him. His breath caught. He didn’t let go of the apron. Couldn’t. Not with her legs frog-stroking like that.
His thumb ventured higher. Lower. Then his fingertips. Blind on the brilliance of her ecstasy, he panted through a slack mouth. Just a little more pressure. It was exactly what everybody accused him of and they would hate him if they knew but he worked the spidersilk along his shaft, then up around his overheated head. A low groan shuddered out of him.
They could all suck it. Frolicking up there together while he was imprisoned alone down here with his dream-goddess locked in her pretty-pretty cell by a jailor who ignored every proposal of marriage he sent, and a father who was more enemy than ally. He wished he could just ask Kore herself. Hers was the only answer that mattered.
What did she imagine as she rode those soft water weeds?
He imagined her imagining him. Imagined her sneaking out to find him…
His hand closed and he fell into full strokes. Saw her creeping down the long staircase amidst all those ghosts with her bare feet and her huge eyes. Her sharp breath upon finding herself nose-to-chest with him. The way she would tremble when he lifted her chin to kiss her, and the insatiable relief in both their moans as their mouths and arms and bodies finally collided.
Would she hate him too, if she knew what he was doing?
Faster. Tighter. The cloth was so smooth—what he imagined her delicate hands would feel like. Or the silky caress of her tongue. Or sliding into her…
The surface of the Mere ignited.
Nocturnal-eyed, Haides winced. Then he watched in awe as ash fell all around her. Its scent infiltrated the river. Tangy and familiar. It churned up the ash-scent already surrounding him. That final clawing, clinging whiff of memory to which any of his cremated or burned-down shades clung.
“Damnation,” he whispered. "Who are you, girl?" He was no longer transfixed upon her beauty alone, but upon what her ecstasy was doing to everything around her, especially him. Over and over, she pumped life and death and life and death and incinerated rebirth into the air. His breathing sped to match hers. So, too, the pace of his strokes as he grunted out his enthralled wonder. He had always felt she would be his perfect match, but this…
Light of Night, she's finally ready.
So was he. His hand thrashed the apron aside so he could grip himself skin-on-skin. His moans tumbled out. They crashed into curses.
Her sodden locks flew back in an arc as her climactic scream shot like fire from her throat. The brilliance of her orgasm transformed the Akherousian Mere into the Pyriphlegethon’s molten, purifying sea, and for one breathless moment, he beheld her in her true splendor: rose-gold and honey-creamed peaches ablaze.
The River of Fire surged up into him, through him, out of him. It scoured his insides. Purged clean his gunked-up runnels. The searing geyser arced. It blew a crater in the bank as his thunderous bellow exploded against the roof of the Underworld. Eight stalactites crashed down, blocking half the Gate of Shades. Didn’t matter. The ghosts would still seep in. He didn’t care. He kept roaring and pumping and roaring and pumping and he hadn’t known that kind of satisfaction in a blasted millennium.
HAPPY EQUINOX!
🍂💀🍁🌸🍂
UP NEXT:
—INFLAMER - The God of Love preps an arrow and his aim.
For your constantly updated bookmarking ease:
Want to start at the beginning?
The entire playlist of songs that I listen to for inspiration while working on this series:
—On YouTube
—On Spotify
The three primordial breaths of the Cosmos:
—Aither (Light) of the heavens
—Khaos (Chasm) of the Mortal Realm
—Erebos (Darkness) of the Underworld
© 2015 Hartebeast