Chapter 49: The Lord Who Waited
Hades did not raise his voice. He did not need to.
The air inside the crumbling temple grew thick until every breath felt like swallowing ash.
"RAAAWWRRR…" Cerberus' three heads growled in sync, with frightening ferocity.
The heavy sound traveled and shook the worn stones of the long-abandoned temple. Every soul within the circle moved silently. Every path of escape was blocked by an endless sea of shades.
Amon stepped in front of Liliana, patiently. Golden eyes locked with Hades in a silent challenge.
"First, you broke the old agreements for souls of that rank," Amon said, his voice calm and clear. "Then, you pulled them from your own realm."
Hades smiled. "Agreements made with the high scepters of heaven, who no longer answer, are for all intents and purposes null and void," he said, his voice trailing forward as he spoke. "I have been patient, Golden One. I watched you clean up the surface world of all demigod kind, setting the balance to rights.
I watched you train up this little witch here, testing her limits and training her to fight. I even watched her fall deeply in love with you, which was really rather touching of her."
Liliana's hands balled into fists. Violet threads of darkness began to twist around her fingers, but she didn't unleash them yet.
The ancient structure was a temple that belonged to a long-lost cult of mortals who sought to worship and tap into the energy of the border between life and death.
Long abandoned, it was now a simple, ruined group of pillars and a cracked old altar, exposed to the heavens by an open roof.
Hades continued speaking as if he were making a casual remark, waiting for the others to arrive. "I guess what I am trying to say is that every time a powerful soul is pulled down into the Underworld, the seal placed here is somewhat weakened.
And so, to prevent my own personal demise from being decided by some capricious fate, I have been feeding the thing in the darkest depths of my realm.
Something older than the Olympian gods, something that the Creator had sealed away and then seemed to have forgotten about. And now it is starting to wake up."
Amon's face did not change, but there was a drop in temperature. For a moment the golden light that followed him everywhere seemed to dull, then spring back to life.
"Fighting it for you" is not what Amon intended to say.
"Let me rephrase. I want the Creator's weapon to do what it was made for. And I brought insurance."
The shades parted.
One of the renegade demigods stepped forward from the shadows behind Cerberus. The tall one, with the scar across his left eyebrow, the woman with the braid coiled around her head, and the third, the youngest of them all, with the half smile that never quite reached his eyes.
They looked older, twisted by whatever dark power Hades had used to turn them into creatures of the underworld.
Liliana's breath stopped.
"Can I kill them?" she asked, part of her intensifying, like the world around her was made just for this.
Twenty one years of searching for the people that took her parents from her. Twenty one years of building up her power, searching for clues of where they might be. And there they stood in front of her, ten paces away.
The same tall, strong man with the same scar above his left eyebrow, the same woman with the same braided hair, and the young man with the same half smile that never reached his eyes.
Hades continued. "Kill the girl, or open the deeper gate yourself. Either way, the seal breaks a little more. Your choice, Golden One."
Amon did not look at her.
He simply said, "Liliana. Run."
She did not move.
"I said run."
The first demigod lunged. Amon sighed and met him halfway.
The fight lasted eleven minutes.
Amon dispatched the three demigods with the cold efficiency of a killing machine.
The first was broken across a pillar of stone, his spine snapped in a sharp crack that seemed to resonate throughout the cavern. The second tried to attack from behind, but was caught and had his arm twisted upward in a vicious arc.
Amon ripped the man's heart from his chest in a single, smooth motion, the blood spraying from the wound in a crimson fountain that splattered against the ground in a puddle of red. The third, however, proved to be a somewhat trickier proposition.
Cerberus did not get near Amon during the fight. Every time the hound of hell attempted to attack him, his hand would shoot out in front of him and create a golden barrier of pure force, slamming the beast back and carving deep grooves in the ground.
One of the hound's heads even snapped at the barrier Amon created, leaving a large smear of black, nasty looking saliva on it, which hissed against the light.
Hades had watched the entire battle, arms folded across his chest. The shades stood around the perimeter of the battle scarred ground, never once moving from their fixed positions.
For a moment Amon stood tall, blood, none of it his, dripping from his fingers. He wiped his clean hand against his coat and let his other hand drop.
Hades tilted his head. "…Why resist, Amon? This is my world. I'm god here, the one and only. Even if you destroy me, I would rise up once more… so why bother."
Amon knew it. Liliana knew it. They were trapped here, literally so.
"I will open the gate to the Underworld, but the little girl must leave."
"Ha!… You still don't understand?"
Just as Amon was about to confirm his deal with Hades, Liliana stepped forward and interrupted him.
"Take me… I know what you want. It's not the gates of Tartarus you want opened."
Amon's head snapped toward her. "Liliana."
Hades looked at her and smiled. "…And that is?"
"Me…"
"Excellent," Hades replied, walking toward her. "Liliana, the Purple Witch, you are of my kind. I knew you could see it. All that dark potential. I will unlock your chains, and you can unlock the gates of the underworld, while I, err, exit the scene."
Amon stared at her for a long time, something cold and hard settling into the gray of his eyes.
"No! Don't you dare!" he said.
Then he raised his hand.
The feeling of Amon's power covered her like a second skin. At first she thought he was going to protect her as he always did. But instead of warming her like he usually did, the golden light felt cold and hard.
It didn't feel like he was binding her up to save her. And when she tried to pull her hands up to her face, she found she couldn't. The golden light was holding her fast.
"Master…?"
"You are not strong enough for what comes next. And I shall not be watching your death for a mission that was never yours, Liliana."
He turned back to Hades.
"I will open the gate, Hades. I can't say I will ask twice."
Hades laughed once, a dry, rattling sound. "I know, I know, the great golden immortal… You know what, open the gates and manage what comes outside. You have the keys."
The ground split.
Behind the Lord of the Dead, a vertical wound of pure black opened up, a cold so deep and so devoid of temperature that it seemed to be pulling in on itself.
A deep, musty smell of old earth rose up, but beneath that was an even older smell, the smell of something that had been around since the dawn of time, long before the first slivers of sunlight had forced their way through the cracks in the ceiling of existence, and that something was long since dead and gone.
Amon walked toward it without so much as a backward glance.
"Master!… Master, Amon!" Liliana screamed.
As Amon disappeared into the black of the gate, the golden light that had held her pressed against her throat, pressed even harder, like it was trying to stop her reckless actions, cutting her off from the darkness.
For a moment she was blind, black spots dancing at the edge of her vision. Then, just as suddenly, she could see again, though her voice was hoarse and her throat felt as if it had been branded.
She tried to reach for the darkness that always answered her call, but it was stifled by the golden chains. Instead, the violet threads of her will disappeared from her mind as if snuffed out.
Just before he stepped through, Amon spoke one last time, still without turning.
"Forget me, Liliana. That is an order."
Then he was gone.
The gate slammed shut behind him with the sound of grinding stone. The black wound in the ground closed up, and the terrible cold that seemed to be made of pure darkness began to seep back into the underworld. Then…
The chains dissolved.
Liliana collapsed to her knees on the scorched stone. She gazed down at her hands to see raw, red wounds on her wrists.
The skin around her throat felt swollen and sore, like a bad bruise. She brought a hand up to her mouth and coughed once, sharply. A trickle of blood ran down her chin.
Hades disappeared into the shadows within the temple, fading from sight. His final whisper was like a lover's breath against her ear.
"Remember, he always chooses the mission and never the people around him, little witch. It will only fuel your hatred more."
The temple was once again empty except for the three bodies of the demigods, the ones who shared the same scar as her parents, leaving Liliana on her knees in the center of the room.
She stayed there for a long time.
It had taken twenty one years of her life to become as good as he was. In all those long years, they had fought together against all sorts of enemies.
And in the end, she was cast away by him, in the very moment of greatest need.
Left behind without so much as a second glance. Because she was weak. Perhaps.
She forced herself to stand. Slowly.
Her legs wobbled beneath her, and for a moment Liliana felt herself collapse back onto the stone floor.
But she didn't, for the darkness that had always been lurking inside her began to stir back, and it felt different.
It felt sharper, chaotic, and for the first time in her life she realized that something in the way Amon had bound her had cracked.
He had ordered her to forget him.
She would not.
She would remember every second of those eleven minutes.
All the special little moments, like the way he did not even look at her when he gave her orders. The special tone he used when he spoke to her, letting her know that she was not strong enough. His special whisper in her ear as Hades disappeared into the shadows.
And she would use all of it.
The violet threads of darkness slowly returned to her fingers, as if the underworld itself was fueling her.
This time, however, they were thicker, and instead of feeling like tools that she was in control of, she felt that they were something that had been waiting for permission to grow.
Liliana wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and followed the blackened stone out of the Temple of the Cloistered Eye.
Behind her, the three bodies of the demigods lay on the stone floor. She didn't look back, as they started to move on their own, finding a new master.
For the first time in twenty one years, she was alone.
And something inside her, something the Creator had indeed missed, began to rot.
She did not try to stop it.
She let it be, and she let it grow.