The Underworld
The first soul came through like a tear.
Just one. Faint. Hesitant. A flicker of light at the edge of the Underworld's broken gate.
Hades felt it before he saw it. A small warmth in the cold. A whisper that wasn't words. Just presence. Just memory.
Then another came.
And another.
And then the gate didn't open—it shattered.
The souls poured through like water through a cracked dam. Not a stream. A flood. Endless waves of light, tangled and screaming, slamming into the Underworld's dark plains with force that made the ground shudder. They came from everywhere. From the fractures in Heaven, from the collapsing Citadel, from places that had held them for centuries—now bursting open, now letting go.
Hades stood at the center of it all.
