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As they moved, Kore clung to the faint echo of her mother's voice—"Stay in the light." It was a thread pulling her back even as the dark claimed her forward. Under her feet, stone turned without announcing itself—basalt becoming damp rock, damp rock becoming ribbed marble, marble becoming raw, fractured slag. Each step was a quiet agreement: here, now, deeper. The hum she'd heard in the judges' alcove followed them, steady as water running far beneath the floor, and the mist thickened, curling at her ankles like something alive and patient.
Heat began to lick at the underside of her skin.
It rose in slow waves, tugging at her hair, drying her lips. The whisper of damp mineral gave way to sulfur—first thin, then unmistakable, stinging her nostrils and laying bitterness on the back of her tongue. Light came not in seams now but in flare—fitful, angry, thrown by flame that did not comfort.
The darkness opened, and a vast pit waited at the edge of it.
Below, a condemned shade knelt before an anvil sunk into black cinders, a forge-mouth yawning beside it. The fire breathed in hard pulses, a living thing with a bad temper—spitting, gulping, flaring—throwing light that never warmed, only punished. Heat shimmered in sheets. Smoke clung low, thick as old breath, tasting of scorched iron and bitter pitch. The air vibrated with the low, steady hum of a furnace that would not die.
With tongs clenched in blistered hands, the shade drew a bar of iron from the coals and laid it to the anvil. The first hammerfall rang out clean—bright as struck glass—then another, and another, a rhythm that tried to pretend it was purpose. Sparks burst and died in the haze. The metal began to yield, edge gathering, form resolving, as if the world might allow him something finished.
Each time the shape began to resemble something—edge gathering, form resolving—the iron shivered. The heat soured. The piece collapsed in on itself like wax, slumping back into a useless slag that hissed and crawled across the stone. The sound of it—metal failing—scraped at Kore's nerves worse than any scream.
The shade stared at the ruin with a mute, animal disbelief, then fumbled for another bar from the pile at his feet. His hands were raw, split to the bone; no blood came, only a dull, tar-dark sheen that steamed when it touched the coals.
"Why this endless toil?" Kore asked. Her voice came out smaller than she intended, swallowed by the forge's breath.
Her hand found Hades' arm without thought—fingers closing on the firm line beneath his chiton. He did not move away. Something in him only tightened into stillness, the kind that made the dark feel heavier—like earth settling over a grave. The flare-light tried to climb his cloak and failed; shadows clung to him as if they belonged there, drinking the fire down to embers where it touched his edges.
"He thought a blemish was a verdict," Hades said, voice low and unhurried, each word deliberate as a stone placed without haste. The heat did not roughen him; it only sharpened what was already there. "He laughed when the misshapen were treated as mistakes. When a mother's disgust became law."
Kore watched the shade's shoulders tremble with each ruined attempt, watched him flinch when the metal failed as if it had struck him.
Hades' gaze did not move from the anvil. It held like a weight.
"He called it right," he continued, quieter now, and the quiet carried more force than a shout. "He called it order."
The dead man lifted the hammer again. His arms shook. The blow landed. The iron sang—then died into slag.
"He made sport of what couldn't be helped," Hades went on, and there was iron under the calm, a buried pressure that made the air feel charged in a different way. "He measured worth by symmetry and grace, and he used laughter like a knife. He praised the casting-out. He cheered the fall."
The forge spat. The slag hissed and crawled. The shade's breath came ragged, useless against the heat.
"So now," Hades said, quiet as the ember-glow, "he strains for a perfection that refuses him. He watches his work collapse until he learns what contempt buys."
His eyes stayed on the shade, unblinking, ancient and unyielding.
"Not power," he finished. "Not beauty. Only this."
Not far off, another shade crouched at the base of a split in the rock where a thin seam of gold showed like a vein under torn skin. She hacked at it with frantic hands, nails worn to nothing, prying loose coins that were already stamped and shining, warm from the stone as if they had a heartbeat.
The moment the coins hit her palms, they began to change.
They thickened, densening into dull, leaden discs that dragged at her wrists, then her elbows, then her shoulders. She tried to fling them away, but the metal clung—biting into her skin, fusing, stacking, layering itself into a shackle that grew heavier with every greedy grab. The more she took, the less she could move.
She lunged anyway—always lunged—scrabbling for more, even as the burden pulled her down into the hot grit. Coins spilled from her fingers and rang against the stone in a sound that was almost laughter, almost weeping, almost prayer. The seam kept offering, and the offering kept becoming a cage.
"Why?" Kore asked, the word sour in her mouth.
Hades did not look away from the struggling shape. The forge-light touched the edge of his profile and died there, as if it could not cross him.
"She lived as though the deep belonged to her," Hades said, voice low and unhurried, each syllable set with the patience of earth. "As though what is buried is owned—rather than lent."
The shade heaved, trying to rise, and the metal on her arms dragged her back down.
"She watched hunger and called it deserved," Hades continued, and the quiet in him sharpened into something cold. "She used plenty to make the poor poorer, and she mistook permission for right."
The shade clawed at the seam again. Another handful. Another instant of glitter. Another thickening into lead that pinned her deeper.
"So now," Hades said, barely louder than the hiss of heat, "what she hoarded becomes what holds her. She wanted more than she could ever carry. She gets it."
Others labored without end—one shade knelt at a low table of basalt, counting grain into a scale with trembling care, trying to make the measures even. Each time the pans neared balance, the weights shifted of their own accord, tipping the judgment against her; the kernels spilled and skittered into the cinders, and she clawed them back with hands that could not hold enough. Another dragged a long chain of sealed petitions across the rock, wax stamps still bearing names and pleading marks; the farther she pulled, the heavier they became, the wax warming to a soft, sticky ruin that glued to her palms and tore free in strips, leaving her hauling the same unanswered prayers again and again.
And above them, a bound offender turned within a great iron ring suspended over coals. The wheel did not race; it revolved with a slow, inexorable patience, like a millstone grinding time itself. Each rotation carried him through a curtain of flame that licked his skin clean, then bit deeper, leaving the air snapping with heat and the metal groaning as it turned.
Kore's stomach turned. She looked away, but the cries followed, because sound did not respect where eyes refused to go.
The stench shifted—wet, copper-heavy.
Farther in, a vast offender was pinned to a craggy expanse of stone, limbs dragged wide by chains sunk deep into the rock. He heaved against them until the metal groaned, but the mountain did not yield. The air here was different, thick and wet and copper-heavy, each breath tasting like a bitten tongue. Sulfur sharpened into a burn at the back of Kore's throat.
And then the dark moved.
Three figures stepped from the haze as if they had been waiting inside it all along. Women-shaped, draped in black that drank the forge-light down to a dull bruise. Their hair clung and writhed close to the skull like living cords. Their eyes were not wild. They were exact.
The Erinyes.
Avengers. Hounds of consequence. They came for blood-guilt. They came for oaths that had been spoken and then profaned.
They did not rush him. They approached with the unhurried certainty of law made flesh.
One carried a scourge braided from shadow and sinew. When it struck, the sound was a door slamming shut.
Another lifted a torch that burned without flame. Its heat hit skin and thought alike. The offender's body tightened as if truth itself were being pressed into him.
The third knelt beside his face. Close enough that Kore could hear her voice through his panting. Low. Steady. A murmur that made his body jerk as if the words had hooks.
He screamed. The sound struck the walls and came back as thunder trapped below the earth. The Furies did not flinch. They worked with method, not frenzy. They returned him to the moment again and again. They refused him the mercy of forgetting.
Hades did not raise his voice over it. He only named them.
"The Erinyes," he said, calm as stone. "They attend the crimes that poison the roots."
Kore's grip tightened, nails pressing into his arm hard enough to sting. It grounded her, this small pain in her own body, against the immensity below. What rose in her was not pity. It was the cold clarity of shape. A deed answered by its echo, returning until it became the only sound left.
"He swore protection," Hades said, quieter now. The quiet carried more weight than the screams. "He looked men in the eye, took their hands, and promised them safe passage."
The scourge fell again. The offender bucked against the chains, and the chains only answered by biting deeper.
"He knew the road ended in blood," Hades continued. "He knew who waited in the dark. He guided them there anyway. Not by mistake. Not by necessity. Because their deaths bought him what he wanted."
The torch lifted. The offender's skin tightened. The whisper went on, patient as rot.
"So they give him what he gave," Hades said. "No shelter in sacred words. No refuge in excuses. Only the truth he tried to bury, brought up again and again until even his bones remember it."
Hades turned them away before the horror could bloom into spectacle.
They hadn't lingered. Just long enough for the shape of it to sear into her mind, for her body to catalog the assault: the blistering heat, the acrid bite of sulfur, the iron tang that coated her tongue like rust. Then his hand rose, and the helm obeyed.
Darkness folded around them - not like fabric, but like stone stirring from ancient sleep. The forge's glare snuffed out. The pit vanished. The clamor didn't fade; it was severed, entombed behind a barrier too dense to pierce.
For a heartbeat, there was nothing. No anchor, no edge. Only the solid weight of him beside her, and the deep, subterranean hum thrumming beneath everything, steady as a river carving stone far below.
Tartarus clung to her regardless.
The hammer's ring on iron, sharp with intent. The molten slump into useless slag. Coins fresh from the fire, cooling to a greedy bite around her wrist. A wheel grinding slow over embers, unhurried as eternity. Women shrouded in black, gliding through air thick with copper, their eyes weighing souls like merchants at market. Her nails digging into his arm - a pinprick of pain to tether her while the abyss tugged at her edges.
The heat lingered, branding her skin from within. Iron lingered on her palate, unyielding.
She waited for the recoil she'd been taught to expect - the revulsion whispered in tales from above, the kind that branded such places as monstrous, demanding a shudder of judgment. But it never came. Her mind searched for the wrongness, for the outrage that should have risen like bile, yet found only a quiet alignment, as if some hidden part of her recognized the necessity in the merciless order. Her body stayed steady, unnervingly attuned, refusing to flinch where instinct should have screamed. The silence parched her throat.
She'd braced for seduction first - opulent chambers, beauty dangled like bait to dull her questions. Instead, he'd plunged her straight into the heart of the nightmare, unflinching, only to yank her back at the brink, when gazing longer would have made her complicit.
Her fingers remained on his arm. Not a desperate grip. A lifeline. The enveloping dark didn't menace; it cradled, absolute, trapping her thoughts inside with nowhere to flee.
Then the fold twisted again.
A swift, silent drag, like an undertow without the crash of waves. The world pivoted - no corridors, no prelude - and the helm sealed them through the tremor that rattled her bones before vanishing as abruptly as it came.
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