“You don’t have to do it alone.” Thanatos tilted his head as he looked at her with encouraging eyes as if he wanted her to verbally excise more of her demons to him. Nyx nearly cursed at the idea she had spoken out loud again. Thanatos, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to laugh.
“You look like Hermes right now. Is this that amusing to you?” Nyx scoffed as she crossed her arms across her chest as if she could barricade her inner self off from him.
Thanatos shrugged, “Souls aren’t the only thing that I take with me when they’ve died.” He waved a hand aimlessly in the air. “Thoughts, emotions, feelings. All these things have a life cycle all their own and sometimes, they, too, must die.”
“When did you become so…”
“Old?” Thanatos finished for his mother, mirroring her as he crossed his arms with a wink. “Sometime in the last thousand years, probably.” Nyx let out a small laugh at that, shaking her head at her own intensity.
“Go on then.” Thanatos encouraged, looking at her once more with a peacefully serene gaze. Nyx let out a long breath and stared at him.
“Even if it’s about your father?”
“Especially if it’s about my father. Tell me. What’s burdening you so badly that you think needs to die?”
“It hardly seems fair for a mother to put that on her son.”
Thanatos’s expression changed to one of a slight mocking.
“I think we became peers sometime over the last millennia. Besides, we’re gods. I was born this way, and you know this is my specialty. Are you not going to let me show off?”
Nyx couldn’t help but laugh a little harder than that. It was true. All her children had been born the way most gods were fully formed and in ownership of their power. There had never been a time when she had played house with a kitchen full of children. When she looked up at Thanatos, there was nothing but a calm acceptance in his eyes as if he knew what she was going to say.
“What burdens you so terribly?” he prodded her one more time.
“If I have learned anything these past few weeks… Thanatos, I will always, always love Erebus.”
29
The sunrise that morning was blood red as if Helios was prophesying across the sky. Erebus looked up at it with a tense feeling building in his chest, standing near the edge of Mt. Olympus. Eventually, Hades and Poseidon had meandered back to the great hall, keeping up facades with the other gods and politicking their way through another round of drinks. Erebus had been unable to send himself back into the fray, unable to force himself to go through another perilous evening dodging glances from Zeus and advances from Hera. The never-ending gossip of the gods drove Erebus to the brink of his own insanity. He was unable to fathom those who made conversations that said nothing at all.
Erebus looked out over Greece, feeling an intense urge to release himself upon the earth and cover it with darkness. To stretch himself thin, from edge to edge, until his very soul was painted on the dirt and cried out to Nyx to join him. He felt a crescendo beginning in his stomach, chills traveling down his spine as his thoughts turned to the God of lightning.
Zeus had commissioned a weapon to capture his wife forever, locking her up in the very sanctuary that she had created for man. Zeus’s precious, precious mankind. Erebus denied the bloodlust building in him as his shadows began dripping from him like sweat, turning his skin transparent and his veins black. He stood on the precipice of his sanity, struggling mid-transformation from his mortal body and god form. Even his brain wrestled with itself, a more primal, ancient part of Erebus threatened to take over—the primordial God of darkness, who was without modern language and political sensibilities. The ancient deity who preceded every soul living and every immortal god, who consumed worlds with his darkness and drank light from the wounds of traitors. His thoughts turned to the monsters and titans he had swallowed, when his mind was full of nothing, nothing for eons, except the scent of his beloved and the reminder of her touch.
Standing on the very edge of the mountain and of his grip on reality, Erebus sank to his knees and gripped his hair as he fought not to cry out. That ancient part of him was winning. That immortal would swallow the earth in darkness and would never let it see light again.
“What is this?” Erebus bellowed, his voice shaking the earth beneath him as power rolled out of him like a steady, incessant base. He felt like a caged animal, having believed the gods and cared for the attentions of men, now forced to play their games. He was overcome with a longing for a time before there was any other existence. Erebus rocked on his knees as his shadows spread, curling around him and bleeding from his veins. It gave him the appearance of a man possessed, covered in his own black blood as it trailed up his arms. Erebus felt the last of his control slipping away, his vision ebbing as he nearly surrendered himself to his own power when a heavy hand clapped down on his shoulder.
“God of darkness.” It was Poseidon’s voice, aged and salt-coated, that broke through Erebus’s confusion. He blinked several times and looked up, blinking at the solar flare behind Poseidon’s head. It took a few moments before the God of the sea’s features came into view.
“Poseidon.” Erebus choked his name out with a sigh, sitting down and dropping his head to his knees. “What is happening to me?” The god sat down next to him and looked out over Greece.
“The same thing that happens to all of us, in one way or another. You see it in men all the time.”
“Do tell.” Erebus encouraged drily. Poseidon only smiled, the lines around his eyes and lips growing more prominent.
“There’s a moment, a reckoning… maybe a fight pushes it along. But every man who’s loved a woman, primordial or mortal, finds a moment of separation when they realize they didn’t leave a wife behind—they left part of themselves, too.” Poseidon’s eyes grew somber, as he continued staring out at the valley below like he was looking for something.
“That sounds like someone speaking from experience.”
“It is.” That was all that Poseidon offered on the subject before he stood, carefully dusting his hands off on the folds of his tunic. “Zeus has called for us all. Kronos spilled first blood this morning.”
Erebus leaped to his feet, a scowl covering his face as he looked down at the valley below.
“How is that possible? I’ve watched Greece all morning—”
“It was Prometheus,” Poseidon said quickly. Erebus sobered. “It looks like he left last night to broker peace with Kronos and the other titans. They didn’t know he wasn’t an official envoy and sent him back to Zeus rather…unofficially.”
