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Sometimes she had to reassure herself that the people there were being punished according to the crimes they committed in life. The Furies could be a little too enthusiastic when a new soul came in.
Still, it was a lot to take in even for her sometimes, even as someone who spent eras seeing
it. Devon might’ve been a seasoned mercenary, but he had only been here less than a day.
“That’s where I belong,” he said, so quietly she barely heard him. Devon stared hard at the fields, his fist turning white from clenching his hands into fists.
Persephone watched his eyes flicker a bright green for a moment, the glow dying down just as fast as it had appeared.
She turned back to the fields, away from his morose stare. Unsure of how to approach this with him, she found that the truth was all that she could offer him.
“Only the judges know what would have been,” Persephone whispered. “But I do not believe
you deserve such a fate.”
She watched his profile out of the corner of her eye and waited to see if he accepted her words as truth.
“So,” Devon said, clearing his throat. “That’s where the seriously evil ones go. What mortals think of as their hell?”
“No,” she said as her voice iced over.
Devon turned to look at her, taking in her tone and its abrupt change.
“Those truly evil go to Tartarus.” She sighed without making eye contact with him, taking in what looked like a hill of rocks in the middle of a vast desert. The barren fields around it with bones sticking up from the sand.
Knowing what he would ask next, she pulled him into a shadow jump before the words could leave his lips. Moments later, they stood not on a gentle hill, but on an outcropping of boulders.
She didn’t really see the rocks, their dark and forbidding edges. Instead, she saw the memories of what had led to her father being trapped below. Trapped in a world that was exactly what Devon would think of as hell.
The pain, the blood, the fear, all more for her sisters than herself. Screaming for them to run as her father, her own flesh and blood, cut her down. The man she trusted to care for them, for her mother and her sisters, turned on them when he knew they held nothing but love and loyalty towards him.
She could still hear Hera’s screams as she yelled to the heavens for someone to stop her father.
Persephone blinked and cleared her mind. Devon took in their new location from beside her, distracted from noticing her silence. Now was not the time to conjure the memories and spirits that belonged to another, older world.
Beneath where they stood was a hellish pit of flames and evil. The only entrance was through the gate that was buried under the boulders. A gate that required the blood of the guardian to open.
The River of Phlegethon ran alongside them, the dividing line between what was Tartarus and the rest of the Underworld. The Phlegethon was quite literally a river surrounded by flames, the black sand of the shore a never ceasing fire to welcome the newest members to Tartarus.
Between them and the river of fire was the boneyard. Never named, just simply referred to what it was: a boneyard. Chained souls rummaged through the bones, cast-off from the Fields of Punishment. Those chalk-white fragments had belonged to the mortal bodies of souls whose crimes warranted more than just evisceration in the Fields of Punishment. They were damned to walk past their decaying mortal flesh as they entered Tartarus, as it was the ultimate offense to have the mortal body kept in the Underworld and not buried above by loved ones.
Cast-offs to the boneyard were rare, as it took someone doing something so vile and evil that Tartarus was not enough.
She watched two souls, chains clanking as they stumbled about, looking for something that only they could see. These souls were at their search, day and night, never ceasing, and only ever found old bones for their effort.
“This is Tartarus,” she stated, attempting to keep her voice steady, but folded her arms around
herself to ward off the feeling of doom coming from the solitary gate.
Devon shuffled hesitantly. “And it’s like hell?” he asked. “Where the evil is really punished?
With eternal fire and everything?”
Persephone almost laughed, but it would have been an empty one. How humans craved the idea of eternal damnation. What comfort it gave them.
“It’s not punishment as much as it is a prison,” she told him. “The inhabitants of Tartarus can never be free, never released. It is the only place in any realm that can contain forces so evil that, if released, their reign over the world would be an unending apocalypse.”
Like her father.
