Hell Is An Empty Body (Book Two of The Triple Moon's Chronicles)

Prologue ***

Warning for mention of incest, murders, and euthanasia: Should we expect anything less from Sisyphus?

Humankind survived underneath their gods. Worshipping them in prays, making them splendid gifts, sacrificing their own lives for them, as they were nothing but preys.

Up to this day, death and the last judgement still frightened them all as a war against their gods was a declared defeat, thus to satisfy their crave for power, they turned against each other instead.

Battles after battles, they gathered into small tribes with at their head, not their strongest one, not their kindest one, but a man it had to be—the most rapacious one of them all. One by one, they all turned tyrant, fighting each other, creating invisible lines around their conquered territories.

They would eventually live together under one ruler, one king, one sacred bloodline.

Descendant of Deukalion, from their direct father Aeolus, Salmoneus and Sisyphus were two rival brothers. While one became the king of Elis, the other was the founder and the first king of his own land, Ephyra, but having his own kingdom wasn't enough, Sisyphus desired the one of his brother too.

Elis was at the image of Tyro—Salmoneus' only daughter—a naïve and young population, an unconquered, ignored but yet fertile soil. Sisyphus took advantage of the newly grown woman and seduced her. He devoured her innocent soul with his lust, but he wasn't after her; he was only after the sons she would produce for him, as they were his weapon to dethrone their grandfather Salmoneus.

As her tummy got rounder, Sisyphus lavished Tyro of faked attentions to fulfil his goal, but the young woman couldn't help to feel ashamed. A sin which would make her damage to any worthy men's eyes.

Upon learning that her father chose her other uncle Cretheus as her husband, Tyro abandoned her newborn children to die in a mountain while telling Sisyphus she had killed them.

If Sisyphus had failed in his attempt, Salmoneus would eventually meet his own fate. Power, wealth, and women had gone to his head, and he forced every soul living in his land to worship him under the name of Zeus. He would spend hours and hours driving in his chariot over a brass bridge, built in his glory. His hubris wouldn't be unnoticed by the real Zeus. One loud thunderbolt sent from the sky destroyed his entire town, including their insane king.

Was Sisyphus innate with the desire to kill his brother?
Or had he learnt how to kill from his greed?
He was sure born to fancy and to chase.
However, Zeus had left him with a dead mouse.
A mutilated inert corpse that could no longer amuse him.

Their determination gave him nausea, their courage made him to suffer from abdominal pains, their honour with their oaths meant nothing to him, as nothing was profitable in them for him.

They had bodies, a smell, a shape and a size, but their faces were just obstacles to his avarice. There wasn't akin to him in any other ways as Sisyphus only loved them dead.

From opponents to his iron fisted rule to lost travellers into his kingdom, they all ended up as bloodstains on his hands except for his brother Salmoneus. There weren't enough deaths equal the pain of this stolen murder, and Zeus would have to pay for this.

Sisyphus found his revenge through Asopus, a River God, son to Oceanus and a man in desperate search for his lost daughter, Aegina. Sisyphus came with an answer coated in a lie to subdue his predator: an eternal spring for his kingdom against the name of his daughter's abductor.

Like Demeter once was, Asopus accepted the deal on an impulse to his lesser and, like the Myth of Persephone, Sisyphus gave out Zeus as the culprit. Soon a source of fresh water invaded the city of Ephyra with an enraged Asopus pursuing Zeus for the release of his daughter.