Hades

Chapter Two - The Underworld

Chapter Two: The Underworld

Far beneath the earth in a place where even demons and monsters fear to tread, where the brightest and most hopeful ray of sunlight could not reach, was the expansive realm of the Underworld. It was dark, damp, cold and foreboding; its yawning caverns echoing the wails and moans of lost souls drifting by in the shadowy depths of the rivers below. This chilling abode had only ever belonged to one, and it was painfully obvious that interior design was not his forte. This dwelling was not befitting of his station and certainly did not mirror the elegant grandeur of his siblings above, and that was perhaps why its owner relished it so. He loved his Underworld – the darker, damper, and downright creepier the better – and took a defiant pleasure in living in a residence with all the homely atmosphere of a mausoleum.

A vacuum of eerie silence descended and pressed down on the ears of those who passed through, broken only by the ominous lapping of waves upon an unseen shore and by the occasional ghostly cackle. Unspeakable things so gruesome the gods had not even given them form unnervingly floated by just out of sight, always watching and waiting and whispering, and vast, sinewy expanses of labyrinthine waterways awaited the deceased; all harbouring an unearthly, misty blue glow. The tunnels of rivers had moist, earthy walls and were long and interweaving and downright confusing – it was little wonder so many souls lost their way. If you peered over the edge of the ferry that guided you into the afterlife you might catch a glimpse of something peering back at you from the current of the narrow river…and it wouldn’t be your reflection. Mouthfuls of bitter fog lingered in the taste buds of anyone foolish enough to open their mouths and cry out – though most thankfully left their sense of taste behind when they vacated their bodies.

As the long, seemingly endless passages reach an intersection, our tale traverses left and up into some base form of civilisation: the Lord of the Underworld’s ‘living’ quarters. Away from the ominous tangled void of waterways and up an elaborately polished black marble staircase with high ornate pillars at each side, the gothic grandeur was lit by lamplight. Small oil lanterns had been placed in the hollows of the cave walls every meter or so along, as though the occupant finally had enough of bumping into things in the blinding darkness, and had decided one day to do something about it. They offered a flickering orange glow, small comfort in the unearthly tomb. While we drift along it is best to avert your eyes from the huge metals bars to the side that look suspiciously like a cage, because when asked to picture what kind of horrific animal a cage like that could possibly be needed to house, the imagination can only run screaming in terror and hide shivering underneath the nice warm blanket of denial.

Deeper into the hollowed-out cavern, on the path where no living humans have passed before, could be found a well-lit drawing room which housed a long, antique dining table, several sad-looking pot plants, and four closed doors around the comfortable room circumference. You may wonder what they housed behind them, and the answer is as follows: the first, the tallest and widest of these doors, led to a massive auditorium called the Great Hall, which was filled with the soft sifting sound of a million grains of sand as they fell in their dusty hourglass containers. If you peeked in you would see that this massive chamber had floors of glittering sandstone and towering shelves of oak that reached up into forever, and the room’s magnificence – not least because of the precious objects it housed – gave it a radiating golden glow that set it apart from the rest of the gloom in the Underworld. Millions of hourglasses upon millions of shelves, in millions of aisles in that staggering hall, each labelled with a name of someone walking the earth in carefully hand-written script on little pieces of parchment, some curling and yellowing with age, some so new the ink had not dried yet; treasures not meant for human eyes, so we shall pry in here no longer.