Death's Delight

The Condemnation

Dedicated to Colecoke for her comments on my other short stories.

Persephone clutches at the bars of her cage, suspended high above Hades’ throne by a chain hanging from the ceiling. Her face is caked in soot and grime, except in the places where tear trails have washed the dirt away.

She looks down at the top of Hades’ head, pure malevolence in her gaze, as he passes judgment on soul after soul; sends person after person to Elysium or Tartarus, or anywhere in between.

She wonders how he can sit there, so impassive and disinterested, while damning countless souls to endless torment.

Doesn’t he understand the stakes?

Another man’s soul enters the room, escorted on both sides by reanimated skeletal soldiers. Their bones creak and groan as the approach the throne, and Persephone winces at the abrasive sound.

The soul in between them is stooped and worn – a little old man, hunched and wrinkled. He incessantly wrings his hands and snivels to himself in a high, tense, voice. Occasionally, his left hand darts up to stroke his wisp of a beard – pulling at it so hard that Persephone fears it will fall off.

He comes yet closer, and she can make out a few words of his ceaseless whimpers as they echo off the high ceiling.

“Good business, good business, good business,” he murmurs, then “Coin, coin, coin,” he chants.

Persephone notes that the motions of his hands are precisely repeated – he runs his fingers together, then holds them up, as if he were counting imaginary coins.

A miser, she realizes, with a mixture of disdain and pity. She would not wish for even the most selfish man on earth to stand before this terrible judge.

Hades consults a decrepit scroll, and then turns his blank stare on the man. “Caius Adrian,” he intones stonily.

The man shrieks at the mention of his name, and huddles his hands even closer to his chest.

Hades merely sighs and rattles off a long list of sins: “You have been found guilty of miserliness, indifference, cruelty, selfishness, brutality, unkindness, spite, violence, frivolity, and greed. Have you anything to say for yourself?”

Previous souls have beseeched the god of death: insisted that their virtues outweighed their vices, offered bribes in the way of service; protested that their flaws were not so dire.

Most have denied all wrongdoing.

Not this man. He merely shakes his head and begins to sob. The one vice he does not possess is dishonesty. Presented with the full measure of his faults, he cannot deny them. They press down on him in a great weight, full of regret and sorrow, but still he does not plead.

He knows what he deserves.

And as Hades passes judgment and the skeletal minions drag him off to Tartarus, he does not scream or struggle, like the others. He keeps his head down and drags his feet, ultimately humbled, completely contrite.

Hades rises to peer through the bars of Persephone’s confine.

“An interesting soul, that one,” he remarks nonchalantly, as if he had just been sipping tea rather than condemning a soul to eternal torment.

“Perhaps you would have found him less interesting if he had not been so much like you,” Persephone retorts, hatred tainting her every word.

Hades chuckles dryly, mockingly. “Like me? How so?”

“Miserliness? Look around you, Hades. You clutch this castle to yourself, making it as horrifically beautiful as possible, all for your own enjoyment. Indifference? One need only watch one of your trials. You care nothing for the souls you condemn to Tartarus, even less for the souls that you commend to Elysium. Cruelty? You lock me in this cage, merely because I will not allow my soul to become your whore. And selfishness goes hand in hand with miserliness. You create things for yourself only, and you can think about no one’s gain but your own. Oh, and one needs only to look at my bruised face and body to see evidence of your brutality.”

Hades delivers a colossal blow to the side of the cage, setting it swinging crazily back and forth. “Enough!” he roars, and moves to sit back in his throne.

Persephone throws herself against the side of her cage, desperately wrapping her legs and arms around the bars. “I’m not finished!” she screams at his retreating back, and he turns.

His expression is invincible, but she can sense the pain that he must be hiding, and she delights in it.

“Unkindness is easy to find – what spark of compassion do you possess? Spite? You do many things out of nothing more than malice. Violence and greed – you saw me, and you had to have me, yet you could think of no other way to get me than to forcibly steal me away?”

Hades clenches his fists, determined to brush her words away. Yet, somehow, the girl’s fierce accusations pierce his soul in some deep place – somewhere that no one has touched for thousands of years, somewhere he has forgotten existed.

His heart?

But she continues: “Oh, and frivolity. You are guilty of that sin the most of all, Hades. You do not intend to be frivolous, I know, but it comes naturally to you. You cannot find true meaning in anything, so you seize illusions. Illusions of power, control, stability. But they are dreams, all of them: superficial and fleeting. You will never find true purpose. By your very nature, you are a purposeless being.” A smile twists Persephone’s lips, wavering on pure sadism. She spits out her slew of daggers: “You are dark, dejected, and eternally miserable.”

Hades’ next shout nearly rends the Underworld in two.

“Stop!”

Terrified, Persephone retreats into a corner, but she cannot run from the angered god. As his rage swells inside him, he grows in size, strength, and power. He grabs, then snaps the chain that suspends her cage, and thrashes her wildly about.

“If you cannot keep your gods-damned, thrice-accursed, prattling little mouth shut, then I’ll send you down to Kronos, where he can sew it shut for you!” He bellows, and all across the underworld, the ground quakes with the force of his shout.

A streak of crimson lightning flashes from his fingers, bursting a hole in the domed roof of his castle, and he raises his arm to throw Persephone through it.

Her cage hurtles through the air, then down, down, down, into the deepest and darkest crevice of hell.

A scream of agony rises, then is suddenly silenced.