Helios stopped at the base of the dais and bowed. The throne room breathed that velvet twilight unique to Hecate's reign: star-lanterns hovered like patient constellations, and the floor's inlaid sigils glowed with a calm, surgical pulse. The air smelled faintly of jasmine and cold iron.
"Finished with your personal business, darling?" Hecate asked, one elbow on the armrest, chin resting in her palm. Her voice was soft as silk and edged like a stiletto.
"Yes," Helios said, straightening. "I'm ready to take Hades off-world now."
A smile touched the demi-goddess's lips—amused, predatory. "Then let us conclude our little arrangement."
She rose, each step down from the throne measured and musical, heels clicking on black stone. Shadows flocked to her as if in love. Behind and to the side, Nemesis detached from a pillar's gloom and fell in at Hecate's shoulder. She wore no visible weapon; she never needed one. As they walked, the hall's ward-sigils brightened in sequence, acknowledging their queen. Wraith-sentries pivoted in perfect, silent unison; skeletal honor guards stood as still as carved ivory.
"Your timing," Hecate murmured without looking back, "was almost gauche, Helios. A mortal boy slipping into my depths to play at vengeance." Her eye slid to him, amused. "Almost."
"Vengeance doesn't keep very long," he said. "And you did say I had a moment."
"Oh, I did." A satisfied hum. "And I always keep my word."
They turned beneath an archway carved with shifting constellations and entered the corridor that poured downward, cold intensifying to winter. The door at the end waited under an indigo seal: a precise circle of runes, six-pointed bindings spiraling outward like a snowflake drawn in starlight.
THE UNSEATED, read the wall above.
Hecate glanced once at Nemesis. The goddess of retribution inclined her head and set her palm to the sigil. The door drank her touch and swung open with a breath like a tomb exhaling.
The chamber beyond still remembered Helios' earlier visit. Frost stippled the floor in a scatter of shattered crescents; the air had a metallic bite; the faint scent of ozone clung to the stone. At the center, Hades knelt inside the star of chains, wrists wreathed in manacles etched to match the seal in the threshold. The blue fire that served him for hair guttered low and mean.
He looked up as they entered, and his grin came on like a cut. "Hecate, babe," he drawled. "And here I thought we were having such a private moment, kid. Bring your new boss to admire the décor?"
"His boss?" Hecate's smile was warm as a wolf's. "Oh, darling. Do choose your words with care."
"Please," Hades said, rattling the chains with a showman's flourish. "If I took that personally every time someone—"
Nemesis moved and the chains answered. She didn't speak. She simply extended her right hand and let it change: flesh turning liquid silver, fingers lengthening into articulate links that flowed to the floor with a hiss like quenching steel. The living chain coiled once around the star of bindings and then struck, lashing Hades' throat and shoulders with precise loops. He jerked under the sudden bite of adamantine restraint.
"Easy, kitten," he muttered, but the wisecrack lacked teeth now.
Hecate didn't look at him as she lifted her hand. A collar kissed her palm—cold, dark metal veined with ember-glow runes, its inner ring set with needle prongs so fine they barely existed until light found them. The Hephaestian craft was unmistakable: every line functional, every flourish a prison.
She stepped close. For a fraction of a breath the chamber held still, all eyes watching a goddess clasp jewelry to a god's throat.
"Look how far a god can fall," Hecate murmured. Her fingers brushed his jaw as if bestowing affection, and the collar clicked home around his neck with a small, obscene sound—like a lock teaching a secret to shut.
Hades bared his teeth. "Live it up while you can."
"Oh, I intend to," she said, the words soft as cream. "Now then."
She didn't bother with a gesture. The black chains linking manacles to the floor sighed and unhooked themselves, slithering back into the sigil. For an instant Hades' arms were free of their old anchors—an illusion of liberty. Nemesis' silver coils drew cruelly tight and then loosened, dragging him forward across the frost to the dais's foot and dropping him to one knee.
Hecate arched a brow. "Stand."
Nemesis let the chain slacken and withdraw into her hand, metal flowing back into skin. Hades rose, chin up, flame hissing. He reached inward for a god's reflex—summoning, swelling, the old familiar roil of power—and found only a quiet that did not belong to him.
The moment hung. Then the realization reached his eyes.
Hecate laughed. It wasn't loud; it didn't need to be. "Crafted by Hephaestus, like your manacles," she said, tapping the collar with a lacquered nail. The runes answered with a foxfire pulse. "It mirrors the old bindings better than I expected. No flame. No smoke. No sweet claim to dominion. Not even a tremor to frighten the furniture. You are, for the present, a name that walks."
Hades' jaw worked. For a heartbeat, true fury coloured his flame red. It snapped, trying to reach past the ring's cold circumference—and sputtered out with an embarrassed pop. Nemesis' eyes, visible beneath the small crack in her porcelain mask, glinted. She didn't smile; victory was merely the absence of disobedience.