Melina heard the goat bells first, a discordant clatter where familiar melody should have been. She set her mending aside, the worn fisherman's net coarse beneath her fingers.
Outside her small stone house, the afternoon sun baked the village of Pyrgos, casting long, skeletal shadows from the cypress trees. The sound wasn't right. It was frantic, panicked.
She stepped onto the packed earth lane. Down by the harbour, a small gathering had formed. Old Yannis, the fisherman whose net she was repairing, stood near the front, his face pale beneath its leathery tan.
Melina walked towards them, her sandals crunching softly on the dry ground. "What is it?" she asked Elpida, a woman whose bakery usually filled the air with the scent of sesame and honey. Today, only the brine off the sea reached Melina.
Elpida turned, her eyes wide. "Nikos. His boat came back. He's not on it."
Nikos was Yannis's son, a young man strong as an ox, who knew the currents like the lines on his own palm. His empty boat, bumping gently against the stone quay, felt like a bad omen.
The sail was partially furled, haphazardly tied. A half-eaten apple rolled near the tiller. It looked as if he'd vanished mid-bite.
"Maybe he fell overboard?" someone offered, the suggestion weak even as it left their lips.
Yannis shook his head, his jaw tight. "Nikos doesn't fall. Not from his own boat. Something took him." His words dropped like stones into the apprehensive quiet.
That was the first. Within the week, two more disappeared. A shepherd from the hills north of Pyrgos, his flock found wandering aimlessly near a ravine.
Then, young Katerina, who collected herbs on the slopes of Mount Lykaion, vanished without a footprint left behind. Fear began to coil around the village, tightening its grip with each passing day.
People stopped venturing out alone after dusk. Doors were bolted earlier. Whispered prayers grew longer, more fervent.
Melina felt the unease deep in her bones. She'd lived in Pyrgos all her twenty-eight years. She knew its cycles, its people, its heartbreaks. This was different.
This wasn't storms or sickness or the occasional accident. This felt deliberate, malevolent. It felt like being hunted.
One evening, while securing the shutters against a rising wind that carried an unusual coldness for the season, Melina saw something down by the water's perimeter.
A figure, tall and draped in darkness, stood near where Nikos's boat had returned. It wasn't anyone from the village. It was too still, too tall.
As she watched, her breath catching in her throat, it seemed to dissolve into the deepening twilight, leaving only the mournful cry of a gull overhead. She shivered, pulling the shutters closed with a decisive bang.
Sleep offered little escape. Her dreams were filled with cold, empty eyes and the sensation of being dragged downwards, into suffocating earth.
She'd wake up gasping, the phantom chill clinging to her skin long after she lit the oil lamp.
Yannis grew gaunt, his grief mixed with a terrifying certainty. "It's the old gods," he muttered one afternoon, sitting outside Melina's house while she worked. "Someone's angered them. Or worse… one of them wants something from us."
"Don't speak like that, Yannis," Melina chided gently, though his words resonated with the formless dread inside her. "It's fishermen's tales."
"Is it?" He looked at her, his eyes hollow. "Three gone in ten days. No trace. No reason. What else could it be? We are small things, Melina. Easily broken. Easily taken."
His despair was infectious. Melina found herself looking over her shoulder more often, scanning the familiar olive groves and rocky shores for anything out of place.
The disappearances spread. News arrived from neighbouring villages, carried by frightened travellers – similar vanishings, always sudden, always complete. A creeping paralysis was taking hold of the region.
One morning, a man stumbled into Pyrgos from the direction of the mountains. He was incoherent, clothes torn, eyes wide with terror.
It took hours of coaxing, sips of water and wine, before he could speak comprehensibly. He'd been travelling with his brother. They'd made camp near an old, ruined temple site, one dedicated to forgotten deities.
"He came from the ground," the man stammered, trembling violently. "Tall… like a king… but dead. Cold. He didn't walk… he glided. Grabbed Demetrios."
The man choked back a sob. "His eyes… gods, his eyes were empty pits. He dragged Demetrios down, right into the earth. Like it was water."
The villagers listened, horrified. A king, tall and dead, emerging from the ground near ancient ruins. The description resonated darkly with the figure Melina had seen by the shore.
Yannis's words about the old gods returned with chilling force.
"Hades," whispered an old woman, crossing herself repeatedly. "The Lord of the Underworld. He walks the earth again."
Panic rippled through the listeners. Hades. The name itself conjured images of the sunless realm, of finality and eternal gloom.
But kidnapping the living? Dragging them into the earth? That wasn't in the old legends. This was something new, something terrifyingly wrong.
Melina felt a cold knot tighten in her stomach. If it truly was the god of the dead, what hope did they have? They were mortals, fleeting and fragile against such power.
Days turned into weeks. The disappearances continued, becoming bolder. People were taken from their homes at night, pulled from fishing boats in broad daylight.
An aura of doom settled over the land. Fields went untended. Fishing boats remained moored. The cheerful sounds of village life were replaced by fearful silence and the constant whisper of the wind, which seemed to carry mournful sighs.
Melina knew she couldn't just wait. Someone had to understand what was happening, why Hades – if it was him – had broken the ancient pacts and turned against the living.
She thought of the ruined temple the terrified traveller had mentioned. It was a two-day walk into the rugged interior, a place generally avoided. Legends said it was built on ground considered unlucky, a place where the veil between worlds was thin.
"You can't go," Elpida pleaded when Melina told her. "It's madness. You'll be taken too."
"Staying here means waiting to be taken," Melina replied, her voice low but firm. "I need to see. I need to know."
She packed a small bag: dried figs, cheese, a skin of water, a sharp knife Yannis had given her for protection, though she knew it would be useless against a god.
The journey was arduous. The path grew fainter, disappearing entirely in places. The landscape felt alien, hostile. Twisted olive trees clawed at the sky, their leaves coated in grey dust.
The silence was profound, broken only by the skittering of unseen lizards and the mournful cry of distant birds of prey. She felt watched, a constant prickling on the back of her neck.
As she neared the coordinates the traveller had described, the air grew colder, carrying a faint, unpleasant scent – like damp earth and something metallic, something akin to decay but colder, dryer.
She found the ruins atop a windswept plateau. Crumbling columns lay half-buried in thorny shrubs. An altar stone, cracked and stained, stood at the centre of what was once a sanctuary floor.
There were signs of recent disturbance. Scuffed earth, broken branches. And something else. Footprints. Not normal ones.
They were large, oddly spaced, and seemed to press down into the earth rather than resting upon it. They led towards a dark opening at the base of the plateau, a cave mouth partially hidden by overgrown vines.
Melina hesitated. Every instinct screamed at her to turn back, to run back to the relative safety of the village. But the faces of Nikos, Katerina, Yannis's grief, the traveller's terror – they pushed her forward.
Taking a deep breath, she drew the knife, its blade gleaming faintly in the dim light, and approached the cave.
The cold intensified as she slipped through the vines. The metallic, earthy smell grew stronger. Inside, the darkness was almost complete.
She fumbled for the small oil lamp she'd packed, her hands shaking as she lit the wick. The tiny flame cast flickering light, revealing damp stone walls that seemed to absorb the illumination rather than reflect it.
She moved cautiously deeper. The cave sloped downwards, becoming a tunnel. The air was still, heavy.
Faint sounds reached her – a low, rhythmic scraping, and a soft, collective moaning that wasn't human grief, but something hollower, emptier.
The tunnel opened into a vast cavern. Melina gasped, pressing herself against the cold stone wall. The source of the sounds became horrifyingly clear.
Dozens of figures moved sluggishly in the cavern's expanse. Their skin was pale grey, taut over bone. Their eyes were empty sockets, yet they moved with purpose, chipping away at the cavern walls with crude tools, hauling rocks, their movements jerky, unnatural.
They were the missing. She recognized the build of Nikos, the long hair of Katerina, the tattered clothes of the traveller's brother, Demetrios.
They weren't dead, not entirely. But they weren't alive either. They were puppets, animated corpses stripped of will, their eternal existence reduced to mindless labour in this subterranean gloom.
The moaning was the sound of their bodies working, the scrape of tools the only music in their lightless world.
A figure stood overseeing them, distinct from the labourers. Tall, cloaked in shadows that seemed to cling to him, radiating an aura of immense cold and power.
He turned, and even in the dimness, Melina felt the impact of his attention. He had no face in the conventional sense, just shifting darkness beneath a hood, but she felt perceived, analyzed, dismissed. It was him. The King of the Underworld. Hades.
He wasn't just kidnapping people. He was building an army. An army of the undead.
Fear, cold and absolute, seized Melina. She couldn't breathe, couldn't move. Her knife felt like a child's toy.
He hadn't seemed to notice her arrival, his focus on his dismal workforce. But now, that terrible non-face was directed towards the tunnel entrance where she hid.
He raised a hand, long fingers like bleached bone emerging from the cloak's darkness. One of the workers stopped its scraping, its head snapping up.
It turned, empty sockets fixing on Melina's hiding spot. Then another turned, and another. A low groan, different from the work sounds, rose from them – a sound of recognition, of command received.
They started towards her. Not fast, but inexorably, their clumsy gait terrifying in its purpose. Nikos was among them, his strong fisherman's body now a hollowed-out shell shambling towards her.
Melina finally broke free from her paralysis. She turned and scrambled back up the tunnel, the oil lamp dropped and extinguished in her panic, plunging her into utter darkness.
Behind her, the scraping, shuffling sounds grew louder, closer. She ran blindly, hands outstretched, hitting the cold, damp walls. Terror lent her speed, the image of Nikos's empty eyes burning in her mind.
She burst out of the cave mouth into the fading daylight, gasping for breath, thorns tearing at her clothes. She didn't stop.
She ran, stumbling over rocks, pushing through thorny bushes, ignoring the pain. She ran until her lungs burned and her legs screamed, not daring to look back until she reached the ridge overlooking the plateau.
The sun was setting, painting the sky in bruised purples and bloody oranges. Below, near the cave entrance, the tall, cloaked figure of Hades stood.
He wasn't looking at her. He was looking out towards the sea, towards the lands of the living. And Melina knew, with chilling certainty, that his gaze encompassed the whole world.
This wasn't just about a few Greek villages. He intended to claim everything. Everyone.
She made it back to Pyrgos two days later, exhausted, scratched, and haunted. She told them what she'd seen. The cavern. The undead workers. Hades himself.
Her words fell into a horrified silence. Hope, already fragile, withered completely.
"What can we do?" Elpida whispered, tears streaming down her face. "We can't fight a god."
"No," Yannis said, his voice raspy. He looked ancient. "We can't."
There were no more disappearances. Not for a while. An eerie stillness descended. It was the quiet before the annihilation.
They waited. What else could they do? They waited for the dead to rise from the earth, commanded by their dark master.
The attack, when it came, wasn't from the mountains. It was from the sea. One night, under a sliver moon, dark shapes emerged from the waves.
Figures walked out of the water, dripping brine and seaweed, their movements stiff, their eyes vacant. Fishermen who'd been lost over the years, sailors from wrecked ships, victims dragged from coastal towns – all returned.
And leading them, walking upon the water as if it were solid ground, was Hades.
Panic erupted in Pyrgos. People ran, screaming, trying to flee inland, but other figures were already emerging from the ground at the village perimeter – the shepherd, Katerina, Nikos. They were surrounded.
Melina stood frozen near the harbour, watching the god approach. He moved without haste, the embodiment of inevitable doom. His dark aura seemed to drain the warmth from the air, the colour from the world.
The undead ignored the living villagers, their empty eyes fixed only on their master, awaiting his command.
Hades stopped before Melina. She could feel the immense cold radiating from him, the utter absence of life or compassion. She clutched the knife, though she knew it was useless.
He didn't speak with a voice. Thoughts, cold and sharp, pressed into her mind. You have seen. You understand.
Melina couldn't reply. Terror held her mute.
The age of mortals is ending. The brief flicker of your warm lives guttered out. Only the cold, eternal order remains. My order.
She saw Nikos nearby, his body obeying the god's silent will, his soul trapped somewhere beyond reach. She thought of her village, her life, the sun, the sea – all of it about to be extinguished, replaced by this cold, grey permanence. Despair washed over her, absolute and crushing.
You showed defiance, the thought intruded again. You came seeking knowledge. Unlike these others, blindly stumbling towards their end.
A skeletal hand reached out from the cloak. Such awareness should not be wasted in mindless labour.
Melina flinched as the icy fingers brushed her cheek. It wasn't physical cold; it was the cold of the grave, the cold of non-existence.
You will not serve me as they do, the thoughts continued, colder still. You will not forget. You will retain your mind, Melina of Pyrgos.
You will watch your world fall. You will watch humanity be remade in my image. And you will stand beside me, my conscious herald, announcing the dawn of the eternal night.
You will feel every moment of their end, and your own unending service. That is your unique reward. Your eternal torment.
Her breath hitched. No. Not that. Anything but that. Mindless servitude was horrifying, but this… this was infinitely worse.
To remain herself, trapped in undeath, forced to witness and participate in the destruction of everything she knew and loved?
She tried to scream, to fight, to plunge the knife into her own heart, but her body wouldn't obey. An unseen force held her immobile.
The god's chilling power flowed into her, colder than ice, colder than death itself. She felt her heart stutter, her breath stop. Warmth fled her limbs, replaced by the pervading chill of the Underworld.
Her vision greyed, the familiar colours of Pyrgos fading. The terrified screams of her neighbours seemed distant, muffled.
She saw Hades turn away, gesturing towards the village. The undead army, Nikos among them, began their slow, inexorable advance upon the living.
Melina remained standing, frozen by the harbour. She could feel her own body, but it was no longer truly hers. Consciousness remained, sharp and terrible, trapped within the newly undead shell.
She couldn't look away. Hades' command compelled her to watch as the figures she knew – Elpida, Yannis, the children – were overwhelmed, their struggles ceasing as the cold touch passed onto them.
She was Melina. And she was damned. Not to oblivion, not to mindless labour, but to awareness.
She was the first herald of the new age, the conscious observer of humanity's twilight, bound eternally to the side of its destroyer.
The sea breeze, once a comfort, now felt like the cold breath of her master against her unfeeling skin. Her silent scream echoed only within the prison of her own mind, a mind that would never again know peace, or forget.
The unique, brutal sadness of her fate had just begun.