When I stepped into Prometheus' workshop, I thought for a moment that I had wandered into the stomach of some mad beast that had swallowed half of Olympus.
Clay smeared every surface. It caked across the wooden floors, congealed in the cracks of the walls, hardened into stalactites that hung from the beams like dripping wax. Scrolls covered in frantic handwriting were pinned to the rafters above me, dangling like molting skins of snakes. Blueprints plastered the walls in overlapping layers, half of them slashed through with angry lines. Tools—chisels, hammers, tongs, brushes, blades of unknown function—littered every table and spilled onto the floor like the aftermath of a battlefield.
And in the middle of this storm sat the Titan of Forethought himself, muttering curses at parchment as though words could be bent by sheer spite.
"Prometheus," I said, clearing my throat.
He flinched, then squinted up at me with eyes bloodshot and glinting too sharp for any sane man. "Oh. Lord Hades. Don't just stand there in the doorway like a nervous suitor, come in. Unless you're here to kill me. Then, by all means, stay there—it's less messy for both of us."
I stepped inside, shutting the heavy oak door behind me. The smell hit first—burned clay, hot ash, and something like spoiled milk. "Your… workshop is as tidy as ever."
"Ha!" He slammed his quill into an inkpot, leaving a splatter across his notes. "This is tidy. You should've seen it last week. I found a dead goat under one of the tables. I didn't put it there myself. Still not sure how it got in."
I eyed the chaos. "You're not joking."
"Of course I'm not joking," he snapped, then softened. "Well. Not entirely. The goat's gone now. Probably."
I shook my head and walked closer. "I came because of a mortal problem."
"Of course you are. Zeus wouldn't soil his own sandals by stepping foot in here. Hera would faint from the smell. And Demeter—oh, she'd probably try to clean, bless her naive heart. No, it makes sense they sent you." He rubbed his temples, leaving a streak of ink on his forehead.
"No one sent me," I corrected. "I volunteered."
That made him pause, quill stilling in his hand. Slowly, his gaze lifted to mine, searching. "Volunteered? Hades, my dour friend, you're the only god among us who actually frightens the dead, and yet you volunteer to check on the living? Either you've gone soft, or…" He trailed off, narrowing his eyes. "Or you care more than you let on."
I folded my arms. "Don't push it."
Prometheus smirked, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Fine, fine. Sit. Or don't. The chairs aren't stable."
I leaned against a half-broken table instead. "The humans. They're dying too quickly. The longest lifespan barely scrapes a month. Some crumble within days. Explain."
Prometheus' whole body seemed to sag, as though the question had been crushing him long before I asked it. He shoved a pile of clay models aside—misshapen lumps vaguely resembling men, women, beasts, and things with too many limbs—and muttered, "It's not the clay."
"No?"
"No," he snapped, stabbing a finger at me like I'd accused him of treason. "The primordial clay is flawless. It holds. It breathes. It even dreams." His tone cracked, a flicker of pride drowned in frustration. "But something slips away. Like water in cupped hands."
"Life," I murmured.
"Yes. Yes!" He spun, grabbing a hunk of half-dried clay from the table and slamming it down. "Life. Not breath, not spirit, not fire. Life. The damn fools walk, talk, and then—" He crushed the clay in his fist until it crumbled. "Gone. Like smoke."
I let the silence stretch, broken only by the scratching of rats in the walls. "What's missing?"
Prometheus raked a hand through his hair, making it stick out in wild tufts. "If I knew that, do you think I'd be wasting my time making… this?" He swept his arm across the room. Several half-finished clay figures toppled to the floor, shattering into dust. "Something binds life together. Something more than the clay. My first attempt… Adam… he lasted. Not forever, but long enough to prove it was possible."
I stilled. "Adam?"
Prometheus didn't notice my tone. He was pacing now, muttering. "He was perfect. Not physically, no—fragile, flawed—but alive. The spark endured. And now? I've tried every mixture, every ritual, every combination of clay, ichor, tears, sweat, ash—and still, nothing works."
He whirled toward me suddenly, eyes fever-bright. "If I had even a drop of his blood, I could compare. I could see what made him last."
I blinked. "Adam's blood."
"Yes, yes, yes. Don't look at me like that. I know what you're thinking—'Prometheus, you impossible fool, Adam's bones have long since rotted!' But you forget." He jabbed his quill at me. "Yahweh either still has him or knows where he is."
My stomach tightened. "You want me to ask Yahweh… for Adam's blood."
Prometheus spread his arms, as though it were the simplest request in the cosmos. "Who else, Hades? Zeus? She'd strike him down before he opened his mouth. Hera? She wouldn't debase herself by asking. Me? She'd burn me alive for daring to step foot in her domain."
"And me?" I asked.
He smiled, and there was something sly in it. "She… respects you. Or fears you. Both, maybe. You walk in shadows, and even she hesitates before shadows. If anyone can ask without being smitten into dust, it's you."
I pinched the bridge of my nose. "You want me to stroll up to Yahweh and politely request a vial of her most prized creation's blood."
"Exactly!"
"Prometheus."
"Yes?"
"You're insane."
He laughed, wild and unashamed. "Insane? Probably. But am I wrong?"
I opened my mouth, then closed it. The truth hung heavy in the air. If he was right—if Adam held the missing key—then the fate of humanity balanced on whether I was foolish enough to ask Yahweh for her secret.
Prometheus saw my silence as victory. He leaned across the table, grinning like a starving wolf. "So you'll do it?"
I exhaled slowly. "Alright, I'll help."
"Don't take too long," he said distractedly, quill scratching, his free hand shoving bits of broken clay into neat piles that immediately collapsed again. "Every day the mortals weaken, every hour we lose them. Time is…"
"Short," I finished for him. "Yes, I understand."
His eyes flicked to me once, burning with something that wasn't just desperation—it was hunger. Prometheus never created for the sake of beauty, or even love. He was created to win. Against fate. Against Zeus. Against the universe itself.
I left before his muttering could follow me any further.
Olympus was unusually bright that day. The marble towers glittered, banners snapped in the wind, and the air smelled of nectar. Yet all of it felt… thin. Painted over. The kind of brightness one sees in a fever dream.
I walked the paths in silence, avoiding the other gods. I wasn't in the mood for their games. Apollo would've demanded to know where I was going. Athena would've pried it from me like a hawk cracking bone. Zeus—well, Zeus didn't need a reason to hate Prometheus. If he caught even a whisper of what I was doing, he would turn the Titan into ash and scatter him across the stars.
So I kept my thoughts close, my steps light, until I reached the edge of Olympus.
The wind was waiting.
I spread my wings. The shadows along my feathers stretched, caught the sunlight, bent it until it bled black. Then I leapt, and Olympus fell away beneath me.
It should have taken half a day. The mortal lands were vast, and the span between Greece and Mesopotamia greater still. But the skies bend for gods, and for me especially. The air thickened beneath my wings, pulling me forward faster than mortal winds could ever hope to move. Rivers blurred to silver threads. Mountains shrank to shadows.
Two hours. That was all it took to cross continents.
When I slowed, it wasn't because I was tired. Gods don't tire like mortals. It was because I had seen it.
At first, I thought they were mountains. A jagged, broken range sprawled across the horizon, stretching farther than mortal sight could follow. But the longer I looked, the less natural it seemed.
The peaks were too smooth. The valleys are too hollow.
And then I realized. They were not mountains.
They were shapes. Faces. Figures.
Forms so vast and still that only in silence could they be recognized. Not mortals. Not beasts. Not Titans. Gods.
They lay across the earth like monuments too immense to endure. Their crowns were toppled, their symbols scattered. Some seemed as large as mountains, their forms carved into the land itself. Others appeared as shadows in the dust, smaller, yet no less unmistakable.
There was Baal, the storm-bringer, his broken scepter dim as if lightning itself had abandoned him. Astarte, the lady of battle, her banners torn and colorless. El, the father, silent, his voice that once thundered over nations now an echo swallowed by the wind.
I saw Asherah, who once gave life, now a silhouette across barren ground where no green grew. Dagon, whose domain had been deep, his form pressed to the shore as if even the sea refused him.
And farther east, the ancients of Sumer:
An, the sky itself, his great form stretched into the firmament, stars scattering like embers. Ki, the earth, her outline sinking into dust. Enlil, Enki, Inanna, Utu, Nanna—all of them—faded, their domains silent, their presence returned to the soil and stone.
One by one, I recognized them.
The land had become their sepulcher. Rivers cut through them as veins. Hills formed around their stillness. And all of them… were gone.
What struck me most was not their fall, but the quiet. No thunder, no song, no lamentation. Only silence, as though the world itself had decided to forget.
For the first time, I wondered what could bring such stillness to beings that once commanded storms, stars, and seas.
What kind of hunger could leave even gods as nothing more than fading shapes in the earth.
I descended lower, wings folding in, my boots brushing the dust of their bones. A part of me wanted to laugh at the irony—gods studying gods, dissecting their histories in mortal libraries, and here I was, walking among their corpses like a man wandering through a graveyard he had once read about in a book.
I had studied them once. In my mortal life, as Nathaniel Rhodes, I had written papers on them. I remembered late nights in the university library, tracing cuneiform translations, debating with professors about whether Inanna had been syncretized with Aphrodite. I had admired them, these gods, for how real they felt—how raw, how close to human desire and rage.
And now they were nothing but carcasses.
"How?" I whispered aloud. My voice was swallowed by the silence. No birds. No wind. Not even the groan of the dead.
No answer came.
I forced myself onward.
It wasn't hard to find what I sought.
The rivers converged like threads pulled tight. Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, Euphrates—all flowing together, all meeting at a single point. The earth there glowed faintly, as though a star had burned itself into the ground long ago.
I hovered above it, scanning the land. Nothing. Just sand and stone, flat and empty.
But then I shifted my vision. Not the eyes of flesh, but the sight behind them—the gaze that sees the seams between worlds.
And there it was.
A shimmer in the air. A distortion, subtle but undeniable, draped across the desert like glass.
The Garden.
I landed softly, boots sinking into the sand. The shimmer was clearer here, pulsing faintly, almost like breath. I pressed a hand to it. It rippled, but did not resist.
I walked forward. The barrier passed over me like water.
And suddenly the desert was gone.
Before me rose a wall of stone, higher than any citadel of men. Eighty feet, maybe more. Smooth, seamless, unmarred by weather or time. It stretched endlessly in both directions, enclosing something vast within.
The gate was waiting.
Massive doors of gold and bronze, etched with symbols I did not recognize. They pulsed faintly with divine power.
And in front of them stood the guardian.
A Cherubim.
Not the soft-winged infants painted on the ceilings of chapels. Not even the golden warriors carved into temple doors. Mortals had never captured the truth.
This one towered, its height nearly reaching the arch of the gates. Four wings shimmered with living fire, folding and unfolding with the restless whisper of a thousand sparks. Its legs were perfectly straight, ending in hooves black as obsidian, yet they did not touch the earth so much as weigh upon it, bending reality under their presence.
Its body was armored in plates that were not metal, not crafted, but grown—layer upon layer of living brilliance, each scale flecked with eyes. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Eyes that blinked and turned and fixed upon me, unblinking in their regard. Eyes that seemed to peer not at my form but into my shadow, into my memory, into every choice I had ever made.
And its faces…
They shifted with every glance. One moment, a man's—stern and eternal. The next, a lion's—fanged and fierce. Then the ox—unyielding, vast, and immovable. Then the eagle—sharp and unblinking, gaze spanning horizons unseen. Four faces, yet one being. Four aspects, yet one will.
Across its back, in a scabbard that pulsed faintly with fire, rested a claymore longer than a mortal man's body. I felt it before I saw it, humming in my bones, radiating the same holy authority that once split seas and turned cities to ash.
The Cherubim's arms were crossed, wings tucked close. It stood with the patience of eternity. And when it spoke, its voice was not sound—it was resonance, the timbre of stone grinding, rivers roaring, thunder rolling.
"Lord Hades."
I halted, just short of the gate. My throat was dry. "I assume you know who I am."
The Cherubim tilted its head, all four faces regarding me at once. Then, impossibly, it bowed.
The shifting faces lowered in reverence. "She waits for you."
My pulse stuttered.
The gates groaned. Slowly, ponderously, they moved inward, the weight of worlds grinding against the hinges. From the darkness within spilled a rush of air—perfumed and heavy. It carried with it scents I had nearly forgotten: the sweetness of pomegranate, the freshness of rain, the green breath of spring earth. Fruit so ripe its fragrance nearly drowned my senses, water so pure it stung my lungs.
The Cherubim stepped aside, wings folding in solemn grace. Its countless eyes never left me.
"Enter."
I hesitated. Not from fear of Yahweh's wrath—though even I, Lord of the Dead, felt its shadow looming here. No, what froze me was the strangeness of it. The bow. Welcome. The expectation written into every detail.
She was waiting for me.
I drew in a slow breath, the air sharp and heavy as incense. My footsteps echoed against the threshold.
As I crossed into the unknown, the gates shut behind me with a sound like thunder rolling through the bones of the world.
And I knew there was no turning back.