The Crown of Erebus lay shattered at my feet.
Once, it had been the terror of mortals and the envy of gods. Now it was nothing more than obsidian fragments scattered across blood-soaked marble, each piece holding dying breath of my power.
The crown that had marked me as lord of the dead for millennia, now looked like broken glass. Sharp. Worthless and Forgotten.
Around me, my kingdom burned without flame.
The Underworld, my domain, my sanctuary, my everything, writhed in its final moments. Chaos spawns, abominations that made the Titans look like children's nightmares, hunted through the Elysian Fields. They moved like living hunger, devouring everything: souls, memories, hope itself.
The River Styx ran black with corruption. The Judges of the Dead hung from their golden thrones, necks snapped, eyes vacant. Even Cerberus lay silent, his three heads twisted at unnatural angles.
And the screaming.
Not the quiet whispers of souls finding peace, but raw, animalistic terror.
Ten thousand voices begging for an end that would never come.
How did it come to this?
Divine ichor leaked from wounds that shouldn't exist. My hands shook. My breath came in ragged gasps. Gods don't bleed. Gods don't break.
Yet here I was. Broken.
We had lost before the war even began.
Zeus fell first. My arrogant brother, who thought himself untouchable, lasted exactly thirty seven days against it. His lightning didn't even make the thing flinch. Athena's strategies crumbled like paper. Even Ares, mad with fury, was crushed.
One by one, they all fell to the thing that crawled out of the Tower.
The Tower Zeus had been so eager to claim. The Tower that held secrets better left buried.
If only that fool had listened.
But gods never listen. We command. We take. We rule.
Footsteps echoed through the ruins.
Not footsteps. The idea of footsteps. The Devourer didn't walk so much as impose itself on reality. Its form shifted like smoke given malice and sometimes a writhing mass of dying stars, sometimes a figure tall enough to scrape the sky.
In its grip, a spear that hurt to look at. The weapon existed in too many dimensions at once, its tip sharp enough to cut through the concept of existence itself.
It stopped before me. Studied me like a curator examining a broken relic.
"The last," it said. Its voice was the sound of galaxies dying. "How... disappointing."
I reached for Thanatos' Edge, my blade, forged in a star's final scream, blessed by Death himself.
My fingers closed on dust.
Even my weapon had abandoned me.
"I know what Zeus found," I said, tasting blood on my lips. "I know why you're here. But the innocent souls-"
"Innocent?" It tilted its head, almost curious. "You ruled the dead for eons. You judged souls like cattle. You call them innocent?"
The spear rose.
"There are no innocent gods, Hades. Only degrees of guilt."
Pain.
Not physical, something deeper. I felt my divinity unraveling, thread by thread. Millennia of accumulated power drained away like wine from a cracked cup. The weight of judgment, the authority over death, the terrible loneliness of immortality, all of it flowing out of me.
I should have screamed. Should have raged. Should have fought until the very end.
Instead, I felt... relief?
Finally. An end to it all.
Darkness swallowed me whole...
Gasp.
Air burned its way into my lungs. Sharp. Clean. Wrong.
I shot upright, my body moving before my mind caught up. Sweat soaked through clothes I didn't remember putting on, soft cotton instead of divine robes. My heart hammered against ribs that felt too small, too fragile.
White walls. Beeping machines. The antiseptic smell of a hospital.
What?
Sunlight. Real, unfiltered sunlight streaming through glass windows. Not the eternal twilight of my realm, but the warm, living light of the mortal world.
Where am I?
Then the memories hit like a landslide.
Two sets of them, crashing together in my skull. Divine and mortal. Eternal and finite. The weight of kingdoms and the lightness of youth.
Hades. I was Hades, God of the Dead, Lord of the Underworld, The Judge of Souls.
Adrian. I was Adrian Blackthorne, sixteen years old, heir to a business empire, son of parents who actually love me.
Both. Neither. Something new entirely.
I stumbled to the window, my legs unsteady. The reflection staring back was a stranger wearing my eyes.
Pale skin untouched by the divine sun. White hair that shimmered like frost under morning light. A boy's face, youthful and unfamiliar, had replaced the ageless visage of a god.
But the eyes… crimson like dying stars, burning with judgment and memory.
Those were mine.
And deep in my chest, something that didn't belong pulsed with each heartbeat. Foreign. Hungry. Alive.
The artifact.
"Well," I whispered to my reflection, voice cracking like a proper teenager, "this is new."
The thing Zeus had pulled from the Tower's heart. The reason the Devourer came for us. The cause of everything.
It was inside me now, wrapped around my soul like a parasite made of starlight and malice...
In the distance, impossibly tall and wrong, stood the Tower. It pierced the sky like a black needle, and even in this weakened state, I could feel its pull.
My reflection smiled back—cold, calculating, but somehow lighter than it had ever been as a god.
The gods were dead. My realm was ash. Everything I'd built over millennia had been destroyed.
But I was still here. And for the first time in eons, I wasn't alone.
The Tower was waiting, sure. But so was something else, a life I'd never had, a family I'd never known, and the strangest possibility of all:
Happiness.