I tore myself free from the dream, the psychic bonds snapping like brittle threads. The true world bled into view, sharp and unforgiving.
Noctandrath hung in the sky, a grotesque, veined eyeball the size of a small moon, suspended in the mist. Ancient, throbbing capillaries pulsed across its surface, and dark tendrils twitched lazily, siphoning the very essence from our still forms.
Faint, silvery trails of energy streamed from my chest and Hecate's, flowing toward him. It was feeding on us, gorging itself on our drained souls while we lay trapped in its nightmares.
As I rose, it seemed to sense its meal being interrupted. Several tendrils lashed out, psychic hooks attempting to drag me back into the illusion. I gritted my teeth, my will a solid wall, and pushed through the assault.
Rage, cold and purifying, focused my mind. I concentrated my power, drawing on my divinity. In my hand, a spear of pure obsidian materialized, its surface etched with swirling patterns of soul-fire.
I hurled it.
As the spear found its mark, a final understanding flashed through me. Its power was a grand deception, a fortress of illusion built around a core of pathetic weakness. Stripped of its nightmares, it was less than nothing, and it unraveled before my true strength like rotten cloth in a gale.
The result was instantaneous.
Noctandrath exploded in a burst of viscous black fluid and shattering, painful light.
I didn't watch its demise. I was already moving, falling to my knees beside Hecate.
She lay twisted on the cold ground, her breathing shallow. Her body was wracked with agony, every muscle taut. Beneath her skin, I could see her soul, fractured and writhing like a trapped thing.
Noctandrath was gone, but its curse clung to her, a psychic poison still eating away at her essence.
I approached slowly, my own heart hammering. I knelt and placed two fingers gently upon her brow. Channeling my Sleep Divinity, I let my consciousness flow forward, a delicate probe.
A direct assault on the curse could shatter her. This, entering the nightmare itself, was the only safe path. The only way to reach her.
---
Inside Hecate's Dream
The sky was an endless, dark velvet, with countless brilliant stars embedded in it. This was the realm of constellations, a place of distant, celestial bodies. Below, a magnificent temple of flawless white marble spired towards the heavens.
It should have been bustling, but it felt hollow. Servants glided past like ghosts, and at its centre, a happy, beautiful couple stood. They were Hecate's parents, beaming at each other with the joy and care of a newlywed couple.
And in a shadowed corner of the vast, cold hall, I saw her.
Hecate. As a child.
Her small form was hunched, her three faces—she was in her nascent triform divinity—and she was crying silent tears. She was utterly alone.
Her kin, her parents, passed near her without a glance. They simply looked through her, their eyes gliding over her as if nothing were there.
She was a ghost in her own home. Forgotten and invisible.
She hugged her knees, her little fingers trembling against the cold stone.
I stepped toward her slowly, the dream-muffled sounds of the temple fading away. I gently knelt before her and rested a hand atop her head, a calm, steady warmth pouring from me, my divinity a quiet shield against her despair.
"They may not care about you," I said, my voice low but firm, "But that doesn't mean you don't exist."
"You've already accomplished more than most gods could even dream of. The world knows your name. It whispers it in fear and respect. Why let a few blind souls convince you that you're unworthy?"
She looked up, her three sets of eyes, still swimming with tears, focused on me. She was listening. Truly listening. Slowly, the tears stopped. She breathed a shuddering, then a steadying breath.
"Hades," she whispered, her voice small but clear. "You really don't know how to comfort people."
A pause. Then, a fragile, beautiful smile broke through. "But… thank you."
It was the most radiant thing I had ever seen.
The world flared blindingly white, and I was violently expelled from the dream.
---
My eyes snapped open. I was back in the mist-shrouded valley, Hecate still before me. She seemed peaceful, asleep.
But I could still feel it. A serious, structural damage. The nightmare was gone, but Noctandrath's power had scoured her soul, leaving it unraveling at the edges. If left untreated, the fractures would spread. She would fall into a sleep from which there was no waking, or worse, simply fade from existence entirely.
There was only one way to save her.
A fragment of my own soul could act as an anchor, a graft to heal hers.
The cost would be catastrophic. To sever my own soul would cripple me, perhaps irrevocably. I could lose power, divinity, everything I had fought for.
I stood frozen, hesitation a cold knot in my stomach.
Then an image flashed in my mind: her smile. Her true, unguarded smile from the dream. And with it came a flood of memories—battles fought side-by-side, quiet moments of understanding, heated arguments, shared laughter. A film reel of a partnership that had become the foundation of my new existence.
If I can't save even my closest ones, then this strength, power, divinity, rule… it is all nothing.
The truth of it settled in my bones. True strength wasn't in the power I wielded; it was in what I was willing to give up for it.
I took a final, deep breath, and made the choice.
I reached inward, past layers of shifting divinity, to the very core of my being—a swirling nebula of power and self. And with a thought that felt like tearing my own heart from my chest, I severed a fragment of my soul.
Agony, not of the flesh but of the spirit, ripped through me. It was a cold, silent scream in the void of my own essence. I felt my divinities fracture, their intensity dimming, my power plummeting from the mid-level of a Chief God to its lowest tier. The vibrant connections to Sin, Fear, and Dreams grew faint and cold.
But I endured.
Cradling the shimmering, agonizingly beautiful fragment of my soul, I wrapped it in a gentle cocoon of underworld energy and stabilized it with soul-fire. With the last of my strength, I pressed it gently into Hecate's chest.
Her body stilled. Then, it pulsed with a soft, golden light, the foreign essence taking root, grafting itself to hers. She was healing.
I collapsed backward, my breath a shallow rasp, my vision swimming. But my gaze remained steady on her.
---
(Hecate's Point of View)
There was nothing.
A void of sensation. A sea of numb collapse.
I drifted in the emptiness until something touched me.
Warmth.
A painful, searing warmth that was agonizingly real.
My soul, fractured and frayed, began to knit itself back together. A surge of life—potent, familiar, yet not my own—filled the broken places, sealing them with golden light.
It was impossible. No one could give of their soul essence without being utterly destroyed.
Unless…
"Hades…" The name was a breath, a prayer, a curse.
Silence.
I was whole. I was me.
I sat up, movements slow and cautious, every sense hyper-aware.
He was nearby, slumped against a rock, motionless. His eyes were half-lidded, glazed with a pain so profound it stole my breath.
There was no need to ask. The truth resonated within my newly healed soul, a harmonic echo of his sacrifice. It struck me with the force of a bolt.
He had done something recklessly, stupidly noble.
He had given me a piece of himself.
I stared, a thousand warring emotions—guilt, awe, a flash of anger at his self-destruction, a profound, humbling respect—crashing through me.
And something deeper, something that terrified and exhilarated me in equal measure.
But words failed me. I remained quiet, overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he had done.
And then I felt it. A deep, sickening cracking, a mirror of the damage I had just endured. It was coming from him. His soul was fracturing, dying from the wound he had inflicted to save me.
I can't live with this guilt, I thought, my chest tightening, making it hard to breathe. I won't.
A terrifying, brilliant thought seized me. If his soul could heal mine… perhaps mine can now stabilize his.
It was a desperate gamble. I acted on instinct alone. I drew a sharp ritual blade from my belt and sliced my palm open. My blood, golden and shimmering with magic, welled up. I pressed my hand to the earth and made a ritual circle from it. I began to recite words of power older than the Titans. Each word resonated with the circle I had drawn, making it glow with a fierce, bloody light.
The circle lifted from the ground, hovering in the air before compressing into a single, pulsing red wisp of pure intent. It shot toward us and vanished into the space where our souls now touched.
Then came the pain. Excruciating. A red thread, fine as silk and burning with my essence, began to unravel from the core of my being. I gritted my teeth, enduring the pain, and guided it into Hades. I pushed my life into him.
Inside him, his own soul—what remained of it—stirred. Recognizing the familiar essence, his soul flared in response, not rejecting me, but guiding me. His innate power enhanced my thread, minimizing the amount of my soul needed and quickening the repair.
After a moment that felt like an eternity, the fracturing in his soul ceased, the damage sealed by my essence.
But it didn't stop there.
In response, a thread of deepest obsidian, shot through with specks of starlight, emerged from his chest and sought me. It was his soul, now offering a piece of itself back to me.
The two threads, crimson and obsidian, met in the air between us. They did not just touch—they braided together, pulsing with a light that was both and neither of us.
A filament of combined essence erupted from my chest and connected to his, and another from his to mine. They twisted together, forming a permanent, unbreakable cord that thrummed with shared power and sealed the last of our wounds.
And in that moment, I felt not just my own heartbeat, but his. A steady, familiar rhythm now intertwined with my own, a double drumbeat marking a bond that could never be broken.