Gods and Monsters

[Escoryon]

Inside, they were beating a man.

Outside, in the rain, in the alley, the Old Man could hear the thudding impacts of plasteel fists on human flesh, the grunts of pain as the body shut down.  One loud pop had probably been a long bone.  It seemed cruel.  The Old Man had always prided himself on being a hard man, a man who could do what must be done, but he felt he had never been a cruel man.  It was not his way to prolong a death, to punish the sons for the sins of their fathers.  In a way, he credited his sense of ruthless pragmatism for his stratospheric rise to the summit of the underworld.  In the opinion of the dead, the rule of Hades was preferable to that of the Titans, after all.  With Hades, you knew where you stood.  With Hades, the punishments fit the crimes.

He wondered if Hades was ever troubled by his position in the pantheon.  The other gods could be loved, but a lord of the depths could only be feared.  Even his wife hated him.  At least the Old Man had stayed blissfully single.  A loved one would have been a weakness, a rock of Sisyphus dragging him back down the mountain.  He was not entirely without human emotion, though.  He had thought fondly of someone in the past.  Even desired her, perhaps.

The beating continued faintly behind the doors.  He stared at them, his eyes hidden even in the inky night of the deep levels.  His symbiants made night and day of no difference to him.  The underworld revealed its secrets to him all the same.  He found that this troubled him, of late.  He had risen to a pinnacle undreamed of in his long-ago youth, taken his vengeance on all those who had crossed him, yet he could no longer find it in himself to maintain his throne.  No longer did he wish to gaze deeply and learn the secrets of the murky abyss.

But it was because of these new thoughts that he had become cruel.  The dead came as petitioners to his kingdom, and his mercy was the bullet.  But those who served him knew another way.  Theirs was the flensing knife and the carbonum-tipped boot.  He believed that his was the way of the gods, and theirs of the Titans.  To him, order and peace, of a sort.  To them, only chaos, death, and brutality.

They were laughing now.  Another soul had passed out of this underworld and into, perhaps, another, purer form of the same.  Another king took that spirit now, for what is a god who cannot bring himself to perform his duties?  In both worlds, it would be ruinous.

The doors flew open.  They were Furies, spattered in blood, grinning with madness.  They looked at him in silence, waiting.  How could he deliver his people to the graces of such as these?  After eons of dutiful rule, what was left of Hades' soul?

He rubbed his cigarette out on the wall behind him, knowing and denying that soon, very soon...the throne of Erebus would sit empty.  He was not fully sure he would live to see that moment.

"Gonna be more killin' t'night, boys.  We best get at it."