Revelation spreads through the ship like an earthquake. Whisper it. Whisper it, because saying it softly might take away its power. Whisper it so that Zeus' breeze might scatter it before it reaches the next ear. Whisper it. Voices so low. Voices so quiet. Nothing to fuel them. How did you come so far with empty lungs? [b]Hades' Tale.[/b] "It took me a long time to understand the dead. "When I arrived in the Underworld I believed my role was to dispense justice. I would see the evil cast down and the noble raised high. Here beneath the dispassionate gaze of the God of the Dead every creature would be stripped to the bone, their wickedness revealed and judged. A realm without lies. Without hypocrisy. A realm that wound stand as a contrast to the corrupt and twisted surface world, a place beyond Zeus' disordered realm, a realm so inevitable and flawless its influence would reach back in time to terrify the living. By perfecting the Underworld I could control the living, and by controlling the living I could unite the realms and enthrone myself as the chief of the gods. Olympus would be a gaudy sideshow in comparison to the noble contemplation of death. The gods would seem a collection of sexual degenerates and squabbling children in comparison to my silent, endless majesty. "For millennia I strived. For millennia nothing changed. Nothing changed except a slowly building fury. My kingdom reached ever greater heights of glory. I devised ever greater tortures for evildoers. Their screams reverberated through the cosmos and into the dreams of oracles and prophets, carried then to the ears of kings. Monuments were built to appease me. The industry of kingdoms cast upon a pyre of sacrifice to me. A necessary start, but the efforts always petered out. Necropoli were abandoned and shunned. Pyramids stripped for stone. The grape and the lute ever remained more alluring to mortals in life. I made them pay for it in death. "To do bitter things one must think bitter thoughts. To punish an enemy one must contemplate an enemy. The satisfaction of holding them in your power is a fleeting thing compared to all the years they held me in [i]their [/i]power with their smiling ignorance or apathy of my rage. And worse still, I did not even have the respect of the wise. They shrugged their shoulders and said that I was merely a tyrant and my morality was as alien to them as theirs to a field mouse. They accepted my punishments and rewards with equal indifference, not because I was right but because I was powerful. Because I was [i]arbitrary[/i]. "I, with my perfect and eternal laws written to define and enforce good and evil! Written in straightforwards language and made commonly available! And I looked around myself and realized that in my immortal Underworld I was surrounded not by great heroes and repentant villains, but by an endless, undifferentiated mass of grey shades. All ground down into dust and monotony by the act of my control. Observing a thing changes it, and by casting them all under my burning crimson gaze I had changed them all into abused and shivering slaves. I had learned my father's lessons well." [b]Zeus' Tale.[/b] "I thought exterminating humanity was going to feel worse than it did. "I indulged them for much longer than I should have. Partly I was afraid of becoming my father. Partly I was still in love with Prometheus. I still remember as we lay together amidst the clay sculptures he had made from ancient river mud. Gasps of my breath mixed with flecks of his sweat and seed as our lovemaking bought them all to life. He was so beautiful in those days, so full of promise. So full of kindness. He taught them how to make metal fly, how to make sand think, how to make crowns out of numbers. Each new idea promised to salve the pain of the previous ideas. Each time he showed me something new he promised that this would change things for the better. It took... a long, long time before I started to doubt that in my heart. "I let him take from me fire. I gave him my thunderbolts. I let him know the secrets of matter and metallurgy. I taught him how to ignite stars. It wasn't until I gifted gravity to the Azura that I saw the side of him that I'd been subconsciously avoiding. There was an anger in him then, an anger and contempt that I'd sensed and avoided while hardly even aware of it. And in his anger he stole from me the secret of life and gave it to his favourite children. "I had loved a wicked creature before. I had looked past a thousand warning flags for the sake of love, but I knew what would come of allowing this line to be crossed. I would not be gentle and obedient like my mother Gaia. I fought him, cast him down, and chained him to a stone. I broke the digital prisons of the Atlas Cultural Sphere and ended the machine tyranny that had developed there. But there my resolve wavered. What if he was right? What if the secret of life was the final gift humanity needed in order to overcome all of the cruelties that they had collected over eons? So I withheld my final judgement for just a while longer, just a while longer, perhaps soon they would..." [b]Aphrodite's Tale.[/b] "Ah ha ha ha ha ha! Oh, stars and ashes, what fools my beloved children are. I wish I could call them worse than that, but they've proved frustratingly wise, haven't they? I can walk them up to the brink, again and again, and each time they manage to pull themselves back. I thought I'd have Hera kill Zeus. I thought I'd have Hades kill himself. Then for a change, I thought I'd have Zeus [i]not [/i]kill humanity. Each time they work out the riddle, just in time. Each time they rise above love, no matter what new toxic new monster I can shape it into. I'm proud of them... [i]most [/i]of them. "So yes, it's all very simple. Zeus loved Prometheus. Prometheus loved humans. Humans loved power. And with a simple triangle I remade the galaxy, becoming grandfather to ten thousand new species, all of which are fucked up in ways that humans could only ever aspire to. Zeus got wise a bit too soon, though, so I had to scramble to adjust. But Atlas had left me their final flower: the plans for the Spear of Civilization. They thought that with it they might finally have a weapon capable of wounding even Zeus herself. Idiots - ha! Can you imagine? No, they couldn't wound Zeus with their pathetic galaxy-destroying superweapon. "But [i]I[/i] could. "Oh, can you imagine it? You, Alexa, upon the firing deck of the ultimate weapon. With your heart full of twisted love for your father, who was in turn in love with war. You were so perfectly obedient that you would overlook the murder of your own beloved! Who better to aim at the heart of Zeus and render Cronus' vengeance manifest? You would have relitigated the usurpation, making the point that the daughter should obey the father [i]no matter what[/i]. I could have done a lot with such a blade. I'd had a lot of ideas. After all, I had that castration to make up for. "But ahhh-hhh, well, can't win them all. Can only win about half of them, really. My mistake was in underestimating the overland speed of Hermes which - yes, I understand exactly how embarrassing that is in retrospect. Alexa was falling out of orbit when she should have been on the Spear. Hermes got aboard and forced the Spear to fire prematurely. And so only [i]half [/i]the galaxy was destroyed when it should have been all of it, and more besides. "Still, can't get too disappointed by that. Like I said. Can't win them all. And I got a really good consolation prize out of the whole thing." * [b]Hades' Tale.[/b] "I did not know how to change. I had to be shown. "Persephone was... you have to understand about Aphrodite that his domain is love. Love in the broadest possible sense. Romantic love for others, yes, but also toxic love, love for power, love for wealth, love for the self, love for lies, love for revenge, love for ideology, love for war. Ares is his consort and that is not a sign of Ares' power as it is of Aphrodite's true intentions. "But Persephone was everything that poets and artists think Aphrodite is. She is kindness and community. She is gentleness and strength. She is understanding and patience. She is the seeds that grow in dark places, the warmth of the earth, the strength of the heart. She is... stability. Not a harvest of wheat, slashed to the root and burned afterwards. A fruit tree that grows stronger and more generous with age. "She showed me how I might nourish the endless shades I had collected in my darkening underworld. How I might feed them, body and spirit, so that they would choose to stay without being coerced. She showed me how even a malformed and twisted plant might be gently guided to grow strong and whole with enough time, and so how human souls could pass through suffering and wickedness that they might learn and grow. She showed me, too, how to separate my happiness and attention from their progress. Light the sun and sooner or later leaves will grow in that direction. "She was on the other side of the River Lethe, with her mother Demeter, when half the galaxy came crashing down into my realm. In the confusion of those moments, Aphrodite and Demeter together drew a cursed veil over the River Lethe to deny all passage, sealing my realm away from the surface world entirely. After the influx new souls stopped coming down. Somehow above they had banished death, and this meal was to be the Underworld's last. "I tried to follow the lessons Persephone showed me. I did not turn my gaze upon those whose lives had been cut short without them even knowing. I allowed their worlds to continue as they existed in memory as I tried to think of ways I could... adjust them more kindly and gently to the realm of the dead. My current method is simply to let people live out their lives here and move them on to the true underworld after they die. New births are rare so depopulation is slowly helping wind this realm down. "But I was still cut off from Persephone with no way across the Rift. And so I asked Hermes, who dwells here in the human form of Nero, to carry a message from me to her. Hermes refused. She was doing work here, she said, because despite everything she still loved humanity and thought that they might be redeemed. She thought that they could be taught to be... better. That the galaxy would be lesser without them. And more than that, I believe she intends somehow to steal them from here. From [i]me[/i]. She is a psychopomp and she has not fully relinquished the dead into my custody. I think she expects to carry them [i]back[/i]. "So, while she schemes and plans, she has no time to fulfill her function. And so she offers me her proxies. She finds and recruits heroic shades from every corner of this crumbling, darkening realm and sends them to their deaths at the hands of assassins and lovers. Every year the stock of heroes drops lower and her choices become more frantic. This year she has sent her own daughter and that shows a profound desperation indeed. But as long as she keeps playing this game she sends more and more souls down into the true underworld and this realm becomes even more lightless and empty. She decrees against death, collars the fleet, consolidates humanity on a single planet where she can keep them safe, tries her best to cling to a guttering flame that will never be replenished. This entire realm slips further and further into oblivion, its best and brightest souls consigned to leave it first in these endless voyages of the [i]Plousios[/i]. "And in time, in patient time, Hermes' despair will grow and her heart runs colder. Eventually she will be done with humanity all together and we can set aside this farce. On that day she will take up her staff and her wings once more and deliver the message I have waited centuries for her to send. If I have encouraged you to simply give up and be done with this whole ordeal this is why, and that offer still stands. If you wish to do away with this painful, rotting realm and progress to something... kinder then you may. If you can accomplish your task then you will indeed have your choice of wishes and my gratitude, and there is little you might not accomplish with those. But understand that this is a personal matter between gods and there is terrible danger in becoming involved in that. "Understand too that once you pass beyond the Lethe you will be without my protection. You will be in Demeter's realm where not even death will be a salvation. And you will perhaps not see this realm or any of its inhabitants ever again."