Page 132 of Hekate: The Witch
‘Not many have had the courage—’
‘And remain to tell the tale?’
I finished his sentence. It struck me
in that moment that it was true.
Nyx left no one unscathed when pushed.
‘What is it like,’ I asked him,
‘to have her as your mother?’
The corners of his mouth lifted,
and his brow raised slightly with mirth.
‘She is as loving as she is terrifying.’
I would have asked what he meant,
but he was pulling into the bay.
Beyond us lay a legend
from which only few came back whole.
The Forest of Silence
When people ask about the dominion of Hades, very few speak about the Forest of Silence. It was a dark mimicry of a mortal forest, as though a cruel God had decided to make a mockery of everything we loved about them. With its trees that had roots and bark made of vipers, and carnivorous black rabbits and poisonous midnight deer that would chase you until you fell to them, this was not a place many entered willingly. Everything here thirsted for blood and ichor; the trees would try to drink from you while crushing your bones into dust. There were stories, of course. Tales of things that knew how to tear you apart and piece you back together, the forest becoming a maze that never let you out. A thousand monsters were born here every day: they said that Echidna, mother of monsters, had hidden her womb somewhere in this forest, ensuring a constant stream of progeny. The screams and screeches reminded me of my visit to Tartarus. My stomach clenched with worry each time I heard an otherworldly sound. But as I looked upon the dark foreboding of the woods, all I could see was the hope that lay on the other side. And that was enough to make my feet move.
Thanatos Knew These Woods So Well
It quelled my fears. I wondered if the folktales told by the mortals in Asphodel about him and his siblings were true: that they grew up with monster playmates instead of Godlings; whether this forest was where they played their games. It struck me then how he had grown up with monsters for companions and I had had my ghosts, our childhoods intertwined with their strangeness. Perhaps this was why he had been so tender with Cerberus? He knew how to be gentle with monsters, just like I had a love for my spirits that no one else understood. I had so much I wanted to ask him, but Thanatos walked these woods in complete silence. Whether this was because he was trying to avoid the attention of what lived here or he simply enjoyed the quiet, I did not know. What I did know was that at one point, a scaled darkness wrapped around my leg and with a single swipe of his scythe it was cut in two, leaving red sap across my skin. Shuddering, I wiped it off. We could have been walking for hours or days. We did not stop, though the tiredness of this quest was starting to wear on my bones. But I held my tongue, and I was glad for it, because soon we saw it: the impossibly tall black towers of Hades’ palace.
Hades’ Domain
Thanatos was watching me
as we emerged from the woods,
brambles stuck in our clothes
and blue-black leaves caught
in our hair. I took in the
four strange obsidian towers
that simply disappeared
into the earth’s crust above us
and the skulls that had been
hammered into the walls
as though a morbid decoration.
