The Captive Titan [ManxMan]

Chapter Eleven: Into the Depths

~Chapter Eleven: Into the Depths~

When the day arrives, I feel woefully unprepared, but there is also a jittery sort of excitement that has me rereading the letter Hades sends not five minutes before the start of the lunch hour in Asgard. It stinks strongly of the sulfur from the outer reaches of the fields of Asphodel, and it makes my nose itch unpleasantly, but it also grounds me in reality since I have to keep rubbing my nose as I read it. So, when a voice cuts through the silence, I startle enough that I nearly rip the letter in half.

"Did you pack enough food?"

I glance up sharply from the now-crinkled letter in my hands. "What?" I ask Loki, who is standing just inside the open doorway - though it was certainly not open a few minutes ago - of my room.

"Did you pack enough food for your trip?" Loki asks again, though the part he tacked on does nothing to clear up what he is talking about.

"I'm not bringing food," I remind him, bewildered. At most, I should only be in Hades' realm and then Tartarus for a few hours, after all, and even if time might not run perfectly normal in Tartarus, as some realms - like the Slavic underworld - just have problems, it is not different enough to actually matter for such a short break-in.

"What about water?" Loki asks, sounding serious enough that I immediately begin eyeing him with suspicion.

"It's the underworld, not the Thar Desert," I remind him. Though it is not always wise for the living to drink anything from the land of the dead, gods can usually get away with more than mortals, and the water from Elysium tastes faintly citrusy.

Loki frowns in concern, and I straighten a little, wondering if he had heard something about Tartarus that I have not. "What about tissues? Did you pack enough tissues, honey?"

The words register individually, but it takes a few long seconds of staring at him in utter bewilderment before I realize that he is an absolute bastard who deserves to be pushed off the palace roof. It wouldn't kill him, after all; there just might be a little maiming, some bruising, and a great deal of overdramatic whining.

On second thought...

Since I doubt I will be needing it after today, I snatch the pillow at the head of the bed and throw it at him. The coward ducks, letting it smack into the wall across the hall, before straightening back up with a smirk. "Feeling a little slow today, Ainmire?" He asks, his amusement bleeding into his voice. "That took far too long."

"My brain just couldn't comprehend the sheer stupidity of your question," I counter dryly. "Did you spend all morning coming up with it?"

"Spur of the moment, actually," he replies lightly, though no less mocking. "A smart god is able to think on his feet."

I scoff, "Just as a dumb god is able to speak out of the arse."

Loki hums noncommittally, but though his eyes are twinkling with mirth, whatever response he may have had goes unvoiced. Instead, he just nods at the letter that fell into my lap when I threw the pillow and asks, "Leaving soon?"

"Within ten minutes," I answer, after pausing for a beat to calculate how much time has passed since I received the letter, which provided me with the vague warning of 'twenty minutes' along with equally vague instructions on where to enter his realm from.

This time, Loki's hum sounds judgement, though these thoughts also remain unvoiced. "I'll inform the team," is all he says, before vanishing out of my room through the door that I still do not remember hearing open.

Sneaky bastard.

- - - - - - -

The Greek underworld is not a nice place once one wanders off the beaten path, as it is very easy to lose oneself in the gnawing darkness. In most mortal depictions of underworlds, there are fires everywhere with rivers of lava and glowing souls. While Hades's realm does indeed have a river of fire, the Phlegethon, that is not the river that leads to Tartarus, so it is not the river I left the road through the Underworld to follow, as only the Archeron comes close to the sole entrance. And it does not help that the closer I get to the entrance, the darker the underworld becomes because everything is dead dead here.