The farewell lasted less time than it should have.
His mother held Kauã by the shoulders and looked at him as if she were trying to memorize every detail of his face—the scar on his chin, the hair that never stayed in place, the brown eyes that always seemed to be laughing at something, even when there was nothing funny. She opened her mouth twice. Closed it twice. The third time, she said:
“If that god hurts you, I’ll go to the Underworld and tear his head off with my bare hands.”
“Mom, he’s immortal.”
“I don’t care.”
Kauã knew she was serious. Helena Padoan was the kind of woman who would argue with fate itself if she thought it was wrong—and she’d probably win. He hugged her. She smelled like salt, barley bread, home. She smelled like everything he was about to leave behind.
Leoni waited for their mother to step away. He stood before Kauã with the same posture he’d always had—shoulders straight, chin raised, as if the whole world were a stage and he knew exactly where to step. But his eyes didn’t match his posture. His eyes were confused.
“Hades,” Leoni said, as if the word were a strange object he didn’t know where to put.
“Yeah.”
“You’re sixteen.”
“I know. Everyone seems really concerned with reminding me.”
Leoni didn’t laugh. Normally he would have—that brief, controlled laugh that made Kauã feel like he’d accomplished something. But this time Leoni only looked at him, and there was something in that look Kauã couldn’t decipher. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t envy. It was something more complicated—as if Leoni were trying to fit a piece into a puzzle that had suddenly changed shape.
“Take care of yourself,” Leoni said.
“You too.”
Leoni held out his hand. Kauã looked at it—the same hand that had pulled him away from fights when they were children, taught him to fish, mussed his hair when he thought no one was watching. He ignored the hand and hugged his brother.
Leoni went rigid for a second. Then he relaxed. And for three heartbeats, they were just two boys from a village that smelled like dried fish, holding on to each other as if the world weren’t about to tear them apart.
Then Leoni pulled away, squared his shoulders, and walked toward Zeus without looking back.
Kauã stood there, watching his brother leave. Something tightened in his chest—not pain, not regret. Something more like the awareness that a door had just closed, and he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to open it again.
“Ready?” Hades said behind him.
Kauã turned. Hades stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his face as expressionless as carved stone. There was no hurry in him. No impatience. Just the absolute calm of someone who had witnessed millions of farewells and knew that no words made any of them easier.
“Ready,” Kauã said. He wasn’t, but he said it anyway, because waiting until he was ready would mean never leaving.
Hades nodded and started walking. Not toward any visible exit—toward the ground. Literally. The earth beneath his feet opened like water, silently, without shaking or drama. A rectangular hole, perfectly cut, with black-stone steps descending into a darkness that seemed bottomless.
“Stairs,” Kauã said. “The god of the Underworld uses stairs.”
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know. A portal of fire. A whirlpool of souls. Ghost horses.”
“That’s theater. I run the place where every soul ends. I don’t need theater.”
Kauã looked at the steps. The darkness below was so dense it seemed solid.
“What if I fall?”
“Don’t.”
“Is that advice or a threat?”
“It’s a practical observation.”
Kauã went down.
The steps were cold beneath his bare feet—he’d lost one sandal at some point during the chaos in the Amphitheater and hadn’t bothered looking for it. Darkness closed above him like a mouth, swallowing the sun, the noise, the warmth of Olympia. Within seconds, the world above ceased to exist.
What replaced it wasn’t what Kauã expected.
The stories said the Underworld was a place of screams and torment, of rivers of fire and fields of ash. The stories were wrong. Or at least incomplete.
The Underworld was silent. Not the empty silence of a locked room, but the heavy silence of a place that had existed before sound was invented. The air was fresh—not cold, not hot, just fresh, like the shade of an olive tree in the middle of summer. And there was light, though Kauã couldn’t identify where it came from. A pale, bluish radiance bathed everything without casting shadows.
Plains of pale stone stretched as far as the eye could see, cut through by black rivers that ran without making a sound. On the horizon, low mountains of dark rock rose like the ribs of some colossal creature buried beneath the earth. And between the plains and the rivers, there were gardens.
Gardens that had no business existing there.
Flowers of colors Kauã had no words to describe—not red, not blue, nothing he’d ever seen before. They were colors that seemed to have been invented specifically for that place, as if the Underworld had decided the colors of the world above weren’t good enough and created its own. Some glowed. Others pulsed like tiny hearts beating inside their petals.
“This is…” Kauã began.
“The Underworld,” Hades finished without stopping. “Not what you imagined.”
“No. I imagined more… screaming. Chains. Maybe a lava lake.”
“Tartarus has lava. You’re not going to Tartarus.”
“Good to know. What about the screaming?”
“The Fields of Punishment are to the east. You’ll hear them eventually. But not today.”
They walked in silence for a while. Kauã stared at everything with wide eyes, trying to absorb every detail, every texture, every impossible color. Hades walked as if he were crossing his own backyard—without looking around, without being impressed, without slowing his pace.
The palace appeared like a mountain deciding to reveal itself.
It was enormous. Not in the grand, gleaming way of the Amphitheater of Olympia—it was enormous the way a storm was enormous. Walls of black obsidian, smooth as mirrors, reflecting the Underworld’s pale light in strange ways. Towers rising until they vanished into the darkness of the world’s ceiling. Gates of black iron, open and guarded by figures Kauã preferred not to look at directly.
But when they crossed the gates, something changed.
The interior didn’t match the exterior. Where Kauã expected cold, empty corridors, he found polished stone covered with tapestries depicting scenes he didn’t recognize—wars, celebrations, births, deaths, all woven in threads that seemed made of solidified light. Torches lined the walls, but the fire was blue and gave off no heat—only a soft radiance that made everything less austere. There was the smell of food. The smell of bread. The smell of something sweet Kauã couldn’t identify.
“Persephone,” Hades said, as if that single word explained everything.
And it did.
She appeared at the end of a corridor, and Kauã immediately understood why Hades loved her.
Persephone wasn’t what he expected from the queen of the Underworld. She wasn’t pale, she wasn’t gloomy, she wasn’t any of the things the stories suggested. She was a woman with golden skin and brown hair falling in loose curls over her shoulders, with green eyes that seemed to contain all of spring—not as a metaphor, but as a fact. Wherever she stepped, the obsidian floor seemed less cold. Wherever she looked, the darkness seemed less dark.
And she was smiling. A broad, genuine smile, the kind that made her whole face join in.
“You brought him,” she said, looking at Hades with an expression that mixed surprise with something very much like I knew it.
“I did,” Hades said.
“He’s a child.”
“He’s sixteen.”
“That’s what I said. A child.”
Kauã opened his mouth to protest—he wasn’t a child, he was sixteen, he already knew how to fish, cook, and survive a mother who used her sandal as a weapon—but Persephone was already standing in front of him, holding his face between her hands and studying him as if he were a rare plant she needed to decide where to plant.
“You’re skinny,” she said.
“Thank you?”
“That wasn’t a compliment. When was the last time you ate?”
“This morning. Bread and olives.”
“Bread and olives.” She said it as if Kauã had confessed to a crime. She turned to Hades. “You brought a starving boy to the Underworld.”
“He didn’t say he was hungry.”
“He doesn’t need to. Look at him.” She turned back to Kauã. “Come with me. Now.”
Kauã looked to Hades for guidance. Hades made a vague gesture with his hand that could have meant go, or I give up, or she’s going to do it regardless of what I say.
Persephone led him to a kitchen that had no right to exist in the Underworld. It was spacious and warm, full of steam and smells that made Kauã’s stomach growl like an animal waking from hibernation. Bronze pots bubbled over stoves fed by that blue fire. Herbs hung from the ceiling—some Kauã recognized from the world above, and others that definitely belonged in no mortal garden. A dark wooden table stood in the center, worn from use and covered in flour.
Persephone cooked. The queen of the Underworld, wife of the god of death, sovereign of every being that had ever stopped breathing—cooked. With her own hands. Without servants, magic, or ceremony.
“Sit,” she said, pointing to a bench.
Kauã sat. She placed a plate of roasted meat, warm bread, figs, cheese, and a thick soup that smelled like garlic and thyme in front of him. He looked at the food. Then at her.
“Can I eat this? I mean… isn’t there some rule about eating food from the Underworld and getting stuck here forever?”
Persephone stopped. She looked at him. Then she laughed—a clear, musical laugh that echoed through the kitchen as if the walls were laughing along.
“This is about me, isn’t it? The pomegranate story.”
“It’s kind of famous.”
“The pomegranate story is a misunderstanding I gave up trying to correct two thousand years ago. I stayed because I wanted to stay.” She looked toward the corridor they’d come through, and something in her face changed—softened, warmed, like metal being shaped by patient hands. “I always wanted to stay.”
Kauã ate. The food was absurdly good—better than anything he’d ever tasted, and he’d grown up in a fishing village where grandmothers competed to see who made the best stew. He ate until the plate was clean, and when he looked up, Persephone was already placing a second plate in front of him.
“I like you,” she said, sitting across from him. “You eat like someone who knows food is a gift.”
“My mom says I eat like a pig.”
“Your mother sounds like a sensible woman.”
“She threatened to tear Hades’s head off.”
Persephone smiled. Not the broad smile from before—a smaller, sharper, more dangerous one.
“I like your mother too.”
After the meal, Persephone took him to his room.
It was in a separate wing of the palace, at the end of a long corridor where the blue-flame torches cast shadows that moved in ways Kauã tried not to think too much about. The room was larger than the entire house where he’d grown up. A stone bed covered in pelts so soft that Kauã ran his hand over them three times just to make sure they were real. A worktable with blank parchment and ink. An empty weapons rack—for now. A fireplace where that blue fire burned, giving no heat, only light. And a window.
The window looked out over the River Styx.
Kauã stood before it for a long time. The river was black—not dark, black, the color of complete absence of light. It flowed without sound, foam, or urgency. And on the surface, every so often, something moved. Not fish. Something Kauã instinctively knew he didn’t want to see up close.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Persephone said behind him.
“That’s one word for it.”
“You’ll get used to it. Everyone does. Well, almost everyone. Some go insane. But I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
“That was reassuring.”
“I know.” She walked to the door and stopped. “Kauã.”
“Yes?”
“Hades isn’t what people say. He isn’t cruel. He isn’t cold. He’s…” She searched for the word. “Responsible. Responsible for things no one else wants responsibility for. That changes a person. Even a god. He’ll train you hard. He’ll push you until you think you can’t take it anymore. But he doesn’t do it out of malice. He does it because he knows what’s waiting out there for someone who carries his name.”
“What’s waiting out there?”
“Fear. People fear Hades. And they’ll fear you by extension. You’ll need to be strong enough to bear the weight of that fear without letting it change you.”
Kauã swallowed hard. For the first time since accepting Hades’s offer, he felt something like the true magnitude of what he’d done.
“And what if I’m not strong enough?”
Persephone smiled. This time, it was the smile of someone who knew something he didn’t yet know.
“He wouldn’t have chosen you if you weren’t.”
She left. The door closed. Kauã was alone in the quietest room he’d ever been in, staring at a river that carried souls, in a palace ruled by the god of death, miles beneath the world where he’d been born.
He sat on the bed. The pelts were ridiculously comfortable.
“All right,” he told the empty room. “All right.”
The room didn’t answer. But the blue fire in the hearth crackled, and Kauã decided that counted.
He slept. For the first time in sixteen years, he dreamed of nothing. The Underworld was apparently silent even in dreams.
He woke with something wet on his face.
Not one wet thing. Three wet things. Three tongues, to be precise, licking his face with the coordinated enthusiasm of creatures that had practiced it their whole lives.
Kauã opened his eyes and screamed.
The creature on top of him was the size of a large wolf. Its black fur looked like solidified smoke. Six eyes—two on each head—glowed in different colors. The head on the left growled softly, protective and assessing him. The center head watched him with almost philosophical calm. The one on the right was trying to lick the inside of his ear.
“WHAT IS THAT?”
“That,” Persephone said from the doorway with an expression of pure satisfaction, “is Nyx. Cerberus’s daughter. And she’s yours.”
“Mine?”
“Yours. I raised her from a pup. She needs someone, and you need company.” Persephone tilted her head. “Unless you’d rather be alone in a palace full of dead souls.”
Nyx’s right head managed to reach Kauã’s ear and licked it with a dedication suggesting that earwax was a delicacy.
“All right,” Kauã said, gently pushing the right head away. “All right, I accept. But someone needs to teach this head about boundaries.”
“Good luck with that,” Persephone said. “I tried for two years.”
Nyx climbed down from the bed and sat beside him, all three heads tilted at different angles, as if each were evaluating a different aspect of her new owner. The left one seemed to be deciding whether he was worthy of protection. The center one seemed to be calculating how long it would take him to adjust. The right one had already decided it loved him unconditionally and was trying to climb into his lap again.
Kauã scratched behind the center head’s ear. All three heads closed their eyes at the same time.
“Traitors,” Persephone muttered, but she was smiling.
Training began that afternoon.
Hades took him to a plain east of the palace—an open field of pale stone with nothing around for hundreds of yards. The Underworld’s sky—if it could be called a sky—was a vault of dark rock so high it seemed infinite. The pale light came from nowhere and everywhere at once.
“Do you know how to fight?” Hades asked.
“Sort of. My brother taught me the basics. I know how to hold a sword without cutting myself. Most of the time.”
“Most of the time.”
“Eighty percent. Maybe seventy-five.”
Hades looked at him with that expression Kauã was beginning to recognize—not disapproval, not amusement. Assessment. Hades looked at everything like someone reading a report, processing information and calculating variables.
“Forget the sword,” Hades said. “Forget everything your brother taught you. Leoni was trained to be a leader. You’re going to be trained to be something else.”
“What?”
“Someone who survives.”
Hades raised his hand. His shadow—which until that moment had behaved like an ordinary shadow—moved. Not following his body, but independently, as if it had a will of its own. It stretched across the ground, climbed Kauã’s leg, and wrapped around his wrist with a cold pressure that made every hair on his body stand on end.
“Shadows,” Hades said. “They’re the first thing you’ll learn. Not because they’re the strongest. Because they’re the most useful. A warrior with a sword is dangerous. A warrior who controls the battlefield is inevitable.”
“And if I can’t?”
“You will.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I don’t accept the alternative.”
The first exercise was simple: darken a room. Hades created a sphere of light in the center of the plain—small, the size of a fist, glowing with gentle intensity. Kauã’s task was to extinguish it using the shadows.
He tried for three hours.
He failed.
The shadows wouldn’t obey him. He could feel something—a cold presence at the edges of his awareness, like water flowing beneath ice—but whenever he tried to grab it, it slipped away. It was like trying to hold smoke. The harder he tried, the more the shadows scattered.
At the end of the third hour, Kauã was on his knees, sweating and gasping, his hands trembling. The sphere of light continued to glow, untouched, almost mocking him with its persistence.
“I can’t do it,” he said.
“I know,” Hades said. He was sitting on a rock ten yards away, in the same position he’d held for the past three hours. He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t offered help. He hadn’t said a single word during the entire exercise.
“You knew I wouldn’t be able to?”
“Yes.”
“Then why make me try for three hours?”
“Because now you know what failure feels like. And tomorrow, when you try again, you’ll fail differently. And the day after that, you’ll fail in another way. Eventually, you’ll run out of ways to fail. And then you’ll succeed.”
Kauã looked at him, sweaty and exhausted, his knees aching and his pride in pieces.
“That’s the most irritatingly wise thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
The corner of Hades’s mouth moved. Almost a smile.
“Go eat dinner. Persephone made lamb.”
Kauã got up, brushed the dust from his clothes, and walked back toward the palace. Nyx was waiting for him at the gate, all three heads raised, her tail wagging with an energy that seemed impossible for a creature of the Underworld. The right head barked—a deep, echoing sound that reverberated across the plains like distant thunder.
“I know,” Kauã said, scratching behind her ear. “I’m hungry too.”
He had dinner with Persephone. Hades appeared in the middle of the meal, sat at the head of the table without saying a word, and ate in silence while Persephone told Kauã about the flowers in the garden—each one had a name, a story, a reason to exist. Kauã listened, ate, and occasionally asked a question that made Persephone grow even more animated.
Hades didn’t take part in the conversation. But he didn’t leave. He stayed there, eating slowly, and every so often his eyes shifted from Persephone to Kauã and back again, with an expression that anyone who knew him very well—and few creatures in the cosmos did—would recognize as something close to contentment.
Under the table, Nyx slept with her center head resting on Kauã’s foot, her left head resting on Hades’s foot, and her right head silently chewing a bone she’d stolen from the kitchen.
No one mentioned the bone.
That night, lying in bed with Nyx curled at his feet—all three heads finally at peace, breathing in the same rhythm—Kauã stared at the stone ceiling and thought about his brother. He thought about Leoni, somewhere in Olympus, probably in a golden room, probably surrounded by people who admired him, probably being everything everyone expected him to be.
He thought about his mother, alone in the house that smelled like salt and dried fish, with two sons serving two gods and neither one there to help her fix the roof when the rain came.
He thought about Hades, sitting on that rock for three hours, watching him fail without saying a word. Without helping. Without making it easier. But without leaving.
And he thought about Persephone, who cooked for him as if he were family, who had given him a three-headed animal as if it were a welcome gift, who looked at Hades with eyes that contained all of spring and chose, every day, to remain in the darkest place in the cosmos.
The Underworld was silent. It was strange. It was frightening in ways Kauã still didn’t have the vocabulary to describe.
But for the second night in a row, he slept without dreaming.
And when he woke, Nyx was licking his face again, Hades was already waiting for him on the plain, Persephone had already made breakfast, and the world kept turning—even down there, where no one could see.