Chương 843: Day Eight Hundred And Forty-One

Dear Diary, I'm gonna find Poseidon. I'm gonna find him, and I'm gonna kill him. I'm gonna find him, I'm gonna kill him, and I am not gonna feel guilty in the slightest. Fuck, I'm gonna reward myself in every way I can think of, including prodigious amounts of food, fun, and fuck, intermingled in every way I can think of that won't hurt one of my loved ones. I've felt a lot of guilt over things I've done in the past.

I realized today that I have not once felt guilty over the fate of the toxic wastes formerly known as Lancaster, nor the Valkyrie who came to collect and reward them afterward. Yeah. If I had the choice of killing Poseidon painfully dead, or killing him painfully dead twice, but the shitty excuses for homo sapiens formerly known as Lancaster got miraculously Revived and set free? Odin would get his Valkyrie back and I'd be killing the Earthshaker three times.

And I'm gonna do all that with exactly as much loss of control as I had when I slowly, carefully, even gently lowered Charlie Lancaster's still screaming brain into Slayer's blade. So yesterday as the sun hit the horizon an Olympian sized winged shadow soared over the royal Palace. A few moments later, in a blustery rustle of wings, a big dude landed a few strides from where Hades, Persephone, Marie and I sat.

When I say 'big winged dude', he had to have at least a foot on Hades, who was himself at least as tall as his nephew. I maybe came up to the dude's waist. His clothing kinda surprised me, because I'd been expecting a toga or something else 'classical Greek', even though neither Hades nor Persephone had worn anything like that. Dionysus did, yeah, but then 'drape a sheet over my junk' seems to be more his style.

Instead of anything like that, the dude I presumed to be Thanatos had what looked to be black satin or silk slacks, a bleached linen shirt, and a jacket that matched his slacks. He also had a sword at his hip, what looked like a dead torch hanging opposite it, and a weird bit of headgear that was half helmet, half crown, decorated with flowers and butterflies, all of it in silvers, whites, and blacks. Fuck it, he made it work, what with the pale skin, the dark hair, and the dark feathers of his wings.

"My Lord." He half bowed to Hades, who nodded to him.

"Lady Persephone," he only nodded to her, and she nodded back, almost like they were equals. Psychopomp God, thought Marie, as Thanatos turned to her, frowning.

"Marie." He sounded kinda offended, like she'd shat on the rug and hadn't bothered to clean it up.

"An unexpected..." Yeah, I might have gotten a little offended at him looking at my Wife like that.

"Hey, how you doing? Tabitha Diaz, Patron Goddess of the Alliance and Matriarch of its Pantheon. Thanatos, I presume?" He stared at my hand like some kind of offensively proportioned insect, then looked over to the Royal couple, who for their part gave him the kind of look I'd shoot at the Menace when she'd done something way too offensive for even her level of cuteness to absolve her of. He snorted, a single exhalation of air, took my hand, and froze.

His eyes bored into mine for an endless moment, at the end of which he said something my Blend simultaneously translated to, "sister?", "brother?", and "cousin?" I blinked, my mind racing through that old mythology brick I'd last looked at two years and a lifetime ago.

"Your mom's Nyx, right?" He nodded.

"Yeah. I'm, uh, Domnu's daughter. Eldest daughter." He stared, mouth working, until he said, "you are not Indech. Not Chaos."

"I'm not. I'm the one before that." He blanched, but to his credit didn't let go of my hand. Instead he just stared into my eyes. I felt something not unlike when my ladies shuffled through my brain, only this wasn't someone touching; more like a wind blowing across my Soul, while the God in front of me watched the ripples.

"You are..." Marie's hissing yowl cut him off, her hands going over my ears as she leaned over me to spit that aggressive angry howl right into his face.

"Not Yet." If he'd looked at her like some kind of insect before, now he looked at her like he'd just realized she was a Darwin's Bark spider, and somebody just told him what that meant.

"But I only..."

"Not. Yet." He fell silent, and after a few moments her hands slipped down to my shoulders. Sounding almost conciliatory, she said, "Wife's Orders." That caught him.

"You mean she," he nodded to me.

"Is not your Wife?" I glanced at Marie to see her grinning at him like the cat who stole the creamery, "Both Mine."

"I assume she," again he nodded to me, "is the one who so offended Clotho by getting you with child?"

"Children. Eight." Yeah, he looked like he'd just swallowed a frozen Carolina Reaper and realized what it would inevitably do when it thawed. Still, that look of offended disdain was gone, and if he looked a lot shocked at Marie and a little afraid of me, I couldn't get all up in arms about that after all the crazy shit I'd done to build up my rep as a dangerous person to offend. I let him have a moment to draw himself back up.

He squeezed my hand, not a crusher grip or anything, just a simple handshake, then said, "well. I suppose it would be too much to ask to meet my, ah, nieces and nephews?" I leaned forward.

"Hey, so long as you're on vacation? Just visiting, not working? Not gonna cart anybody off? You're welcome to come visit. Just give me a little warning so Saffron doesn't think you're a danger to anybody at the Homestead."

"Saffron? Your, ah, other Wife, I presume?" I was about to answer, but Marie cut me off, saying, "Dangerous One." Yeah, I got to watch as Thanatos smiled, then froze, realizing that Marie wasn't joking, then looked slowly from her, to me, then over to Hades.

"Lord?"

"I haven't met her yet, but I've never known Marie to lie." Before Thanatos could gnaw at his foot some more, I said, "just this week she killed one of those Titan-Jotnar Hybrids in single combat."

"She... She bested a Titan? How?" I shrugged.

"Beat it to death, mostly. Okay, she used Mana Blades, but I'm pretty sure that just sped things up."

"So... What is her Domain, then?" I smiled at him and dropped the bomb on the big old target he'd stepped on.

"Oh, no. She's Mortal. I mean, she's an Archmage, yeah, but still a Mortal one." He blinked, and I saw realization hit his eyes.

"She's responsible for that 'System' Spell?" I shrugged.

"I mean, she designed it, but she let our Concubine cast that one. She handled the updated Status Spell that night." Thanatos closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

"Well then. The three of you have a Concubine who is an Archmage. I..."

"Two."

"Pardon?" I shrugged, unable to hold back the impish grin on my face. Then again, I'm pretty sure Marie had the same fuckin' grin on her face.

"The three of us, Marie, Saffron and I, have two Concubines. Both of them are Archmagi." He took another deep breath.

"Well, I'll do my best to alert you well before any visits I pay. Although as a Psychopomp, I cannot say any visit will not require my services."

"Nah. We got that covered." He peered at me again.

"You're a Psychopomp as well." I nodded.

"Yep. Me, Marie, and two of our daughters." He froze, and I smiled.

"I don't want to bury my daughters. And I can do something about it. So I did."

"I... See." He turned to Hades again.

"Lord, you needed me for something?" Yeah, I might have noped out of that conversation right about then too. Unfortunately, while Hades was a decent guy, he wasn't exactly known for his soft cuddly kind of mercy, and he had called Thanatos here for a reason.

"Tabitha and Marie require an escort to Tartarus." Thanatos' gaze snapped to us, then back to Hades.

"Forgive me, Lord, but that is no longer your Demesne."

"It is not. But it is still accessible to Psychopomps." Thanatos nodded.

"It is. But should they remain for a night and a day, they will be trapped there, and there is naught I could do to remove them."

"We're just gonna go talk to Poseidon." He opened his mouth, and I continued before he could say anything, "maybe talk him into giving Hades here back the keys to Tartarus." The big winged guy closed his mouth, then stared at me for a minute before opening it again and saying, "take care. Poseidon has altered the flow of time within Tartarus. I know not exactly how far, but time passes faster there." I stepped out of Time, walked around behind him, and stepped back.

"Yeah, I can move pretty quick if I have to." He stiffened, but didn't jump.

"Fellow Child of Night, I would ask that you not do that again."

"The Time thing?"

"What? What Time thing? No, I meant please don't startle me again." The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. I stepped around in front of him, that impish smile still on my face.

"Sorry. Trickster Goddess. Kinda habitual. I'll try real hard not to tho, because you're being such a bro about things. And I mean that in the very best way." He nodded, then turned to the royal couple.

"If you do not need me for anything else, I'd best be off, then. Once I deliver these two, I have work to do." Hades and Persephone both nodded. He dismissed the three of us with, "don't let us keep you, although I hope to see all of you again in more pleasant circumstances."

"Lord." With that, Thanatos nodded to the two of us and rose into the air in a flurry of wings. Marie and I followed; here in M-Space, it seemed like I could do the thing Dionysus had shown me without too much of a problem. I didn't remember Mimicking that Skill from him, but then I was kinda drunk at the time, I might have done it without realizing it. At any rate, Thanatos didn't seem to be pushing the speed real hard, instead soaring slowly, letting us follow him easily.

We rose into the sky, then flew southwest. As we moved out over the ocean, I pulled up closer to Thanatos and asked, "isn't Tartarus connected to Hades?" He shrugged.

"Technically, yes. But to go that way requires walking. I assumed you wished to get there this Season?" I nodded.

"Yeah. Thanks. Stupid question, I guess."

"There are no stupid questions. Only stupid people, who do not listen to answers." I'd never heard the second half of that before. Wasn't sure if it was really a 'second half' or just his own spin on it. Either way, I could relate. After maybe half an hour, we started descending. Straight at the waves.

"Hold up a second?" Thanatos swooped back up and floated around us, gliding on his wings.

"Is something wrong?" I turned to Marie.

"Yeah, I know you're not exactly fond of getting soaked." She grinned at me, and I playfully batted at her.

"I meant going underwater." She blepped.

"It's Fine."

"Yeah, well. If I'm in there, and time is wonky, I might not be able to react quickly." I turned to Thanatos.

"Straight down, right?"

"More or less. She should be able to find it from here. If she can find her way back here again."

"Can you?" Marie nodded.

"Okay. While I really want you watching my back, I want you keeping our family safe even more. Can you go back and do that for me?" She frowned.

"Both." I facepalmed.

"Yeah, I didn't think of that. Will you be okay with the whole time differential?" She paused, shrugged.

"Should Be." I turned back to Thanatos.

"Okay then, lead on." I felt one of Marie shoot away to the east, and then we hit the waves. Without really thinking about it, I changed to The Dress, because she was just way easier to swim in for whatever reason. Other than that, after all the time I'd spent there during the Norfolk campaign, not to mention nomming the Mother of Water Panthers, I felt right at home underwater.

While she always looked horrifyingly bedraggled when she got out, while underwater Marie's fur all slicked down and went translucent, almost transparent. It formed a wavy haze around her body and especially her limbs, which without her fur looked almost emaciated. I knew for a fact that she had both physical power and supernatural strength there, but underwater even more than when soaked, she looked absolutely creepifying.

Yes, I still found her hot, and I have no idea how much of that is just proof I deserved that monsterfucker permit, how much was me knowing how good she was at all forms of sex play, and how much was me just loving everything about my tiger Wifey. For his part, Thanatos flew through the water as if it were air. He looked almost like he wasn't even wet. Just a dude with wings slowly gliding downward toward the deep, deep valley below us. We dove for nearly as long as we'd been flying.

Halfway down, the light from above died out, only to be replaced by a deep red glow from beneath. When I first glimpsed it, I thought it was a cave mouth. Then we dove further, and further, and further. By the time we reached it, it stretched from horizon to horizon, a wavering, foggy, glowing red wound on the floor of the sea.

"This is as far as I travel with you today, Daughter of Night. Remember, do not stay too long." I reached out and clasped his hand.

"Thanks for guiding us here, and thanks for the reminder. Still, what's the worst that happens? I put Possy in a headlock and noogie him until he hands over the keys, right?" He rocked his head from side to side.

"While you are not wrong, I for one would not like to be anywhere nearby should that confrontation come to pass. Farewell, fellow Child of Night." I pulled him in to a quick hug, then let him go.

"Let us know first, but I look forward to seeing you at the Homestead. For a visit, understand?" He rocked his head again, smiled, laughed, and shot upward, like he'd been holding himself down, holding himself back the whole time he'd been with us. I turned to Marie, but before I could say anything, she frowned and thought, This Depth Hurts.

"Oh, shit, Mittens. You sure you gonna be okay?" She tried, she really did, but after a moment she thought, Not Really.

"Okay then. You step in with me, and if it gets even a little worse, I want you to head home, okay?" She got a mulish look that reminded me so much of our Wife, our first daughter, that I wanted to laugh, to cry, to scream about the unfairness of a world where all I wanted to do was fuck around with my Wives and partners and play with our kids, but I had to be the mature adult to call fuckin' Poseidon to account. I must have shown some of that on my face, because she just nodded and thought, Let It Be So.

We descended. For a moment, glowing red mist surrounded us, and then we broke free into the air. My effortless glide through the M-Space sea and air turned into something far closer to trying to lift myself in the Mortal Realm. Nowhere near as hard as that, but still rough. Meanwhile Murder Mittens grabbed at my hand as she lost all semblance of flight and hung there, gasping for air.

"Okay, Mittens. Time for you to head home. Uh, if you can, get with Saffron and give me a ratio for how much faster time is here?" She nodded and disappeared. I tried very hard not to think about how I was now alone in Tartarus, looking for the motherfucker who killed Cerberus and nearly ended his own brother, Hades. Instead I looked around. For a hot minute I couldn't quite grok what I was looking at.

Above me the ceiling roiled with that glowing red mist; that glow repeated itself here and there through the entire cavern. It took me a bit to realize that each of those blobs of glowing mist had to be as big as the entrance, although with how they hung in midair I didn't think they were actually exits or entrances. In fact, each of them seemed to drift slowly upwards, and the base of the cavern far, far below was one big lake of the stuff.

The cavern itself had a kind of spindle shape to it, widening until about midway, then narrowing at the far end. Strange shapes hung suspended from thin chains, clusters of them pressed together against some of the walls. It wasn't until I traced one of those chains back to the wall up near me that I realized each link had to be as big as me. The chains themselves stretched for miles and miles, and the pit at the bottom of the place had to be as far down below me as the red mist was from the ocean's surface.

What I'd taken for crevices and cracks along the sides of the cavern were Olympian sized rooms and walkways carved into the walls. Fuck it, I had shit to do. Places to be. I pulled Mana from the tentacle that always stretched away behind me here in M-Space, and poured it into the mother of all Message Spells.

"POSEIDON! I know you're here, you colossal asshole! Where's my fucking money!" What, brain made out of memes and you think I don't know that one? My voice echoed through the space, and as it died down, I screamed out, "don't be such a pussy, I just want to talk!" I mean, I wasn't exactly lying.

If Fuckstain McGee decided to kowtow and hand over the keys to Tartarus and call off his kaiju goon squad and bribed me with a shit ton of I'm not sure what, because as I may have mentioned if my fam isn't rich, nobody in Atlantis is, I might, just maybe, not kick his teeth hard enough to eject them from his asshole.

Okay, yeah, I'd be willing to avoid violence if he surrendered completely, because that meant I could go home and concentrate on important shit like birthday parties and mead and holy fucking shit I almost forgot I had to figure out a way to get my femboy Priest pregnant before I saw him again. Maybe a minute after the echoes died down, I heard something. It took me a minute. Eventually, though, I realized two things. First, the sound was deep, rolling laughter coming from below.

Second, the red glowing mist flickered and shivered in time to that laughter. Right then Saffron's voice, strangely distorted, squealed through my head, you have minutes at most. Hurry. Fuck. I wasn't sure what was going on, but somebody with access to the central lighting system and, from what I saw, the gate to the place, thought my threats were funny. I dove. I lost track of time as I neared the first of those clusters of hanging stone.

I never stopped diving, but as I got close my brain finally made sense of what I'd been looking at. Something deep inside me, something that had laid buried by my own hand for years now, sparked to life as the atrocities beneath me came into focus. Each 'stone' had once been a single cube of pure marble wrapped about with some kind of metal. Each cube held a single body. A single Titan, with nothing sticking out except their head. None of the Titans in Tartarus moved. Dead things normally don't.

Every neck I saw gaped, and congealed blood covered the slowly rusting metal. Someone had smashed away portions of the stone prisons, then flayed the exposed flesh, shattered the joints beneath. Elbows. Knees. Crotches... In amongst those hanging, imprisoned Titans, smaller figures, held only by metal wrapped around their torsos, reminded me of Dad. Or more so Olga. Because Dad generally didn't have tits.

The Jotnar hanging there, limbs torn away, bellies ripped outward from inside, had savage bloody bite marks scarring their breasts. Everything I passed was dead. Dead, and mercifully so, because they'd been tortured, raped, and by all evidence forced to give birth to the results of that rape, all while still imprisoned, still bleeding from their torture. Every single being I passed was dead, and when I got to the asshole laughing about it, he was going to be as well. Some duBois trained part of me counted.

Thirty-two giant women with their bellies ripped open. Some Titans, but mostly Jotnar. Maybe twice that number of giant men, their eyes gouged out, their limbs destroyed, their genitalia severed or savaged, just as dead as the ones Poseidon had used them on. Everything I passed was dead. Tiny figures in the cracks in the walls smeared along the walls themselves. Some still looked almost humanoid, but most of them were just red and black skid marks. I fell, and as I neared the base of Tartarus and saw him.

Not Poseidon. The one remaining living being in the whole fucking cavern. Something bigger than a Titan, his upper torso larger than the first kaiju that had attacked Atlantis, yet still dwarfed by the long, coiled, serpentine body beneath that. He'd been chained like the Jotnar above, the chains themselves reeking of metal and stone and hate, each link larger than my Black Dragon.

"Foolish little Goddess. Arrogant whelp. Now you are trapped here in my realm." I reached, and though I could barely feel it, couldn't stop it, couldn't pull it backward, I knew the sun had nearly set.

"You're not Poseidon. Who the fuck are you?"

"I am Tartarus. Did he send you to entertain me?" He glanced at the clusters of stone above, longing clear in his eyes.

"it's been boring since he left."

"Yeah, why'd he leave you alive?" The big bastard snorted as I slowed to a stop, hovering his own arms length above him.

"Without me, this place would collapse. This pit is mine, without me it would cease to be. Why would the Gods have let me live otherwise?"

"Yeah. Why'd he leave you your eyes?" He moved like he wanted to shrug, but his chains wouldn't let him.

"So I could see." I remembered this state of mind. I'd treasured the sound of Charlie's screams from this forsaken wasteland.

"Did he make you watch?" The snake thing snorted, blasting me with wash of glowing red mist.

"Make me? Make me? He bribed me with that vision, that I might not use my remaining influence over my realm to interfere with him."

"Bribed you."

"How else am I to entertain myself? I cannot move. I cannot act, save to speak. To scream, as all who are imprisoned here may do, that our jailors may know we receive the punishment we 'deserve'."

"But you can control your realm? This place?"

"I can."

"You could let me leave. Turn time the other way so I can get out in an instant."

"I could." I closed my eyes. Took a deep breath as the day ended.

"Do so. Now."

"No." I dropped. Plummeted. Still accelerating when I hit him just below where his scales began, my superhero landing smashing a crater into his scales.

"YOU BITCH!" His strangled shout music in my ears, I slashed behind me with two massive Mana Blades, slicing off the paired appendages that slipped out of the cloaca behind and beneath me. As he screamed, I Translocated above his forehead. I pulled Mana so hard that the eternal shadowy tentacle stretching from me to my Maw lit Tartarus like a bolt of lighting yards wide. I'd noticed one other thing about all those Titans, all those Jotnar, even about Tartarus himself. There were no locks. No hinges.

No method of release. This was a box, and the Gods, including Tartarus himself, had welded the lid shut.

"Fuck. That. Noise." A column of light obliterated everything above Tartarus' shoulders. I stepped back to the Homestead, leaving the collapsing cavern behind. Something crackled and hissed as I landed next to our bed, smiling at Siobhan and Hailee where they stood in the back doorway, obviously headed to the Bore to get down to dinner.

"Darling, I'm home!" Right about then I passed the fuck out.