Chapter 367: After the End

They returned to themselves in silence

No sky, no familiar ground, no throne, no realm, no power. Only emptiness that seemed to stretch itself in all directions in an unfinished thought, in a shape that refused to be defined. The air was thick and cold.

Zeus was the first to rise to his full height.

Chaos no longer obeyed his summons as it had in the final confrontation. The power that had once been his rested now, inert, in the hollow of the world that no longer existed. He looked at his hands. Bare. Empty of lightning or rage or the desperate energy of the last stand. The universe that he had fought and bled for was no longer there, and the absence of it ached in his ribs as if it had a second heart beating there.

In addition to the world, he had lost something more.

Hera’s face floated before his eyes, sharp-eyed and resolute, the loyalty in her gaze carefully woven into the expression of disappointment. Athena had survived, but so many others had not. The sons and daughters who had once been a complication to his rule and then a annoyance grown into an unbearable weight. All of them gone, reduced to the neat concentric rings of destruction expanding outward from the point where he had stood. The realization of what had happened pressed against his lungs. He had saved her and the others. He had failed everything else.

A low sound, almost a moan, escaped from somewhere in his chest

Hades was on his knees.

The Lord of the Dead- or whatever he was now- looked into the empty distance with an expression that Zeus had never seen on his brother’s face. Green light still pulsed weakly beneath his skin, but there was nothing for it to illuminate. No fields, no rivers, no Persephone.

He had barely managed to save her.

Through all of it, through the prison and the slow torture of returning spring to his realm, she had stood beside him. Together, they had built something that was more than duty. And then the door had opened, the judgment had come, and she had been taken with the rest while he was pulled away with the others.

Hades’ knuckles whiten against the floor, his fingers curling into a fist. He did not cry out, but instead let out a single, shuddering breath that carried the weight of all the things he had lost and the foolishness of believing he would not lose this as well.

Poseidon stood nearby, trident planted in the strange ground as if it could hold onto something. The salt water that used to drip from his beard was gone, along with the vast reaches of sea and the countless halls and children and lovers that had filled them. He looked into the distance, his expression vacant. Odin leaned against Gungnir, one eye fixed on the horizon. Sun Wukong slung his staff over his shoulder, uncharacteristically sullen. Kratos stood a little apart from the others, chains loose around his wrists, muscles tensed as if the grief in his chest was another monster that he had to kill. Loki hovered at the back of the small group, his expression inscrutable. None of them spoke for a long time.

Not because something had gone wrong

The silence of people who had been rescued from one fire only to realize that all the things they might have returned to were already consumed by it.

Hades was the first to speak.

"She was right there," he said hoarsely, "I had her. We were...we were starting over. And I let her go again."

Zeus closed his eyes. He wished he could say something comforting, something that would not be another lie. He had lost Hera. He had watched children who should have been his die, their names still unformed on his tongue. Poseidon had suffered the same loss. And now Hades, broken and alone, mourned the woman who had been the closest thing to a daughter he had ever known.

"You didn’t let her go," Athena said softly. "None of us had a choice."

Hades gave a mirthless laugh. "Choice. We spent so long talking about choice. Free souls. New orders. A world without the old chains. And all the choice that really mattered was made by something that looked at everything we had built and decided that it was garbage."

Poseidon’s grip tightened on the trident in his hands.

"I felt the seas die," he said flatly. "Not the storms, not the battles, but the sea itself. And the things I was supposed to protect stopped existing while I stood there throwing water at a hand bigger than the islands."

Zeus opened his eyes and looked at them all, at each of the nine who had survived where so many others had not. Gods and monsters and mortals, all that remained of everything that had been. He felt the crushing weight of responsibility, of the impossible loneliness that came with knowing too much and being responsible for too many lives.

"We failed," he said.

Not the final battle. Not even really the war as a whole. We had the sky and the dead and the sea, but it was never enough. Whatever it was, it didn’t even have to fight us. It only had to decide that we were finished.

Sun Wukong shifted his staff in his hands.

For once, the movement was without its usual arrogance. "I have broken mountains and stolen treasures and laughed at kings. I have never stood before something that did not even notice me trying to kill it."

Kratos did not look at anyone as he said, "There is always a higher mountain. We only found one that does not care if we reach the top."

Loki smirked. "Some of us already knew the world was smaller than it seemed. The rest of you are only now realizing it."

Hades stood slowly, his posture stiff. The green light beneath his skin was steady, but it looked fainter somehow, as if a part of it had been left behind with the woman who was no longer there.

Zeus looked at the expanse around them, at the unformed shapes and the thick air, and felt the first true pressure of the place that had swallowed them all up. It was denser than anything they had known, older, less interested in their survival than anything else. He looked at his brother,

"What now?"

he asked, his voice rough. "We were rescued. Someone wanted us to live. That doesn’t bring them back. That doesn’t bring her back."

Zeus had no answer that would not be a lie, because the sky that he had carried was gone, and the dead that Hades had learned to walk among were gone, and the sea that Poseidon had ruled was gone. The wives and children and lovers, the wars and betrayals and friendships, everything was gone. As if it had never been. As carefully as the thing beneath them had taken the stone away when it was no longer useful, it had taken everything else away as well. Now it was done, and the survivors were left with the grief and the guilt and the unasked question of who the next ones to die would be.

He looked around at the strange world and the strange air and the strange shapes that did not belong to anything they knew, and he felt something like the beginning of understanding. The first tight coil of fear and the knowledge that there was still a war to be won.

"Now we survive," he said, and the words rang false in his ears even as he said them. "Now we find out where we are and who took us and decide if there is anything left that is worth the effort."

Hades’ jaw tightened, and for a moment, Zeus thought his brother would argue, would demand another answer, would try to die here in the face of this new, terrible loss.

Instead, Hades turned away from him and looked into the distance, into the unformed shapes of the battlefield where the remnants of their army still stood. Poseidon closed his eyes, and Athena rested the butt of her spear against the ground. The others stood or sat, silent, thinking of all the things that would never answer when they called them again.

And behind them, far back in the direction from which they had come, the last fragments of their universe faded away.

Nine gods and monsters remained.

Everything else was gone.