Benthesicyme II

Benthesicyme stood amidst the ruins of the Lotus Casino, her emerald eyes glinting with satisfaction. The once-mighty establishment lay in shambles, the wreckage a proof of her divine fury, of what the divine could easily usher when displeased. She had claimed Nico and Bianca, the children of Hades. She guessed that it was most likely for her sire to intend to use them as leverage against the Lord of the Underworld.

She was truly glad her father was finally acting, not staying idle like the last millenniums. She could feel it coming, complete and total upheaval. Soon, she will have her vengeance, everything her dark heart longed for.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a soft, almost ethereal voice. "Lady Benthesicyme, must you resort to such measures?" The voice was calm, polite, and carried the weight of millennia.

She turned to see him, the son of the night and darkness, Thanatos, the personification of death. He was approaching with an air of quiet nobility, one who could easily fool the unaware of his true monstrous nature.

They liked to call her father a begetter of monsters when the true one was the primordial night. Even amongst deities, they were different as if they were something similar but not like them, as if they were twisted.

His presence was both comforting and unsettling. Nothing else she supposed could be expected from the Daemon, from gentle death.

A welcoming embrace, an endless fall, an eternal oblivion, his presence seemed to whisper.

He was technically a Daemon, a deity personifying one domain. In truth, he was no different from a primordial. Most daemons weren’t when you took time to look deeper.

Even though she was strong, even though facing a Kronide wouldn’t be a thing that would make her hesitate, the presence of death did.

Fighting against a nigh-primordial. It would be foolishness.

It would be glorious.

"Thanatos," she acknowledged, her tone curt. "I do what I must for the sake of the sea."

"These children," Thanatos began, his voice gentle yet firm, "are under my protection. Hades entrusted them to my care. I must insist you release them."

Of course, she had suspected that such a thing would happen. Her father had explicitly asked her to accomplish this task.

You didn't send the wolf to crush an ant. More than that, it was logical for the king of the underworld to have his half-blood spawns guarded. After all, the great prophecy was still looming over the Dokatheon.

Benthesicyme's eyes narrowed. "Release them? Why should I, when their father hath overstepped his bounds? Thy master sent a kindly one and the son of Pasiphae against the youngest of our brood. He was assailed by a hellhound within Camp Half-Blood. Dost thou truly believe there would be no retaliation?"

It was a trick question, a trap. The truth was that it shouldn’t have mattered. Thousands of her father’s spawns had died in ignominious ways in the past and her father’s reaction had been temporary anger at best.

The thing that should have happened was that her father wouldn’t be caring at all or at least this much.

Her father shouldn’t have decided to war against the entire world, against his siblings and his family for a mortal child.

Thanatos inclined his head slightly, acknowledging her words, not refuting them. "Indeed, what happened with your youngest sibling could be said to be uncouth,” the daemon spoke softly “but the consign amongst all the deities of our pantheon was clear."

Demigod children of the big three were supposed to be presented before the council on the first occasion and executed immediately after discovered if their existence in any kind of form proved to be a threat to Olympus.

“I never knew Death to be a hypocrite,” the princess of the sea mocked. "In such a case, why dost thou interfere?" she asked him.

"We all know what becomes of most of the mortal progeny of my uncle." The little thing with the children of Hades was that they were more prone to madness. Being both entrenched in the living and in Death? That has consequences, especially for children of mortal origin.

“More than that,” the goddess continued with a smile filled with shark teeth "I would not be here were it not for the fact that my sister, thy queen, was unaware of their existence."

Kore would have slaughtered them at the first opportunity if she had known about the bastards of her husband. One of her names was Dread Persephone for a reason.

The almost imperceptible flinch from Death’s personification was enough to inform her that she was right.

"I could merely whisper, death boy, a breath of her name, and she would hear. Perchance she would align herself with her father rather than her husband. Perhaps she would rend your realm asunder if she learned that her husband sought to seize her father's treasure.”

The myths called Persephone, the lady of slay, her dread majesty, mistress of life and death, daughter of Zeus and Demeter.

The last of those things was wrong. Persephone had been born from the union of her father and his sister. Persephone had a twin.

Persephone hadn’t always been known as Persephone. In the past, the world, her family had just known her as Kore.

She had been born after the first Olympiomachy, while Athena had ruled with Poseidon and Demeter as some of her direct advisors. Her father had been called Wanax, King for a reason.

All of that changed when Zeus came back, all of that changed after the betrayal, after her brother stopped the oceans from helping due to spite.

A part of her had agreed with his decision. Zeus, the murderer of her granddaughter, the last thing she had of an equally dead daughter was at their mercy and they were refused justice.

They were refused what should have been theirs because their father had been too weak to do what needed to be done. They were refused because her father had always cared more about his siblings than anything else in the world when they were most of the time the reason for everything wrong happening to him.

On the other side, watching Zeus gain back his throne, his authority while she could have stopped, when she could have crushed him, when his place was in endless torment and suffering, not in glory and crowned had felt like the worst torture imaginable.

She had respected the decision of her brother. She had understood it but it didn’t mean that she had agreed.

It had been a foolish thing. Yes, their father paid for his betrayal but in the end, the one who won had been Zeus. They had been the reason why he had won.

Time only proved the foolishness of her brother’s action. Zeus had wanted to punish those who had betrayed him.

He had wanted to punish Demeter and her father at the same time. Benthesicyme was a parent, a mother.

This is why she knew Few things could hurt as much as watching your child be hurt, changed because of your weakness and unable to do anything.

Few things could hurt as much as loving your child and never being able to show them this love.

Zeus changed Kore. He changed her essence, something that could be called equal to identity-death.

He sealed her heritage from the sea, her claim over the underworld she inherited from their father.

He twisted her so much that what came after he was finished was a parody of the one they had loved.

The sky god adopted her, molding her essence until it was a facsimile of his and called her daughter.

The sky god changed her and didn't stop that. He changed, hid and destroyed every mention, every trace of her as their father’s daughter.

When it wasn’t enough, he split a part of her essence. That discarded part would be called by the mortals as Despoina.

The only reason why she hadn’t lost her sister forevermore was the fact of her marriage to her uncle.

Demeter had hated it, had made the world pay for the loss of her child but for a goddess, for a daughter of the crooked one, she had been tamed. Humanity still existed.

It could have been much worse as in the end of an iteration of humanity bad but it is not what happened.

Kore by accepting the title, the crown and the name of the queen of the dead had been able to break the seal of Zeus, to gain back what had always been hers and that should have never been tampered with.

Kore hated Zeus, almost as much as Triton did. Benthesicyme guessed that the only reason why she hadn’t attacked Olympus itself, joined this brewing war was because of Demeter. Kore had always been loyal.

Thanatos' dark eyes remained steady, his demeanor unflinching. "This hostility is unnecessary. Respect, however, should be mutual. Let us not allow this to escalate beyond reason."

Benthesicyme's patience waned. "There is no compromise to be found here. I am loyal to my father, Poseidon, as thou art to Hades. The children shall remain with me."

With a swift motion, she summoned a sea pearl, its shimmering surface reflecting light, almost becoming incandescent like a flame under the rays of the chariot of Apollo.

Before Thanatos could react, she acted, encasing the two spawns of her uncle within it, their forms sucked into it and swallowed the pearl, sealing them inside her very essence.

She was a queen. She was also a general. Those roles had taught her one thing. Always prepare for the unexpected and the worst.

At best, nothing happens. At worst, you aren’t caught unaware the way the Trojans had been.

Thanatos sighed, his expression almost sorrowful, almost sad as if a monster such as he could truly feel such "You leave me no choice."

“There is always a choice, child of the night, and thou hast just made thine.” was the only thing she answered as she began to remove the shackles suppressing her divine self once again.

The two deities squared off, their gazes locked onto each other, the air crackling, the air becoming literally heavy as they began to release their divine self.

Benthesicyme's form rippled with the power of the ocean, her body shifting, moving almost like a living riptide, the world around her beginning to drown.

Once in the past, thousands of years ago, it not more, this place had been under the ocean, had been a part of it.

The daughter of Amphitrite only did one thing, only asked one thing, “O you who was once of the drowned, remember,” she whispered.

She asked the world to remember and remember it did. An ocean appeared where once was Las Vegas, animals. human lives, human construction swallowed, buried, crushed, extinguished.

A great pressure fell, one, one enough to flatten islands on Death yet as the world bent, Death stood impassive, untouched, unbent Thanatos' presence darkening his surroundings, creating an invisible barrier between the Daemon and the ocean trying to crush him.

The worst was that Benthesicyme knew he wasn’t even trying, that this wasn’t of his doing at least intentionally. Just Death’s presence was enough.

"You have always been steadfast in your duty, Benthesicyme," Thanatos remarked, his voice a calming murmur amidst the chaos on the point of being unleashed. "But this path you have chosen leads only to destruction."

Benthesicyme's laughter was a harsh, mirthless sound. "Spare me thy platitudes, Thanatos. Thou speakest of duty as though it were something sacred. The gods have never been constrained by such mortal notions. This is a matter of power, plain and simple. This is about vengeance. I have awaited eternities for this. I shall not be denied."

"Power wielded without wisdom is nothing but chaos," Thanatos replied, his tone unchanging. "Your actions risk much more bloodshed, a worsening of the war undergoing. The consequences will be dire for both our domains."

Benthesicyme's gaze hardened. "War? If war is what it takes to finally avenge my granddaughter and remind Hades of his place, then so be it. If the lives of all those mortals are required for her vengeance, then so be it. The sea shall not bow to the whims of the underworld."

Thanatos' eyes softened, something almost like a hint of sorrow in their depths. "There is more at stake here than pride or vengeance, Benthesicyme. The balance of our world hangs by a thread. Do not be the one to worsen its severing."

"The balance was shattered the moment Hades dared to strike against the baseborn child of my sire, against a divine prince," Benthesicyme retorted.

Vortexes of power began to take form around the deities, the ocean brought by the daughter of Amphitrite rumbling, the force of their divine power clashing in a silent battle of wills. The air grew thick with tension, each second stretching into eternity.

A leaf fell, unremarkable, so little, without any true worth yet it was when it touched the surface of the water that the two immortals launched themselves at each other.

Death’s scythe clashed against claws coated in ice and poison, calm dark eyes meeting mad green ones.

The goddess grinned with what could only be deemed as joy before she swept the scythe to the left with one arm, the other coming to claw at the face of Nyx’s son.

Thanatos’s demeanour didn't change, the god acting almost nonchalantly, the staff-like part of his scythe moving the crash against the nails of the daughter of Amphitrite.

He was sent flying back, his form tearing through the ocean. The god’s wings appeared and extended from his back making the impromptu flight a controlled one, the wings helping him negate the velocity in a way that could only be called gracious, Death’s soles hovering millimetres above the ocean.

The ocean took outrage to that, tendrils, spears and waves surging toward him as the ocean under gained life.

Death’s wings batted, sending him on the left, his scythe moving to bisect a wave in two in a way reminiscent of one of the ancient messengers of the god of Israel.

Had it been a normal ocean, Thanatos wouldn’t be dodging, moving as much as he was doing but the body of water under him was one that had been summoned by a goddess who inherited too much otherness from both her parents. Counting on the fact that he was death itself wouldn’t be enough.

He would need to take things seriously if he wanted to not fail or worse. Death coated his scythe with darkness.

He tightened his grip on his divine weapon and swung. The ocean trying to swallow him from under. The wave trying to crush him from above. The tendrils and spikes coming from the side.

Only one swing was enough, the scythe moving like a painting brush in Da Vinci’s hands, cutting through the wave above, continuing in an arc to crush tendrils he could see now were filled with teeth, the scythe still moving this time to the ocean under with its pointy tip, death unmaking the force of nature, his left arm pushing the scythe to end the swing with spikes.

There were things worse than death. There were things older than death. More than that, what did the worshippers of the ancestors of Benthesicyme like to say?

What was it? What is Dead may never die? If only they knew how wrong and right they were.

The wings of death tensed, his gaze turned toward where he could feel the queen of the Atlantic before exploding toward her, his form soaring through space in a way and speed that shouldn’t have been possible from something physical.

He reappeared before the daughter of Poseidon, gripping his scythe with two hands before he swung downward hard.

The force of the strike due to how fast and hard Thanatos moved made sure that his strike was akin to thousands of tons if not more of TNT exploding at once.

The ocean under him, the one created by the goddess caught on fire, hot steams and hot geysers erupting.

Thanatos’s hands shook as he felt resistance on the other side of his scythe, his gaze locking with the one of the daughter of Poseidon.

Bracers made of ice were covering the arms of the sea immortal and it was with those two that she had crossed her arms above her head just as Thanatos struck and against what he was feeling resistance.

Death didn't show it but inside, he was impressed. It was one thing to be informed of something, in being told and it was another thing to see it.

More than that, they weren’t even fighting seriously. They were still testing the waters. The same way Thanatos hadn’t used even a once of his true power yet, the same he was sure The sister of his queen was doing.

Poseidon was truly a begetter of monsters.

"You cannot escape death," Thanatos intoned, his voice a cold whisper that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

"Nor canst thou drown the sea," Benthesikyme retorted, her voice as frigid and unforgivable as an endless ice tundra, cracks beginning to form at the surface of ice bracers before they exploded, shards flying to the face of Death.

Thanatos backpedaled almost running backwards to avoid them but This time, Benthesicyme was following.

He slashed at her neck with his scythe, the goddess not even trying to dodge, a smile full of teeth blooming on her face, an arm cocked back before being released against the nose of Thanatos.

The scythe bit into the neck of the sea immortal coming out of the other side at the same time that Thanatos’s face was caved in.

The arms of Thanatos moved, pulling the scythe to behead the sea goddess, to separate her head from her neck.

Ichor erupted upward as Thanatos succeeded yet it wasn’t the end because The daughter of Poseidon was still moving, another punch launched at the midsection of Death.

The staff part of his scythe moved in the path of it to stop it but it was worthless, the divine metal, enchanted by Night herself bending in a way it shouldn’t have been possible for such thing to do, the staff and the punch digging into the inside of the god.

Already, the beheaded head of the daughter of Amphitrite was reconnecting to her body in a macabre display as ichor tendrils surged from her neck to her head.

Already the damage Thanatos had taken was healing, crushed divine flesh, obliterated skin regrowing at an almost impossible pace.

The scythe of Death moved, the son of Nyx almost using it like a bat to Pierce the queen of the Atlantic at the hip.

A webbed hand, one that looked like a human one superficially at best clashed against the blade of the scythe of death and Death was stopped.

Only the instincts of Thanatos made him duck as a leg swept at the place where his head stood moments ago, on the corner of his eye, he watched as sharp winds erupted, the violent winds acting more like mini cyclones than anything else.

All of this was happening in less than an instant, too fast for anything mortal to catch on. It was only now that the world was reacting to their actions, shockwaves slowly beginning to erupt, the sea created by the daughter of Amphitrite splashing and becoming mad.

He was brought back to the fight by the movement of the space fabric itself being distorted as something too heavy was moving too fast toward him.

He looked before him just to meet the sole of a foot propelled at his face, drops of water igniting and sizzling into nothing on the path of it.

It seemed that the daughter of Poseidon had planned that. It was the only thing that made sense. It was too perfect almost like a choreography prepared before.

It was too fast for Death to dodge it but not too fast for one of the wings in his back to cover his face, to act as a shield.

Even then, the sound they made when they entered in contact was akin to one of the thunders of the thunderer himself, the strike due to how it was angled pushing him downward, under the ocean created by Benthesicyme.

In a second or maybe less, Thanatos travelled dozens of miles. The immortal used the velocity of his descent, his wings batting, the force so strong that for an instant, the oppressive ocean trying to crush him from all sides was the one to be repelled instead of trying to fight it.

From the gap he had created when falling into the cold abyss of the daughter of Poseidon, his gaze met hers, the deranged smile that was present since the beginning of the fight widening even more making the goddess look like a creature coming straight from the depths of the pits, her hands quickly moving through motions her palms clashed against each other leaving her almost in a prayer like stance.

The eyes of Death widened as he realized that he knew the signs the goddess had just made. He couldn't not do so when he had known and lived with Hekate for Milleniums.

Witchcraft, the goddess above wasn’t only fighting using her divine might, her divine powers, her domains. No, she was also using witchcraft.

Witchcraft in the hands of proficient humans could make them equal to some of the strongest half-bloods from the Greek pantheon and make their names etched in history like Morgan the Fey.

Witchcraft in the hands of half-blood could make them equal if not close to a minor god like Circe, Medea and Pasiphae had shown.

Pure Witchcraft in the hand of a god like Benthesicyme? Well, there was a reason when even before becoming the goddess of magic, Hekate had been feared, why Hera even without the fire of Hestia, the direct and powerful domains of her siblings could stand proudly amongst them.

Around him, the ocean began to shine. Looking deeper into the atomic composition of it made him understand that the atoms of hydrogen composing it were becoming unstable.

"Dost thou truly believe I fashioned this ocean merely to battle as though I were in my father’s domain? To fight, to conquer Death, I cannot contend with thee as a mere sea nymph. I must be more. I must become destruction itself!" Benthesicyme shouted.

The eyes of Thanatos, of Death himself widened in shock. What the goddess was doing, it would at best erase from the card all of North America and scar Gaia itself probably forever!

To explain, to understand Death’s fear more we needed to break it down in a simple way.

First off, Las Vegas is pretty big, right? It covers about 352 square kilometers. Now, let's say we have water covering this whole area, just 1 meter deep. The ocean was more than 1 meter deep but just to understand the dale more easily, let's use 1 meter deep. That's already a huge volume of water—352 million cubic meters, to be precise.

Now, water is pretty heavy. If we calculate, this water would weigh about 352 billion kilograms. But we want to think about the hydrogen in this water. Each molecule of water has two hydrogen atoms. So, for every kilogram of water, you get a lot of hydrogen atoms—around 6.68 followed by 25 zeros.

When hydrogen atoms fuse, they release a ton of energy. One fusion reaction between two hydrogen atoms releases about 6.7 mega-electron volts (MeV), which in more familiar terms is a tiny, tiny amount of energy in joules. But when you have a ridiculous number of these reactions happening—like the number of hydrogen atoms in the body of water summoned by the goddess—the energy adds up really quickly.

To give you an idea, the total energy released from fusing all the hydrogen in that body of water would be about 2.52 followed by 25 zeros in joules.

To put it into perspective, this energy is equivalent to around 6.02 quadrillion tons of TNT. For context, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, was about 50 megatons of TNT. We're talking about something trillions of times more powerful than that. We're talking about something at least a hundred more powerful than the meteor that is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs.

The Hell that Amphitrite’s daughter was trying to bring on Earth, it would be one beyond catastrophic. The explosion would vaporize Las Vegas instantly and cause unimaginable destruction. The blast would likely affect the entire planet, messing with the Earth's crust, the atmosphere, and maybe even awake the Earth Mother herself.

In short, it would be a world-ending event, something way beyond any natural disaster or human-made explosion ever seen or could be even realistically imagined.

This is what would happen at least if Thanatos dodged, if Thanatos didn't try to take the brunt of the impact.

This was a trap the goddess was putting him in. They both didn't want this but in the end, the one who would lose the most would be Thanatos.

The balance, the cycle of life and death that was already so hard to keep up, maintain in modern times, hundreds of millions of souls suddenly rushing to the underworld would break it.

This was without even mentioning what it would do to, How it would affect the Olympians if the place where resided the flame of the west was destroyed in such a way.

“παρακόπτω,” the immortal of the sea whispered, activating her spell making the world for an instant brighter than Phanes’ corpse in the sky.

The hateful eyes of Death gazed at the queen of the Atlantic.

“This is thy choice, Death! Thou hast spoken of honor and reason. Prove to me thy belief in those words!” shouted Benthesicyme

The only thing Death could do was shed his mortal disguise and hope his immortal glory would be enough.

*scene*

Benthesicyme had to admit. Thanatos was fucking impressive, deserving of being seen as one of the more scary deities.

For an instant, she gazed at his true form, at a silhouette that defied the boundaries of the known, an abyssal form shrouded in shadows darker than the void of space.

His presence was an affront to the very fabric of existence. She could feel it. He was a malignant force that seeped into the mortal world, tainting it with the icy grip of oblivion.

Thanatos was no longer looking like a mere reaper cloaked in black. He was now undoubtedly an eldritch horror, an amalgamation of nightmarish aspects.

His form shifted and writhed, a ceaseless cascade of indistinct, otherworldly limbs and tendrils stretched into the fathomless dark. Eyes—too many to count—glimmered in the stygian depths of his true visage, each one a portal to the endless void she knew was deep down in Tartarus, at the common origin of all immortals, at Chaos.

The eyes were brimming with the cold, indifferent knowledge of eternity. She could feel them bear into her psyche. Had she been an average deity or something less, had she not inherited so much from the otherworldly sides of her parents, her mind would have unraveled, fragile defenses, fragile psyche butchered savagely leaving only madness behind at best.

From his maw, she could hear a cacophony of whispers—multitudes of souls screaming, begging, crying, praying, despairing, cursing in unison, their voices merging into a discordant symphony that gnawed at the edge of her mind.

The very air around him was thick with the scent of decay and ancient, forgotten despair, with the scent of a corpse left putrid in the air for too long. His breath was the chill of the grave, an icy wind that sapped the warmth from the marrow.

Thanatos moved with a grace that belied his horrific nature, a spectral glide that left no trace as if gliding through space and time, his monstrous form expanding until any kind of light coming from above was swallowed and crushed.

The form of the daughter of Poseidon flashed Gold as she teleported away from the touch of Death, to the edges of Las Vegas.

Even so far from where she originally had stood, she couldn’t not gaze upon the divine form of the son of the night. gazing upon him almost made her feel small, almost made her see her own existence as insignificant, like an ant gazing at the majesty of the sky. She could feel the pull of the abyss, the seductive lure of an eternal sleep.

She could have already escaped. She had successfully distracted Death away from her. She just needed now to deliver the Di Angelos to her father yet a part of her didn't want to leave.

It had been so long since she had been able to let loose. It had been so long since she had been able to make the world feel her wrath and grief.

Seeing the true form of the deity allowed her the understand him in a way she hadn’t before. He was not merely the end of life but the harbinger of a cosmic truth too terrible to behold—the inevitable, all-consuming entropy that awaited all things in the end.

Death was a simplification of what Thanatos truly was, a human way to try to understand what couldn’t be, what shouldn’t be.

Looking at the son of Nyx, at the monster before her eyes, Benthesicyme wanted to crush it, to see how long until such monstrosity could last against her, if she could win.

More than that, if she could win against Death itself, it would indicate, confirm the fact that if needed, she could by herself crush the lord of the sky.

In the wake of Death, shadows twisted and curled, a preternatural darkness that devoured light and hope alike closing around the ocean which molecules she disrupted.

She opened her arms as if preparing to hug an old friend, mad eyes wide open, smiling with shark-like teeth as she watched it unfold.

*scene*

Thanatos covered the shining ocean, trying to limit if not negate the damage it would create as it went on.

Pain, so much PAIN, one almost maddening assaulted his senses as the spell was activated point blank to him.

Even then, he acted using his divinity to kill bit by bit the spell, to kill the heat, to kill the energy, to kill the destruction.

Maybe it lasted an eternity or maybe a second. He wouldn’t know but when he blinked, he was back in human form, surrounded by a literal wasteland.

Maybe it was white sand, maybe it was ashes but it was the only thing remaining everywhere he looked, everything that remained of Las Vegas, literally ashes.

Already, his body was healing, his divine strength coming back to him as if nothing had happened.

His gaze met the one of the daughter of Poseidon and even miles away from each other, they saw themselves with perfect clarity.

Thanatos could see the souls of those who had perished because of the daughter of Poseidon. He may have preserved hundreds of millions but she still had taken dozens of millions from their mortal coils. This was war he knew yet it left a bitter taste in his mouth. He recognized it as regret.

The daughter of Poseidon proved that he couldn’t underestimate her. It didn't matter that she had the children of his master or at least it wasn’t the most important thing anymore.

His primary goal was now to incapacitate her, to make it impossible for her to be a greater part of the war between the Heavens, the oceans and the underworld because something told him that this was one of the least dangerous things in her arsenal.

*scene*

Benthesicyme walked, danced in a city of white ashes. Many would call her a monster. Many would call what she did wrong when the truth was that it didn't matter.

Mortals died and their souls went to the realm of her uncle. They could reincarnate if they wished so. They could remain in Asphodel or go to Elysium or to the fields of punishment.

This wasn’t truly their end. This was just another step in their existence. Maybe she would have felt bad, remorse if their existences were completely erased the way it was the case when immortals truly faded.

She stopped not far from Death. She could have sworn that she could see anger instead of cold apathy in his eyes.

Good, anger was always a good motivator. She opened her hand. In it appeared a trident, one longer than the mortal form she had chosen and coveted in barnacles.

She didn't bat an eye as she closed her hand around it and it dug into her flesh making her bleed Ichor.

The riptides rumbling through her skin became Wilder. Her skin began to rot from the inside, cracks forming, green eyes peering behind her breaking flesh.

Death deserved nothing else but her best.

“Let's really begin. Let's finally let loose child of the night.”

“Indeed,“ Death spoke as his two hands closed around his scythe, as darkness began to emanate from his form, his mortal flesh crumbling back to the divine.

The daughter of Poseidon looked above to the dark clouds covering the sky.

“Wilt thou not join us, child of the sky? I know well thy desire to do so,” she asked.

Hermes’ form was hovering above them, the god looking as divine as he once did when Olympus was at its strongest in Greece.

The easygoing god had been replaced by an angry god, a god searching only for vengeance and retribution.

Poseidon had Atlantis. Zeus had Olympus. Hades had Erebos. Hermes had Las Vegas. The flames of the west had moved the domains of Hermes here in America in the USA. Could anything else be more appropriate than the city of sin, that never slept where thieves both legal and illegal in any sense of the world met?

“Since when did you see me?” the god asked the goddess.

“Since thy birth, O child of the Thunderer.”

A crack appeared in the middle of the face of the goddess slowly widening to let the madness behind out.

“I can’t let the two of you go. Millions died because of the two of you. My city was destroyed.”

Thanatos sighed “I expected nothing else.”

“The heavens, the seas, the very depths of hell—all gaze upon us with unyielding eyes!" Shouted Benthesicyme as the madness escaped.

“Let us reveal to them a spectacle they shall never forget!”