Empty Graves (Styx)
The knowledge of how he'd come to be there was lost to him. Just as so many things were. His conversation with Makaria had left him weeping, beyond broken, so that when he at last was alone he'd curled into a ball and heaved on his knees. Over and over. Until he was filthy with his own fluids, but he couldn't stop himself. Somewhere along the way all of it came together in a perfect storm of self-loathing and self-pity. She wasn't his enemy. Zeus and Hades weren't his enemies. Only what could they be? Both of them had left his son as he was for their own reasons. Selfish desires beget selfish desires and nothing had changed. A corrupt rule was to be obeyed because it was the rule of law. And what was he supposed to be? What was he supposed to do? Sit back, and let them escape punishment for destroying his life? Nothing could be farther away from what he wanted to do, at that very instant.
He wanted to drink their blood.
Only all of it had come to pass because he couldn't draw himself a line, couldn't tell the difference between what he believed and what he wanted to believe. Couldn't find the balance that would let him live his life. What was the point of living a life now? It was her, the same goddess whose hate burned in him eternal. She was the reason. He'd realized it, again and again, as he lay there clutching his head in his hands and waiting for a death that wouldn't come. Akheron still had not taken advantage of his river. Blood was dried on his face, rivers of red that streaked his skin. Those rivers seemed to flow forth from his eyes. Maybe they had, once. Akheron had no idea how hard Kratos had punched him. He just knew that his nephew had thoroughly ruined this body. Spending time in the river was the only way to satisfy his body's need for rest and rejuvenation. Which was why he refused to go into the river, which was why he refused to take advantage of its healing benefits.
"I mean it," Akheron mumbled thickly. "I don't care what you have to do. Lie, if that's what it takes."
That line between fantasy and reality was still blurring, still falling away, until at last what he saw before him was an endless ocean of his pain. And his son's pain, and the pain of his family, all of it spider-webbed and forming a network. At the core of that web of pain he found himself, tied by tethers he could neither see nor control to the pulsing glow of it. It fed him, but he was its prisoner. It cared for him but he was its slave. And when the word 'slave' had finally lost its meaning, so too had the spiderweb, until there was nothing left to sustain him. His mind was in a frantic method of operation. Trying to rest his reason, his faculties, while it attempted to overcome the pulsing radiating storm of hate and pain that issued forth from his gaping mouth.
Consume everything.
He wanted to. Wanted to. That way lay madness, a disturbance of the soul that he couldn't let himself explore. That was how Moros had to come to be where Moros was now, and wherever it was Akheron felt certain that he did not want to join his brother. Reality snapped back to itself and his mind, for that instant, was crystal clear. Lying on the floor of Styx's home. How had he come here? He didn't know. Where was she? She planned on letting him sit there for a while, apparently. He could make the most of it, but he didn't know what that was anymore. Could he ever truly pursue his course of action again, knowing what Hades would suffer if he took Hades child away? Did that matter to him? Who cared about a daughter that only existed because Akheron's son did not? He should just kill her the next time he saw her. But something kept him from doing it. More than pity or restraint or... the thought, as he'd stared into his son's eyes, had come swift and unexpected.
Ascalaphus wouldn't want this.
And from that moment on it all became a game of sorts, to see when and how Ascalaphus would communicate with him. The idea that all of this was just chance, that he'd seen the things he'd seen and said the things he'd said of late accidentally only, was preposterous to him. It was his son at work. All the time he'd wondered if there was a mind, feelings, emotions at work behind that beaked face. Now the owl was resting on Akheron's keep, looking out into blackness that was anything but for a creature of the night, and here Akheron was. Slumped over on the floor, wondering when he would see her. How beautiful she would look. How could he tell her that...? That he was sorry. That he knew it had to be done. He'd done it for her, and because he didn't trust Moros to know when to stop. Styx might forgive him. If she did, he could go on living. If she didn't then Akheron had reached the end of his road.
That had been decided a long time ago.
"Are you there?" Akheron asked weakly - his suit was clean, impeccably black, but the good flesh beneath it was another story entirely.