Charon

Watching as they were instilled with the terrible gift of knowledge that he brought, that death had come to them hours before. Without fail, they would look to Charon, his massive ship sitting in the sky in the middle plane, where the living and the dead walk together. They would look at the misty planks of wood of the impenetrable ship and see the branding of the waves of Acheron about its hull. The only thing of colour and substance in the terrible night of their realization, would be Charon. They'd all feel themselves become less at the sight of him. They'd release the images in their mind that they had pressed about themselves like a cloak. The image of living flesh. They'd brush it aside as a sheen of dust.

They'd look to each other and their enemies. In death, all are united. There could be no hate or love among the dead, only brutal realization.

They were lost now. Charon would ferry them for eternity. There was nowhere to take them. In these battles, there were no rites administered to the dead, there were no coins placed in their mouths, they had no hope.

Charon took delight in this work.

The ferrying of those who could pay, those who had had the rights administered, and had been released from the living plane with every advantage due to a loved one, was sick work to Charon. He took them upon his massive ship, and he took the coins from their mouth and swore bitterly as the coins burned his palm, and watch as the spirit passed him and evaporate to the place of judgment, to his father.

The others, the innumerable souls he forever ferried would look on with numbed death aching through every inch of their being.

He could not refuse payment.

Charon had always stood as a gnarled tree on his ship. Moving it upon the ocean by will alone. He was rooted to this ship. He had been since his necessitous birth to Erebus and Nyx. His mother cried black, luminous tears from her face, upon which the night sky had based its shape. She cried when she laid the fated curses on each of her children, but especially Charon, who had been born dead and ugly, and wailed like a vulture some time after passing from the womb.

Erebus, his father, was not to be found, for after he had taken his sister, under the compelling voice of their father, Chaos, and the children had sprung out of her, he'd retreated, in all his darkness, which was endemic to the world and every plane that existed therein.

Charon's mother, Nyx, had also, from this familial union, given birth to the day, Hemera. And though this child was beautiful, she could not raise neither tenderly. Hemera and Nyx could never share the earth together, and so one would be forced to the bowels of the Underworld while the other went free. Nyx forced herself to curse them to their fates, saving the cruelest for her least desired child.

Charon often thought of his mother when the women would board his ship. The Lost Women. He was permitted to enter no other kind, for those that could cross were the domain of his father, and final judgment. In death, no woman could come close to the beauty of the night, which was his mother. Only in night could Charon exist.

Sometimes, Charon would be brutal.