Charon

It was his only supplicating revenge, not upon the women - the supplication would never be felt by them, but upon his mother, who was always watching, for night was all that prevailed in the realm of the dead.

On and on forever, they hated each other and bitterly loved each other, but with a very great distance between their mutual feeling reaching each other.

There was no release for the ferryman of the dead.

Only savage repetition.

Ferryman, bring me the unbroken. These words from his father, Erebus, who even now, could not call his son by name. That fruit of an enforced tryst with his sister.

Erebus had fled after the children had sprung forth from her. Hemera, the light of the world, his first offspring with extra familial ties. It was, in his mind, her radiant light and innocence that had forced him to flee. The part of his mind that held truths, the part that was disavowed by the rest of him, knew that it was the other child that had caused him to grind himself into the underworld with his thick atmosphere of darkness preceding and succeeding him.

The child was hideous. The stillborn. How could it have been born anything else? It was brought from Nyx's womb in a state of desiccation. Taut skin over bone and muscle as though it had never fed, yet still somehow grown. Its skin was luminescent and iridescent. Fierce Brightness, she had said. His skin is like fierce brightness. Therefore, in grieving, she named the child Charon.

His mother wept for her dead child until it let forth its birth cry, and then she wept for herself.

Erebus left, shamefully, somehow fearing that that living stillborn was the price for having obeyed his father and lain with his sister. When he was old enough, Erebus decreed, the stillborn would shuttle the dead to him. Only those who had been properly prepared. Erebus would not judge those who were not so. Those were the ones who were doomed to stay with the ferryman until the pull of the sea claimed them and they merged with Acheron.

He waited for the pull of the inner tide that directed him to the middle plane. It was an inner tide that was impossible to fight, and as such, the ship would follow its ebb and flow as though it was Charon's will to go there.

But there was no pull, he was not needed anymore.

There had been no answer to his question of what had happened to cause him to become superfluous to the grand design of the dead. He'd only felt his mother's presence recede and knew that she was no longer watching. He was alone.

His ship had become empty. The last of the lost, broken souls aboard had flung themselves to Acheron, joining and adding to its unified sorrow.

His ship seemed small. A diminutive canoe.

"Acheron," he addressed the ocean. "Catch me if you can!"

The ocean swayed furiously, packing wave after wave into the area of Charon's ship. Charon made no move to hold himself to anything. The ship was tossed, and Charon along with it, his laughter submerged by the angry waves.

Acheron would have him. It would wrench the very immortality from him. It would pull him apart and destroy him utterly for what he had done to them. His penetrating stare had been the blow worse than death. His twisted body had broken the last tether to the vestiges of humanity and hope that they had held in their dissolution.

He had raped the broken women, and so because their grief had come to Acheron, all of Acheron felt that grief.