CHAPTER EIGHT
"Demand for Justice"
In the abyss of the underworld, Tao could not contain her seething rage.
Right from a young age, Tao had never been a sore loser.
With Tao it was winner takes all or nothing.
But she had made a deadly mistake of underestimating Monica, and that mistake had cost Tao her life, and the accounting of it sat in her chest like dry coal.
"Want is dangerous," her father had warned her once, sitting across from her in the Edinburgh study with his glasses pushed up on his forehead.
She had nodded and kept his words, not truly understanding it until now, here, in the throne room of the Netherworld, with the full picture finally assembled in her mind.
The heels of her shoes clicked loudly against the cold floor as she marched through the familiar hallway, her pace carrying the weight of her emotions.
"Hades," she said, her voice carrying through the throne room before she had fully entered it.
He raised his eyes at the intrusion. Her presence was of no surprise to him. He had heard the sound of her feet pattering through his halls and had known that she was on her way.
The council murmured at her interruption. It wasn't often that something extraordinary would take place in the underworld, and many of its inhuman residents were rigid about protocol and procedure. An uninvited human soul marching into the throne room mid-session was not on any approved agenda.
Tao stood unfazed by the displeasure in their collective eyes. Her attention was fixed entirely on Anubis.
"Tao," He addressed her. His calm voice settled the unrest in the room the way a hand smooths a tablecloth.
"Leave us," Hades said to the council.
Without much noise they collected their scrolls and moved toward the grand doors of the throne room, murmuring to one another in hushed, disapproving tones.
Hel was in the middle of another uprising, and their leader was entertaining a human soul as though she were a visiting dignitary.
They did not approve. They also were not asked to approve.
"I need to know why Monica is roaming free," Tao said, moving closer to his throne. "I am here and my killer runs free? She is walking around, working, breathing, benefiting from everything she took from me, and I am here. I need you to explain to me why that is acceptable."
"My, my. You certainly know how to make an entrance," Anubis said smiling, he loved the push. This was the most amusement he had gotten in decades. "I'm honestly surprised it took you this long."
"Very funny," Tao retorted, dropping herself into the seat before his throne.
The chair was a close replica of Hades's throne, and he admired the way she settled into it without hesitation, without even appearing to register the significance of it. He had a brief and inconvenient thought about how she would look with a crown on her head.
"What do you want?" He asked. "Justice or vengeance?"
"Why can't I have both?" Tao said.
He looked at her steadily. "We don't mingle in the affairs of mortals," he said. "The Netherworld and the living world are kept separate. It is one of the oldest rules of this realm, every real really."
"No mingling," Tao said. "Just bait and consequence. Just letting Monica's own actions find their natural conclusion a little faster than they might otherwise."
"Justice or vengeance?" He repeated.
"Justice," Tao replied, "With significant emotional overlap into the vengeance category. I won't pretend otherwise."
Hades studied her face for a long moment. She met his gaze without flinching, without any of the layers of calculation she brought to her interactions with almost everyone else. That was the thing about this place. It had stripped all of that away.
"Perfect," he said softly. And then he stood. "And what do you propose?"
He said it lightly, but they both understood what it meant. He was going to help her. Perhaps not in the ways she would have chosen, and perhaps not on her own time, but he was going to help her.
?
Tao followed Hades down the halls and through the many gates of his palace. Taking Tao exploring had become a thing he enjoyed most. Hades enjoyed the look of amazement and wonder in her eyes as she realized how wrong the myths were.
"Where are we going?" Tao asked.
Tao enjoyed every little moment she had with him. Each mystery she had discovered only made the Netherworld ruler more alluring in her eyes. The structure of Hel never seized to amaze her.
"Is it in your nature to be so inquisitive? To ask so many questions?" Hades uttered.
" This is my first time being dead, can you really blame me?" Tao replied.
Anubis wasn't used to being questioned. And he often found himself piqued with the unending curiosity the young girl had.
"Do mortals ever know patience?" Anubis asked.
" I thought you all had the saying of ‘patience is virtue’?" He continued leaning against the golden pillar of Baal.
Tao looked around the vast field, " Elysium,"
Hades quirked his eyebrows, he knew that he shouldn't be shocked about such actions from Tao. She embraced his world with open arms.
"It's magnificent," Tao said.
She had seen beautiful things in the Netherworld, more than she had anticipated, but Elysium was something else entirely.
The vast field was luminous under a sun she could not explain, its sand the colour of heated gold, its structures rising with the grandeur not of power but of permanence.
Of something built to last and had obviously endured.
"Transforming the Elysian fields was my first task when building this world," Hades said, looking at them, revisiting his old memories. "I felt completely out of my depth. Every idea I had seemed inadequate to the scale of what I was trying to create."
"What changed?" Tao asked, genuinely curious.
"I stopped trying to build something that looked correct and started building something that felt true," he said. "The difference is enormous."
Tao stood looking at the field and thought about her own building. Parts of the empire she had been handed. Parts she had extended. She thought about what any of it had actually felt like from the inside.
She became aware of his hand at the small of her back.
She turned to look up at him. He was looking down at her with an expression she had never seen on a face of that kind of authority, an expression of raw admiration.
?
Tao lay beside Hades in the warm light of Elysium, her hair spread out around her in the gold-lit air, and she thought about what it meant to find something worth having in a place that was nominally not alive.
The more she laid there, the more she could feel her feelings toward the Netherworld become motherly. The flowers whispered a new tune and the Earth reached up to embrace her, like this was where she was meant to be.
Hades watched on as the world beneath him, the world he had built accepted and embraced her. He pursed his lips thinking of their future to come.