Persephone's hands descended like the executioner's axe fashioned from the wrath of heaven itself.
Each was the size of a small car, fingers spread wide to ensnare his entire being, divine power radiating from them in visible, warping waves.
Golden ichor, the lifeblood of gods, pulsed through intricate networks of light beneath her luminous skin. The very air screamed as her palms dropped, the sheer, impossible velocity of her movement creating a pressure wave that would have atomized a mountain.
"I'M SORRY! PLEASE! WHATEVER BROUGHT ME HERE, TAKE ME AWAY! TAKE ME AWAY NOW!"
Pete's soul was a fly in amber, frozen solid by the crushing weight of her divine fury. He couldn't twitch, couldn't flee. He could only watch, a captive audience to his own final, utter erasure as those massive palms came together to grind him into nothing—into less than nothing, into a memory that never existed.
The power roiling off her was biblical, apocalyptic. It pressed against the very concepti of Pete, a force not of anger but of correction, of an cosmic error being scrubbed from the source code. This wasn't a tantrum; it was a law being enforced.
This was what happened when an mortal saw what was not meant to be seen.
"PLEASE! I DONT WANT TO—"
The palms closed in.
Impossibly fast. A silent clap of doom.
BANG!!!
A pulse erupted through the Underworld.
It was not sound. It was not light. It was a fundamental, reality-wracking tear in the causal plane. The scream of the rivers hitched and fell silent. The weeping souls on the ceiling froze mid-drip. The stones of the cavern, millions of years old, groaned and split.
The Underworld shook. Not a tremor, but a full-body convulsion.
Mountains of bone and petrified agony avalanched into chasms. Bridges of woven vertebrae snapped and fell into the black, screaming water. Th great chasm itself yawned wider, and from its fathomless depths, something ancient and displeased roared a challenge.
And Pete—
Pete found himself already gone.
Fifty feet back. Then a hundred. Then across the chamber entirely, his soul rocketing away from Persephone's clapping hands as if yanked by an invisible, unbreakable cord.
"WHAT?!" Persephone's voice was a thunderclap of pure shock and fury. "YOU DARE RUN FROM YOUR PUNISHMENT?!"
'Wait, did she want me to stay there and take it?' What logic was that.
"I'M NOT RUNNING! I'M NOT DOING THIS!" Pete screamed, his voice a thin, reedy thing against the backdrop of cosmic chaos. But his soul was already being pulled again, faster now, accelerating toward... somewhere else.
Anywhere else.
Persephone rose from her bed in a single, fluid motion of terrifying grace. Divine power erupted around her, a nova of wrathful light, and suddenly she was clothed.
Not dressed—clothed.
A gown of woven shadow and captured starlight materialized on her form, flowing and terrible and beautiful. It clung to her, accentuating every divine curve while somehow making her even more magnificent, even more untouchable, even more terrifying.
It was a declaration: You saw nothing. You are worthy of nothing.
"I WILL FIND YOU, MORTAL!"
She moved.
It wasn't a walk. It wasn't a run. It was a sundering of space. She moved with the terrible, linear speed of divine fury, covering impossible distances in the blink of an eye.
Her footsteps shook the entire Underworld to its core. Each one was an earthquake, a localized cataclysm, a seismic reminder that she was not just a beautiful face or a violated goddess. She was Persephone.
Queen of the Dead. Bringer of Spring and Harbinger of Destruction. Wife of Hades.
And she was hunting him.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
Her footsteps were not sounds; they were tectonic events, a percussive drumbeat of divine fury that echoed through every cavern, every chamber, every forgotten pit in this sprawling realm of the dead.
The weeping carpet of souls on the ceiling scattered like a flock of terrified starlings, their essence rained down in a panicked shower. Guards of bone and shadow threw themselves flat against the walls, not out of respect, but out of pure, primal self-preservation.
The very rivers of screaming agony parted before her, her path a corridor of absolute, silent terror.
And behind her—though Pete's soul-form was rocketing away too fast to see—he could feel another presence joining the hunt together.
Another set of footsteps.
Heavier.
More deliberate.
Infinitely more final.
Hades.
He he'd felt him but now he was close now.
Pete's soul accelerated. The Underworld dissolved into a smear of nightmare-fuel—pillars of engraved bone, rivers of viscous despair, gardens of corpse-trees with their fruit of still-screaming faces, all a kaleidoscopic blur of torment.
"PLEASE! FASTER! GO FASTER!"
Persephone's voice was a storm that pursued him, omnidirectional and inescapable. "I HAVE MARKED YOU, MORTAL! I HAVE PLACED A HOOK IN YOUR ESSENCE!"
Suddenly, Pete's soul-form exploded in agony. It wasn't a burn; it was an invasion. A golden brand, intricate and unforgiving, seared itself onto his very being. It blazed like a tiny, captive sun, a beacon, a target, a claim of ownership.
"NO! GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF ME!" He thrashed, but the mark was part of him now, a new and terrible organ.
"YOU CANNOT HIDE!" Her voice was the chamber itself, the stones, the air, the void between spaces. "I WILL HUNT YOU ACROSS EVERY REALM, EVERY PANTHEON, EVERY WORLD THAT HAS OR EVER WILL EXIST! I WILL FIND YOU!"
The Underworld buckled under the weight of her promise. TheGreat Chasm yawned wider, and from its lightless depths, something ancient and hungry stirred, drawn to the surface by the sheer, delicious chaos.
"AND WHEN I DO," she shrieked, her voice an shard of madness, "YOU WILL BEG FOR THE MERCY OF THE VOID I ORIGINALLY PLANNED FOR YOU!"
Then—deeper, darker, infinitely colder—the other voice joined hers. Not a shout, but a sound like mountain ranges grinding to dust. Like the final, resonant closing of a billion tomb doors. The voice of endings.
Hades.
"I WILL FIND YOU, MORTAL."
The words were not a threat. They were a statement of physical law, as inevitable and inescapable as gravity.
"NO MATTER WHERE YOU RUN. NO MATTER HOW MANY WORLDS AND REALMS YOU FLEE TO. I. WILL. FIND. YOU."
Pete's soul didn't just scream; it vibrated with a frequency of pure, unadulterated terror.
And then—
Gone.
His soul disappeared. Not flung, not thrown, but erased from one location and... scribbled into another. It was a violent, nauseating lurch, a reality-transplantation that felt like being turned inside out and sideways all at once.
Persephone stood in the epicenter of her storm, her green eyes blazing suns of pure, focused wrath. Her hand was still outstretched toward the last known coordinates of the offending soul.
"FILTHY, INSIGNIFICANT MORTAL FROM EARTH!" Her voice was a weapon, cracking foundations and shattering chains into rust. "YOU DARE GAZE UPON MY DIVINE FORM AND FLEE?! I WILL TEAR THE THREADS OF FATE ITSELF APART TO HUNT YOU DOWN!"
Her final, talon-shrieked promise echoed through every corner of the Underworld, bleeding through the thin veil between worlds, a stain on the canvas of creation.
And then—silence.
The kind of profound, ringing silence that follows a cataclysm. The kind of silence that doesn't promise peace, but a cold and terrible reckoning.
Gasp.
GASP.
Pete sucked in air—AIR!—in great, heaving, desperate gulps that burned his phantom lungs.
Wait.
Lungs?
He had lungs again. He had a body again.
"OH GOD. OH GOD. OH THANK GOD."
His chest heaved with breaths that should have been impossible. He felt the frantic, solid thump-thump-thump of a heart in his chest. Weight. Substance. The sheer, overwhelming, glorious physicality of it all was a tidal wave of relief. He'd escaped. He'd actually escaped. He'd cheated death twice!
The memory of the branding, the vows of the two most terrifying beings in existence—it was still there, a cold knot of fear in his gut, but it was distant. Muffled.
And then the image of her flashed through his mind, unbidden and glorious.
Naked. Perfect. Divine. Every impossible curve, every luminous inch, the fall of her midnight hair, the sacred shadow between her thighs—
Pete grinned, a wide, stupid, reckless thing that stretched his face.
"WORTH IT," he whispered to the dirt, and felt a crazed laugh bubble up in his chest. He choked it down. Almost.
He had seen a goddess. The Goddess. Persephone, Queen of the Fucking Underworld, in all her naked, world-ending glory.
The fear was a coiled serpent in his intestines, but the memory... the memory was a bonfire.
Pete sighed, a long, shuddering release of pure exhaustion, and let himself fall backward.
He hit the ground.
Wait.
Ground?
Hard, solid, real ground. Not the bone-white stone of the Underworld, not the ephemeral mists of soul-space.
Dirt. Coarse, dry sand. Something undeniably, beautifully, mortal.
"YOU DARE REST, BOY FROM BEYOND?!?!"