The Existence of Darkness (Mythos Book 3)

Book summary

In The Existence of Darkness, tensions flare on Mount Olympus as Hercules returns, triggering unease among the gods. While he and Jason seek to reclaim their honor, deeper mysteries unfold involving Hades’ secrets, Zeus’ hidden agenda, and an ancient evil resurfacing in modern America. The gods’ alliances are tested, revealing secrets long buried.

Excerpt from The Existence of Darkness (Mythos Book 3)

Thick, dark clouds covered the sun, but no rain had fallen yet. The air was heavy, waiting for the rain to fall, and the anticipation grew with each moment. The ground thirsted for nourishment, waiting like a young child outside a toy store, and it wept as the clouds tortured it with their promise denied. The rain would come when the clouds were ready to release their gift. At this moment, they were enjoying the taunt.

There was a graveyard down the street which most people had forgotten. Most of the occupants were members of families who had since moved on without them; several had simply been forgotten on family trees; a handful were remembered in lineage, but not activity, and a small minority had purposefully been neglected from familial history. No human knew all the graves since the location had been a graveyard long before the first stone was placed. Ornate stones and tall crypts accurately represented about three-fifths of the occupants. There were bodies buried underneath graves, bones lost in the surrounding forest, and ashes scattered throughout the soil, which nobody alive would ever recover or even have any knowledge of. Some places are a graveyard simply because that is what they need to be.

A young girl sat proudly on the edge of a tall crypt, swinging her feet playfully, pulling petals from the red rose in her hand. Delicate blonde curls bounced to her small shoulders, and bright eyes shone out like gems set in her fair skin. An innocent smile and a button nose completed the image and, if anyone were ever to notice the girl, they would instantly adore her. As she sat in her blue, frilly dress, it was almost a shame that only one type of person would ever acknowledge her. That type of person was past the “adoring things” stage of existence.

She was Thanatos. She was the only one who knew every resident of the graveyard. Each one, at one point or another, had held an intimate relationship with her, and she remembered them all. She knew the more recent arrivals, like the businessman who had died tragically while saving his family from a raging fire. She knew the old, like the settler who had died of malaria after claiming to have discovered a land which already had residents. There was the peaceful man who had died in his sleep after 56 years of being faithfully in love with his wife, and there was the violent man who had been shot in the head while having an affair with his lover’s wife. Thanatos remembered each one, back to the ice age, and even before then. Each one had died, as humans were prone to do.

The crypt which she sat on was dedicated to the lineage of an Anglo-Saxon family. The family themselves had not contributed anything significant to society, aside from the standard human elements, but they loved one another. It was one of the few memorials which was still regularly attended to in this graveyard. Members of the family line would come by regularly to give remembrance to their former members and, occasionally, curse Thanatos for taking them too soon. Thanatos was used to that since, for centuries, most people regarded her as evil. They drew parodies of her, a bone skeleton with a scythe in a black robe. Often, they would blame her and condemn her for the natural order of things. Thanatos was not actually responsible for the deaths since death is the natural consequence of living. What Thanatos did was guide the wayward souls to their afterlife, be it reward or punishment. Thanatos was not evil, far from it; she simply had a job to do.

She took great pride in her job, and she did it well.

She was humming to herself, kicking her feet, and discarding rose petals from the bulb when a new figure approached her. He was a long, tall man, with long, silver hair. He was clad in a long, leather duster, wearing a long, serious scowl. He walked with light steps, hardly touching the ground through his stride. Two silver-grey eyes stared at the small girl, and a furrowed brow attempted to analyse her actions.

“Hello Morpheus,” Thanatos greeted him when he had come within appropriate range. She did not turn to see him but, instead, remained fixated on her rose.

“Hello Thanatos,” Morpheus replied. “What are you doing with that rose?”

Thanatos shrugged. “I’m trying to determine how the most recent occupant of this crypt felt about our relationship,” she answered. “Right now, he loved me not.”

“You know,” Morpheus sighed, “you’re not actually a little girl. You’re older than time! Why do you insist on behaving like a small child?”

Thanatos sighed. Placing the remaining rose on the crypt, she pivoted to face Morpheus. “What can I do for you?” she asked, pointedly, the childish charm draining from her voice.

Morpheus’ eyes fell to the ground. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not my place to say how you should act or behave. You have your own identity, and I ought not to criticize that. You are, of course, free to behave however you see fit. After all, you have been doing this longer than most of us.”

Thanatos allowed herself to smile a bit. “I have,” she confirmed. “Long enough to know what I’m doing, and to know that any explanation I provide for my behaviour would be less than satisfactory for the cynical, jaded lord of dreams. Long enough to know that it doesn’t matter, either.”

Morpheus cocked his head, raised his eye, and smirked. “You have a point,” he conceded. He hated being corrected by Thanatos but, often, this was how their conversations went. He made assumptions, and she knocked them down. That was precisely the reason that he had come to talk to her in the first place.

“I assume you have heard the news from the mount,” he began his discussion without pausing. “The heroes, Jason and Hercules, have returned after centuries of absence.”

“Why would you assume that I had heard that?” Thanatos asked. “Neither Jason nor Hercules were, at any time during the absence, dead, which is the only way that you could have safely reached that conclusion. Honestly, you Olympians are strange beings. You think that I should automatically know things, but no one bothers to tell me anything. I’m not omniscient, you know?”

“Fair enough,” Morpheus acknowledged. “Jason of Iolces and Hercules, the favoured son of Zeus, have returned to the mount after they had been—”

“I know,” Thanatos cut him off, giggling. “Jason came to see me, searching for his lost bride.”

Morpheus sighed and rolled his eyes. He seemed to do that a lot when talking to Thanatos. He had come to her to seek her advice on a topic which was causing him some concern because he thought that it might be of some concern to her as well. Now, he was reconsidering that notion. There was a small chance that he would get a straight answer, and a much larger one that he would just get frustrated. He had come this far, though. There was no point in leaving without attempting to get an answer.

“To that point,” Morpheus continued, shaking off the annoyance of both being cut off and being teased, “when I first realized that they had returned, I thought back to when I was studying The Posterus, which contains the lost prophecies of the poet Homer. There were references in the text to that exact event. I studied The Posterus for decades after our exile but set it aside because I could not find any evidence of the events which it was predicting, and I was beginning to feel like an overly religious human, trying to find signs which would signal the time and date of the end of the world. However, The Posterus did suggest the return of the two heroes.”

Thanatos nodded, gently petting the petals of the flower in her hand. “I will take your word for it,” Thanatos shrugged. “Homer’s work has always bored me. Besides, the long-short-short-long-short-short-long-long tempo really messes with my head.”

“Try talking to him sometime,” Morpheus scoffed. “That’s beside the point, though. In a later stanza, Homer refers to an underworld resident who will return to life. It suggests that this resident will likely be altered in some way, which stands up to reason. Very few underworld residents, with the obvious exceptions of Persephone, Hades, and Hecate, have ever earned re-entry into the world of the living. I just wanted to get your opinion on this. Should the gates of the underworld turn into a revolving door, that does not exactly strengthen your reputation.”

Thanatos breathed deeply; her eyes fixated on a gravestone several yards in front of her. “Death is final,” she stated after a moment of thought, the childish charm vanishing from her voice. “It must be. There have been exceptions before, but very few that I approved.”

“I am aware of this,” Morpheus nodded. “Up until now, I could count the number of cases on one hand. It seemed ridiculous to think that you would relax your grip even a little, but the script seemed so certain that—”

“Death is final!” Thanatos reiterated her point passionately. She turned her head to face Morpheus, and chills gripped his spine tightly as he watched the soft blue of her eyes melt, seemingly devoured by two black orbs, growing quickly in her sockets.

“There are things that a soul sees after death,” Thanatos continued, her voice filling with darkness, echoing through the cemetery, “which would make returning to life impossible. Even if a soul were to be retrieved, it would never belong to the same person that it did before the life was taken.”

Morpheus stared at Thanatos for a moment, gathering his thoughts. “Fuck, you’re dramatic,” he eventually chided her.

“Jason and Hercules did not return from the dead,” Thanatos continued, her eyes reverting to blue as her emotions came under control again. “The two were merely hiding from time, and doing it successfully, in my understanding. Their return, therefore, has nothing to do with me. Now, if the two of them intend to begin ravaging the underworld and dragging departed souls back to life, they will not be satisfied with the results.”

Morpheus nodded, his brow furrowing deeper. “So, the fallen heroes of our legendary tales will likely not be returning,” he surmised, thinking on the prophecies, and realizing that perhaps he needed to study them closer.

“What I am saying,” Thanatos said, returning her attention to the flower in her hand, pulling a petal, and muttering ‘loved me not’ under her breath, “is that if Hades intends to begin returning the dead to the living, he and I will need to have a discussion.”

Morpheus felt his heart sink. For a moment, he had allowed himself to hope that, perhaps, Olympus Prime would have a fighting chance, and they might return to Earth as deities once more. Nearly all the Olympians hoped for that, to some degree. Even Zeus, the orchestrator of the exile, still longed for his throne on Earth. Cupid hated what had been done with his image, and he would love the opportunity to rectify the misunderstanding. Apollo claimed to be enjoying his invisible status, but those were only words. Morpheus was convinced that he would prefer returning into active deity rotation.