Perseus Abyssos (4)
The resolve was made, and the moon rose.
The time had come.
“Come on, little brother! Let’s go!”
“Yes, big brother!”
A beautiful youth who could rival the Golden Fleece itself beckoned from the sky, and I spread my wings in answer.
Flap!
Even after becoming an eagle—just as when I had been a bull—I still boasted a massive, heavy frame. It was nearly griffin-sized. Hermes told me Hera’s power of growth must have bled into his own authority.
I clamped the heaviest offering chest tight in my talons while Hermes slung the lightest casket over one shoulder, and together we rose. Endlessly cold yet pleasant air filled my lungs; the moment we punched through the clouds, the splendid constellations under that beautiful night sky seemed to wave us onward. This place could only be heaven.
But before we reach the Underworld, let me digress a little.
Why? Because the road ahead is long, and I wanted to get the story straight first.
Anyone who grew up on a certain modern manga knows as common knowledge that Hades lives underground. They know Theseus fell for Hades’s scheme and was seated on the Chair of Forgetfulness; they know the tale of Persephone, kidnapped by the King of the Underworld and married on the spot. They know Charon the ferryman and Cerberus live there too. Plenty even recall the link between Achilles and the rivers of the dead.
This mythology is popular.
Really popular.
I wasn’t even born here, yet I know so much—almost expert level—that I can’t help bowing my head to the greatness of books. Anyway, while I’m praising the great teacher who wrote that book, what I actually want to ramble about is the parts it left out. I’ll fill those in properly.
Now and then you see mythic heroes casually strolling in and out of the Underworld, yet for all that, we know almost nothing about how to get there. It’s called the Underworld and it’s underground, so we just figured it was… underground. We take the journey far more lightly than we should.
Didn’t you ever do this as a kid?
When someone the hero loves dies, you start daydreaming: “Well, just go ask Hades to bring them back,” and then fantasize about how you’d sweet-talk the Lord of the Dead.
At least I did.
What I’m trying to say is that reaching the Underworld was never as easy as we think. First premise: this world is not round. It sits on a flat Earth, and at the edge of its sea a vast river flows in a perfect circle.
You can dismiss it as “setting” because it’s ancient Greek myth—except here it was reality. Once more for the cheap seats: this is not the past. This is a fantasy world inside the myth. The Earth really is flat, and the end of the world really is a gigantic river.
In other words, a place where scientific thinking is almost worthless.
The moment I learned that, my head spun.
A river that encircles the flat land (Gaia) and the rim of the sea (Poseidon). That colossal river is called Oceanus. The name alone tells you he is a god—the sea-god who reigned before Poseidon—so his power and majesty need no further sales pitch.
Why am I suddenly lecturing about Oceanus, the river at the world’s end? Because this is the place that wraps Earth and ocean and pours out every drop of water—river water, seawater, all of it—across the entire world. And the place from which Oceanus’s water wells up is the bottomless pit itself.
……Even as I say it, I’m not sure what I’m saying.
Let me break it down simpler.
All the rivers and seas of the world flow from Oceanus → this super-massive river called Oceanus rings the Earth and sea in a circle → the place where that river rises is underground, and that underground is the Underworld we all know—the realm of the dead.
Oceanus fans out into countless tributaries. If that doesn’t click, picture this river and that river meeting and merging somewhere without ever reaching the open sea. The famous River of Forgetfulness Lethe, the River of Woe, the River of Lament—every one of them exists inside that filthy, planet-girdling river called Oceanus.
Now the answer is clear.
To reach the Underworld you first have to cross those rivers of the dead.
Leave the edge of the flat land → journey to the edge of the sea → arrive at Oceanus, the end of the world and the end of the Earth, the place that descends underground → then cross the rivers of the dead that are Oceanus’s own tributaries, and only then do you reach the Underworld.
……Just hearing it is exhausting.
Lord Hades, you really live in one hell of a neighborhood.
The legends say he doesn’t get along with the Twelve. Live somewhere like this and even I’d turn sour.
Here you can finally appreciate how great Orpheus was when he walked into the Underworld to save his wife Eurydice. There’s the famous story where, moved by his music, Hades agreed to return her on the condition that Orpheus never look back until they left the realm—and Orpheus carelessly broke that promise. Looking at it now, I don’t think it was entirely his fault.
Even Hermes and I, flying, are taking this long!
He not only reached the end of the world on foot, he walked this entire vast expanse, got one step from saving his wife—and somehow managed not to glance back? That would be the weird part!
Most people would just die! Straight-up die!
The Argonaut expedition looks like a Sunday stroll next to this!
“What kind of superhumans were the great men of myth who reached a place like this barefoot?”
Having finished my mental tidy-up, I asked Hermes, who was flying beside me. He answered with a mischievous grin, bright and easy.
“Mostly people who had one side of themselves developed to an absurd degree. Just being able to get here is proof you’re a hero, so the residents of the Underworld generally didn’t look down on them. They’d say the rules forbade it and still grant a hero’s request now and then. Even Lord Hades, who does everything by the book, tended to give them some kind of chance.”
Hearing stories like that while soaring through the sky almost felt like tourism. Except the tourist attraction was the river of the dead, and the screaming of the shades below was pure mood-killer. Flying overhead was basically the same as invading the Underworld, so the ferryman—Charon, I assume—stared blankly up at us.
Past the Acheron that Thanatos guides and Charon ferries, past the River of Woe Cocytus, the River of Fire Phlegethon, the River of Forgetfulness Lethe…
Centered on that Lethe, plains stretched left and right, heaven and hell coexisting in the most literal sense. The place that looked like paradise was almost too bright to look at; the place that looked like hell never stopped echoing with the shrieks of the dead.
“What’s that over there?”
“Heh. Even clever little you don’t know that one?”
“There aren’t many books about the Underworld up on the surface.”
“Fair enough. Look there—see the crowds of shades? That big plain to the right of Lethe. That’s the gate leading to Elysion, the place they call paradise and utopia. The lofty judge Rhadamanthys stands guard in front of it; only good souls may pass.”
At the tip of Hermes’s pointing finger shimmered a portal of golden light. I couldn’t see inside, yet just looking at that glow felt like my soul was being gently reeled in.
Utopia… what kind of place is it, really?
I opened the wisdom pouch, but the search came back empty: I don’t know either.
“Besides Elysion, see the opposite side? On the left plain of the Lethe is the famous Tartarus. You know what that is, right?”
“The place where the most wicked among humans fall… and the primordial gods… and where the Titans were once imprisoned…”
“If you already know that much, no need for further lecture! Hahaha!”
Hermes laughed, cheeks flushed a merry red, then suddenly cut his speed. I matched him without thinking. He explained at once.
“The Underworld proper starts ahead. Strictly speaking, after you pass Tartarus and the Styx. From here the boundary between sky and underground gets fuzzy, so better be careful. Especially right around this spot—it’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous? I’m flying just fine.”
“Ah~! Wait! It was around here, I think? Little brother! Slow down more! One wrong move and you’ll end up like Icarus—?!”
“Eh?”
Then it happened.
Wobble!
“Hwaaaaak?! Hwak!!!”
“Oops! Little brother!”
Grab—!
I had been flying perfectly, yet the instant Hermes warned me my griffin-sized body simply toppled. He caught me, so I somehow kept my form and didn’t die, but—
Hweooo…?!
Of all places, I had been flying directly above Tartarus…
I nearly dropped straight into that nightmare…?!
While I was silently stringing together every curse I knew, Hermes burst out laughing. Both of us were now gliding much lower and slower than before. The reason hit me a second later.
“Uh… heh… just like you said, big brother, I really thought I was about to become Icarus… Something just… yanked my body all of a sudden… that kind of feeling…?!”
“Hahaha! Same thing happened to me the first time! This is still above the river, but it’s also the path that drops into the Underworld! An absurdity only people who fly the sky ever get to experience! Hahaha!”
Hermes’s words made it click. This world is exactly as the ancient Greeks imagined: the Earth is flat. Right now I had been flying toward the underside of that flat world. Yet without any sense of having entered the underground, I had simply kept flying above the river—so somewhere along the way the feeling of up and down simply vanished.
I took the myth world way too lightly! Without Hermes I’d already be dead!
I forced my hammering heart to calm and glided slowly lower. The sky I had been flying through only moments earlier now felt strangely close, as if an invisible wall had sealed it off.
So this is what descending underground feels like…
The sky grew darker still; the clouds hardened into walls. Hermes remarked that we were nearly there and offered one last explanation.
“Once you cross the Styx you’ll see the plain the dead cultivate under Lord Hades. But nothing grows properly here—it’s all wasteland. Not much to look at.”
Exactly as he said: nothing but black willows and the flowers called asphodel. Beyond that the land was empty, a true waste. The clouds had become black walls, turning this place into the underground; not a single ray of sunlight reached us. We were flying the sky inside the abyss.
I can’t see ahead… What the hell is this place…?!
The bottomless pit—or Abyssos (ἄβυσσος).
This was the place that earned that name.
Kuu?!
It felt less like flying and more like swimming through pure darkness. I wondered if this was how a person in a spacesuit would feel if you tossed them into space and left them there. Without Hermes I was certain I would have lost my way above this endless river and simply fallen. The thought alone was terrifying.
“Making a first-timer fly through this was probably a bit much! Hahat! But you can relax. We’ll reach Lord Hades’s palace any moment now.”
Even without a single torch, Hermes found the path with perfect ease—true to his title as messenger of the gods. Imagining what would have happened without him left my body soaked in cold fear.
“Really… I can’t even lift my head in front of you, big brother… Thank you for giving this experience to someone who was taking the world so lightly…”
“It’s all experience! Don’t worry! The first time’s the hard part—second time’s easy!”
Hahahahat—!
Hermes thumped his chest as if the whole thing were just another good story. Following the starlight he shed, I glided low toward solid ground. Somewhere along the way the plain had vanished; in its place rose a vast palace and the enormous dog that guarded it. Even now the sensation was less flying than falling, so I decided to stop trying to figure out which way was river and which way was sky.
Fuck! When I get back I’m writing a whole essay praising Orpheus! And I’m never coming here again—never! Handle the business cleanly and get the hell out!
I was already sick to death of the Underworld. Just the descent had stressed me enough to make my hair fall out. I’d heard the Twelve and Hades didn’t get along; after seeing the geography, I felt I already understood every ounce of that feeling.
『Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-!!!』
And as if that weren’t enough, a dog started barking at the top of its lungs like it was happy to see me!
My guts are about to explode!
Three-headed mutt bastard!
I wanted to ask whether it also had three assholes so it shit in three streams, but I bit the words back and concentrated on keeping my face straight. Just getting down here had drained me dry, yet the real business started now. I couldn’t afford to screw it up.
“Your face is blue. You sure you’re okay?”
“……I’m fine now.”
“Then follow me. Let’s go pay our respects to Lord Hades right away.”
My human form was still wobbling, and Hermes clearly found it hilarious; his expression stayed bright the whole way. Fortunately I managed to pull myself together before we met Hades. Small mercies.