Page 10 of A Kingdom of Sand and Ice (Kingdom of Gods #2)

Hades doesn’t visit me anymore. I spend my days studying all manner of potions. He used to come and watch me, always teasing me for how seriously I took my studies. But then he simply stopped.

And I can’t help but wonder what changed, what I might have done to make him go.

Tabitha Wysteria

Mal had no recollection of how she had come to stand upon the banks of the Underworld. One moment, Hades had clasped her hand in his and the next, the world had vanished into shadow. She had awoken beside a slow, silver river, its waters whispering secrets she could not decipher.

They lingered there for what felt like an eternity, cloaked in silence and mist. Mal's patience, never plentiful to begin with, began to fray.

She turned to Hades more than once, questions trembling on her lips, but he only smiled as if he knew time bent differently in this realm and her frustrations amused him.

Then, at last, a small wooden boat emerged through the haze.

It drifted like a dream, barely disturbing the water’s surface.

At its helm stood a lone figure, robed in grey, their face hidden beneath a deep hood.

Mal recognised the silhouette only by the curve of the horns—black, sweeping, wyverian.

A kin of sorts. Yet there was no breath, no sound, only the rhythmic dip of an oar.

Hades stepped lightly into the boat, the river seeming to welcome him. He extended a hand towards her.

‘Don’t mind Charon,’ he said, his voice low and lilting with amusement.

‘Harmless as a lamb. We’ve been friends for longer than I can count.

Isn’t that right, old soul?’ He glanced at the hooded figure, who neither spoke nor stirred.

Hades gave a casual shrug. ‘He’s not much of a conversationalist.’

Still uncertain, Mal climbed aboard. She didn’t trust Hades. How could she? But she trusted her own curiosity more. The moment her feet touched the vessel, Charon began to row, silent as the dead.

The river thickened with mist, the world around them ghostly and grey.

At first, the banks were lined with familiar trees, gnarled and leafless, their shapes not unlike those from her homeland.

But soon the river widened, stretching far and wide until it resembled a great black lake.

They entered a gorge carved deep into the stone of the earth, its walls soaring above them like the bones of giants.

Ahead, a bridge had formed, an arched passage seemingly hewn from the very rock of the cliffs, linking both sides like the spine of some ancient beast. Beneath it loomed gates, black as midnight, towering so impossibly high they rivalled the cliffs themselves.

As the boat drew closer, the great iron gates stirred.

Without sound or command, they groaned open, revealing what lay beyond.

Mal's breath caught.

Scattered across the earth, like broken dreams, lay statues of unimaginable scale.

Some were toppled, others shattered, their heads lost to time, their limbs crumbled into dust. Moss crawled across cold stone faces.

One colossal figure lay on its side, its marble arm outstretched as though reaching for something it would never again grasp.

‘What are they?’ she whispered, her voice no more than a breath.

Hades reclined slightly, his expression unreadable. ‘What do you think they are?’

‘Statues,’ she said. ‘But I’ve never seen any so large.’

‘They were gods,’ he said at last, his voice heavy, stripped of its usual jest.

A chill laced her spine. Mal looked again, more closely this time. Though many were unrecognisable, consumed by decay and time, some faces she knew. Gods she had prayed to in silence, deities whispered of in ancient rites. All fallen now. Cracked and buried by the very earth that once praised them.

The boat bumped gently against the edge of the dock, jolting Mal from her daze and drawing her gaze away from the broken colossi now swallowed by mist behind them.

She stepped off the vessel, boots crunching against damp wood, and turned just in time to see the cloaked figure wordlessly retreat into the fog, oar slicing once more through the water’s glassy surface. Charon did not look back.

‘Come,’ Hades said, reaching for her hand with the casual familiarity of a man who had done so all her life.

As if she were an old friend. Mal stiffened at the touch, every fibre of her recoiling, yet some quiet fear, some deep-rooted instinct not to face this place alone, kept her hand within his grasp.

He led her along the dock until it melted into a street that seemed torn from her own memories. And yet… wrong.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said, her steps faltering. ‘It looks like… home.’

The narrow street unfurled before them in eerie silence, a muted reflection of the Kingdom of Darkness.

Lamps, frail and flickering, hung from weathered brackets, their dull blue glow swallowed by shadow.

The ground beneath her boots was uneven, formed from jagged slabs of mountain stone, warped and broken in places where water from the river had surged through, reclaiming the path.

Buildings loomed above them, tall and foreboding, their blackened facades leaning inwards as if conspiring to fall upon any who dared walk beneath.

Gargoyles snarled from cornices and arches, frozen mid-scream, while doorways and windows had been bricked up with stone, their frames adorned with featureless faces of the dead, an architecture of mourning.

‘It is a shadow of your kingdom,’ Hades said, his voice echoing against the stone. ‘The Kingdom of Darkness was built as a mirror of mine.’

‘You created it?’ she asked.

He nodded.

‘Why not make it different?’ Her voice was low, almost reverent beneath the weight of what surrounded them.

‘Because I am a god,’ he replied with a lazy smile. ‘And therefore, I am selfish. I wanted a piece of my own home in the realm above.’

They pressed on, the path winding towards a bend in the road where the river had broken through the rock, flooding the street.

A small arched bridge of dark stone had been constructed hastily, as though nature had been too swift to allow for grandeur.

The water gurgled beneath, black and brackish, glinting faintly beneath the torchlight.

Mal looked up and found no sky. Just the jagged roof of the mountain itself. The cavern above swallowed the heavens whole.

‘We are inside the mountain,’ she whispered to herself, her voice laced with awe and dread. ‘As if it has eaten us. ’

Blackened vines and branches had twisted themselves along the walls, pushing through windows long abandoned, wrapping the forgotten city in a blanket of darkness.

Some buildings were half-collapsed, stairways crumbled to ruin, doors barred by moss and time.

It felt like a place untouched for centuries, left to be reclaimed by silence and root.

Mal stopped. Her breath caught as her eyes were drawn to a high terrace on the building ahead. Two figures stood watching from above, their forms tall and still, their eyes, though distant, locked with hers in the eerie hush.

‘Who are they?’ she asked, voice hushed, a shiver working its way down her spine.

Hades chuckled, that deep, effortless sound curling through the air like smoke.

‘Those, my dear,’ he said, stepping closer to her side, ‘are your siblings.’

…

The terrace clung to a towering structure carved into the very bones of the mountain, its silhouette regal in its silence.

An ancient temple that seemed less built than summoned from stone.

Vines trailed over the steep steps leading to its grand entrance, curling like fingers across each slab, as though nature herself had conspired to suggest no soul lingered there at all.

Mal waited by Hades’ side, her breath caught as two figures emerged from the temple’s gloom. They could only be described as creatures, for nothing about them felt remotely mortal.

The girl, who introduced herself as Makaria, moved like poured silk, her steps fluid and uncanny, each one more a ripple than a stride.

A veil of ink-black draped her face, flowing like the river they’d crossed, as if she had been spun from the waters themselves.

Long, pallid fingers lifted the shroud, revealing another cloth beneath it, this one bound tight across her eyes.

She smiled, but there was no warmth in it, only something unsettling that curled at the edges of her lips.

Something familiar. Her hair was unlike anything Mal had ever seen.

Not the white-blonde of Vera, nor the cool snowy-silver of Wren.

This was white in its purest, most blinding form.

A white so stark it seemed to reject all colour, all life, leaving only the hollow echo of what once had been.

But it was when Makaria lowered the cloth from her eyes that Mal recoiled.

One was deep and black, fathomless. The other…

was red. Not the red of phoenixians, so famously prized and revered, but something far more vivid.

Unholy. Consuming. A crimson that swallowed even the white of the eye, bleeding into everything, as though it had been carved from raw flame.

Mal’s gaze snapped to Hades. The same red eyes. The same unnatural hue. The same impossible truth.

The man beside Makaria stepped down with effortless grace and took Mal’s hand, his own eyes gleaming with that same dreadful light.

He brought her knuckles to his lips with a mocking bow, never breaking eye contact as he straightened, studying her as if she were some curious thing washed up from the riverbank.

He resembled Hades, uncannily so. Though Hades himself did not look much older than any of them, this one was younger still, all sharp lines and roguish charm that twisted like a blade meant for amusement, not mercy.