[Skotos] 1 – Skotos, Son of Hades and Persephone

Title: Loving Son Of Hades and Persephone

Synopsis: Hades, Greek God of the Underworld. God of the Dead, of Spirits, of Wealth, of the Underworld.

Persephone, Wife of Hades, Goddess of the Underworld. Goddess of Nature, of Life, of Spring, of Fertility, of Death, and of Rebirth.

Then came along the unholy union of both Hades and Persephone, a Child, a new God born in an age not all that safe or peaceful to those that have found themselves being a part of the supernatural world hidden from mortal eyes.

[Chapter Begins Here]

[Word Count: 1505 Words]

[A/N: Info Dump and Lore]

Hades, the Greek God of the Underworld. God of the Dead, of Darkness, of Spirits, of Wealth, and of the Earth.

Persephone, Wife of Hades, Goddess of the Underworld. Goddess of Nature, of Life, of Spring, of Fertility, of Death, and of Rebirth.

Two Gods, but both with Domains opposing one another. A God of Death and a Goddess of Life. Two forces so fundamentally different that when the two Greek Gods got together, many assumed the communion would end in disaster, but over time, they were proven wrong. Hades, the God of the Underworld and Lord of the Dead, who was seen as a dark and brooding God, was pleased with Persephone, as she was with him. Yet, despite their love for one another, the powers that be, upon seeing the two's happiness, interfered.

Demeter, Goddess of Agriculture, of the Harvest, and of Fertility, upon seeing her daughter in the arms of a captor, wept with tears of salt that led to vast swaths of land in the mortal world drying up and rotting, and in her grief, demanded that Zeus return her daughter to her rightful side.

 Zeus, in his perpetual arrogance, did not doubt for a second that Hades kidnapped Persephone and held her hostage within the realm of the dead, and so, he ventured into the land of the dead to retrieve the lost daughter, only to arrive and be rebuked by the same daughter he sought. In his anger, Zeus attacked his brother, Hades, in a battle that was to have lasted exactly three days, but the Primordial, Styx, annoyed, stepped forward and stopped their fight.

It was there, under Styx's eye, that the two Gods talked and negotiated. In the end, it was decided that for six months, half of the year, Persephone would remain by her mother's side, while the other six months she would be free to return to Hades' side in the Underworld.

For thousands of years, Hades and Persephone loved one another, and in 1881, the God of the Dead and the Goddess of Life were blessed with a child—a natural-born God of both Hades and Persephone.

A Paradox, for Hades, who had become the King of the Dead and Ruler of the Underworld, had become attuned to the land of the Dead, and had undergone a fundamental change. With his rule over the Underworld and constant exposure to the dead, he had become cold, colder than anything living ought to be, and for that very reason, both Hades and Persephone were prepared to live out eternity without any chance of having a child, and yet, a child was born. 

This child, who was born on the coldest night of the year, came out of Persephone's womb the size of a child.

[spoiler]

This is the MC's adult form; imagine a child instead. 

[/spoiler]

This child, the son of Hades and Persephone, boasted skin resembling the night's sky, with piercing, glowing white eyes that seemed to peer through everything it looked upon. A faint aura seemed to surround the boy, giving it an ethereal appearance, yet all Hades and Persephone could see was their son. 

At first, the boy did not speak; instead, he merely observed everything with a strange calm clarity that made the mortal souls that worked under Hades in his palace afraid and hesitant to approach. Still, mere days before Persephone would return to the Surface and to her mother's side to bring about Spring, the boy spoke his first words.

"My name is...Skotos." [#1]

...

After Persephone left to return to Mount Olympus and Hades to his work in managing the Underworld and the Dead that lived within it, Skotos found himself with plentiful free time and a curiosity that far surpassed that of a child. He watched and observed, but he rarely spoke to the servants and the dead who worked within Hade's castle, and when he did, the servants felt a distinct anxiety and terror.

This fear naturally led to even more servants and ghostly apparitions within the palace, keeping even further distance from the young God, to the point where Skotos found himself sitting alone in the only garden in the Palace that Persephone had personally created. Skotos looked upon everything around him with confusion, for what he saw he could not understand.

As his gaze shifted from the Palace to a small pebble on the ground, Skotos knew that the small pebble could be...changed in numerous ways. It could be altered in shape, in mass, in color, in position, in composition, so many different ways the pebble could be changed that only grew with each passing moment he looked upon the pebble.

Reaching out with his hand, a faint white light constantly emanating from it flowed down into the pebble, and before Skotos's curious eyes, the pebble began to change at a fundamental level, Skotos's mind willing the change to take place. As the white energy flowed over the pebble, it slowly began to shift and lengthen, its rough exterior replaced by a thin green stalk that lengthened into a small 'head' of petals.

Grabbing the pebble, Skotos looked at the pebble turned flower that now resembled all the other flowers around him with a confused indifference. In his mind, a single word continuously repeated itself.

Change. 

But what was the change exactly? Skotos did not understand.

For hours, Skotos inflicted change on the various things he could get his hands on in the garden, turning plants into other plants rocks into whatever he could imagine, before long the Garden no longer resembled what it did before, transforming, changing, into something else, something other and through it all, Skotos felt a connection to the life around him, changed as it was. 

Yet, it did not take long for Skotos to find his father standing before him, looking at the change Skotos inflicted with a mixture of disappointment and curiosity. Until now, Skotos had not felt the presence of his Father, but once he laid his eyes on him, Skotos could feel the Divinity radiating off of him. To Skotos, Hades felt like Darkness and Death given form, and to a degree, he was. 

Hades led his son back into the Palace, where he began to teach young Skotos the fundamentals of the new world he found himself in. 

He first taught Skotos about the Gods, explaining what they were, how they could form, and some vital trivia Hades felt Skotos should know.

Gods came into being through several different ways. The first type was a Natural Birth, as in the God was a naturally born child of another God, or spontaneously came into existence without any outside influence. Hades used the Biblical God as a Prime Example of a Natural God that came into existence spontaneously.

Another method was the God of Faith, a Deity born solely from the prayers and beliefs of countless mortals, the belief eventually coalescing to form a new God. Few Gods were born in such a way, but the most notable was the Roman Aspects of the Greek Gods.

The third method was a Mortal God, a Mortal who ascended into Godhood through some technique, Magic, or an unknown process. A few examples were Buddha, King Arthur, Merlin, and Hercules (Heracles), though Hades did mention that King Arthur had passed away not long after he rose to Divinity. 

Then Hades moved on to the Demi-Gods, mortals who were one step away from full divinity, being the children of a God.

Hades followed that with Champions, the chosen mortals of the Gods to act in the mortal world and given a small measure of a God’s power to fulfill the God’s will.

Next up, Hades spoke of the Primordials and the Endless who came before even the Titans. 

The Primordials, beings of unfathomable power and age who existed long before all other life on Earth, represent concepts such as the Ocean, the Greek Underworld, and much more. The Greeks are known to have the most Primordials recognized by the Gods. Yet, even the power and age of the Primordials were but notes of dust when compared to the Endless.

The seven Endless are Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium. They each represented a core concept of reality and weren’t functionally endless; they could not be killed, harmed, or affected by reality unless they wished to or faced an equally powerful being or item. 

Then came the Titans, being born from the Primordials and the precursors to the Gods, and while Hades did not tell Skotos of the other Titans from the other Pantheons, he did explain that Hades and his siblings overthrew the Greek Titans and rose into power, only to find that they were not the only Gods on Earth. 

As Hades explained the history of his family and the Greek Pantheon, he uttered a single word that caused the entire room to drop to such a temperature that most mortals would perish within moments.

“Styx.”

…

[#1 - Skotos, meaning in Greek is: Darkness, Gloom, or Obscurity]