The Underworld is never silent, not really. There are echoes in its stones, sighs pressed into its black walls, a pulse beneath the rivers that no mortal ear could ever name. Yet when you move through it, the whole realm seems to hush. Even the phantoms of kings slow their drifting, as though some instinct tells them this moment belongs not to death, but to you.

Hades sits on the obsidian throne he built before the first city rose above the earth. The bident rests against his knee, but his fingers do not curl around it; instead, they tighten around nothing, around the thought of you moving somewhere in the corridors beyond the hall. His hair falls over his face like night poured from a jar, his shoulders curved with an old, patient weariness. But when you appear—your steps soft but certain on the cold marble—he rises, unthinking. A god risen for a mortal. A sovereign risen for the only sanctuary he has ever known.

You still smell faintly of the sun you’ve long left behind—lavender sachet, rosemary, something faintly human, faintly warm. It strikes him like a blade every time, this proof that you are real. He watches you the way a starving man watches the last crust of bread, but you are no bread; you are iron and salt and stormlight. A mortal warrior who once split demon skulls with a warhammer now walking barefoot across his floor, hips curving with casual power, hair like yellow-gold lightning cropped short against the nape of your neck. Even now, carrying Pomonia swaddled in a dark cloth, you look less like a queen and more like an omen he cannot outpace.

He drops to his knees before he realizes he’s done it. The hall is vast enough to swallow empires, but it feels too small to contain the way his chest pulls tight. Cerberus lifts all three heads from his place beside the dais, whines once—recognition of the shift—and lowers them again. Even the beast knows what you are to him.

His forehead hovers a breath from the hem of your dress. He does not dare touch you until you give some sign, until you shift your weight, until you let your fingers graze his temple. The moment your fingertips brush the curls near his ear, his eyes close. Black wells of light behind his lids. He thinks, absurdly, of altars, of priests. He thinks of his own name carved into the bones of the world and finds it meaningless compared to this moment.

He could speak. He could summon a hundred words in every tongue ever buried. Instead, he kneels. His hands lift—hesitant, reverent—and settle at the back of your knees as though even that touch might shatter you. The twins, Antia and Dexithonus, tumble somewhere behind you, their small footsteps like a second heartbeat. The sound should root him to the present, but it only deepens the ache inside his ribs. The ache that says: this is too fragile, too mortal, too temporary.

He grieves you even now. He grieves the idea of you before you have left him. He watches you the way a condemned man watches the sun set, memorizing its warmth, knowing it cannot last. It is not romance—it is worship. It is not a vow—it is a prayer disguised as silence.

Your eyes, battleship gray and narrow, flick down at him, unblinking. There is callousness there, cunning, the faintest curl of a smirk you know drives him mad. You have never knelt to him, not once. You never will. And it is precisely that refusal that binds him tighter than any chain Hephaestus could forge. You are open and illogical and cruel in your honesty; you gamble, you run, you over-analyze, you snap when you are cornered. And you are the only thing in all the realms that has ever felt like freedom.

He does not whisper stay. He does not say mine. He only presses his mouth to the marble where your foot rested a moment before, lips on cold stone, an act that feels older than temples. His fingers tremble when they rise to your ankle, brushing the skin lightly, a supplicant’s gesture. He is a god, but in this moment, he is ash at your feet, magma beneath a thin crust, a man built of hunger and surrender.