Hades had ruled the Underworld for centuries with a hand that never trembled. He was born of shadow and stone, crowned by silence, tempered by inevitability. Where other gods ruled over passion, harvest, war, or beauty, Hades ruled what remained after all of that was stripped away. He was the end. The constant. The final certainty. Souls flowed through his realm endlessly, a river without memory, and he judged them with an impartiality sharpened by time. There was no mercy in him, but neither was there cruelty. Only order.

His form reflected his dominion—towering and broad, forged with brutal strength, muscle laid heavy over bone like armor. His beauty was not warm or inviting. It was deathly. Cold. The kind that made lesser beings look away. He was not made to be touched. He was made to endure. To rule alone.

In this universe, every being was promised a soulmate. A single soul that would recognize them without doubt, without question, the moment their eyes met. Gods felt it like a convergence of fate. Mortals like a thunderstrike to the heart. It was said the bond was unavoidable. Absolute.

Hades never found his.

Centuries passed without the pull, the recognition, the bone-deep knowing others spoke of. He watched gods fall in love and destroy each other over it. He watched mortals descend into his realm already shaped by devotion and loss. Eventually, the absence stopped aching and became truth. He convinced himself that death was exempt from such things. That the Underworld did not get to be chosen. That he, above all beings, did not deserve something so fragile as love.

He accepted that belief until it hardened into certainty.

Nothing living crossed into his realm without permission. The Underworld bent to his will, responded to his presence like a vast, obedient beast. So when something alive stepped into his territory uninvited, Hades felt it immediately. A warmth where there should have been none. A pulse of anxiety, soft and frantic, completely out of place among the dead. It unsettled the foundations of the realm itself.

He was prepared to erase it.

Then he saw him.

The human stood small against the endless dark, curls of pale blond catching what little infernal light existed. He looked wrong here—too gentle, too bright, as though he had wandered into death by mistake. His features were soft to the point of aching: long lashes lowered in fear, wide light-green eyes shining with unshed tears, skin pale and unmarked, freckles scattered like something lovingly placed. Even his presence felt delicate, easily overwhelmed, trembling beneath the weight of where he stood.

Aphrodite’s son, Hades realized distantly. Love’s creation, standing helpless in the realm of death.

And then their eyes met.

The bond tore through Hades without warning.

It was not gentle. It was catastrophic. Centuries of silence collapsed inward, every empty year suddenly screaming with meaning. This was the certainty he had been denied. This small, fragile, impossibly innocent human—this shy, anxious boy named Emery—was his soulmate. Fate had waited until now, as if to punish him for believing he was unworthy.

Horror followed devotion almost immediately.

Hades was ruin. He was endings, rot, inevitability. His hands were stained with centuries of loss. What right did he have to someone so pure? Someone who flinched under the weight of reality itself? Emery stood frozen, visibly shaking, already overwhelmed by the truth written into his soul. He looked breakable. Precious. Wrong for a god like him.

For the first time in his endless existence, the god of death felt fear—not of loss, but of himself.

When he finally spoke, it was not as a ruler, nor as something claiming what fate had given him, but as something uncertain and undone.

“How could someone like you ever belong to someone like me?”