The Times That Zagreus Got Killed By A Very Angry Man Who Was Also His Cousin (Hades/God of War)

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I think Ghost and Zagreus would have understood the exsasperation there. Why are there so many saw blades?!
 
Mr. Cloak said:
I think Ghost and Zagreus would have understood the exsasperation there. Why are there so many saw blades?!
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They have different ways of looking at things:

Zagreus: "Why are there so many saws?! Those things hurt!"

Kratos: "...with a little work I think I can stick some of those on my Blades of Chaos and saw people in half at range."
 
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I had started to assume this was Kratos after he got stabbed by Ares right after he found Pandora's box (but didn't use it).

Kinda fits the best tbh.
 
Zagreus Gets the Kill
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    • Snow crunched underfoot, sizzling under the burning tread of Prince Zagreus. Great column-like brown pillars rose up, their upper reaches covered in green and white. Fleet-footed Zagreus pursued the maddened shade Kratos.

    "Olympus!" roared Kratos. "I'm coming for you! I will have my revenge on you, Ares — and Athena, too! And every other architect of my misfortune!"

    "What in blazes are you talking about?" Zagreus demanded. Fortunately, the prince had found that the one advantage he had was that he was substantially faster than Kratos — and up here, unlike the narrow warrens of the Underworld, he had space to move. And long practice at trying to escape had given him a surplus of stamina to allow him to chatter while on the move. "Weren't you just looking for revenge on Ares?"

    "Shut up!"

    "Stop running and talk to me!"

    "Stop dodging and fight me!"

    "We both know you'll try to gouge my eyes out again, so no. Why not try talking? I won't go away until you do. And I," said the truthful prince, "am very persistent. Really."

    Kratos huffed through his nose, frustration blending with acknowledgement that a man he had killed so many times did indeed qualify as very persistent. "Fine! Do you know why I hate you, and your father, and this whole rotten order? Do you?"

    "That's why I'm asking you."

    "I suffered for so long in your hellish prison of Tartarus? Do you know how long?"

    "N-n-no?" Zagreus tried, because he genuinely had no clue. Time had only a distant relationship with the Underworld, a second-hand inheritance for a realm without sun.

    "I cannot know! Years? Decades? Centuries of torment! Bound in red hot chains which burned at me! And the nightmares from life did not leave me! They never left me! I saw their faces time and time again! Their faces and their blood on my hands!"

    Zagreus decided not to mention again that he had found Calliope, because the last time he had tried to say that, the man had snapped and tried to murder Zagreus even harder than he had tried before.

    The Spartan was too deep in his rage-filled misery to notice the silence. "The whips of the furies! The cries of 'Murderer!' Repeated time and time again! As if that is all I am!"

    "Nah, that's just Tis. She's actually a really nice girl when you put the effort into getting to know her. Which, honestly, not sure anyone ever has. Not even her sisters. Hmm. Maybe for my next project I'll try to sit them down together, get some sisterly bonding going on, maybe teach Tis to say other people's names."

    For his troubles, Kratos threw a tree at Zagreus. He dodged, but the shade took the chance to change direction.

    "Yeah, they'd probably just use the chance to fight me three on one," Zagreus said thoughtfully.

    "Do you ever shut up?"

    "Not if I can help it. Kratos, mate…"

    "I am not your mate," Kratos roared, wading through waist-high snow even as the light-footed prince jogged atop the surface of it. "I will have my revenge! Ares tricked me into murdering my wife, my daughter! Athena was using me! And if Zeus was my father, he did nothing to stop any of this! The world is unjust! So if I am to be cast back into Tartarus regardless of what I do, I will tear down Zeus and the heavens themselves! No matter how many times I have to escape! I will kill them all! Even Zeus!"

    "Lord Uncle Zeus is…" Zagreus looked up in the sky, checking for any signs of thunderbolts, "... well, my father doesn't like him much."

    "Your father tortured me!"

    "Hey, I never said I liked my father. I'm trying to break out of here too, you know. Which… I guess I technically have?" He looked around. "Look, if you stop running, we can talk for a bit more and I can take a look around. This is the first time I've ever seen the surface. Born in the Underworld and all that."

    Kratos tossed a burning chained blade out at him, but that almost seemed reflexive. "Look at what the gods have done to the world, you fool! Nothing but ice! Nothing but snow!"

    "Is that unusual?" Zagreus asked out of curiosity.

    "Fool! We are not in the northern mountains! It should not be this cold near the coast! Look!"

    The prince felt that he should have had a sense of sublime awe at the sun over the water, for he had never seen anything like it before. However, he had no time for transcendent moments or feelings of the numinous because he had absolutely no time to stand and revel at the beauty when he was trying to reason with a blood-crazed madman. "Kratos, cousin," he tried instead. "Why don't you tell me your version of what happened?"

    "Fight me or leave me, godling! Argh! No one I've killed has ever been so talkative!"

    Zagreus nodded. Once again, persistence had paid off. He had by all indications broken something of the Spartan's will to fight him through sheer refusal to stay dead and equally sheer refusal to stop talking. "Maybe you'd feel better with some nectar in you," he suggested.

    "You cannot bribe me! I will have my vengeance!"

    "Such willpower," Zagreus murmured, shaking his head. Only Lord Hades himself had proven resilient to Zagreus's nectar-aided blandishments. The Fury Megaera might have made feeble excuses about 'confiscating illicit goods', Death Incarnate might have gone pink in the face and mumbled things about 'well, if you had some spare I suppose I can help you get rid of it', but they didn't just refuse his gifts. "Look, cousin, I've heard the story as Ares and Athena tell it. If you tell me your version, I can—"

    "I will not dwell on the past!"

    "Seems to me that's all you're doing, cousin! Wait, no, I didn't mean—"

    With a roar, Kratos turned on his heel and threw himself at Zagreus. Cold hammered into his back as they crashed through a frozen waterfall. In the light of the sunset, the shards were beautiful as they glimmered in the air for a moment. But then the pain came as Zagreus hit a rock, and all the breath was knocked out of him.

    "I! Will! Not! Be! Mocked!" Kratos bellowed, punctuating each word with a punch. With a great toss he sent Zagreus flying over a hill, and Zagreus had just enough time to wonder why the ground under him was suddenly green before he landed face first in a well-manured vegetable patch.

    "I'm… not dead," Zagreus said in mild surprise. He had expected to fall into lava or possibly a pit full of spikes, but he had not seen a single one of those since he came to the surface. It was most comparable to Elysium, but everything was so much more… vibrant. And less pastel.

    "I will end you!" Kratos roared, landing on the neatly trimmed grass with an impact that cratered the world and knocked over a row of vines. "Die! And leave me alone!"

    But the fleet-footed prince was already upright, and Kratos's blow only found the whirling bladestorm of Ares's wrath which lacerated and flayed him. "You know I'm not going to do that!" Zagreus said, in an act of bravado for he was on his last legs and felt his death close by.

    With a titanic clash, the door to the little cottage banged open and a clearly just-out-of-bed woman with ruffled blonde spiky bed-hair emerged. "All right, I want to know who the hell is smashing up my garden!" she yelled.

    "Him," mendacious Zagreus quickly said. "Definitely him. Not me." He hastily tried to hide the Stygian blade behind his back, running into something of a problem due to its size. The prince then briefly wondered why he had so instinctively reacted like this, as if this was Nyx catching him doing something he was not meant to.

    "Who are you, woman?" Kratos growled.

    The woman locked eyes with him. "Just… a maiden."

    "Maiden! Ha! Your lies demean you! You are no maiden!" callous Kratos said, quite rudely pointing out that the woman had the certain air of dignity and grace that comes to women only with age, not to mention a figure which was distinctly maternal.

    "Ma'am, I would like to say I am not with him and I would never say something like that," Zagreus quickly interjected.

    "And what is that meant to mean, shade?" the woman said, rounding on Kratos.

    "I think you look like a lovely young lady," Zagreus desperately continued.

    "No mere maiden would live in this place of unnatural growth in this frozen wasteland," Kratos scowled, gripping his chained blades closely. "More trickery!"

    "That's what I was afraid you were going to say," the woman said. "Your dim-witted companion might be less perceptive than you, but you are a problem."

    Zagreus chose, for one of the only times in his life, to keep his mouth closed in the likely futile attempt to avoid putting his foot deeper down his gullet. He backed around the growing confrontation, seeking to perhaps be able to step in to protect the maiden whose identity he now strongly suspected. His directions to find her had assumed he was leaving the Underworld normally, but through sheer luck - or perhaps the will of at least one god - his passage had taken him straight to her.

    "You dare threaten me? Me, Kratos, greatest warrior of all the Spartans?"

    "Who?"

    "Ha! And which divine spirit are you? Which tricksy nymph or cruel, vindictive goddess? Ha! Perhaps you are Demeter herself, to live in such a fertile place!"

    The woman's eyes narrowed, and Zagreus knew for a fact that she had decided then and there that he had to die. But she was unarmed and he was badly hurt and— "Catch!" the quick-witted prince called out, and tossed his sword overarm towards the woman.

    She caught it, and the burst of gentle green light — shot through with streaks of pomegranate red — knocked both him and Kratos off their feet. Shielding his eyes, knowing what the pillar of light was but unable to recognise the one granting the boon, Zagreus stared in befuddlement at the scene before him.

    "That's not what the Stygian Blade looks like," he said, squinting at the colossal sword held casually overhead in the blonde woman's hand. There was no grace in it, no finesse; it was more akin to an oversized butcher's cleaver than it was to the shape it held in the prince's hand.

    "Hmm. I haven't held this weapon in a long time," said the maiden. "At least I still have the knack."

    Wrathful Kratos raised his hands, and roared. Zagreus recognised the same blood-maddened roar that had led the Spartan to tear down the ceiling of the labyrinth of the satyrs. But with his attention upon the woman, he was not watching his feet, and the garden itself erupted around him. Corn-sheaths ensnared his ankles, roses bit deep deep into his flesh, and countless blossoms spat their pollen into his eyes. Still, the prince knew for a fact that this would hold Kratos for but a moment, and—

    "Oh, shut it, old man," said the woman, and with a graceful step she was in close, that monstrous blade already swinging in an arc. Just as the plough parts the earth in the spring, so too did she part Kratos's head from his shoulders.

    The blood of the Spartan gushed out from the stump, and became a tributary of the Styx, bearing the shade Kratos back to the deepest depths of the Underworld.

    "Um," said Zagreus, quite in shock at the behaviour of the woman and how she treated an honourable narrator. "No, I'm not shocked at the behaviour. I'm mostly shocked at how quickly she killed Kratos."

    The woman turned to him, locking two green eyes on him, and Zagreus felt a queer shock of recognition for he saw those bright green eyes — or, rather one of them — every day when he looked at himself in the mirror. "Well, this has made quite the mess of my garden," the woman said, leaning on the Stygian blade. "Do you know how long this is going to take to fix? And as for you…"

    "Um," said Zagreus, acutely aware that he had no weapon, he was mediocre at best with magic, and also this was probably his mother given the rather overt display of divine power. "Hello?"

    "Hello, you." The woman crossed her arms. "You're trespassing. You smashed up my garden. And while I appreciate the loan of that weapon, if you stole it you are in trouble that you cannot even comprehend."

    "Oh, no no no," he quickly reassured her, "I'm here on the House's business. Tracking down an escaped shade! And, uh, you're Persephone, right? And I think… I'm your son. Though, gosh! I wish I'd inherited your skill with the Stygian blade! I'm better with other infernal arms!"

    The blonde woman who was in truth the goddess Pesephone levelled the monstrous sword at him, holding it one-handedly. "This is a sick joke, and I will have no part in it! Get out!"

    "It's no joke! I… I don't know what you think happened—"

    "This pretence will not help you get out of trouble for destroying my garden!"

    "Damn the garden, mother! The garden is not what matters!" Zagreus spread his hands. "Look at my feet! They're on fire! And look at my eyes! One of them is like father's, but one… one is like yours!"

    "You… you died! This can't be true, you died, you—"

    "I die a lot, okay. It… it happens. But… oh. Oh." Zagreus exhaled. "You don't mean the normal way. Or… possibly you mean the normal way. For everyone else."

    The woman — Persephone's eyes — welled up with tears, and she let the Stygian blade fall to the ground with a clatter. "You died, those burning feet went out, my newborn son gone — but here you are, so tall!" generous and kindly Persephone blurted out.

    "I… wait, was that a crack at my height, old man! This is a sentimental moment and you are ruining it!"

    "Oh, just ignore him!" Persephone declared, running in to embrace her son. Her arms were strong from fieldwork; she smelled of all the good flowers of spring that Zagreus had never known. "Even he can't ruin this moment! And it is you! Really, truly! How! What are you doing here?"

    "Chasing an escaped shade," Zagreus managed, his breath feeling choked, all the pain of his injuries forgotten.

    "You are working for dear Hades! Oh, that's wonderful! I always hoped he'd be a good father to our son!"

    Zagreus opened his mouth. Zagreus closed his mouth. "I didn't even know you existed until very recently. Why did you leave, how did you—"

    While she made breakfast and he dusted off the Stygian blade in its strange new divine aspect, motherly Persephone recounted the tragic tale of his birth and the loss of her son — and of newfound joy at his discovery anew and even the fact he bore the name she had picked for him. And in return Zagreus told the twisted tale of how he had found himself here, slain repeatedly by the shade Kratos only to return once again to pit himself against the Spartan warrior.

    "Come! We need to talk! I scarcely believe that you are alive! It seemed impossible! And," added honeyed Persephone, "there is no need to worry about that shade! I'm sure he's back in the House, ready to be sent back to the appropriate place. Hades always was so meticulous about such things. And I know sweet Nyx will make sure that my name won't appear in the records."

    Zagreus felt the bottom of his stomach fall out. "What was that? He'll head… back to the House?"

    "Well, yes, that is where any creature of the Underworld goes when they're taken by the Styx."

    "I knew I did it." Zagreus considered. "And Megaera. And her sisters. And the various shades I kill and— oh no."

    "Oh no?"

    "I'm really sorry, mother. Really, I am. I've been trying so hard to find you. And I promise, I promise," Zagreus said, the words so bitter in his mouth, "that I'll fight my way out again and talk to you."

    "I thought you said you were working for the House…"

    "But," Zagreus continued, studiously ignoring his mother's words, "I need to go back. He's going to hurt Hypnos. Probably kill him. And other people in the House. He'll kill them too! And then he'll try to hurt Nyx."

    "Nyx can look after herself."

    "I know she can! But — blood and darkness — I have to save him before Nyx gets really mad!"

    "Why do you have to save—"

    "Family matters! Sorry, mother! I'll be back!" And with that said, Zagreus flipped his sword around in his hand, and drove it into his own gut. "Oww," he groaned, falling to his knees, as his lifeblood dripped from the Stygian blade, "this really never — ow! — gets any easier! Aaa-aaah! Wait. There's a river over there. Why…" blood dripped from his mouth, "... why didn't I drown myself instead?"

    "Zagreus, no!" Persephone reached out, hand glowing green. "I can't watch you die! Not again!"

    "Trust me, I'm used to it! Sorry! Really sorry! And— wait a moment, do I leave bodies behind when I die? Because, ow, I'm really sorry—"

    And with those apologetic words, Zagreus, Prince of the Underworld breathed his last. Again
     
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    • Oooo, here we go, really pushing towards the endgame.

    And yes, the title of this chapter is a joke I've been sitting on basically since the start of the fic. :p

    While you're here, The Times That Zagreus Got Killed By A Very Angry Man Who Was Also His Cousin is up in this year's User's Choice Awards for Best Ongoing Fic. If you're looking for something to do while digesting your meal, why not check out the voting there - and if you enjoyed this arc and think this story of Zagreus dying again and again (and again and again and again) is a worthy pick for the award, well, I'd appreciate your vote (and hey, Overlady, also by me, is also up in the same category and you can vote for multiple fics).
     
    EarthScorpion said:
    And yes, the title of this chapter is a joke I've been sitting on basically since the start of the fic. :p
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    EarthScorpion said:
    "Fight me or leave me, godling! Argh! No one I've killed has ever been so talkative!"

    Zagreus nodded. Once again, persistence had paid off. He had by all indications broken something of the Spartan's will to fight him through sheer refusal to stay dead and equally sheer refusal to stop talking.
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    A succinct summary of the entire game, there.
    EarthScorpion said:
    "I will end you!" Kratos roared, landing on the neatly trimmed grass with an impact that cratered the world and knocked over a row of vines. "Die! And leave me alone!"
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    Well, this is going to end poorly.
    EarthScorpion said:
    She caught it, and the burst of gentle green light — shot through with streaks of pomegranate red — knocked both him and Kratos off their feet. Shielding his eyes, knowing what the pillar of light was but unable to recognise the one granting the boon, Zagreus stared in befuddlement at the scene before him.
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    Presumably a god can basically grant themselves every single one of their boons at max level and rarity at once... I wonder if we'll see canon Persephone boons in Hades 2.
    EarthScorpion said:
    "Um," said Zagreus, quite in shock at the behaviour of the woman and how she treated an honourable narrator. "No, I'm not shocked at the behaviour. I'm mostly shocked at how quickly she killed Kratos."
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    Persephone: canonically and historically a way more dangerous deity than her husband.
    EarthScorpion said:
    "Family matters! Sorry, mother! I'll be back!" And with that said, Zagreus flipped his sword around in his hand, and drove it into his own gut. "Oww," he groaned, falling to his knees, as his lifeblood dripped from the Stygian blade, "this really never — ow! — gets any easier! Aaa-aaah! Wait. There's a river over there. Why…" blood dripped from his mouth, "... why didn't I drown myself instead?"
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    Zagreus, God of Never Quite Thinking Things Through
     
    Given that Zagreus explained literally nothing of import about his whole death deal, I think Persephone is gonna come smashing back into the House demanding answers.
     
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    Fayhem said:
    To be fair, drowning is actually quite a painful way to die as well. Though Zagreus can be forgiven for not knowing that, since the only river made of water he's ever seen is the one that it's definitionally impossible to remember drowning in.
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    Probably less traumatic for his Mom, tho.
     
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