Hades very rarely
leaves the underworld, especially during the six months when he rules alone.
But when he and
Hecate go where none but them dare to tread, to the dark, unknown corners of
the realm to push it wider, he can’t be disturbed. Icarus doesn’t know what,
exactly, they do, but he knows it’s dangerous, delicate work. As such, neither
Hades nor Hecate can be found during these long days, no matter the cause.
Hades only ever expands
the realm when his wife is here, so that she can rule over the dead in his
absence.
Except for this
time.
“But why can’t you wait?”
Icarus asks, wringing his hands together. “You’ve always been able to wait
before.”
“The realms are
tilting on their own right now, we’ll be able to push it farther than we ever
have,” he says, scanning over the plans that only ever look like a mess of
lines whenever Icarus looks at them. “If we wait, we lose this opportunity.
You’ll be fine. You know how to do it all.”
“I’ve never done it
alone! I’m not you or Persephone – can’t Charon do it? Or Nyx? They’ve been
here longer than I have,” he protests.
Hades looks up and
reaches out a hand to pull Icarus closer. He wants to resists, to be petty
because Hades is making him do something he doesn’t want to do. But Hades asks
for so little, and he’s quite terrible at denying him. His arm curls around
Icarus’s waist, pulling him flush up against his side. Icarus looks up at him,
and one look at those soft, dark eyes has him melting, as always. “You’ll be
amazing, because you are amazing. Nyx and Charon are wonderful. But only you
can do this.”
“Fine,” he says,
giving in, as he suspected he would from the beginning.
Hades has to go
meet Hecate, but he does spend several minutes letting Icarus pin him against
his bookshelves and kiss him, which is rather nice.
~
Icarus opens the
doors to the throne room. Guards line the wall, as is customary, even though
it’s not in use. Two thrones sit there. One is simple and made of gleaming
black obsidian. The other is more elaborate, made of silver and decorated with
bones and blooming vines. Both were made by Hephaestus.
He walks forward,
and no one stops him. No has the authority to stop him, they didn’t even before
Hades left. The only ones who could challenge him are Charon and Styx, and
they’re both staying far away just in case he tries to trick one of them into
taking his place.
There’s nothing for
it. Persephone is gone, Hades is gone, and someone must rule.
He drags his feet
as he takes his final steps forward. Both the thrones are cloaked in power, and
if any but their owners sit in them without permission they would be more
than simply killed, because most people in this realm are already dead. They
would be unmade, erased completely, and nothing could bring them back.
Icarus takes a deep
breath, legs trembling. The he takes the finals step forward and sits on
Hades’s throne.
Nothing happens.
He lets out a sigh
of relief and goes boneless. For all that it looks like it’s made of hard, cold
stone, it’s actually rather comfortable.
Styx and Charon
materialize in front of him, and go into a deep bow. “My king.”
“Shut up,” he
snaps, “You’re lucky I don’t force one of you into this thing instead.”
Charon is making a
raspy sound that Icarus recognizes as laughter. They straighten, and Styx is
grinning, “It suits you, I would just look silly.”
“Flattery won’t
hide your cowardice,” he says. “You’ve been here the longest. It should be you
in this throne.”
“I’m just a kid!”
she protests, “That would be a disaster.” She vanishes without another word. He
wonders if he could use his temporary status to make her come back, but he
won’t risk it. An angry Styx isn’t something he likes dealing with on the best
of days.
Charon holds out
his skeletal hands, and a fat scroll appears. “The most recent logs, King
Thanatos.”
“Please don’t call
me that,” he says, pained. He gets up off the throne and takes the scroll,
“I’ll be in Hades’s study.”
Charon vanishes.
Icarus walks out of the throne room, and the doors slam shut behind him. He
refuses to go back there until Hades returns. Besides, if his lover has taught
him anything, it’s that a ruler that spends more time on a throne than out of
it isn’t very good at his job.
~
For the first two
days, all is well. He’s been doing this work for hundreds of years, it’s
nothing new, evn though for the first time he does it without either Hades of
Persephone to guide him. Then Hermes appears out of beside him, holding a
writhing, reedy looking man. The man’s trying to scream, but no sound is coming
out. “Our King Zeus wishes for Hades to deal with Sisyphus, traitor to the
heavens, personally,” he says, face slack with boredom.
“Hades is busy,” he
says, “Put him in the waiting area with the others. He’ll see to it when he
returns.
Hermes blinks, then
looks uncomfortable. “Zeus wanted it dealt with immediately.”
Icarus is tempted
to tell Hermes that he doesn’t particularly care what the lord of the sky
wants, but he knows that’s not very fair. Hades would never let Zeus take out
his temper on him, but he knows not everyone has that same protection. “Fine.
But I’m too busy to be creative, I’m just going to tie him to a tree in
Tartarus and leave him there to get eaten.”
“That’s
appreciated,” Hermes says, and his instant relief is almost worth the
interruptions to his paperwork. The in-between places are almost full, he has
to start moving people out otherwise – well he doesn’t know what will happen,
but it won’t be good. And for that to happen, he needs to do an awful lot of
paperwork. So he better make this quick.
~
Sisyphus is far
from the first person Icarus has dragged to the depths of the Tartarus. So he’s
not sure how, exactly, he’s the one that ends up pinned and tied to a mountain
as the mortal darts away. Which is annoying, but it’s not like there’s many
places to hide in Tartarus, and he some celestial ropes aren’t really enough to
keep him bound for long.
What is should have
been was only a mild inconvenience.
Instead, it becomes
something so much worse.
In the few hours it
takes him struggle free, great hulking figures have already drawn near, and
Icarus isn’t just the son of an inventor anymore, he’s Thanatos, the Death God,
he’s Hades’s lover and the current king of the underworld.
But in all his long
years on this plane, in all the times he’s been to Tartarus, he’s never
actually seen a titan up close before.
Three of them crowd
around him now, their rotting, pulsating power like a stench clogging his nose
and lungs. He tries to leave, to slip through the planes of this place like he
has so many times before, but nothing happens. He tries again, and again, and
again, but nothing happens.
i say this like once a month but modern artemis would absolutely be a country butch lesbian wearing aviator shades and a messy ponytail and a camo jacket and hunting boots, she’s in a bigass silver truck with a deer skull mounted on the front, she’s got her gold shotgun next to her and there’s like 10 girls in the back of the truck with beers and she’s doing donuts in the bass pro shops parking lot blasting like dixie chicks
A sitcom about the modern Greek gods where everyone is wildly miscast
Zeus is played by Michael Cera
😂😂😂😂 Hephaestus is Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
@seerofbirds has cast Danny DeVito as Aphrodite and @qrowxiii has cast Eddie Murphy as Ares, so this is shaping up to be a pretty great TV pitch and if anyone from Hollywood is reading this, could you also consider casting Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson as Hermes and Christopher Walken as Apollo, thanks.
Hera is Oscar Isaac because are you really going to cheat on Oscar Isaac, Michael Cera? Really? You’d do that? You’d look at that man’s face and chase tail somewhere else, Michael Cera, you sack of shit?
I’m dying this is fantastic I NEED THE WHOLE CAST
Hades is Whoopi Goldberg and Persephone is Jeff Goldblum and Demeter is Julie Andrews. Their interplay makes up 70% of the film and is all improvised.
Athena is played by Amy Schumer (thanks anon!) and she defeats her enemies by being incredibly loud and annoying and plagiarising all their tactics and eventually they just give up in irritation. She only has 3 minutes of screen time and no dialogue. Thank fuck.
Heracles is played by Jesse Eisenberg because Michael Cera got to be Zeus. Sometimes they swap roles. No-one notices.
Poseidon is played by Daniel Craig but his only scene is when he reenacts the famous Bond scene with speedos.
Artemis is played by Robert Pattinson and all his lines are just slightly amended from Twilight. Dionysus is played by Helen Mirren. It is perhaps the only apt casting in the film.
To clarify, Hestia is absolutely played by Charles Dance, whose costume includes an apron which gets progressively dirtier throughout the series.
In the sitcom, which precedes the feature film and which focuses on certain myths every episode, Narcissus is played by John Goodman. Echo is played by Billy Crystal.
Other episodes include the story of Eros and Psyche, played respectively by Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine, the story of Daedalus and Icarus, played respectively by Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern, and the story of Zeus overthrowing Cronus, in which Michael Cera as Zeus must defeat Cronus, as played by John Cena, in a battle of wits and muscle. Astonishingly, he wins.
this is all very good gud
but who is perseus and medusa? jason , Midas, circe, media, please I NEED TO KNOW
These are very important questions and I will answer them immediately.
Perseus and Medusa are played by Andy Samberg and Glenn Howerton. All their scenes together are just them one upping each other with improvised insults.
Jason and Medea are played by John Boyega and Meryl Streep, and all their scenes are so beautifully acted that they both get nominated for Oscars, despite the fact that one of Jason’s lines is “are you trying to fleece me out of the golden fleece?”, to which Medea replies “me, fleece you? Oh no, me dear.”
Midas is played by Steve Buscemi, obviously. For no discernible reason, everything he touches does not turn to gold, but copper alloy. This is possibly due to budget cuts. Due to their on screen chemistry, he bizarrely has several buddy cop style scenes with Jeff Goldblum’s Persephone.
Circe does not appear. If she did, she would be played by Audrey Hepburn, using that creepy CGI from the Galaxy adverts, but her estate refuse to give their permission.
Important updates:
(Anonymous suggests: Kelsey Asbille Chow playing Achilles, Michelle Obama is Thetis, Danny Trejo as Helen, Terry Crewes as Paris, and Adrien Brody as Hector. olvmpos says: Ganymede is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and regularly benchpresses Michael Cera.)
Hey @teashoesandhair I’m not saying that I felt inspired and sketched Whoopi Goldberg and Jeff Goldblum as Hades and Persephone but that’s exactly what I’m saying
OH GOD THIS IS PERFECTION. THANK YOU. JUST THANK YOU. PHENOMENAL.
YOU’RE WELCOME BUT ALSO PLEASE HELP COS I CAN’T STOP
THIS IS GOING TO BE THE POSTER FOR THE SERIES, YOU HEAR ME
I’m mad that people are just reblogging the first post here because YOU’RE MISSING OUT ON THE MOST INCREDIBLE ARTWORK YOU’LL EVER SEE
I’M HOWLING WE NEED THIS
This is a riot! 🤣 LOVE the artwork!! ❤❤
BUT WHERE DOES WOODY HARRELSON FIT INTO THIS
also that art is as close to perfection as you get, but don’t tell Aphrodite, she’d be jealous
WOODY HARRELSON IS IO AND I WON’T HEAR A WORD SAID AGAINST IT
woody harrelson is io and i won’t hear a word said against it
there’s a lot of evidence that the iliad and the odyssey were actually composed by a variety of poets through an oral tradition rather than just by one poet, so what if the homeric texts are actually just a very long game of D&D
homer, the dm: okay achilles, agamemnon has just taken away your war prize, what do you want to do achilles’ player: i roll to have a diplomatic conversation with agamemnon achilles’ player: *rolls a 1* homer: you throw the staff of speaking at agamemnon’s face and storm off to sulk with your boyfriend
Homer, the DM: Your beautiful Patroclus is dead. What do you do? Achilles’ player: I fight everyone. Homer, the DM: You can’t fight everyone. How would you even– Achilles’ player: *rolls a 20* I fight everyone. Homer, the DM: *sighs* Fine. You cut a path through the Trojan army, enemy dead strewn in your wake. Achilles’ player: How many? Homer, the DM: …lots. Enough to clog the friggin’ river with bodies. Achilles’ player: I fight the river. Homer, the DM: You. can. not. fight. the. river. Achilles’ player: *reaches for dice*
Homer, the DM: Okay guys, so the war’s over, you had a bunch of losses but you won in the end. Time to go home, let’s roll to see who gets there firs—
Odysseus’s player: I got a critical failure.
Homer: The cyclops asks you who you are. What do you do?
Odysseus’s player: I say, “Who me? I’m nobody.”
Homer: Roll for deception.
Odysseus’s player: I got a natural 20.
Homer: The cyclops now completely believes that your name is Nobody. He shouts for help from the other cyclops but they ignore him because he’s telling them that “Nobody hurt him.”
One thing I never really understood was Sleipnir (meaning “slippery one” fyi) in depictions of Norse mythology. Sleipnir is an eight-legged horse, the steed of Odin and the son of Loki, and he is commonly depicted like this:
(image not mine)
But why would you depict an eight-legged horse like this? Horses gallop the same way most other mammals run, with all feet leaving the ground at one point, so having extra feet here doesn’t seem like it could make the horse any faster. I’m also not sure it would give it any more stable footing, since it doesn’t have a wider base.
If you want a stable eight-legged form that can reach great speeds for its size, wouldn’t you want to start with what nature has already provided? Wouldn’t you want something more like… this?
(my drawing)
“But wait!” you might say, “Sleipnir was conceived when Loki, in horse-form, seduced another horse! That’s why it looks all horsey, just with extra bits!”
Well, that’s a good point, but consider that Loki as a deity was originally based off the spider, and his name even derives from the old Swedish word for spider (source). Therefore, it’s not too hard to believe Sleipnir inherited his horse half from his mother and the more spidery half from his father. In conclusion:
Spider-Horse, Spider-Horse, He does spider-things of course! Weaves a web, Makes you gawk, Riding round ‘til Ragnarok! Look out! Here comes the Spider-Horse.
I am all for creative interpretations of Sleipnir. And spiders, obviously. This is epic.
But just so you know, that journal is from the 60′s, and the current scholarly consensus no longer considers the spider etymology to be likely. We still aren’t sure where the name comes from, and probably won’t ever be, but I’ve seen quite a few more recent academics lean toward Old Norse luka, meaning “close”, “shut”, or “end.” (See Simek’s Dictionary of Northern Mythology.)
^^^^ my research found much the same. (which is sad, i like spiders)
As far as Sleipnir having eight legs, it’s probably a reference to Icelandic horses. Icelandic horses are one of the few horse breeds with five gaits. They can do a walk, trot and canter/gallop, like most horses. But they have also evolved to have a tolt,
[ gif of a man riding a brown Icelandic horse doing a tolt. The back legs of the horse move rather stiffly back and forth, while the front legs are lifted up almost to the horse’s chest. While the horse bounces slightly, the man riding the horse could probably hold a glass of water without spilling. ]
which is fast, smooth and noted for its explosive speed and ability to cover long distances.
The second unique gait is called flugskeið, or flying pace.
[ a light brown Icelandic horse demonstrating the flugskeið. With the exception of the wind in the horses’ mane, the upper part of the horse and the rider seem to almost be still, with the background simply zipping by them. The horse’s legs, however, move fast enough to blur. Unlike with a full gallop, the horse does not fully extend its legs away from its body. This is particularly obvious in the front legs of the horse, which lift up to the chest of the horse and land under its chin the same way as in the tolt]
It is both smooth and fast, some horses being able to reach speeds of 30 mph. Not all Icelandic horses can do a flugskeið, but you’ll notice that when done properly the legs move in unison and so fast they can blur, giving the illusion of the horse having eight legs.
Anyways, here is a video to further emphasize how cool the flugskeið is;
I’d never heard this theory! That’s so neat.
The one I’ve read attributed the eight legs thing to a metaphor of a coffin + 4 pallbearers.
This is FASCINATING, and I adore Sleipnir! 😍 @tinaferraldo
You’ve brought my horse geek out now. You have been warned!
The thing is, until the late 1800s we didn’t know how horses moved.
In old paintings you typically see horses with their legs stretched wide as they thought that gave the appearance of great speed.
But it really just looks like Timmy’s big brother was being an evil bastard and bent the legs of his tin horses out .
It’s completely unnatural looking, but horses moved too fast for us to be able to see how they moved, until Edward MAuybridge captured their motion in a series of consecutive photographs in 1878.
And for the first time we could see that all four legs did leave the ground. (and are never stretched uncomfortably wide!).
He also created the first motion picture as the individual photographs could be put together as a series of film frames (below).
So, all this is to say that back when Sleipnir was being dreamed up, they didn’t understand how animals moved and probably thought more legs = faster, and to a degree they were right, things on four legs run faster than bipeds so they continued that principle to its logical, if incorrect, conclusion.
THIS IS THE BEST HORSE MOVEMENT DISCOURSE EVER
or we can consider that norse epics were, above all else, poetry, and consider that the image of an eight-legged horse brings to mind a horse that moves like a spider – with that fast darting scuttle that so many people find terrifying. an alien horse. a divine horse. a monster.
(personally i find the spider run adorable, like when a cat gets startled and does the skitter. but i recognize this is an unusual reaction.)
So, inspired by the whole concept of a spider-horse I very loosely sketched this:
…To which my brother @foxofwar simply pointed out, that being a spider-horse, it’s a sporse.
Slightly off topic, but it isn’t unique to Norse mythology to give a magical horse unusual number of legs tho. In Hungarian folklore special horses (usually fond of eating cinders, capable of flying or running faster than the win or even faster than thoughts, usually liked to sass the hero of the tale) had 5, 6 or 7 legs.
Obviously those numbers were chosen because they held cultural significance (our dragons/giants had odd number of heads too), but it probably sounded like common sense that more legs=faster horse.
I have nothing to add but damn is this thread epic.
There’s a Peruvian horse breed called the Paso that has a fifth gait as well – kind of a smooth, toe-skimming shuffle between the trot and the canter. It’s smooth as butter.
Russian soldiers witness the awakening of an elder god.
Why does this stuff always happen in Russia? What are they doing?
Reality decided that’s the only place where it can cut lose, considering they don’t seem to give a fuck about anything.
“According to some of the YouTube comments, the fire was caused by burning zinc, and the screaming came from the underground pipes that had somewhat of a ‘flute’ effect when the air passed through the tubes.“
reverse hades/persephone, where the young daughter of summer uses plant magic to ensnare the lord of darkness and keep him prisoner in a beautiful garden above ground. Eventually, enchanted by her cleverness and wild youth he agrees to eat six pomegranate seeds and stay with her for half of every year.
It’d be even funnier if the other gods show up all “Persephone, hey, you got the lord of death in there so no one’s dying anymore and the world is getting too full—” “Not my problem”
This would of course lead to a word in which there is no winter, but people can only die for six months out of the year. Which is a heck of a setting for all kinds of story.
why do so many “icarus and the sun” artworks and stories portray the sun as a woman? do y’all know who controlled the sun? apollo. icarus is gay as fuck, y’all.
Sometimes it was helios, not Apollo. Icarus was still gay as fuck
“Icarus we just escaped prison don’t ruin it by flying too close to the sun”
[Icarus already fucking launching himself across the sky for the sake of some godly dick]
woops
Guy getting himself killed to get some godly dick is propably the most Greek thing to ever happen in mythology
sparksoffandommagic 